Horner's Corner » media

News and the Same Old Same Old: Why We Must Challenge The Manufactured Consensus

Chris — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 10:39:51 +0000

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.

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Shelley – From ‘The Mask of Anarchy’

Chris — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 19:42:15 +0000

‘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.

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Mountains Out of Molehills (click on image to enlarge)

Chris — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 12:08:02 +0000

Mountains Out of Molehills.

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Edward Hill: Trololo

Chris — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:34:37 +0000

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.

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The BBC is caving in to a Tory media policy dictated by Rupert Murdoch

Chris — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:29:59 +0000

The BBC is caving in to a Tory media policy dictated by Rupert Murdoch

Mark Thompson is jumping from the second storey because he fears a new government may throw him from the roof

So why has Mark Thompson done it? Because he feared that if he didn’t jump from the second storey window, an incoming Conservative government would push him off the roof. He is right to be anxious. The Tories have indeed signalled a hostility to the BBC that is rare, if not unprecedented, in an opposition. Why might that be? Two words: Rupert Murdoch.

People often speak of the unique influence of the media magnate, with his combination of economic and political muscle, but “influence” doesn’t quite capture it. Instead David Cameron has simply allowed News Corp to write the Conservative party’s media policy.

Start with the BBC. Murdoch, with son James, can’t stand it – regarding it, a senior figure in broadcasting tells me, as “like the Ebola virus: they can’t destroy it, so they try to contain it”. They dress up their opposition in pseudo-intellectual free market blather, but the reality is much earthier than that: the BBC is a rival, and therefore an obstacle to their commercial ambitions. The smaller and weaker the BBC becomes, the more money News Corp can make.

So the Murdochs constantly demand a cut in the licence fee. Last year Cameron nodded dutifully, and called for an immediate freeze in the licence fee. That would have marked an unprecedented break in the multi-year financial settlement that is so integral to the BBC’s independence – preventing it from constantly having to make nice to the politicians to keep the money coming in.

Second only to their loathing of the BBC is the Murdochs’ hatred of Ofcom, the regulator that stands between them and monopolistic domination of the entire UK media landscape.They particularly dislike Ofcom snooping into pay-TV, an area that makes billions for Sky. How odd, then, that a matter of days after the regulator published a proposal that would have forced Sky to charge less for its sport and movie channels, Cameron, in a speech on quangos, suddenly singled out Ofcom, suggesting it would be cut “by a huge amount”, possibly even replaced altogether.

That’s the pattern in one area after another

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Charlie Brooker: How To Report The News

Chris — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 16:48:44 +0000

Fast Tube by Casper">From \’Newswipe\’

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Paternalism?

Chris — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 20:12:36 +0000

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.

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Rebecca Solnit: Covering Haiti: When the Media Is the Disaster

Chris — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 19:14:58 +0000

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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