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| Never, ever, think outside the box (Photo credit: Mrs eNil) |
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| JOURNALISTS (Photo credit: drinksmachine) |
Throughout my many years in journalism I held some beliefs
that I would, if pressed, recite like a mantra.
*Editorial writers
are paid liars for the boss
(When I became a senior
journalist, offered promotions to pseudo-management positions, it was always
understood I would never write editorials. In the end I never accepted any of
these offered promotions, believing that the position of Reporter was responsible
enough in any newspaper. I was once given the status of Associate Editor, which
came automatically with my position as a senior writer, but I didn’t know until
I signed a letter of worker protest that I was considered to have joined the
management. I let my signature stand, and the devil take the hindmost, which
happened, I guess you could say, a few months later when I quit the paper).
* Promotion is a method
of worker-control: if you refuse you’re unreliable
(It was not until I was moving
crab-like towards my inevitable quitting of the job, that I realized how
venemous my boss was towards me because of my persistent refusal to accept promotions. Suddenly I realized that
my refusal had been meant my boss had no effective way of controlling me, and
that is the last thing a boss wants of anyone under his command. When all this
sank in, I quit, as I had done previously from five other newspapers, scattered around the
Commonwealth.)
*Advertising,
especially display advertising, is all lies
(At one point in my family life,
when my children were young, I was in the habit of lining them up before the TV
set and we all chanted “Lies, lies, lies!” as advertising droned on. I really
think this is the most effective response to advertising, better than any code
of ethics. Strangely, Randal does not mention this technique of resistence in
his magisterial review of the field!)
* Every
newspaper, all advertising, whether subliminally or directly, is always engaged
in propagating capitalism and its system.
( This is the great hidden pressure on every citizen, that every
advertisement, every issue of a mainstream newsaper, is in its very existence a
subliminal appeal, instruction, or encouragement, to the viewer to believe in
capitalism. Thus, we are surrounded, inescapably, by the propaganda of capitalism. Thus, I
imagine, it follows from all of these that
I never really believed in the illusory, self-accepted status of journalists as
the defenders of freedom of expression.)
* And lastly, I will never vote for anything but a leftist
party.
Having read these, it will come as
no surprise to most of my readers to find that I scarcely thought it worth
reading the chapters on advertising and public relations in Randal
Marlin’s epic work Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion (published by Broadview
Press, Peterborough, Ontario, pps 368,
$32.95.), the excellent book that
has triggered these typically rambling and unstructured reflections on my
working life in the media. Perhaps I
could add one to the list of mantras listed above:
It would be:
* Journalism may
not be a particularly honorable profession, but it is a notch above Public
Relations, which again is a notch above Advertising.
(I associate Advertising men as
the crassest of seekers afer wealth. And I associate Public Relations with
those pathetic washed-up journalists, come through desperation to representing
the national Turkey Federation or somesuch, who are always to be found hanging
around the local Press Club bar.)
I imagine it also follows, and
scarcely needs to be emphasized, that I have always regarded talk of the Ethics
of Advertising, and the Ethics of Public Relations (and the Ethics of
Journalism, come to that), as at once a cruel joke and a monstrous hoax
perpetrated on the public in an effort to obscure their real purposes, and to
camouflage the constant lying that lies at the heart of their work.
Randal, of
course, is bound to take them seriously, since his field of expertise is the
Ethics of Persuasion, and all three professions (I hate using the word in this
context) are certainly in the business of persuasion. I remember in my first
years in The Montreal Star in the
late 1950s hearing an expert talk at a luncheon club meeting about the arts of
salesmanship, beginning with what he called the “needs creation” aspect of the
sales pitch (which means they have to create a need that doesn’t really exist),
moving on to the “needs satisfaction” area of the pitch (meaning they have to
satisfy the imaginary need they have just created: and these guys are pedallig
Ethics!). I thought this both hilarious and revealing, and hastened back to the
office to write a wry account of the talk (using those skills I had developed
over the years in seeming to say something without actually saying it). The
fate of my noble effort was the sub-editor’s spike. Reflections on the falsity
of salesmanship did not deserve a place in a newspaper that depended on
advertising for its living, however amusing they might be.
Similarly,
after my eight years of relative freedom writing from London, I returned to
Montreal to take up a position as a reporter on the staff, and one of my first
assignments was to describe the opening of a huge new shopping centre in the
north end of Montreal. Having become accustomed to the lower key of everything
in British life, I was amazed by the scale of the architecture, this temple to
commerce being placed in a building almost worthy of a cathedral. Fidel Castro had just made a speech in which
he criticised the western world for its commercialism, and I worked into my
article that it could have been this new shopping centre that he had in his
sights. The fate of this article, like the other written a decade before, was
the sub-editorial spike. “It would be in bad taste,” growled the
editor-in-chief, “for us to criticize advertising, since we make our living out
of it.” (I could have gotten away with
writing something like that from London, but there my bosses were not likely to
meet the offended parties over lunch at their clubs. A melancholy reflection on
the flexible devotion of the newspaper to freedom of expression.)
So, Randal,
you will have to forgive me, old man, if I skip over your chapters on
advertising, public relations and their supposed Codes of Ethics.
I did make a
note of one interesting thing you wrote, on page 195 of your opus.
“In Ancient Greece the orator directly
confronted an audience, and persuasive skills were directed to winning it over,
along lines described in Aristotle’s Rhetoric.
(My note: good
old Aristotle, glad you could get him in there!
He hadn’t reappeared for sixty pages, and I was missing him!) Today large-scale comunication is mediated
through print, radio, TV and the Internet.”
This did bring to mind the
occasion on which I got my idea, as a teenager, of what I still think to be
seemly politics. Our governing Labour Party in New Zealand had, of course, right-wing and left-wing factions. Naturally, I supported
the leftists, one of whose leaders after the war mounted a campaign for
nationalization of the banks. He undertook a nation-wide tour, an Aristotle de nos jours, and in my home town he
drew a capacity audience of at least 1500 who sat quietly and respectfully
through his presentation in a theatre packed to the gills, before going home to
consider his arguments: just how politics should be conducted, I thought (and
still think). Much superior to this modern
“mediation” through electronic media.
Incidentally,
I had some experience of this “mediation”, too. I first became a contributor to
the CBC in the mid to late fifties when I wrote a talk about the writer Jean-Paul
Sartre, one of my favorites, which was
accepted by the dedicated and deadly serious radio producers of that day --- who
also produced farm forums, adult education programmes on the radio and such
other improving and laudable stuff that filled the airwaves in the 1950s. In
those early days, I could talk for fifteen minutes without interruption. Later
I made a monthly contribution to a programme called Critically Speaking, my particular field being criticism of radio
programmes (because I never had a TV until my employer provided me with one on
my arrival in London in 1960). Eleven minute talks, if I remember correctly. From
London, later, I was an occasional commentator to programmes dealing with British
politics, the length being usually six or eight minutes.
Only years later
when I was writing a rare commentary on something or other for the CBC, did one
of the new-breed producers interrupt my flow to tell me, “You’ve been talking
for two minutes. You’ll be losing your audience. We need some sound effects
here, if possible.!”
This is the new
“mediation” of communication, and it kind of explains my dismay when I hear
that youngsters are studying “communications” in universities. In fact, this
modern “mediation” is worse than so far
stated, because, while chatting to a TV producer one day as we waited to get
into a studio, I was told that the average sound-byte on TV had been reduced to
six seconds! I could scarcely believe my
ears, but I knew it to be only too true because not long before I had given a
45-minute interview to a CBC sound producer for a piece on the historic
creation of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement ten years before. She
had congratulated me on the coherence and relevance of what I had to say, and
thanked me for it by including all of half a sentence from the interview in her
programme. I vowed never again to be interviewed by the CBC. Why waste one’s
time?
Perhaps my
distaste for this modern world of “mediation of communications” as it is now
called, explains why, when I finally quit daily journalism in 1971, hoping to
be able to continue to feed my family of four children, and expecting to make
most of my living from the CBC, they hired me only twice in the following forty
years.
Presumably
because I’ve never mastered the art of the six-second sound byte. Or also,
maybe, because I’m just a teeny bit bloody-minded.
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