I am mildly addicted to keeping up with “the news”
particularly with a general election in Britain and here the interminable
wrangle between the Eurozone and Greece about bail-out finance. What I see and
hear on TV and in the written media sometimes excites and pleases but more
often depresses and dismays me and I suspect that is precisely the intention of
those who control the media. I and millions of others are essentially having
our intellectual defences weakened as a prelude to manipulation and exploitation
by powerful vested interests. We need to resist their deceptions.
Techniques of persuasion or, more brutally, propaganda, have
been refined greatly in the 20th and 21st centuries. Now
“the News” is a manufactured article, distilled by mendacious press releases,
pithy sound bites and by armies of spokesmen and lobbyists. Almost 100 years
ago, a vituperative newspaper campaign against unflappable Prime Minister H.H.
Asquith, full of half-truths and distortion, helped bring down his coalition in
1916. A similar series of attacks on Stanley Baldwin in 1931 provoked him to
utter his famous put-down of the rampant Press Barons: They are aiming to exercise power without responsibility - the
prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages. This shaft hit home (Baldwin
had borrowed the phrase from his cousin Rudyard Kipling) and Rothermere and
Beaverbrook were firmly shut up.
Britain's modern Press Barons have been a rum lot – remember Robert
Maxwell, Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch, much favoured by bankers and fawned
upon by politicians but hardly convincing guardians of the common weal. British
newspapers are often fiercely partisan, most of conservative hue, like The Telegraph, The Times and the Daily Mail
though the Left is catered for in The
Guardian, The Independent and in
parts of the provincial press. The populist tabloids switch sides
inconsistently. The TV and radio channels are regulated by an Ofcom Code
requiring impartiality and although I am often enraged by what I think is Leftie
bias in the BBC, the consensus seems to be that most broadcast media is broadly
impartial; Sky News and ITV are accused of maybe leaning too far towards the Right.
The current election campaign will be an exercise in
distortion. The voters will be offered false choices (“either support our NHS
spending programme or face the closure of your hospital”), selective
statistics, half-truths and the suppression of inconvenient facts. The
electorate want to see and hear the party leaders but their public exposure will
be carefully choreographed; face to face debates are sharply limited and while
some monitors of discussions are excellent – Julie Etchingham of ITV and David
Dimbleby for the BBC shone – the ego of Jeremy Paxman intruded into the
Sky/Channel 4 interviews of Cameron and Miliband, as if the viewers wanted to
hear him and not the politicians.
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| Pass the sick-bag, Alice |
The TV programmes,
especially the 5 challengers evening on BBC before a clearly Leftie audience,
gave unwarranted exposure to undeserving outsiders; the sight of the 3 witches
from Plaid, the Greens and the SNP embracing enthusiastically afterwards,
beside a sheepish Miliband, leaving Farage rather forlorn and isolated was one
of the more stomach-churning moments so far.
The OBR tries to keep the politicians honest when it comes
to statistics about the economy but not much restraint is shown elsewhere. New
words have been coined – “truthiness” (gut feeling as fact) and “proofiness”
(bogus statistics) to describe common political debating techniques. Thus we
hear about the number of immigrants, HIV infection among them, the prevalence
of zero-hours contracts, the rate of deficit reduction, the future value of
Scotland’s oil – all matters open to interpretation and spin – and we are left
none the wiser. Mercifully the campaign itself is quite short, although all the
signs are that the result will not be clear-cut and unfamiliar coalition
building will occupy Westminster and bemuse the voters for many days after
polling.
Yet the British media is far better regulated than the
Greek, Greece being the place for “excitement”, if that is what you want, as
Cameron rather sardonically remarked. The main Greek press and media channels
are all owned by highly conservative oligarchs, who have ne’er a good word and
many a bad one to say about the incumbent SYRIZA government. There are endless
political panel programmes on TV with some kind of “balance”- accommodating all
the 6 parties in Parliament (neo-Nazi Golden Dawn excluded). Greek politicians
are noisy, shrill and dishonest so the discussions usually end up in an
undignified shouting match. New Democracy’s star-turn is loudly manic Adonis
Geogiadis, operating at off-the-meter decibel levels, probably certifiable in any normal
society. The Greek equivalent of the BBC, mismanaged ERT, was closed down as an
economy measure in 2013 but has partly reopened. Journalists and commentators
of any previous reputation are now cosily in the financial pocket of the
oligarchs. Nobody expected any better of Greece.
What makes the situation scandalous is the interference of
the EU. The grand-daddy of all propagandists was the unlamented Dr Josef
Goebbels, henchman of Adolf and fellow-suicide in the 1945 Berlin Bunker.
Goebbels specialised in The Big Lie, wholly fictional, and repeated so often
and so loudly that his audience came to believe it. His heirs in Berlin and
Brussels do not repeat his ravings about “the Zionist world conspiracy” but
have moved on to “the sacred status and irresistible progress of the Euro”, equally
fictitious. They use well-trodden techniques, mud-slinging, ignoring proof,
card-stacking and so on to spread their gospel.
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| Wolfgang Schaeuble playing the blame-game |
If they succeed, the ghost of Dr Goebbels will be proud of
their handiwork.
SMD
27.04.15
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2015
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