When actors exert power in abstract ways, that is when they begin to hold sway over their target's actions, and even the target's view of itself and its own expectations. The press does this with extraordinary success.
In “The Manufacturing of Consent”, Noam Chomsky writes that the liberal western press is completely controlled by capital, because editors and press barons bow down to the demands of private share holders. Media accuracy and plurality is stifled by those who are from the thin layer of unaccountable cream that lies on top of our unequal society. The press, with their strings pulled by these tycoons, then provides smoke screens for why the economy is slumping, crime is up and tube lines get bombed. The economy is in a bad place because too much money goes to the EU. Crime is up because of an influx of immigrants. The tube lines get bombed because of Islamic extremism. This anti-historical diagnosis to why things happen is extremely dangerous and divisive, and does not examine the specific phenomena in any detail.
The power that the press wields over the identities of the public is incredible. Not even the Catholic Church exerted this amount of control over such huge swathes of people, yet this new dogma is often hailed as a transparent benchmark of the western world. When, at the end of the Cold War, Gorbachev introduced Glasnost into the crumbling USSR, he was hailed as a champion of democracy and the free press. At last, it was said, Russians would receive what they justly deserved - freedom of the press and media plurality. As Margaret Thatcher said, Gorbachev was a man who “she could do business with”. Unfortunately, in 2005 the fearless journalist Anna Politskovkaya was not someone Putin could do business with. She received four bullets at point blank range into her head and chest for her polemics on Russian aggression in Chechnya.
Many of you reading this will say, "well everyone knows that the racist, bigoted news you read in todays press comes from discredited journalists like Melanie Philips and Murdoch-moulded media news channels such as Fox and Sky, Russia merely needs time to separate its media from the state apparatus". This is completely true, but it seems to John Pilger (see link at the bottom of the page) that even the BBC is turning to the tactics of the corporate press (an argument with which I concur greatly).
The respect that the BBC garners lies in its reputation. For many of those in the generation before mine - before the age of the Internet - the BBC was their current affairs bread and butter. However in recent years the BBC has seemed to have lost its credibility and seems more and more answerable to the government. After the Hutton enquiry (which cleared the Labour government of any wrong-doing in the suspicious death of biological weapons expert Richard Kelly and the subsequent purge of possible dissidents within the corporation), the BBC swung to the right. Mark Thompson took over from the no-bullshit Greg Dyke and started to neuter any cutting edge journalistic prowess the BBC had left. To take just two examples; Panorama, a documentary series that used to cut to the very core of the inefficiencies of our government and society, has lost its panache and is currently relegated to analysing tax bureaucracy (see latest showing), and the Daily Politics show is now a platform for slobbering partisan lackeys within the government and the BBC to illustrate their admiration for the red or yellow/blue corner. My grandmother has received more incisive questions on the contents of her homemade cider than any politician has received on this show.
But is it any wonder that the status quo is never truly challenged when the BBC's director general, Mark Thompson, is on over £800k/year, and other such self-proclaimed 'guardians of media plurality' such as Andrew Marr and Fiona Bruce are on similarly stratospheric salaries? It seems Britain is reaching a Berlusconi moment, where political critique is reserved to those who have nothing to gain from turning the establishment on its head.
Nick Rodrigo
John Pilger on the BBC: http://www.johnpilger.com/articles/the-bbc-is-on-murdoch-s-side
More information on the Hutton Enquiry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutton_Inquiry
