The Media Aug '97 - July '98

The media play a particularly malevolent part in the continuation of the Status Quo in present day society. Ironically enough it was a group of journalists who uncovered the details of the Watergate scandal, thus donating the real powers that be a patsy with whom to burden all the blame, and the American public with a villain on whom to vent their discontent. In would be pleasant, though I fear a little naive, to believe that these journalists acting on their own initiative uncovered the scoop of the century. I fear that that truth lies more in a nod and a wink in the right place allowing the floodgates to open and an unprecedented impeachment of the head of state to ensue. This cleverly took the heat off the more camera-shy, just as in the Kennedy assassinations the previous decade. The latter example proving beyond doubt that if the National Security Council / CIA wish to keep certain details quiet, their is no Freedom of Information act that will make them comply, they are ‘above the law’. Uncomfortable as it may be for the Americans to contemplate, their are many state actions in their recent history that do not add up.


The media played a large part in the covering of the collapse of the Eastern Block, and therefore were able to have a significant role in the way we back home in the West perceived the whole affair. For those of us not present in East Berlin, Bucharest, Prague or Warsaw or Moscow our opinions were shaped entirely from those events deemed newsworthy by the crews there at the time. Who decided which city to cover, which person(s) to interview, and did anybody care? I, like many others was touched by the pictures of euphoric people atop the wall and passing through the Brandenburg Gate on the 9th November 1989, but then I was only 17 and did not discover the whole story until much later. I look back on these events now and wonder why so many of us felt that history had been made and an oppressed people liberated I was too young and too far away to formulate my own objective opinion I relied on the media to provide me with the facts and thereby the basis to do so. Having only been to Berlin a couple of times I couldn’t fully appreciate the depth and complexity of the GDR problem then. I have now lived in the former GDR, in a city little changed over the six years since the demise of the state save for the rise of the neo-nazi contingent, the rise in unemployment, the rise in competitive consumerism and the fall in western subsidies. I met many people who lived much of their lives under the oppression that we in the West were so glad to see come to an end in the ‘people’s revolutions’ no matter how much blood was shed. I can only presume then that the feelings I felt when I watched the wall torn down, were the product of the media and the state in which I lived.

This is what I was supposed to believe, as a good capitalist I was meant to share the victory of the market economy over its planned counterpart and see the spoils of war, the people dancing in the streets and the end to the threat of global nuclear warfare. The actuality of this period is not for this chapter to address, suffice to say the media served its purpose in suppressing debate on the subject with alarming success. I wonder how Europe would have fared had the Eastern Bloc countries survived long enough to witness the West going through the most crippling recession since the 1950’s. The austerity many families and individuals were forced to endure during this period would not have looked out of place in Eastern Europe, how ironic it would have been if the Soviet Union had been forced to bale us out, perhaps it would have removed the West’s intolerable smugness and self-righteous manner - that in itself would have been grounds for celebration! It has been said that a bank is only as sound as its investors’ money. Whilst the investors remain confident the bank prospers, but input the element of doubt in competence or the stability of circumstances into the minds of the investors and they withdraw their money and look to safer havens, this will ultimately bring about the dissolution of the bank regardless of whether the doubt was well-founded or not. He who controls the element of doubt is a powerful man indeed especially as the capitalist economy is founded on these market principles. One has to ask the question is this situation, where uninvolved individuals can, by speculation, make or break the economies of countries, and therefore influence the fortunes of the citizens, really a sound basis for the governing of society? 


I have wanted to be a journalist/writer since the age of 18, a formerly noble profession in which I thought one could possibly aim to help try to balance the lack of equilibrium between the classes and therefore forge together the makings of a fair and just society for all. This is perhaps particularly important for a person not entirely adhering to any classes and seeking to gain acceptance or at least tolerance from any of them. The steady realisation that all is not well in society at large and notably within the media world has cut deeply, although as I will state many times I myself must confess that I do not hold the solutions to the problems. I believe that the media can function as a communication tool to act on behalf of the people and the state, it is fundamentally there to inform and allow us to have the necessary facts at our disposal in order to formulate a rounded opinion so that we may have a realistic idea as to what is going right and equally importantly what is not. The more people aware of the problems the greater the pool of knowledge within which to discuss the solutions, it is not important who is first to a story or who gets the exclusive rights etc. etc. What is important is that the news business is cleaned up once and for all and we rid ourselves of the mindless pap put out by magnates who would prefer it that we simply by their brand of drivel, shut up and stop asking questions. It is vital that journalists refuse to join the cover-up that is the ‘news’ today and start reporting the real issues, the ones which will affect us and many generations to come. Only this way can we start to address the backlog of information that needs to be supplied to all so that those with the potential intellect to answer some of our present-day concerns can start from a position of strength without having to waste time sifting through useless stories. One key change which I would suggest would be the abandoning of the pretence of objectivity, Karl Marx stated that the Press, one can safely include modern forms of media in this as well, can never be neutral as someone(s)will always control certain factors critical to its survival. Be it the printing presses, the ink, the paper or perhaps most importantly the access to information - the News Agencies.

Furthermore a journalist can never be fully objective due to them looking at events through their own eyes/ears and also using the ways of expression that they know to communicate them to other people. To bastardise a historical quote, Nietzsche once said that “historical objectivity is like a eunuch watching over the harem of world history.” I think this holds perfectly true to the current day, and serves to act as an analogy for all forms of objectivity in general. This means unless we are to remove the parts of ourselves that feel as well as the parts that judge things owing to past experiences, we can never view or explain happenings in a fully detached fashion. Now one solution is that offered by Marx who maintains that the press be in the hands of the state, which in turn is subservient to the people, thus the Media, now openly subjective, should work for the good of the people by working for the good of the state. This appears at first to be theoretical and sentimental lefty claptrap, some would say dangerously naive perhaps, there will naturally be those that disagree with such ideas, many of them with their own reasons for doing so. Others, I feel have purely been hoodwinked by the rhetoric of the Right since the collapse of the Eastern Block, they believe that the Free Press should always be the goal even if it be somewhat far off. I would strongly assert that this is in fact the dangerously naive principle, for it is far more pragmatic to recognise the impossibility of the task and therefore plan action accordingly. For those still with doubts one only has to look at who benefits from the present media set-up and how the magnates such as Murdoch, Springer, Black are able to ensure their own financial security and in addition the propagation of their political views, - it is perhaps no surprise that all the major news magnates control the right-wing press, which of course in many countries accounts for the only choice the population have, or could it in fact be the case that Murdoch is a closet communist who prints right-wing papers in a tongue in cheek fashion, or aiming to educate the people in the evils of capitalism in the method of ‘Die Welle’. The more worrying factor is the more covert control exacted over the News Agencies which supply most, and in some cases all, of the information that all the Media uses not simply that owned by the press barons, although this section of the ‘free’ Media is scant enough. When this position occurs in History it is regarded for what it is, ‘Totalitarianism’.


In my opinion one only has to look at the Pre-Second World War Press in Germany to gauge the possible consequences of the road down which we are hurtling. // Hugenberg Dates TelegraphenUnion WIPRO etc. etc. //
There are some writers and observers who have recognised the control exacted by the few over the Media which determines the opinion of the many. “At any given moment there is a sort of all pervading orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss large and uncomfortable facts” stated George Orwell, this is succinctly paraphrased by Noam Chomsky in what he chillingly calls the ‘Manufacture of Consent’. John Pilger in his book ‘Hidden Agendas’ writes, “ For us in democracies, the message of our saturation ‘free’ media is that there is only one way now, and opposition is heresy and fatalism ideal.” It is this ‘fatalism’, this ’manufactured consent’ that is the most dangerous of all the things that the ‘Establishment’ can throw at us, it is the self-censorship, we believe that as the present course is unavoidable it is best to go along with it. We stop looking for alternatives and stop forcing the decision-makers to justify those decisions. In this way Capitalism has entrenched itself far more than it should have been allowed and those now with their fingers in every hierarchical pie are going to be extremely tough to shift.

This is not to say that any would-be megalomaniac in the West necessarily has plans to do the same, yet, or moreover that s/he would be allowed to do so were they to try, however with the mechanism already in place one must wonder whether we will be able/ be allowed to check the status all the time, one slip-up and the consequences would be catastrophic.
I believe that all of us wish to express our own views to an audience, whether we feel we have the ability to do so or not. What is it that makes us lack this courage? We do not wish to look stupid and be ridiculed so we cover up our individual participation: “I have a friend who has a problem” or alternatively “hypothetically speaking, what if...?”. This passes the buck and allows us theoretically to express ourselves without fear of being exposed. What we could say if only we owned a newspaper and could employ like-minded journalists working under directives written in stone or would take the flack for us were our opinion not to be palatable. If these journalists were truly free then one would surely not take the risk of associating our good name with their potentially embarrassing views. If our opinions however were known, the rules of conduct crystal clear as was the knowledge of who is the boss how many dissenting voices would be likely to be heard? This being said what would be so wrong supplanting the individual at the top with an idea, mutually acceptable, let us call it the common good, tinkering with the iron directives and we’re almost back to Marx’s/Hegelian theory again. 



This was not entirely the case in the Eastern Block, the individual was replaced by ‘the party’ which often in reality did mean an individual as in the case of Stalin, Ceacescu, or Honecker but the difference here appears to be the reluctance of the majority of the Eastern Europeans to accept the facade allowing them therefore to read/listen/watch the media knowing that this was the state line. In the Western world this accepted line is passed off as objectivity and factual information beyond reproach. It is a great pity that the free media that set itself up in the transition period that followed the collapse of the Eastern bloc has been subsumed by the Western media machines, under the guise of market competition. The government has sold off its holding companies and thereby the presses, the paper companies, the press agencies, radio and television stations alike to the highest bidder, a process naturally favouring the affluent free-booting Western media magnates. What chance would a small co-operative of journalists and editors from Sachsen-Anhalt have in bidding against the giant expansionist Springer Verlag during one of the greatest industrial bargain basement auctions to take place in Europe. Naturally the co-op could try to continue its operation from make-shift premises but who will buy the local paper with all its advertisements and cover price twice that of the national daily with its numerous on-the-spot correspondence, regional supplements, cover photographs, exclusives and just ten pence on Mondays with extra sports section and free pull-out Royal magazine? Without State subsidies, enough newspapers must at least be sold to cover the overheads so in the late eighties and early nineties a very real opportunity to trial a de-centralised and relatively objective and independent media was sadly lost, perhaps forever. There is a slogan in East Germany the translation of which reads “I want my wall back and this time ten metres higher”. It is now put on T-shirts and sold to tourists just as the wall itself (and every other chopped up piece of slap-dash concrete in East Berlin) was. There is now a small bit of “Ost-bloc” in the living rooms and display cabinets of thousands if not millions of people all over the Western world. The symbol that was once the largest monument against the Capitalist West has in fact, in its death throes, become one of the most marketable pieces of capitalist merchandise this century. The T-shirt slogan shows that this irony is not entirely lost amongst the East Germans, though they find it less and less amusing as the subsidies fail to arrive, unemployment goes up and educational standards and prospects for the future go down.
The structure of the media is not simply built upon the whims of individuals, but rather a concept more sinister that touches on many of the situations that I have already mentioned and others that I will come to in due course.

The dawn of the 21st century heralds the widespread permeation of the Multimedia into all strata of Society, the Internet, lest one forgets was set up by the CIA to allow a continued accessing and transferral of information in the event of a global nuclear holocaust both during and after. The firm guards their secrets and technological advances as a Dragon would a cave of riches, I cannot believe that the Internet has been allowed to fall into the hands of Joe Public purely as an act of democratic benevolence. If, what the Americans say is true, the threat to the civilised world remains great, wouldn’t the CIA and the National Security Council want to hold on to this huge asset with its fallout purposes and intelligence potential? Alternatively, the explanation might be that the CIA and NSC decided that they could keep a far more covert eye on the world with Joe Public logging in every day to check his E-mail and ‘surf the net’. This is no random conspiracy theory as the American tracking stations across Europe testify to. The one in the North of Scotland is powerful enough to receive all the telephone conversations and filter through to look for keywords to monitor the activities of ‘known subversives’. As if that wasn’t enough the notorious clipper chip seems to be the final proof backing up this argument. For those new to “cyber surfing” the clipper chip was a method by which the American government planned to give themselves a back door access to all e-mail accounts and internet log-ins. This would allow them access to personal and business information rather like the post office having a quick glance at the letters passing through their hands to check for illicit material of a subversive, anti-establishment, anti-social nature. Bearing in mind most e-mail accounts have their source in the USA this would in effect have allowed the American government to scrutinise files and data pertaining to people over whom they should have no jurisdiction. Added to this it is worth remembering that not all countries have to declare such policy intentions to the public and it is therefore conceivable that some countries, at the behest of the Americans and not wishing to displease this potentially powerful ally, have implemented the clipper chip or similar such device to monitor the data of their citizens or “cyber immigrants” operating within their geographical boundaries. Whilst this may not seem life-threatening one need only look at the McCarthy era in the United States to show the damage caused by state suspicion and associations with supposedly suspicious elements. Of course nowadays many people may consider themselves too clever and devise elaborate encoding and decoding programs to protect their information/opinions, this is hardly likely to allay the suspicions of an eagerly prying state. Such themes are seldom tackled by the media not necessarily for want of interest so much as lack of proof, but the inaction the longer it continues leads us down a path foreseen by Orwell as early as 1948. 



Sometimes citizens cry out “injustice” often prompted by reports in the media and the people wait for something to be done about it, but it is no coincidence that at these points something equally gripping and possibly more moving will quickly be scheduled to divert people’s attention to events considerably further away from home. Reports of wars in Africa or Bosnia and famines and droughts across the third world will be brought back into the public eye again should people decide to recall facts such as the bombers of the Lockerbie plane still roaming free, or that lawyers are being killed when investigating or prosecuting Mafia bosses, or journalists murdered for asking too many awkward questions about the IRA or simply people questioning the unquestionable in whatever capacity. The Status Quo rolls on in the inevitable fashion of a bulldozer through a flat field, it cares little for what lies in its path and it would be folly to expect the wheels to grind to a halt to avoid crushing a blade of grass.