What on earth is wrong with the people who run our TV and radio news programmes? Ideology, I suppose, is what’s ‘wrong’.

Still, it can be quite infuriating to listen to the same discredited perspective being peddled day after day on the networks. We should certainly challenge it: if we do not we cede the space to the right and the centre right without a fight. Hegemony needs to be met by contestation, even if that’s only at the level of writing or calling these programmes. It’s not enough, of course, but better than passively letting them repeat the old tired rigmarole.

Take the discussion on this morning’s  BBC Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme about the role of  banks etc, with  Geoff Mulgan, Richard Lambert and Gillian Tett, ‘chaired’ by John Humphreys.

I was pleased that a discussion of this kind was initiated but disappointed that again we heard the same voices. This is nothing against the contributors per se, and I was impressed in particular by  Gillian Tett’s remarks. But really, can’t they do better than this? The  Today programme seems to think the most radical outlooks on the  current financial crisis are those of (say) Martin Wolf and Will  Hutton, plus Gillian Tett or Blairites like Mulgan. So that’s the FT, the Economist and the right of the Labour Party sorted (and Lambert is ex head of the CBI). Not exactly a broad swathe of opinion, is it? Unsurprisingly, the most radical of the bunch was Gillian Tett, who at least seems capable of critical thought. Hardly radical, though.

In this they fail as a news gatherer, and they tend to reinforce a  supposed consensus that is actually not shared by many of us. And that is  why phenomena such as the Occupy movement are so hard for them to  evaluate. Why not interview David Harvey or Wolfgang Streek, for  instance? both are noted academics who have recently written on the current  events and who don’t share the perspective we keep hearing on ‘Today’.  Vox pop outside St Paul’s won’t do: they need to include a broader  tranche of informed opinion in their daily diet of comment and analysis. This has to include radical voices – and ‘radical’ here ought not to mean just  ‘mildly Keynesian’.

If they did that, maybe John Humphrey’s opening remarks today about  trade unions ‘ruling the roost’ until they were ‘dealt with’ would  have been challenged by someone. If they don’t, they will be seen as  increasingly irrelevant to the concerns of large swathes of the  population. No wonder the blog and the tweet are replacing the old channels of news and information.

This ought to matter to them, so we need to say it to them, as part of the struggle to get different views heard. I don’t write this because I naively suppose that this issue of who gets airtime hasn’t come to the attention of the production team at Today, but rather that we must not let this kind of thing go by without any response. ‘Today’ still has a big audience, and that matters.

So I urge you: write or phone them. Don’t let them claim no one objected.

‘And these words shall then become

Like Oppression’s thundered doom

Ringing through each heart and brain,

Heard again – again – again -

‘Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number -

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you -

Ye are many – they are few.’

Complete poem:  Shelley – The Mask of Anarchy.

Good article by Daniel Trilling on the meaning of the Millbank protest here.

Mountains Out of Molehills.

Some things seem so odd, so completely insolite, that in coming across them one can only assume that they are completely without historical precedent, that they exist outside of all tradition. Consider this, for example:

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The man singing is Edward Hill, also known as Eduard Khil’, or, better yet, Эдуард Хиль. According to his Russian Wikipedia page, Hill was born in Smolensk in 1934, and finished his studies at the Leningrad Conservatory in 1960. By 1974 he had been named a People’s Artist of the USSR, and in 1981 he was awarded the Order of the Friendship of Peoples. He is best known for his interpretations of the songs of the Soviet composer, Arkadii Ostrovskii. As for the peculiar name, I could find no information, but imagine that he is descended from the English elite that had established itself in western Russian cities by the 17th century. He is not a defector of the Lee Harvey Oswald generation. He is entirely Russian.

via Justin Erik Halldór Smith.

Read more at:

The BBC is caving in to a Tory media policy dictated by Rupert Murdoch | Jonathan Freedland | Comment is free | The Guardian.

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The non paternalist elite hobnobbing at the ICA

It’s worth reminding ourselves of the peculiar logic that neoliberalism has successfully imposed. Treating people as if they were intelligent is, we have been led to believe, “elitist”, whereas treating them as if they are stupid is “democratic”. It should go without saying that the assault on cultural elitism has gone alongside the aggressive restoration of a material elite.

Parkes touches here on the right way to think about paternalism – not (just) as something prescriptive, but in terms of the gift and the surprise. The best gifts are those we wouldn’t have choosen for ourselves – not because we would have overlooked or rejected them, but because we simply wouldn’t have thought of them. Neoliberal “choice” traps you in yourself, allowing you to select amongst minimally different versions of what you have already chosen; paternalism wagers on a different “you”, a you that does not yet exist. (All of which resonates with J J Charlesworth’s illuminating piece on the management of the ICA in Mute, with its attack on the assumption that “what the audience wants is merely what the institution should do.”)

Neoliberalism may have been sustained by a myth of entrepreneurialism, a myth that the folk economics of programmes like The Apprentice and Dragon’s Den have played their part in propagating, but the kind of “entrepreneurs” that dominate our culture – whether they be Bill Gates, Simon Cowell or Duncan Bannatyne – have not invented new products or forms, they have just invented new ways of making money. Good for them, no doubt, but hardly something that the rest of us should be grateful for. (The genius of Cowell was to have plugged a very old cultural form into new machineries of interpassivity.) And for all the bluster about entrepreneurialism, it is remarkable how risk-averse late capitalism’s culture is – there has never been a culture more homogenous and standardized, more repetitive and fear-driven.

Read more via k-punk.

By Rebecca Solnit

Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences.

I’m talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster. I’m talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol. They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they are staining themselves anew in Haiti.

Within days of the Haitian earthquake, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran a series of photographs with captions that kept deploying the word “looting.” One was of a man lying face down on the ground with this caption: “A Haitian police officer ties up a suspected looter who was carrying a bag of evaporated milk.” The man’s sweaty face looks up at the camera, beseeching, anguished.

Another photo was labeled: “Looting continued in Haiti on the third day after the earthquake, although there were more police in downtown Port-au-Prince.” It showed a somber crowd wandering amid shattered piles of concrete in a landscape where, visibly, there could be little worth taking anyway.

via Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics.

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Zizek - looking quite trim and moody here

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Fast Tube by Casper">Zizek on reviving the left

On the face of it, the struggle over the Christmas number one this year sums up capitalist realism’s stranglehold over culture. From one perspective, what we have here is a simulation of disputation, one Sony BMG act versus another, where capital wins every way up – abetted by a grassroots Facebook campaign that has fed the marketing machine while ostensibly raging against it (retailers and Sony BMG must be delighted that members of the public have off their own back come up with a way of re marketing ye olde commodified rebel rock). Yet it’s worth also attending to the utopian dimension at work in both the campaign for the Rage Against The Machine to be number one and (submerged) in the X Factor phenomenon itself.

The problem is that no response to the X Factor phenonemon is adequate: whether it be the standard bourgeois “I don’t watch it, I don’t have a TV, although I occasionally watch serious documentaries on the IPlayer”, the PoMo “I watch it to exult in how awful it is”, or some version of apparently ingenuous engagement – any response seems useless. The X Factor has seemed as impregnable as capitalism. In one of the best pieces he has written for some time, Paul Morley captured very well the quandary that the X Factor presents. “What’s the point of watching the show,” Morley asked, “and feeling that I must be losing my mind, because I seem to be seeing and hearing bad, unsavoury, deeply uncomfortable things, while everyone else is enjoying a cheery, light-hearted party, fun for all the family, a Saturday night television show that is merely an ingeniously produced newfangled way of keeping alive certain old-fashioned light entertainment values?” Complaint seems both churlish and impotent; or else irrelevant – why be concerned about the X Factor at all? Aren’t there more important things than this high-gloss trivia?

more via k-punk.

Read more here:

The enemies of reason: Hmm… remember this?.

Zizek’s new website

I’m not sure exactly who is running it – not the man himself I suspect – but it’s the hub for Zizek related matters, with a US emphasis, I assume.

Slavoj Žižek —.

Rupert Murdoch as he actually looks

The Conservatives have vile little deal sorted out with Murdoch, and when they come to power (alas! – it’s looking pretty certain), they will start to knacker the BBC for him. One way to help Murdoch is to hobble the regulatory framework that protects public service broadcasting and restrains him (I’ve blogged on that before) – the other begins to emerge in the Guardian story  below. In return for The Sun‘s support – and that of the rest of his squalid empire – the Tories will ensure that the BBC is cut down to size. Naturally they will deny the link, but it is there, and it will be toxic for yet another part of the UK’s public realm. And that’s a firm prediction.

You didn’t  think the Sun’s backing came free of charge, did you?

Jeremy Hunt warns of tough times ahead for all ‑ including BBC

Hunt, who would take charge of broadcasting policy as culture secretary, says the BBC should respond by “cutting its cloth”, pointing out that 47 BBC executives earn the same as, or more than, the prime minister’s £197,689 salary.

If the BBC fails to act on a voluntary basis, Hunt makes clear he would use his role overseeing the renewal of the BBC licence fee in 2012 to push for salaries to be cut. “That will be a chance to look at the whole direction of the BBC ‑ and executive compensation is obviously one of things that you discuss as part of that.”

Hunt shares the concerns of Sir Christopher Bland, the former BBC chairman, who warned the corporation to be careful about throwing its weight around now that the BBC’s income outstrips all its commercial rivals put together by £1bn. “There is a real risk that if this carries on, the BBC could be the only show in town. That would be incredibly unhealthy for consumers who really appreciate the choice that they get.”

Stressing that the BBC’s independence is sacrosanct, Hunt is careful about dictating where it must cut. He rejects the call from the Sunday Times for the BBC news website to be scaled back because it is undermining newspaper websites.

But the BBC should be careful about expanding its website. “You might think at first glance that if the BBC does have a website about angling, that can be brilliant for the angling community. But if the unintended consequence of that was that it drove out of business every single angling magazine in the country, you might take a different view.”

More below, if you can stomach it:

Jeremy Hunt warns of tough times ahead for all ‑ including BBC | Politics | The Guardian.

Adam Curtis Films here:

Adam Curtis, The Trap, The Power of Nightmares, The Century of the Self and others….

(You might need to scroll down a little to find them)

All on Rewtube.

you can see his new film It felt like a kiss on his blog, here.

Adam Curtis