I know that Wills married Kate last weekend because I saw it with my own eyes. I didn’t have much choice in the matter because my wife was camped out in front of the TV for 12 hours being catty about Victoria Beckham’s Croydon facelift and stupid hat and generously summoning me in whenever Lady Amelia Spencer, the pouting blonde baddun accused of lamping some bloke in a Cape Town McDonald’s drive-thru restaurant (that’s how I like my quasi-royals to be), hove into view. So, anyway, I had no objections when the BBC and ITV News that night reported their marriage as an unchallenged fact, nor when the newspapers said the same thing the next morning. I did not require the newsreader to insert the words ‘according to palace officials’ when reporting the wedding, nor for the headlines the next day to make use of quotation marks to qualify a statement of fact. But two days later the reported killing of Osama bin Laden by US Navy Seals — well, that’s a different matter, isn’t it? I saw nothing; I was reliant upon the journalists to tell me what they had seen. And they’d seen nothing either.
I am no conspiracy theorist. I do not cleave to the view that astronauts played golf on a backlit film lot in New Mexico, rather than on the moon, or that Jews blew up the Twin Towers, or that the Duke of Edinburgh arranged for Princess Diana to be bumped off. All I want, really, is a little less avid, panting credulity from our journalists — all of them, the whole lot — and to stick by the old journalistic credo that when someone tells you something has happened, and you haven’t seen it yourself, you report that they have told you something has happened, rather than reporting baldly that it actually has happened. If you get my drift.
‘Osama bin Laden is dead’, though, was the headline everywhere, and without my quotation marks. It was treated as an unassailable, unquestionable fact. Not the slenderest tendril of doubt was allowed to intrude. Not even when the photographic evidence of the dead terrorist, proudly printed in the Daily Mail and elsewhere, was revealed to be a crude Photoshopped hoax dating from 2009, which was the last time we were told that he had been killed.
Is he dead now, then? Was he killed in a special operation by US forces? It seems to me, applying Occam’s razor, that he probably was. It is a lot likelier than the notion that the whole thing was a fiendish and rather complicated deception by the US government, and more likely as well than the suggestion that they had thought bin Laden was camped out in that building but actually he wasn’t. But there are plenty of reasons for allowing a moment or two of doubt to creep in, many of which may have occurred to you. The first concerns the reluctance of the US government to publish photographs of the dead bin Laden, photographs which they say they have but will not release because they’re not very nice. One suspects that they will get away with this genteel sensibility only for so long as the press decline to insist upon verification. The second concerns the haste with which they disposed of the body — it was dumped at sea before the first reports were aired that he had even been killed. According to the US, the mysterious aquatic ceremony was to ensure that the compound in Pakistan where he was killed would not become ‘a shrine’ for fanatics. But it might just as well become a shrine as the place in which he was killed, rather than buried. The US also insisted that bin Laden’s body was cleansed and purified and given a properly ‘Islamic’ burial at sea; most Muslim clerics who have been quoted so far say that his burial would most certainly not have been properly Islamic, for various reasons which seem, to me — an infidel pig — arcane and even bizarre, but there we are. And the locals living nearby that house with its huge walls greeted the reports that bin Laden had been holed up there with outright hilarity, not to mention incredulity.
Finally, while there have been interesting photographs released of Barack Obama and his lieutenants watching, with rapt attention, a live feed of the raid, the live feed itself will not be made public. That was an odd picture to have been made public, when the salient pictures, and the things they are watching, are still being kept under wraps. But then all of this is a little odd; although perhaps nothing more than a little odd. You do wonder, though, if Obama’s regime is making the same mistake it made when they waited for three years to publish details of his birth certificate.
I suppose, mind, it is odder still that if Osama bin Laden had not been killed he hasn’t popped up by now on one of his exciting homemade videos smirking that famous smirk, or that al-Qa’eda — such as it is — has not put out a statement of refutation and promising retribution and mayhem.
I suppose that it is the advent of 24-hour news, a multiplicity of channels, the bloggers and the tweeters and so on that have encouraged both the press and the terrestrial broadcasters to report stories with more certitude and less reserve than would once have been the case. ‘Osama bin Laden dead’ is a more compelling headline than ‘Osama bin Laden dead, says US’. There is a greater tendency to swallow things whole, for the sake of the story, than was once the case.
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