Media is the message

Lest anyone gets too excited about the impending closure of the News of the World in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal, it’s as well to remember the role and power of the media in society.

From the most liberal to the most reactionary of newspapers, the media is ultimately part of the relay mechanism for the dominant outlook, ideology, philosophy, culture or whatever term you care to use, of the ruling political and economic elites.

How could it be otherwise? Media empires like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp are run for profit and will never ever challenge the capitalist system and what it stands for.

This conveyor belt assumes many forms but it all adds up to the same thing: the notion of a “free press” is so conditional and restricted that its carries no real meaning for the mass of ordinary people. The media may not be formally part of the state but it sings from the same hymn sheet.

The News of the World, for example, dates back to the Victorian period when scandal-monging dominated the discourse of the landed aristocracy and other idle beings. Gossip and tittle-tattle are among the lowest forms of social intercourse.

Papers like the News of the World took aspects of the frail and vulnerable sides of human behaviour and blow them up to ruin people’s lives and titillate their readers. It won’t be missed.

The use of lies, distortions, omissions, witch-hunts and sensationalism is the stock-in-trade of all the tabloid newspapers as many an activist or striking trade unionist will readily acknowledge. Notoriously, the Daily Mirror launched a ferocious attack on miners’ leader Arthur Scargill in the wake of the 1984-5 strike.

In the recent public sector strikes, virtually all the media slavishly followed the government’s line about the “unaffordability” of existing pensions. This helped to create the impression – and that’s all it is – of a public that was in general against the strike.

This is how “public opinion” is shaped or, more accurately, concocted.

Journalists often try their best to buck the trend but as any hack will tell you, proprietors have editorial control through their appointees who have absolute power over what gets published. If they want to work, journalists have little choice but to comply.

Other newspapers and media outlets are perhaps more subtle, but ultimately the message is the same: the status quo is alright, even if it does need cleaning up a little to make it more presentable.

The “serious” papers swallow official propaganda without too many qualms. Take the invasion of Iraq in 2003. None of them seriously challenged the lies and distortions and the notorious “dodgy dossier” put out by New Labour about so-called weapons of mass destruction. This proved the justification for an invasion with far worse consequences than a bit of phone hacking. Patriotism overcame questioning as normal.

As for the BBC, it sounds more and more like an official state broadcaster every day. ConDem statements are repeated ad nauseam as if they were the gospel, while the language used over Palestine, for example, ensures that Israel’s line predominates.

If there is a rush to purge the “excesses” of the tabloids through tougher regulatory control, it is because the general public – who are denied access to the media – somehow need to be reconnected with the conveyor belt of images, distortions, half-truths and support for the status quo.

The breakdown of this relationship is significant because it runs alongside the cracks in the edifice of the state itself, embracing the police, Parliament and legal system. There is an opening here for susbstantial, revolutionary change and we should seize it.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Johnson's hypocrisy over BNP

When Alan Johnson, the home secretary, expresses outrage at the decision of the BBC to invite the neo-fascist British National Party on to its Question Time programme this week, you know something is not quite right. This is a stench of opportunist hypocrisy here that is overpowering.

Johnson condemned the BBC for giving the party a platform it doesn't deserve. "They are a white-supremacist party," he said. "They are an illegally constituted party. They should be confronted in argument. I've been doing that all my life. But I won't appear on this platform with the BNP, because you're talking about bringing them in, to be a legitimate political party, to sit on this platform."

Firstly, if anyone should come under fire it is Johnson’s own New Labour and not the BBC. The programme could not have gone ahead if Gordon Brown had, as leader of his party, decided that New Labour would hold to its position of not sharing a platform with the BNP. Instead, Jack Straw, justice secretary, is to appear with BNP leader Nick Griffin. Johnson neatly sidesteps that one, perhaps with one eye on a bid to take over from Brown sooner rather than later.

Secondly, Johnson is no position to lecture the BNP, as he and the government have pursued policies that have played right into its hands. The constant demonization of asylum seekers, through policies that have included vouchers, the denial of emergency housing and medical treatment, has fed the prejudices of the right-wing press and the BNP.

Only last month, Johnson himself expressed his “delight” at the “swift and decisive” action by French riot police against mainly Afghan refugees living in a make-shift camp near Calais. What Johnson denoted a “dignified success” was a squalid business, where distressed teenagers were confronted by uniformed thugs, as video reports like the one by Jason Parkinson show.

Of course, it’s alright to send thousands of troops to invade Afghanistan. When a few hundred people turn up seeking asylum and refuge from that poor, war-ravaged, corrupt country, they are treated as if they were a major threat to “our way of life”.


The tone was set early on in the history of New Labour. David Blunkett, a former home secretary, claimed in 2002 that asylum seekers were “swamping some British schools” and that there was a case for educating them separately. He won the backing of the then prime minister Tony Blair – and no doubt of the BNP too!

Johnson claims that the BNP is not a “legitimate party” and should be denied access to the BBC on that basis alone. Agreeing to that point of view, however, would allow the political establishment and the state to decide who and who is not “legitimate”. Once you go down that road, anti-capitalist groups and parties could, for example, at some stage also be designated beyond the pale.

It is actually the break-up of “legitimate” parliamentary politics, in particular the transformation of New Labour into an openly capitalist party, that has fuelled the growth of the BNP’s influence and support. As the expenses scandal demonstrates, this process is continuing apace, with or without the BNP appearing on Question Time.

The political establishment has no answers to the destabilisation produced by the coincidence of the demise of traditional politics with a profound economic crisis. The democracy they allegedly promote is hollowed out and is now under open attack from the extreme right-wing. You can only counter that threat by extending and renewing democracy in new ways, setting out to transfer actual power at the level of the state into the hands of ordinary people. That’s the best way to fight the BNP.


Paul Feldman
Communications editor

New Labour's about-turn on BNP

Targeting the BBC for its decision to invite the neo-fascist British National Party onto its Question Time programme is missing the point. The real volte face is on the part of New Labour, which has decided to abandon its long-standing policy of refusing to sit on a platform alongside the BNP.

Now the party is so desperate for votes that it is prepared to discuss with just about anyone. The only surprise is that it has taken New Labour so long to come round. The BBC knew New Labour’s decision in advance, otherwise it wouldn’t have extended the invitation to the BNP in the first place. Now, according to reports, New Labour will put up a “cabinet heavyweight” to confront the BNP, which will have the neo-fascists trembling in their jackboots.

Anyway, how is New Labour going to “confront” Nick Griffin when its own policies and pronouncements have played right into the hands of the BNP leader and his party? Attacks on “bogus” asylum seekers and refugees began almost as soon as New Labour was elected in 1997, lending credibility to the BNP’s racist policies. The demonisation of the Muslim community, reinforced by invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, have also encouraged the BNP.

Government policies that have widened inequality in society have enriched some sections at the expense of older, white working class communities whose votes New Labour had considered unwelcome and unnecessary. Local authorities where migrant workers were moved to have been denied the resources to build new homes and facilities, allowing the BNP to win seats on local councils and get two Euro MPs elected.

Now the capitalist economic crisis is bearing down most heavily on poorer workers who were encouraged to take out mortgages in the absence of decent, affordable social housing, as well as young people. The BNP is taking advantage of Gordon Brown’s “British Jobs for British Workers” remarks to win support (meanwhile the trade union leaders are encouraging actions against foreign workers, which shows how incapable they are of fighting the BNP).

Having said that, it is mistaken to call for a ban on the BNP appearing on Question Time. To do so would promote the notion that capitalist institutions – and the BBC is a key part of the state – somehow have a role to play in the fight against neo-fascism. They do not for the simple reason that the reappearance of a fascist movement is not something separate from capitalism but an expression of the degeneration of the system itself, especially its democratic aspects.

The parliamentary expenses scandal earlier this year served to highlight a deeper malaise at the heart of the state political system. It now openly serves big business and the banks and the voice of ordinary people counts for little in so far as the major capitalist parties like New Labour are concerned. Into this vacuum has stepped the BNP, posing as the champion of the ordinary (white) man.

Stopping the BNP, and the slide towards authoritarian rule as the economic crisis deepens, means challenging the capitalist state with a view to replacing it with more advanced forms of democratic rule that transfer political and economic power to the majority. You can be sure that no one is going to get an invitation to talk about those sorts of ideas on Question Time!

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

The BBC, bread and circuses

The admission by the BBC that its programmes are not always what they appear to be raises important issues about perception, image and reality and the role of the mass media in manipulating and distorting their relationship. In a world dominated by marketing, commercialism and image, the BBC is doing no more than other broadcasters struggling to retain audience share. It is truly ironic that it took the monarchy, an institution with a medieval image and history, to restore reality by exposing the fact that footage showing the Queen storming out of a photo-shoot was untrue and the result of a manipulation of actual events. In other words, rather than the image presented having a connection to a deeper reality or truth, the exact opposite was the case. This casual blurring and inversion of fact and fiction is what leads the BBC and other broadcasters to invent winners of TV phone-in competitions and from there to obscure the nature of the real world in a more systematic way.

Instead of a probing analysis of government actions - such as workfare for single mothers, the collapse of a Tube consortium, and more disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan this week – we are saddled with endless “reality” TV programmes. Wall-to-wall scheduling of property buying, DIY disasters, losing weight, gaining weight, the Big Brother house through to celebrity dancing on ice is the standard fare. This leaves precious little room for news and analysis, even on programmes like BBC News 24. Rolling headlines with no insight is mesmerising but totally deceptive and uninformative. It is a reflection of a channel that threw in the towel when one of its reporters rightly accused New Labour of “sexing up” the intelligence on Iraq’s weaponry. The story was true but the BBC chairman and director-general had to resign.

Alison Cahn, a former BBC producer who helped make Death on the Rocks about the assassination of IRA members in Gibraltar, wrote in the Daily Telegraph today: “I think there is a thread that unites the mis-editing of the Queen with the dishonest use of phone-in lines by the BBC. It is the pressure now put on programme makers to deliver the desired programme at all costs, so that honesty and fair dealing, with both audiences and participants, is no longer seen as the rock on which programming is based. For me, the experience of moving from more traditional documentaries to making ‘reality’-type TV was invigorating but ultimately depressing. I remember a Channel 4 commissioning editor asking me to alter the chronology of a piece of interview, which would ‘sharpen up’ the story by making a woman look heartless. I refused. On another occasion I was told by a BBC executive producer that I wasn't ruthless enough because there were things I wasn't prepared to say or do to deliver the programme he had in his head.”

The distortion of the truth by the media is, of course, not new. Newspapers like the Sun and Daily Mail do it every day. The Mail, notoriously, actually invented a letter that helped bring down a Labour government in the 1920s. Newspapers and broadcasters play a crucial role in sustaining the ideology of the status quo and in keeping dissent allowed on the airwaves and pages to a minimum. But the contemporary approach is absolutely connected to the fantasy world that is modern capitalism. Here, you can be what you want to be because you are worth it. This is justified by a post-modern philosophy that claims that the world is what each individual thinks it is and that notions of objective reality are old-hat. So reality TV, which is actually unreal TV, becomes the norm and fictional people win prizes. Bread and circuses anyone?

Paul Feldman, communications editor