[A-List] UK ideological state apparatus: journalism

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

More evidence of Stiglitz's naiveté...


Death Of Diversity

Are massive media corporations and partisan writers destroying British
journalism?
Ian Bell
The Sunday Herald, 6 October 2002

THIS may be a first (there won't be a second): I think I just found myself
agreeing with the Daily Mail. This disturbing meeting of minds may only have
come about thanks to a typically stupendous piece of hypocrisy on the part
of the Forgers' Gazette -- and I may require counselling for a while -- but
there it was: as though caught in the midst of premature senility, I was on
a train last Thursday morning telling myself that this time the splenetic
rag actually had a point. Labour's Blackpool conference had caused the
trouble. Blair had emerged triumphant -- a double, a triple triumph -- and
the Mail didn't like it one bit. Never mind the blatant stage-management,
never mind the creepy glamour of Bill Clinton: the Prime Minister had put
every enemy to flight. The right was in squalid disarray; the left in
confused despair. The unions had not troubled him; the vote for war was his;
and only Edwina Currie had provided a small, comic diversion. Iain Duncan
Smith's shambolic Tories, officially Her Majesty's Opposition, had merited
no more than a few token, contemptuous mentions at the seaside. In the
universe of the Mail, where everything was going wrong at once, this meant
only one thing: conspiracy.

Dutifully, the paper named the guilty men and women. It covered a page with
photographs of their smug, complacent faces. It named and shamed them, each
and every one, for their roles in the plot. These were 'Blair's Media
Groupies', the journalistic great and good accused of abandoning their
professional responsibilities just to keep New Labour in power. Every word
reeked of the Mail's indignation.

As it happened, I knew a few of the sinister crew. I had socialised with a
couple of them -- the only remaining purpose of a party conference -- just
hours before. The Mail said that these individuals, prominent people at The
Guardian, The Independent, The Times, the BBC and Channel Four, had ceased
to cover politics and were now active participants in the grubby business,
to Labour's obvious benefit. I read all this stuff and thought, suddenly,
that this charge was perfectly, self-evidently true.

I had not forgotten, of course, that when the boot was on the other foot the
Mail had never mentioned the possibility of bias. When the Tories and their
numerous press cheerleaders ruled the land our right-wing media scarcely
attempted to justify their behaviour. But in the fervour of Blackpool the
realities of modern British journalism were hard to disguise: numerous
so-called left-of-centre hacks were working actively, with every written
word, for the Blair government while lonely Tory scribblers went around with
a hunted and haunted look, trying desperately to work out how the world
could once again be put to rights. Those of us whose affiliation reads 'none
of the above' had the sort of fun you usually only find at a petting zoo.

Foreign journalists are frequently amazed by this state of affairs. Those
who work for anything resembling a free press cannot understand why British
newspapers have become quite so shamelessly partisan. They see a media that
is the mirror image of a narrow political culture and a few potent
commercial interests (themselves defined by their relationship with
government) and wonder whatever happened to diversity.

It is a good question. Modern Britain's press could almost have been
designed as a parody of Henry Ford's dictum: you can have any colour as long
as it's black-and-white. Politics, for the vast majority of our newspapers,
happens only in the tiny spaces that separate Labour from Tory. A journalist
who seeks influence or regular employment picks his or her side, if he or
she is wise, and processes information or argument accordingly. With every
year that passes, alternative voices grow fewer.

Our old friend Rupert Murdoch has done sterling work in this area. The
biggest newspaper owner; the sole purveyor of satellite broadcasting; a
media ruler in Britain, America, Asia, Australia and elsewhere; a man with
designs on terrestrial television (via Channel Five), Rupe is the principle
of 'consolidation' made flesh. He once said that he envisaged a day when
only The Times, The Sun, The Daily Mail and The Guardian would remain as
major London newspapers -- and he wasn't kidding. The lesson to be learned
about Murdoch -- about News Corp and News International -- is that, first,
they are part of a global process and, second, that governments, Labour or
Tory, have not minded one bit.

The problem, like Uncle Rupert's ambitions, is not confined to Britain. In
the United States, the media have been steadily coalescing into a few giant
corporations with near-absolute control over TV, newspapers, film, radio,
the internet and book publishing. The Federal Communications Commission,
controlled by Bush's Republicans, is busily removing the last few regulatory
barriers in the way of the oligarchs (by no coincidence, Blair's government
is doing precisely the same thing), while news blends with entertainment and
American insularity -- or plain ignorance of the world -- becomes a central
issue in international affairs.

How many US TV networks have raised the possibility that a war with Iraq
might be rather worse than ill-considered? How has even the mighty New York
Times become muted in its pronouncements on American foreign policy? When
did the word 'liberal' become a term of abuse in American discourse? The
paralysis of a democracy's intellect began long before September 11. It
began when the voices grew fewer, when those with axes to grind --
commercial, ideological, even religious -- started to colonise the spaces
once occupied by diverse alternatives. In journalistic terms, America is
becoming a monoculture.

But we should talk. I may have been handed a truckload of prizes, deserved
or not, for this stuff, but the number of newspapers prepared to print it,
left or right, becomes fewer by the year. ITV will meanwhile soon be a
single company, in large part thanks to the Blair government; Murdoch's
reach grows steadily longer; and newspaper titles continue to fall into
fewer and fewer hands. The very idea of diversity is in danger. The birth of
a new newspaper such as Business AM, for which I write, is these days
greeted with a kind of astonishment, as though such things should no longer
be possible. But the threat, for all that, is obvious enough: how can there
be diversity without honest argument, and how can there be argument if there
is no-one left, in effect, to argue with?

In the humid netherworld of last week's Blackpool conference the narrowed
arteries of British journalism were in plain sight. The coverage --
partisan, compromised, shameless in its allegiances -- was as far from
diverse as you can get. And the oddest thing was that very few people
thought that any of this was in the least bit odd.

Meanwhile, The Herald, Sunday Herald and Evening Times are for sale. A
commercial process, with the usual commercial imperatives, is in train. Does
it matter who emerges victorious? Does it matter if editorial independence
for each of the papers is maintained, and maintained in Scotland? Is the
political fact of Scotland's distinctiveness to have any echo in the
Scottish press? And should anyone care?

Go back to Blackpool, just for a second. As usual, Scottish journalism and
politics had a presence, a minor one, at this gathering of the British
Labour Party. Scotland was mentioned, now and again. Scottish MPs -- and
First Minister Jack McConnell -- played their parts. And did the affairs of
Scotland impinge for a fraction of a second on a London media paid to report
on Britain for Britain? My apologies for wasting your time with a stupid
question. Foundation schools for England's children, to pick an example at
random, were far more important to my colleagues from the south.

You could argue, reasonably enough, that this is merely a function of
devolution. But what happens if yet another Scottish newspaper title falls
into the hands of people for whom home rule is a mystery, a quaint
distraction, or an abhorrence? What happens, equally, if such a title is
merely the object of the sort of asset-stripping that makes journalism
impossible? Hacks who ask such questions may stand accused of being
self-serving. It would be better, surely, to write about the just demands of
firefighters. But what happens to the remnants of our politics when yet
another newspaper is told what to think and write about an industrial
dispute?

It matters. A handful of newspapers are now the last refuge for real
political debate in Britain and elsewhere. And that, like it or not, is a
political matter.