Showing posts with label The media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The media. Show all posts
Caoimhin O’Muraile ☭ Is the Western Media Free?In a word No

We are often told how lucky we are in countries like the UK and 26 counties to have a ‘free press’ which is not strictly true. It may be true enough to say the state do not interfere with the media in countries like Britain, Germany, France and Ireland, among many others, in the same way we are told they do in Russia but to call these news outlets free is stretching it. Any reporter who publishes anything against the newspaper proprietor’s interests or political position - and any editor who allows it will be dismissed. Be under no illusions about that. 

So, perhaps we should define a ‘free press’ in its entirety. Does such a thing exist? Can such an entity exist? Just as it may not be in the interests of the Russian or other authoritarian states to print the truth, neither is it in the interests and advancement of interests for the billionaire owners of the British and other capitalist countries media to tell their readers the truth in any other gospel but their own. The gospel according to Rupert Murdoch or that of Richard Branson. Perhaps the late David Bowie should have written a song about this, like the one The Gospel According to Tony Day which he wrote and was released back in 1973. These are the two magnates who own television stations and newspapers and they are not alone. And it would be imagined if a free-thinking reporter printed the truth about, say, the rail dispute ongoing in Britain and wrote from the trade union point of view instead of prioritising the management and government position they would face the sack. The media are a very subjective source of information not to be believed without question. Perhaps the only thing they write which is true, and then look twice and check, is the date! As Arthur Scargill once said at a press conference:

why don’t you lot jut for once print the truth? I know you will get the sack, but you’ll feel a whole lot better for it.

I remember back in the British Coal Miners Strike in 1984-85 and the nominally Labour paper, the Daily Mirror then owned by a very rich man called Bob Maxwell printed lie after lie about the NUM leadership. The very same Mr Maxwell who ran off with his company’s employee’s pensions reportedly and was supposedly found floating in the Atlantic Ocean off the Canary Islands? Maxwell had been bugging his employees' telephones, illegally, to test their loyalty. Maxwell was the proprietor of what we are supposed to believe is a ‘free press.’ This so called ‘free press’ printed lie after lie about the NUM leader, Arthur Scargill and, to a lesser extent the union's general secretary, Peter Heathfield. This so-called Labour paper, when the chips were down just like the Labour Party in Britain, supported Margaret Thatcher’s attacks on the NUM leadership. The Daily Mirror printed lies about the NUM collecting money from Libya’s Colonel Gadhafi and a supposed trip to Libya by Roger Windsor, the union's CEO and MI5 agent. 

Windsor was placed there by friend of Thatcher’s and MI5 chief Stella Rimington purposely to spy on the National Union of Mineworkers at Thatcher’s bequest. The position of CEO was the only role in the higher echelons of the NUM which was unelected by the miners. Windsor travelled to Libya, supposedly as far as the union were concerned, to meet with Libyan trade unionists. Windsor had secretly arranged a meeting with Gadhafi which was not authorised and was certainly not in his remit, a meeting which he had photographed. These were the images which were seen in the newspapers and reported on national news, all lies and fiction invented purposely by the British state, executed by Windsor, and dutifully reported by the ’free press.’ No questions about the authenticity of Windsor’s agenda on his visit and who wrote it were asked. This was despite the denials of the NUM leadership that this meeting with the Libyan leader was not on Windsor’s to do list and, if had been known of, would have been forbidden. As Scargill later said; “if Colonel Gadhafi wants to help the miners he would stop selling cheap oil to the British government.” 

The fact the Thatcher administration was importing cheap oil from a supposed enemy state just to crush the NUM was never reported. I would suspect any reporter who got the truth behind this and reported such, would have been at best dismissed at worst disappear, just like in South America where no ‘free press’ exists. The media told lie after lie about the NUM leadership while at the same time reporting Thatcher’s proven lies as truth! On more than one occasion Arthur Scargill had stated Thatcher and the NCB Chairman, Ian MacGregor, had a secret “hit list” drawn up to “decimate the coal industry”. This was denied by the government who claimed Scargill was making it all up to pursue his “own political agenda”. In actual fact the NUM hit list was an understatement as the one Thatcher had written dwarfed the union's figures of pit closures. These lies by the British Government were never reported by the ’free press.’

Much of the biased reporting against the trade unions continues today, and if anybody has read the stuff about Mick Lynch, General Secretary of the RMT (Rail and Maritime Transport) union, who are presently in dispute they would see correlations between the reporting of the miner’s strike forty years ago and that of today. The last thing any newspaper owner would want is to give militant trade unionism any credibility as it may for one give their own employees ideas about wanting better pay, more freedom, and much more say in their own industry! It was Rupert Murdoch who used the governments anti trade union legislation against his own employees and their union, the NGA (National Graphical Association) at his News International works, Wapping in the later 1980s.

On Sunday morning 28th May 2023, I was watching Laura Kuenssberg’s Sunday Morning Politics Show on which she interviewed then British Health Secretary, Steve Barclay. Laura is usually very impartial and her interview with Mr Barclay was no exception. She asked Barclay about the forty new hospitals he had told the British people the government were going to build. Barclay went, as is the norm, round the houses before not answering any of the interviewer’s points. Much facial acting and hand waving to express himself, but no actual answers. When Laura pointed out that in fact, they were not going to build forty new hospitals at all, he then said; “we will be building extensions on to hospitals to create new facilities.” And when it was suggested that this sounded like; “building a patio on to your house and saying it is a new house”! Mr Barclay then repeated his answer several times about new extensions and never really telling the truth that there are no new hospitals, certainly not forty, as such just a few additions to the old ones. This was objective and fair reporting but Mr Barclay is only a British Minister and people get used to being lied to by such people as this all the time.

On then to interviewing the Russian Ambassador to the UK, Mr Andrei Kelin, now obviously playing to a pre-arranged script. She asked the ambassador about Russian attacks “on civilian targets” and other atrocities the Russians have allegedly carried out in the Ukraine. Fair enough, a reasonable question which the Russian diplomat struggled with, as would Laura with his reply. Without actually addressing the deeds carried out by the Russian army, which are little different apparently to those carried out by the Ukrainian armed forces, including the overtly Nazi Azov regiment, Mr Kelin pointed out that the shooting of “civilians had been going on for nine years prior to February 2022 by the Ukrainian Army in the Donetsk region and Luhansk which have Russian majorities in Eastern Ukraine”. To a large extent she ignored this point asking again about Russian atrocities to which the ambassador repeated his counterclaim which she once again ignored possibly on government instructions. What he was trying to say was the Russians went in as a response to Ukrainian attacks on Russian civilians. Is this true? I know no more than anybody else including those who pretend to. What is true and does give the ambassador's claims some credibility is the presence of the Russian hating Nazis operating in the region. 

What did appear pretty plain to me was Laura Kuenssberg with this interview, unlike the one with Mr Barclay, was running to a prearranged script. This may well have been written by the BBC bosses in conjunction with the British Government who in turn would have sought approval from Washington. It was not a transparent and free interview. When the ambassador asked; “why had the atrocities carried out by the Ukrainian Army against Russian people in the Donetsk not being reported in the British press” she shifted ground a little briefly acknowledging all atrocities are wrong in a very mumbled fashion. She did not address the issue as to why the actions of the Ukrainian armed forces in Eastern Ukraine had not been reported in the same way as those of the Russian Army in the British press or news. Unlike the prior interview with Steve Barclay about the health service and building, or not, of forty new hospitals which Mr Barclay was given ample opportunity to answer, this interview was very much anti-Russian. Laura did not, probably because she could not, answer the Russian Ambassador's counterclaims. 

The Russian claims about Nazis in the Ukraine have recently been vindicated by President Zelenskyy’s reference to Russians as “near humans”. This is similar discourse to that used by the Third Reich describing the Russians as “Untermenschen” (sub-humans). This clip was on the news very, very briefly and not shown again - obviously it was not intended to be aired at all! This short clip unintended or otherwise shows once again the biased reporting we are subject to. What may have happened if an Editor had insisted Zelenskyy’s full speech about Russian being “near humans” be aired? I’ll leave that to the imagination.  

Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist.

Myth Of A Free Western Media

Jim Duffy thinks that in the midst of the current pandemic journalists need to calm down and stop rushing their fences. 

I like the media a lot, contribute to it occasionally, and respect many journalists. But like all professions it is flawed. 

One of its major flaws is its tendency to get carried away with things. Journalist R reads what journalist S wrote in a newspaper or said on a bulletin, and tries to take the story on, and the momentum gets faster and faster - often based on the media losing the run of itself and covering something journalists have only a superficial knowledge of. (Saying they have a superficial knowledge of it isn't a criticism. By definition, in covering all of society, most issues that crop up will be outside their knowledge base and they will end up talking and writing about issues they don't actually know much about.) 

That tendency for a journalistic frenzy to build up is one of the negative aspects of the media. I remember a very respected broadcaster, normally so calm, getting so carried away with a story that he literally roared a ludicrous question into the face of a candidate and "demanded" an answer to a question no-one could possibly answer.

After a period of calmness in covering Covid-19, elements of the media are in an increasingly frenzy in running wild with stories. A mis-informed media frenzy has been building on the issue of when will the lockdown "end", and how soon will a vaccine be available. To take the latter case first, the UK chief medical officer tried to impose a dose of realism into the media getting carried away by mythical vaccines. They report every successful testing of a potential vaccine in a lab as a "breakthrough". One US media outlet reported "vaccine found."

It was garbage. Just because something in a lab works is no indication that it will work outside it. The vast majority don't. Some do but have such horrendous side effects that it cannot possibly be used. It is quite possible that all the successful lab tests reported to date between them will not produce a single workable vaccine. Then there is the fact that every prototype vaccine found has to be tested to make sure it has no worse side effects. There is no point having a vaccine if its side effect, as with Trump's lunatic promotion of a drug, is to kill the patient by causing a heart attack, or triggers strokes, or raises blood pressure to dangerous levels, or causes epilepsy, or makes the patent susceptible to cancer!

Even when you finally have a vaccine that works and is safe, there then is the problem of mass manufacture. Billions of people will have to be vaccinated. Both the manufacture and the vaccination will take a long time. One expert was overheard after a press conference saying that the next journalist that asked him would vaccination be available by June was liable to have a paper cup of water thrown over them. Of course it fucking well won't. The expert guess is that a vaccine, If one is found, probably is 18 months or longer away.

But too many journalists still talk as if vaccines are just magicked up in a few weeks.

Then there is the lockdown. So much media coverage is based on the question "when will the lockdown end?" It is like asking 'How long is a piece of string?'. Others talk as if the lockdowns are going to be over in a couple of weeks. Even worse, they get carried away with easing of lockdowns in other countries - oblivious to the fact that different countries are at different points of the coronavirus journey.

Experts try to explain, with extraordinary patience, that the ending of the lockdowns will not occur in the foreseeable future. We may be in lockdowns a year from now. The experts try to explain that the lockdowns will be Eased, not ended, and are likely to be eased very, very slowly. We are not going to see 80% of the population going back to work. We may see 5%, and maybe another 5% a month later. Even then, every easing is temporary. If the reproduction number climbs above 1 in any country, then it is back into a lockdown to get it down again. Even if the lockdown is eased, bit by bit, the re-imposition of it will be on the cards well into the future, right down to the day when everyone has been vaccinated. Various Asian states that eased lockdowns initially had to re-impose them again. We could have an eased lockdown in May or June, and be back in it again in July, be eased out of it slightly in August and be back in it in September.

Journalists really do need to calm down their frenzy, and stop getting carried away with mythical impending vaccines and mythical complete ends to lockdowns soon. We are in this for the long haul. It may be a year or two before we are having a normal life again.

➽ Jim Duffy is a writer.

Media Frenzy

Barrett Brown writes about Orwell's favourite poem.

George Orwell's favorite poem, which he recited out loud to himself over and over again while on night patrol duty during the Spanish Civil War, was written by a Catholic priest from some rural English parish in the 19th century, after a lifetime of studying the ancient speech patterns left behind centuries prior by those who preceded him in dwelling there.

The thing one you must understand about Orwell - and more to the point, about the world we've inherited after a century of struggle - is that he started out as an imperial police officer in Britain's subject state Burma, under the aegis of a king whose ancestors had won various wars centuries prior, and was thus, you see, the king.

This world he grew up in was modern enough for such things to be troubling even to those like Orwell whose politics had been most fundamentally informed by an Edwardian childhood filled with Kipling and romanticism and empire. But it wasn't so modern that the globe was not still divided up chiefly by empires justifying their atrocities via concepts that just a few decades later would be considered too crankish to take seriously.

Years later, Orwell became a key figure in the fight that is always correct, whether it be decided by infantry or debate: the fight against everyone, on every "side", who expects you to lie on behalf of the grand objective, which is always justified, along with those in charge.

Not everything is Stalin or Hitler or Mao. But then our public intellectuals are hardly Orwell, Goldman, and Nehru, which is why I'm forced to evoke those names from the past, my only solace being that each seems smaller than gods, somehow, when one gets to know them - but still larger than us, the people for whom they sacrificed, probably without ever feeling in their bones the possibility that we would squander everything they sacrificed, right or wrong, for good intent or ill, on a scale we cannot contemplate.

Orwell was lucky insomuch as he actually got a chance to shoot some of these people during one of those periods when political violence was not only permitted, but accepted by most everyone in public life as morally superior to just sitting around and watching the tanks rolls in and the millions die.

No one was shocked in the 30s when Orwell went off to Spain to fight for mankind. Everyone thinks its remarkable that I made a few sacrifices and took less explicit risks to oppose Palantir and the like, and then DOJ's bid to criminalize linking, and then the BOP's ongoing crimes against a small subset of the hundred percent of Americans who will violate America's psychotic version of "the law" at some point in their lives, likely without having any idea that they are now criminals, too, and subject to the same fate as any of those they've left to the mercy of bureaucrat-cops, as their children will be just a few years hence, under a system that will have gotten worse. The silver lining will be the calm and well-being that comes with being drastically severed from a nation that can no longer pretend with such ease that it is a citizenry, and the natural heirs to Solon and Pericles, rather than a feckless rabble that smells vaguely of Weimar.

I guess what I'm trying to say to my colleagues in the media, in my own circuitous fashion, is that when I ask you to reform, I'm not really asking. I'm threatening you personally. What form the consequences will take I leave to your imagination, especially if you're capable of imagining that an institution which does not regulate its conduct towards the public is hard to reform from within, but easy to terrorize from without. I should know.

Here's that poem. Keep your knife sharp.


Felix Randal
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then? my duty all ended,
Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome
Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it, and some
Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?

Sickness broke him. Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended
Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some
Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom
Tendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended!

This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears.
My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears,
Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal;

How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,
When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!

⏭  Barrett Brown is a former imprisoned journalist and a current activist, essayist and satirist.

Sharp

Mick Hall thinks the media continuously call politics wrong. Mick Hall is a Marxist blogger @ Organized Rage.
 
Over the last decade the mainstream media, including the Guardian has persistently called wrongly the main political issues of the day. In 2010 they failed to foresee the emergence of the UK Tory-Lib Dem coalition government,  nor the Tory majority government which took power last May.

Why Do The British Mainstream Media Get Politics So Wrong?