Propaganda Compliant Society Alex Law
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28 | VARIANT 32 | SUMMER 2008 Propaganda Compliant Society Alex Law Scotland is a small nation with meshing social elite coalition of power structures are defined all somewhere between stocks & share circles where elites gather to profit from their the way through by specific kinds of class interests. and the ‘commonsensical’ editorial mutual connections. Close interpersonal relations, Neither are these structures always hidden sometimes literally family relations, eases the away from view. Much corporate propaganda pity the poor arts page profitable mobilisation of social capital and goes on in full view of those who are prepared to cultural capital. A journalist in the investigative look. Corporate visibility is made plain in many thinking itself alone tradition, Paul Hutcheon, has tirelessly mapped forms, from trade associations, lobby groups, and Tom Leonard, Reports from the Present the contemporary nature of ‘McCroneyism’ in policy planning vehicles.12 There is no need to Scotland. Hutcheon found that around fifty MSPs settle dogmatically on the simplistic conspiracy Media failure poses a stark conundrum for civic had put their spouses, children and in-laws on the idea of isolated groups of malign individuals who 8 nations. Where, as a matter of course, it naturalises payroll. Of course, this is not unique to Scotland. posses disproportionate causal powers to explain the rule of dominant groups’ mass communications However, devolution was meant to represent a wider, complex and uncertain social and political and provides rather inhospitable ground for departure from the Old Corruption of sleazy phenomena. nurturing democratic values. Public discourse Westminster. Of course, small conspiratorial groups do exist. is instead forced through narrow institutional Here political devolution has also had the In their detailed coverage of the public relations channels amenable to the ruling consensus. This effect of diverting attention from the emergence industry Miller and Dinan demonstrate as much. vision of a spoiled public interest is bad news of neoliberal elites springing from the very same But this is not a sufficient condition to explain the 9 indeed for those nations that pride themselves on soil as civic nationalism. Whatever the democratic efficacy of corporate propaganda. Indeed, it proves the democratic vitality of their civil societies. arguments for devolution, it has proven to be a counter-productive where it diverts attention from Mass communications made nationalism boon for elite groups in Scotland in other ways. much wider, more deeply embedded structures of possible.1 With the onset of modernity stimulating Access to, management of, and influence over domination. the spread of print capitalism, geographically the devolved institutions has been lubricated Part of this explanation is provided by Nick separate groups of people became socially by public relations and its auxiliary wings in the Davies in Flat Earth News. Davies, a seasoned, 10 arranged as a special kind of a community, a Scottish media. award-winning journalist with the Guardian, specifically national one, united by newly-minted With the election of a minority Nationalist dissects conspiratorial theories that purport ancient bonds. Today, appeals are made about administration, the political, business and cultural to explain away the degradation of the craft of preserving, or better still reinventing the nation; elite founded on largesse under the control of journalism by recourse to the dubious character all the better to fend off market processes that Labour Party apparatchiks in Scotland has been of individual journalists. It is unlikely that there impose cultural standardisation and political forced to reorient itself. This has not proven to be a are any more flawed personalities working as homogenisation. shattering experience for the well connected since journalists than are working as academics or lorry In England, the call has been put out by left- the SNP administration is wide open for public drivers or any other occupation for that matter. wing and liberal nationalists like Billy Bragg, relations interventions, in which they themselves Not all journalists are unprincipled, corrupt Jeremy Paxman and Paul Kingsnorth to rescue are proven adepts. So while the 2007 Scottish hacks and careerists, although some may be. A what is distinctive about English national culture election disturbed some entrenched Labourist major problem here is that the flawed personality from rapacious corporations and overcentralised networks, the permanent elite in Scotland carry theory of media distortion fails to account government. This alternative Orwellian England on, usually out of sight. In Edinburgh’s Princes adequately for the systemic character of the includes the English pub – “probably the best Street, for instance, the New Club allows business, distorted newsprint consensus about the nature of know international symbol of our folk culture” legal, political, state, and professional elites to the world around us. “Individual corruption only 11 – bookshops, orchards, post offices, dairy farms, mingle unobtrusively with each other. masks the structural corruption (should we even and street markets.2 Such appeals to a ‘national talk about corruption in this case?) that operates folk culture’ not only carry with it the danger on the game as a whole through mechanisms such 13 of accepting right-wing national mythology Mistaken Conspiracy as competition for market share”. Neither is the Nations such as Scotland like to claim that they are uncritically, it also issues in a false opposition overt influence of corporate advertisers sufficient founded on a robust civil society. They further lay to neoliberalism in the essentialist idea of an on its own to profoundly distort newspaper claim to the civic values of rationality, democracy, authentic organic folk community. reporting on a daily basis, although the daily personal liberty, pluralism and tolerance. At the ‘Britain’ here is too often appealed to as delivery of audiences to advertisers remains a heart of this is a free and open system of mass 14 a universally neutral source of identity in profound shaping mechanism for media content. communications, where dissent can be aired, contrast to the selfish particularities of small Nor are explanations adequate that point to the claims to truth verified, gaps in understanding nation nationalism.3 For instance, one Scottish interference of the nasty newspaper proprietor. Of acknowledged, and where a tolerable consensus academic countered arguments for devolved course, there are examples of this from Northcliffe emerges through the gravitational pull of ‘public public broadcasting by arguing that the BBC through to Murdoch. But there are substantial opinion’. symbolises the best of British values: “Scottish differences from the old-style Citizen Kane owner The books under discussion here explode this broadcasters are embedded in the most admired models of political interference to a Murdoch, as an image of how mass communications actually broadcasting organisation in the world”.4 Leaving for whom the pursuit of profit appears to be function in a neoliberal world. In A Century of Spin, aside the BBC’s own class bias, both in staffing pathological, hence his bias for political rulers David Miller and William Dinan plot with scholarly and programme content, and notwithstanding its from Thatcher to Blair, and an ability to operate care the real extent and corrosive nature for reputation as a supposedly impartial arbiter of the flexibly within political systems as distinctive as democracy of the public relations industry on both public interest, at an overt level it failed to resist Australia and China. sides of the Atlantic. They drag into the glaring political intimidation and New Labour threats to Perhaps then the unseen influence of ideology, light of day the truly dirty business of corporate public funding. where journalists share the same narrow political PR as the handmaiden of the most powerful One need not be a crude materialist to notice and moral worldview, might account more interests that rule over society. that, amidst the unselfish altruism of nationalist adequately for media distortion. In this case a In a context where PR operatives much prefer rhetoric, the social base of nationalism often broad consensus exists among journalists around to remain unnoticed and unchecked in the rests on groups that are suitably positioned selective ‘news values’ that results in stories shadows and background, Miller and Dinan’s to gain from it – not just politicians but also that chime with dominant interests. This is the dogged research has allowed them to piece cultural workers like writers, academics, lawyers, staple of media studies explanations of media together usually unnoticed inter-connections. They journalists.5 Smaller nations within Britain are bias. Undoubtedly, like the baleful influence of push public relations into a spot where it would certainly no strangers to the attractions of cultural advertising, this forms part of an explanation for rather not be – at the forefront of our attention. nationalism. Cultural workers in Scotland demand media failure. But where it remains stuck at the Building on a wide range of sources and their more resources in support of a distinctively level of the (false) ideas in isolated journalists’ own previous studies, they expose the extent and Scottish media and arts policy, while others, heads that gives rise to misrepresentations in function