MEDIA ALERT
Dumb Is Not The Word...!
November 28, 2001
"And the main headline this lunchtime: Prince Charles and
Camilla Parker-Bowles have appeared as a couple, in public, for the first
time." (ITN 1 O'Clock News, 29.1.99)
Very occasionally the
corporate media subjects itself to some self-analysis. In a two-page spread
in the Guardian on April 1, 1996, headlined, 'News You Can't Use', James
Fallows, Washington Editor of the Atlantic Monthly, focused on 'How the media
undermine American democracy'.
With a title like that, rational human
beings eagerly anticipated incisive examination of the way giant media
corporations, often owned by arms, oil and other parent companies, undermined
political parties, ideas and value systems threatening to corporate
interests. They awaited discussion of the significance of the fact that
broadsheets are 75% dependent on advertising revenue, and of how this must
shift support, profits, power and outreach towards business-friendly media
and away from honesty.
Instead, Fallows began by arguing that the press
should stop "portraying public life in America as a race to the bottom, in
which one group of conniving, insincere politicians ceaselessly tries to
out-manoeuvre another."
Too much negativity is bad news, Fallows
continued, "If an awareness of the parts of life that go right is not built
into an enumeration of what is going wrong, the news becomes useless, in that
it teaches us all to despair." Similarly, what is really irksome is that
media celebrities like to make themselves "the centre of attention" by making
"fun of the gaffes and imperfections of anyone in public life".
In
short, the press is +too+ hostile to power, too willing to grab attention at
the expense of imperfect politicians. A more up-beat press should
present American public life with more respect and less cynicism. Fallows'
arguments were subsequently described as a "fierce attack" on the American
press in the Guardian.
The Guardian returned to the issue last week,
with an article by Rod Liddle, editor of BBC Radio 4's Today programme. This
is what Liddle had to say:
"When we allege that TV has 'dumbed down',
what exactly do we mean? Certainly not that it is dumber than it used to be -
because clearly it isn' t. More like it's dumber than we are, or dumber than
we like to think we are. Meaning the rest of the population, those people who
settled down, uncomplainingly, to watch acres of the stuff every evening are
- comfortingly - our intellectual inferiors. We are complaining about
what other people want; not about television itself." (Rod Liddle, 'News to
me', the Guardian, 19.11.01)
To complain, then, that 10 minutes, or
thirty percent, of the BBC's 6 O' Clock News on January 26, 1998, dealt with
the Queen Mother's fall and fracture of her left hip, is simply to be an
intellectual snob. Dissidents, at least, do not accuse the TV of 'dumbing
down', we accuse it of moral meltdown. Our government has been accused by
senior UN diplomats of genocide in Iraq. It is supporting the US government
(ie, US big business) in wrecking climate treaties. It has embraced a Russian
government responsible for huge massacres of civilians in Chechnya. Failure
to report this, and much else besides, is not 'dumbing down'; it is moral
collapse.
In conclusion, Liddle drew up a "hate-list":
"·
Deepscreen narcosis: the inability to turn off the television even when you
loathe what you're watching and, worse, despise yourself for
watching it."
The editors of Media Lens suffer from a related
complaint: Broadsheet narcosis: the inability to stop reading trivial points
made by 'liberal' commentators in response to grave and urgent issues such as
press freedom. Liddle had more serious points to make:
"· Brevity and
banality: the assumption, which is unfortunately correct, that we will grow
bored or exhausted by intelligence presented in any depth or at any
length."
Do we really grow bored or exhausted by "intelligence presented
in any depth"? Or do we grow bored with deceptions, superficiality,
half-truths, distortion, omission and deliberate obfuscation? Liddle's own
article is an example of the problem he is discussing: arguments which do not
penetrate illusions to reveal important truths, arguments that do not help
people to understand the world, but instead side-track them and bewilder them
with trivia, are naturally of no interest. Following John Pilger's
documentary, Death of a Nation, on East Timor, British Telecom registered
4,000 calls a minute to the 'helpline' number displayed at the end of the
programme - an enormous response, according to BT. After a unique televised
debate between Andrew Marr and Noam Chomsky on media control, the producer,
Simon Finch, was "inundated" with a flood of letters the like of which he had
never seen.
Commentators like Liddle seem to associate "intelligence"
with complexity and difficulty. Nothing could be further from the truth:
honesty is often clear and simple; it is the convoluted, deceptive arguments
of the corporate mainstream that are difficult and complex. Liddle's comments
recall the words of John Milton: "They who have put out the people's eyes,
reproach them of their blindness."
Liddle continues:
"· The
deification of the celebrity: usually in inverse proportion to talent or
virtue of the celebrity in question."
Another trivial point.
"·
Standardisation of thought: partly a result of political correctness,
partly
a lack of imagination."
Economic correctness is the problem, not
political correctness - journalists careless of corporate sensitivities do
not last long in the corporate media. The standardisation of thought and lack
of imagination, quite obviously, are the result of the standardisation of
media control: giant corporations +are+ the mass media, and giant
corporations all have vested interests in promoting the same 'muzak' and
public passivity.
"· The great god television: an overwhelming belief
that television is the single most important thing in all of our lives, and
that an appearance on TV, even if it is merely to be humiliated, is the acme
of our existence."
A third trivial point. Focusing on the weaknesses and
foibles of the public is preferable to analysing the horrific institutional
corruption of a state and corporate controlled mass media system. The public
desire for TV fame is not responsible for allowing corporations to wreck the
climate and to devastate the Third World for short-term profit - corporate
control of the media is.
Media Lens has also drawn up a "hate-list" to
add to the comments above:
* TV news consistently reports less of the
truth of Western crimes against people and planet even than the 'broadloids'
(broadsheets and tabloids). Richard Falk, professor of international politics
at Princeton, has explained how Western foreign policy is promoted by the
media "through a self-righteous, one-way moral/legal screen with positive
images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a
campaign of unrestricted political violence".
* TV journalism relies
heavily on official sources. Reporters automatically turn to the PM's
official spokesperson, the White House press secretary, various business
associations and military experts. Such reliance on official sources gives
the news an inherently establishment cast and gives those in power tremendous
influence over defining what is or is not 'news'. Robert McChesney, author of
Rich Media, Poor Democracy, warns: "This is precisely the opposite of what a
functioning democracy needs, which is a ruthless accounting of the powers
that be."
* The mainstream media plays a large role in the demonisation
of western 'enemies': Qaddafi, Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
The standard strategy involves arming and nurturing the monsters-to-be,
covering for their human rights abuses, and then publicising those crimes
as geopolitical interests dictate. This is vital for justifying violence in
the cause of state-corporate interests around the world, while
mollifying home-based critics of such behaviour. The creation of an 'evil
empire' of some kind - as in post-war Western scaremongering about the 'Red
Menace' or earlier talk of the 'Evil Hun' - has been a standard device for
terrifying the population into supporting arms production and military
adventurism abroad - both major sources of profit for big business. Iraq's
Saddam Hussein has been a useful bogeyman for US arms manufacturers who
have notched up sales of over $100bn to Saddam's neighbours in the Middle
East. The mass media also demonises 'anti-globalisation' protesters -
often described as 'rioters' - and anyone else perceived as a threat
to free-market ideology.
SUGGESTED ACTION
Write to the Guardian editor (alan.rusbridger@g...)
and Rod Liddle (rod.liddle@b...)
and ask them to provide serious analyses of the economic and political forces
that compromise press freedom.
The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. In writing letters to journalists, we strongly urge readers to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Copy your letters to editor@medialens.org
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