Excuses Excuses
Dear BBC - some handy suggestions, lame excuse-wise, for next quarter’s set of appalling economic figures:
The start of the football season.
Leaves on the line.
Germans.
Yobs.
Some localised drizzle in the vicinity of Croydon.
Snow on the line.
Unemployed, disabled, benefit-scrounging Polish single mums.
Swine flu.
Trains on the line.
Al-Qaeda.
Health and safety madness.
The pervasive influence of gangsta rap on the youth of today.
Brussels.
Labour.
Manufacturing Consent
“People will think what I tell them to think” - Charles Foster Kane.
Rupert Murdoch, it’s fairly safe to say, adheres to this principle of Orson Welles’ character in Citizen Kane. But suddenly, in the space of a week, a substantial pillar of the real-life media mogul’s grand exercise in thought-control has collapsed suddenly, without warning. Today marks the last edition of the News of the World, purportedly the biggest selling English-language newspaper on the planet.
We are only now beginning to grasp the degree to which our democracy in Britain was being damaged by a dominant newspaper group which, almost inexplicably, adopted the tactics of the Stasi and all of its equally disreputable forerunners. The king is dead – long live democracy.
When you can’t control people by force, and the voice of the people can be heard, you have a problem: it may make people so curious and so arrogant that they no longer possess the humility to submit to civil rule, and therefore there is the need to control what people think. The standard way to do this is to resort to, what was known in more honest times, propaganda - the manufacturing of consent.
Very few people have the time, energy or commitment to carry out the constant battle required to think outside of what the Murdoch press thinks. Instead, you come home from work, you’re tired, you’ve had a busy day - you’re not going to carry out a research project, so instead you turn on the television, you read the headlines in a newspaper, you watch sport, because that’s basically the way the system of indoctrination works. Sure, the other stuff is out there, but you had to work a lot harder to find it. But the more recent effect of social media has been to make alternative sources of information more widely available.
The ultimate question now is whether privileged elites should dominate mass communication, and use their power as they tell us they must - namely to impose necessary illusions, to manipulate and deceive the majority, and remove them from the public arena.
The question, in brief, is whether democracy and freedom are values to be cherished and preserved, or threats to be avoided. In this possibly terminal phase of our existence, democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured; they may well be essential to our survival.