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It is 30 years since I reviewed
for the magazine Canadian Forum a new
book on the media that in the intervening years has turned out to be the most
influential book ever written on the subject. The book was Manufacturing Consent, co-written by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman,
and it almost completely demolished most of the myths by which most journalists
lived, and still do.
I am indebted to Richard
Gizbert, the experienced Canadian journalist, graduate from Algonquin College
in Ottawa, who runs Al Jazeera’s programme
The Listening Post, a weekly critique
of media around the world, for drawing attention
to this anniversary of Chomsky’s ground-breaking work. He whistled up Chomsky
from Tucson, Arizona, where he presumably now lives, for an interesting
reminiscence covering the present work of the media, and its behaviour.
Gizbert says that every journalist
working on his programme has been influenced by the book, which doesn’t really
surprise me. But I have to say--- blowing my own horn a little --- that when, in 1988 I read the book, nothing in
it surprised me, except that I was reading
from such an authoritative source and with such overpowering factual
backing, confirmation of opinions I had held about the press almost ever since
I got my first job as a journalist in 1945. It was my clear-sightedness about
the nature of the press as the propaganda arm of the capitalist economic structure
that caused me to quit every job I ever had in three newspapers in New Zealand,
one in Australia, one in England, and three in Canada. Given my political
views, picked up as I grew to maturity under a Labour government, it was
obvious I could never have what one might call a career in journalism, or at
least not in any one position on any given newspaper. I had observed that no
matter the country, the bare fact that newspapers are always owned by wealthy
people, and serve their class interests, means that the same characteristics are
to be found everywhere.
This scepticism led me to
be always somewhat negative to professions of journalistic faith such as are
enunciated from time to time by journalists’ organizations, and even more so in
relation to publishers. Before interviewing Chomsky, Gizbert produced an
animation showing that the first problem with Western media is that it is
controlled by major corporations, susceptible to pressure from advertisers, and
open to manipulation by governments,
business conglomerates and other major forces, who, collectively, impact on the
practise of journalism by enforcing an establishment consensus against which only
the occasional nonconforming practitioner can hold out. Gizberg said that when the book was written some 50
corporations controlled the media in the United States, a number that has
shrunk to six in the present day.
The only way out of this
for journalists, as I can testify from my own experience, is either to practise self-censorship of varying degrees, or to quit
(both of which stratagems I used at varying times). Gizbert quoted what he said
is a well-known passage in which on one occasion Chomsky was asked by a BBC
journalist “how can you know I am self-censoring?” Chomsky’s reply was straight
to the point: "I'm not saying you're self- censoring. I'm sure you believe
everything you're saying. But what I'm saying is that if you believed something
different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting." This is so
obvious, yet it is a truth that many journalists of my acquaintance over the
years have steadfastly refused to acknowledge. Let’s face it, only the guys
(and women) who believe in the prevailing political consensus ever get to the
top jobs.
Chomsky told Gizbert that
the title for his book originated with Walter Lippman, who he described as the leading public
intellectual of the twentieth century, who said that a new art in democracy was
manufacturing consent, so that the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders (“his
phrase”, commented Chomsky), the population, will be passive and acquiescent and
will accept the rule of the responsible men, people like us. “Within a
framework that determines what to discuss, what not to discuss,” commented
Chomsky, “if you look at the structure
of the media over the years, it is performing very much as one would expect.”
Gizbert used a phrase from
the book that encapsulates for me what I have always believed instinctively
about the press in which I worked, a quote that spoke of it as a “propaganda model…that traces the
routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print,
marginalize dissent and allow the government and dominant private interests to
get their messages across to the public.”
It has aways impressed me
that the reliance on advertising in itself
has provided almost non-stop propaganda for capitalism, even squeezed in
between and sometimes right into programmes otherwise designed for the public
interest. (That explains why, when my children were quite small, I would line them up while the ads were showing on TV and we would all shout, "Lies, lies, lies!" They have grown up to be quite sceptical).
In my relatively enfeebled
present condition, unable to walk more than a couple of blocks, I have taken to
watching a lot of television, recording many programmes for later viewing, and
switching almost compulsively between a variety of outlets, such as the CBC,
the BBC, AlJazeera, and RT, while taking in every day the news published by The Guardian, The Washington Post and
the few other newspapers that have managed to survive without having to charge
for their web sites.
Their political
programmes, when carefully watched, have this common thread, that each of them
seems to be animated by a prevailing consensus beyond which they very seldom step. That is as true of the BBC, so widely admired
an institution, as any other, as recent coverage of the Brexit fiasco
indicates.Their reporter Stephen Sacker, who runs in Hardtalk a programme purporting to put tough questions to
everybody, is sometimes driven almost to hysteria when he is called on to
defend the prevailing British (and Western) political consensus against
interviewees who argue for other values. Certainly the guests chosen to comment
every day on Canadian politics by the CBC represent a very narrow consensus of
political outlook: each programme nowadays has its own “power panel”, as they
call them, made up of rightward-thinking people who leave no doubt as to the acceptable
orientation of our national institution.
With the rise of what is now called “fake news”, and the alarums raised by it among
responsible commentators, a great deal of emphasis is placed on the
need for facts, as if facts, (I quote here the late, great Irish journalist Claud
Cockburn) were lying “about like pieces
of gold ore in the Yukon days, waiting to be picked up by strenuous prospectors
whose subsequent problem was only to get them to market.”
He added, something I
wholeheartedly agree with: “Such a view is evidently and dangerously naïve.
There are no such facts. Or if there are they are meaningless and entirely
ineffective; they might as well not be lying about at all, until the
prospector --- the journalist --- puts them into relation with other facts: presents
them, in other words. Then they become as much a part of a pattern created by
him as if he were writing a novel.”
What I have always complained
about is not that journalists are restricted from expressing their views: it is
simply that the vast majority of those views are carefully chosen by their
employers to support their economic and profit-making purposes. Those who
choose not to go along with this usually hidden process, are, in the end, simply
pushed out.
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