Meanwhile, back in the grimy present, there are nevertheless limits to the Establishment’s ability to spread propaganda.. Sometimes the Media must be helped along the way. And so we arrive at the big necessary north American Media illusion.
Over and above sheer media servility, it is also necessary for corporations to add an element of persuasive illusion to help the Media on their way. The North American Newsroom barons had to be shown the “Truth”. But seeing as the “Truth” is actually a lie, then an illusion is necessary. And so to the “Phoney Arms Ploy” and Edward Bernays again.
1951 – Honduras – United Fruit’s PR team, headed by Edward Bernays invites the North American Press to witness faked atrocity photos and a “Communist riot” to pave the way for the “anti-Bolshevik” invasion of Guatemala.
Bernays had previously alerted power to the need for effective propaganda back in 1928. A long future of US invasions need a pretext. The Red Menace of communism was taken as the appropriate Satan and the Phoney Arms Ploy was cooked up.
This massive illusion fed the Media barons and they passed on their infantile delusions and McCarthyist hysteria to us via their obedient journalists eager to report the accepted “line” for the next half century, including Vietnam.
But then the truth came out and the people saw the photos of American atrocities, rejected the media illusion that Americans were there to fight communism and came to realise that America was simply attempting to build an empire propped up by local dictators and untold brutality. The demonstrations outside the White House caught on to the obvious historical parallel and shouted “Sieg Heil” to their government in Washington. Attempted empire building is the truth revealed by Vietnam. It gave the game away. Empire.
You may get the impression that the media are the enemy of the Government because they constantly question injustice and put pressure on the Government to act. But, in looking to the Government to lead, the media remain the true allies of power. If the media regarded a Public Enquiry with the same scorn as the public do, and lost faith in politicians to make change (like the public), they would start to look for and actively promote alternatives.
The propaganda of “civilised” countries is maintaining respect and credibility for processes that history has actually discredited. For example, the process of public enquiries is held up as responsive and progressive democracy.
Our experience of Public Enquiries does not give us the same faith in them. Media Reports that there is to be… yes, wait for it… a Public Enquiry! are generally met with groans of resignation by the Public. As with Bloody Sunday, and Hillsborough we witness decades of delay followed by little action. We know that Grenfell Tower will not be the last of its kind.
Where is the progress when a public disaster leads to a public enquiry which leads to irrelevant legislation that is watered down, underfunded, unenforced and then finally removed by subsequent deregulation, leading once again to a public disaster? The cycle of disaster-enquiry-legislation-deregulation-disaster is not progressive, it is cyclic. Tell them. Life is a road, not a roundabout.
Crucial recommendations are either ignored in framing the new legislation or are not enforced even if they do struggle on to the statute book. Disasters recur and the media report in good faith that another enquiry is to be launched as if it will make a difference.
If someone doesn’t want to listen, they don’t have to. Bleating on about the abuses of power is meaningless if the abusers choose not to listen. Our protests are barely audible until pressure turns into rioting and the media and the police spy on the public activity thereby alerting the Prefect in coded terms and stronger emphases that action from the Prefect is required to squash the disobedience, restore the status quo, and protect the system (that pays the propagandist), take further security measures to keep the people down. Or if we’re really lucky, the Government may even consider it necessary to back-track on the repressive legislation that caused the disobedience in the first place. Margaret Thatcher’s Poll Tax in Britain is a rare example of riots effecting direct and immediate change.
If the System is broken is it time for the Media to start promoting alternatives? Will that time ever arrive or will the Media constantly resort to completely discredited methods by which the System pretends that it will fix itself, the Public Enquiry?
The alternative to stealing is sharing. The alternative to easing the path of goods to the needs of Wall Street is to allow the locals to share it between them. By promoting attempts to share and providing ongoing and supportive (not dismissive) coverage, the media will raise the profile of the alternative. Promotion will yield supporters and pressure will yield resources. Examples…
News from the Protest Network. Wouldn’t you rather hear the words of the leader of Oxfam sometimes than the words of the leader of the Tory Party all the time? And yet the media score in the nineties when I last looked was John Major 3869 Oxfam 12. Balance? Did I miss anything?
News from the Street. News from the factory. 500 people work in the CBI. 500 people live on the average street or work in the average factory. But again, it’s CBI 286 Street 0 Factory 4 (Trade Union Leader gets a say). The priorities as they stand become obvious. And yet the real news is on the street where it’s sold. But there’s no time for the street because the CBI have so much to say. Committed coverage of a single street would yield a real understanding of what’s going on after as little as ten weeks. Then there is no excuse for ignorance – we will finally SEE how the other half live. If the CBI say that we’re in a recovery does it mean anything or would it mean more if we check the upward or downward decline of people’s lives?
Politicise the soap opera. Bring the news to the street. Combining the reality of news with the location of soap operas will, over time, show very clearly what the news is on education, health, housing, crime, opportunity and the future of our country. A million reassurances from the chancellor tell us precisely nothing, simply because what he says today he reverses tomorrow. The Media should tell us what’s going on. We know that they don’t and we know what they should be telling us. They don’t. Denial is the mother of blindness and insanity. So if you ever wondered whether the Institutions might be becoming madder by the day…
With the advent of multiple digital channels there remains no excuse to disenfranchise any voice. Local TV connects the people to the place that they live in and so allows them to act. The box in the corner of your room becomes a ticket to ride to see people you know, places you’ve been and to get involved in alternatives that you didn’t know about. Like a local newspaper without a corporate agenda, like a local pirate radio station that’s allowed to do more than just play records. Only more powerful than either. The establishment are extremely edgy about pirate TV. Mainstream TV tells us about the world that we are not connected to and so cannot act on directly. It connects us to unusable information.
Mainstream TV tells us nothing of the more local world that we are connected to. All around us, who are these strangers in our home town? What do the main players look like? How did that road come to be there? Who built that eye-sore? Who are those locals setting up a Corporation to claim their own land? If forced to do so, Digital could empower and enable the community to draw closer together. There are many methods to draw communities together to protect against outside exploitation. Locally produced TV with the specific purpose of uniting communities is only one.
An interesting example occurred entirely by accident during an experiment by mainstream television. At the beginning of Cable TV, Granada TV hooked up 10% of the residents of the small Yorkshire village of Waddington to a variety of channels that were to be offered through the new cable TV platforms. The usual stuff – films, sport etc. But while they were at it, the Engineers thought it may be fun to offer another channel. From one camera in the local village hall, we bring you… Local TV.
With no prior experience the locals used their camera to bring the locals a kids programme, made by the local kids, and a Thought for the Day from the local Vicar, amongst others.
The purpose of the Experiment was to observe the viewing habits of a sample group of people when exposed to multiple channels. What may be a surprise in the face of all that glossy, new, luxuriant film and sport offering was that the clear winner was .. the Local TV station. What may be more of a surprise is that it achieved 95% viewing share. People would appear to be MOST interested in discovering what is going on immediately around them. For their TVs to connect them to the immediate world around them.
I used to run a local Video Production Company. It was my objective to put the means of production into the hands of people. Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys famously said one time “Don’t criticise the Media, become the Media”. So I did. We made programmes for all sorts of local groups. At an exhibition of our work to an invited audience, many of whom had appeared in the various programmes. The question was asked. “What type of Local TV would you like to see?” The answer with the greatest support was the wish to see programmes about “what’s going on round here”.
A few years later, a local TV franchise becomes available through the outsourcing of the new Digital Network. And so of course there was a coming together of a group of thirty or so locals all interested in video production. But it was the local newspaper, the Manchester Evening News that won the franchise, the prize of course being awarded to an established local Institution, with the same news agenda essentially sympathetic to the notion that the existing system strives manfully to meet the needs of the citizenry, transferred over from the print edition to the video edition. Nothing new to see here, and everyone moved along. Local TV, apart from the accident in Waddington, will never be allowed to be truly local TV again. Independent voices without heavily circumscribed agendas are not allowed loud voices.
But then technology steps in. Roll forward another decade and we have Twitter and YouTube, millions of channels, topics and lists – and open to all to participate. There is now the facility to speak to the entire world. What I refer to as second fixes of course abound, for example there was an interesting TED talk on sortition – randomly selecting politicians to avert careerism and corruption as they did in ancient Athens. But the big question always remains. ”Very interesting and I love it, but how do we get from here to there?”
A first fix will put us in power so that second fixes may be enacted.