When Matt Kennard was a student at Columbia University, Henry Kissinger once came to deliver a talk. Kennard, who had put up posters saying “Arrest Kissinger” around the journalism school, was upset at the lack of protest from fellow students on the visit by the controversial diplomat.
During the Q&A session, he thought if he didn’t say something he would be really angry with himself. Kennard, who can be quite shy in large groups, managed to muster the courage and asked Kissinger how he slept at night.
“Do you think you are morally superior to me?” Kissinger asked. Kennard suddenly stopped. Adrenaline was rushing through his veins as he realised who he was speaking to. Then he thought, of course he was and said, “Yes, I do.” Groans from fellow students and professors filled the room. A couple of days after the talk, a professor approached Kennard. “I heard you disgraced yourself the other day,” the professor said.
When I went to a café in London to interview Kennard about his new book, he told me the “hero” treatment Kissinger was afforded at Columbia University is indicative of what elite institutions in the United States are like.
“My eyes were really opened to it at Columbia, which sells itself as a top journalism school in the world,” he says. “And you’d think you’d have a lot of critical minded students who would know, firstly, what Henry Kissinger had done. But secondly, they would have asked questions that were more incisive than ‘what is your favourite colour’? or ‘What do you think of the Olympics going to China?’ Some of the questions were really ridiculous.”
The lack of awareness about Kissinger’s past was disturbing. “It was kind of crazy to me. He was literally responsible for the murder of millions of people — Vietnam, all these different people. And there is no reaction at all at the top journalism school in the world.”
Apparently Kissinger’s visits to Columbia University were something of an annual event. “Somebody told me he never went back after I did that.” So was he responsible for this? “I hope so,” he says.
Kennard is a Fellow at the Centre for Investigative Journalism. “The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs the Masters of the Universe” is his second book. Kennard worked at the “Financial Times” for three years. “The interesting thing about this book is that a lot of it is what I reported on and got when I was at the ‘FT’. But what I did in this book is to fill in the blanks that I couldn’t at the ‘FT’. You can hint at what is going on, but you can’t really speak the truth because people — the masters of the universe — don’t want to read that they are evil [expletive],” he says.
His previous work, “Irregular Army”, was the result of his masters research at Columbia University. It created a stir of sorts, exposing how the US military had recruited neo-Nazis, criminals and mentally ill people as it struggled to fill its ranks following the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“The Racket” covers several other countries and issues — from financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank to controversial US policies in Latin America. He also reports from his time in the US, covering issues such social housing and the country’s massive prison population, the largest in the world. There’s also reportage from Palestine, which he visited in 2009 just before joining the “Financial Times”.
Kennard went there with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). “The main issue at that time were the evictions in occupied east Jerusalem based on some forged Ottoman-era land titles,” he says, talking about an Arab Palestinian family being forced out of its home. Citing these land titles, the [Israeli] colonists said “this family didn’t own the property. But the family refused to leave,” he says. “Very heroic family actually, because Israel had offered a lot of money to the father. Israel’s got the money and often bribes a lot of them [Palestinians] to leave, but this man refused.”
So Kennard along with a few others from Europe stayed at this family’s home to offer support as Israel was threatening it with eviction. However, after he returned to the United Kingdom, Kennard learnt the family had been evicted. “It was tragic,” he says. He talks about the “distorted” coverage of the conflict in the Western media. “Gaza is [witness to] one of the worst crimes happening in the world today. It’s a disgrace but you can’t say that in the mainstream media.”
Kennard joined the “Financial Times” with a critical mind. “If everyone around you thinks in a certain way, it is very difficult to maintain your individual dissident opinion and stay in that institution for 10-20 years. People slowly shave off their more edgy opinions or what are conceived of as ‘edgy’ and become a part of institutional thinking. I never did that and I suffered. I had to quit the ‘FT’.”
I tell Kennard that I am surprised he went to work for the “Financial Times” with his “dissident” ideas. “Once you are out of what is perceived as the best journalism school in the world and want to do dissident media and get paid, where do you go? There is nowhere to go,” he says.
He interned at “Democracy Now” but didn’t get the job. “A massive problem for young journalists is that idealism is smashed completely when they leave journalism school. There is no media institution for people with these kinds of ideas,” he says.
So Kennard applied to the “Financial Times”. “To be honest I never thought I would get it,” he says. On the day of his final interview Kennard was at the G20 demonstrations. “You know the one where they smashed the Royal Bank of Scotland? We were hemmed in a kettle and I was going to miss it [the interview]. Eventually everyone pushed so hard at the police line that I managed to go down the street and get to the ‘FT’.”
“The ‘FT’ is a good paper,” he says. “They instil in you very early on the necessity of getting your facts right. Not putting ideology in, although there is quite a lot of ideology — more and more — because people trade and invest based on those articles.”
Kennard doesn’t regret working for the “Financial Times”. “It’s just that I would like a media world where the ‘FTs’ have space for people such as me. I think they used to until the 1980s. When I left I was told by certain people that if you had been there 20 years ago you might not have been rejected the way you were.”
However, it wasn’t just about ideology. “I had a meeting with not the editor but a higher up. She told me that they use the first couple of years to really mould you into being ‘FT’ journalists but I had resisted that completely.”
Kennard felt he didn’t fit the mould. “If you go to the ‘FT’, especially if you go higher up the food chain, they are all white men in suits who went to private school and then to Oxbridge.”
Working at the “Financial Times” did give Kennard a chance to gain access to people that would be very difficult to do otherwise. “I knew what I was doing. I am not going to lie. While I was there towards the end, halfway through, I knew that I was probably going to leave and I wanted to write about it. So I was collecting information. I went to Bolivia as an ‘FT’ journalist and I got access. The beautiful thing about working for the ‘FT’ is that you have access to everyone,” he says.
He spent about a month in Bolivia on holiday. Kennard did a big project about how the US was trying to destabilise the country. He talks about how he “used the fact that I was working for the ‘FT’ to get interviews with the US [authorities] — they don’t have an ambassador anymore, but the Charge d’ Affairs.” This ran in the “Financial Times”? “No way,” he says.
Kennard collected information he knew he couldn’t publish in newspaper but wanted to use it in his book.
There is a chapter on Haiti which covers the exploitation of the country following the deadly 2010 earthquake. Parts of it were published in the “Financial Times”. “But as I said, I filled in the blanks. I couldn’t really write in a critical way about what the international financial institutions were doing in Haiti. So I waited until I quit and wrote a story in ‘Open Democracy’ and turned it into a chapter for the book.”
Kennard certainly doesn’t come across as your typical “Financial Times” journalist. Once he invited the Bolivian vice-president to the “FT” office in London. “If I wanted to stay, in fairness to the ‘FT’ I didn’t play my cards very well,” he says. “You wouldn’t invite the socialist, well Marxist, vice-president of Bolivia to speak in the canteen at the “Financial Times”. But by then I knew I was going to leave so I was more cavalier about the sort of things I was doing. But he came, and that was really interesting. He spoke to the NUJ [National Union of Journalists]. I think the ‘FT’ were a bit shocked having him in the building.”
His father is the famous photomontage artist Peter Kennard, noted for his political work. “Massively powerful influence on me in terms of seeing someone who had managed to hold on to their principles,” he says.
Growing up he remembers going to marches and art galleries with his father. “We used to go to the National Gallery every weekend. I was more interested in computers. But I was obsessed with the Renaissance and stuff. I never had my father’s artistic mind. You know how they say — right brain, left brain. I was always much more into, not so much science, but trying to understand things from a mechanical perspective.”
Though Kennard didn’t really have the same creative side to him, the history of dissidence definitely had an impact. Growing up he read a lot of George Orwell. However, he wasn’t particularly political until the war in Iraq.
“When Iraq happened I thought this was completely insane. I started looking into what was happening, the propaganda that we were subjected to. And I suppose I recalled all the stuff that I got when I was young.”
He was studying history at Leeds University at the time. Kennard found journalism was an effective way of covering the protests. “I did much more comments when I was at university,” he says, “writing about the opposition to the war and why it was a bad idea.”
At university, Kennard wrote a major story for the student newspaper when he interviewed a professor who made “racist” remarks. “It was a big story on the front page of the ‘Leeds Student’. It became a massive issue on campus. There were lots of protests from the entire student body. It was even picked up by the national media.”
Leeds University didn’t know what to do with the professor who eventually opted for early retirement. “It was quite interesting that the police were involved. I had to hand over the tapes of the interview because some students had complained about incitement to racial hatred. It was a big deal. That really opened my eyes to the power of journalism. That was the story that was hiding in plain sight.”
After graduating from Leeds, he applied to Columbia University and earned a scholarship for masters in investigative journalism. “The whole year brought home to me how constrictive the opinions you are allowed to have within any institute in America. When I went to the ‘Financial Times’ it was merely confirmed further. You just can’t think certain things. And if resist the cultural pressures and career pressures to change those opinions, you get ejected from the media,” he says.
Kennard recounts an incident from his time at Columbia. Journalist Amy Goodman, the presenter of “Democracy Now”, had come to deliver a lecture. “She is an amazing public speaker. At the end she wanted to do a straw poll. She said, ‘Can all those who have heard of the Armenian genocide put their hands up?’ And everyone did. Then she asked the same about the genocide in East Timor. About three people put their hand up,” he says.
“It is very interesting that you go to an elite journalism school and every single student knows about a genocide that happened a 100 years ago. Yet no one knows about a genocide that happened more recently, was armed and funded by the United States, with the dollars paid in taxes by these people’s parents. Why is that? What intellectual culture creates this situation where people are only aware of the old crimes you can’t do anything about, or crimes that are done by others, not us.”
According to Kennard it is not any different in any other country. “Russia is the same. But the point is America has this idea that it is this free society and doesn’t have the problems of conformity to state power. But it does. It has exactly the same problems.”
Once, as a student Kennard was planning to do a “critical” article about Israel by interviewing Norman Finkelstein. He was given a friendly warning by one of his professors at Columbia who was an editor at the “New Yorker”.
“He said you can do that if you want but it is like criticising Mother Teresa. I thought that was interesting because people aren’t stupid in the media. You have to make a wage, you have to make a career. I don’t blame them. Some people are still aware of the constraints. He was aware of what you can and can’t say. Not everyone thinks they are completely free. I have friends at the ‘FT’ who just say, ‘I’ve got to make a living’,” he says.
Syed Hamad Ali is a writer based in London.
