SPOKESMAN BOOKS
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Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation
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Catalogue
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How to Lose a War
The Spokesman, 90
David
Edwards & David Cromwell, The Guardians of Power: The Myth of the
Was
that really 30 years ago? Reading the first chapter of Guardians of Power by
At
the time of the publication of Bad News I worked as a film and video
cameraman, and I can reveal that its appearance caused no small anguish
amongst the editorial staff of the day. Personally I had been aware that the
pictures I recorded did not necessarily relate to the commentary or context in
which they were transmitted. By this time I had already read James
Halloran’s case study on Demonstrations and Communication, which had
alerted me to cultural and other powers that affected the selection of topics
and the news angle taken for these topics, as well as the need for a
differentiated audience to decode the mixture of pictures, sounds, language,
and authoritative sources dependent on their level of empathy with the actors.
When Bad News was published it gave me the
The
authors of Bad News had great difficulties to overcome. Quantifying
news coverage is an extraordinarily difficult task. You can be accused of a
simplistic approach if you quantify television output by aggregating the
transmission times of individual items under specific headings, or you can
expend a great deal of effort in a more contextual and qualitative analysis. A
further difficulty for the team was that they would have to wait for a year
before their work was published in book form, so that it had no direct effect
on the subject under examination. I mention this because in Guardians of
Power similar tasks have been undertaken with respect to the written word.
But, spooling forward 30 years, personal computers, search engines and the
internet have provided its authors with a tool of immense power for such a
task.
Media
Lens’ great strength is the way in which it pools the breadth of its
subscribers to scan the news in print and on the web so that when someone
notices a significant piece of news, or a blatant distortion in a report, they
can raise the alert which draws the attention of everyone accessing the
service. The brain-power, computing power and sheer weight of activists such a
system can call upon is huge. Instead of analysis being passed serial fashion
along the line, it proceeds in a cascade, multiplying contacts in seconds.
Importantly this system requires the active engagement of some, but not
necessarily all, of those who read the alert.
One
pertinent example from Guardians of Power is the alert that Blair and
Straw were lying about the withdrawal of the UN arms inspectors from Iraq.
Both said that Saddam Hussein had thrown them out, yet there are many official
sources that flatly contradict this. Further, when war was about to start,
several newspapers carried the same disinformation in a compilation of
justifications for war. Within minutes, earlier reports, filed by the same
correspondents, that withdrawal of the arms inspectors came after a warning
from the United States that its bombing operation, Desert Fox, was about to
start and that the inspectors’ safety could not be guaranteed, had been
retrieved from various archives, and brought to the attention of these
forgetful journalists in particular, and the media in general.
The
power of this informal network is the message from this little book. Each
alert that goes out informs but also, as a subtext, it asks is this true, can
this be contradicted, and better still, can it be contradicted by its own
author? Within its network Media Lens has a broad range of active visitors who
all bring something to the party. Thus an article on Kosovo may be read by
only a handful of visitors to the site, but it will more than likely be read
by those with an interest in the topic, thus providing a bank of knowledge of
its history and the history of reports on Kosovo as a news topic. This could
mean that waiting in the inbox for the journalist before he or she arrives at
the desk on the day following publication of the erroneous article, they will
find polite e-mails asking if they remember that article which they filed
three years ago in which the migration of refugees from Kosovo happened after
NATO started bombing and not prior, as is now reported.
A
lesson that can be drawn from this is that news organisations do allow
breaking news to be reported as it happens. It is when the significance of
this news becomes apparent, and questions arise as to how it fits in to the
corporate editorial line of an organisation, that bias is mobilized and the
gatekeepers on the flow of information swing into operation. It is at this
time that the gate guarding the original source is closed, and that from
official and approved sources is held wideopen.
When challenged on omissions in their coverage, news organizations can
invariably draw attention to the fact that their previous reports did carry
the alleged omission and therefore they have covered it. This neatly sidesteps
the fact that, without the original information as a prefix, the story is now
set in a different context. What is invidious about this process is that from
now on the story is invariably set in its new and distorted context, thus
masking the history of the events in question.
Bias
can enter the news gathering system at many junctions. Edwards and
Perhaps
it is time to dust down Wright Mills’ and Dahl’s analyses of power with élites
versus pluralism, which lead to the more interesting work of Bachrach and
Baratz in the United States and Steven Lukes in the United Kingdom. The
latter’s radical view explains the phenomena so well exposed in Guardians
of Power. He did receive criticism at the time for his concept of
‘latent conflict’, which some equated to the Marxist concept of ‘false
consciousness’. But that was where I came into this debate. How could it be,
I thought, that a family watching the news in a council estate I had been
filming can accept as incontestable a report providing an ideologically loaded
solution to social and economic problems which would not benefit them? It
wasn’t that ‘there is no alternative’; it was that the solution on offer
was the preferred solution of the owners of the technical and financial
apparatus that controlled the media system. The financial threshold to
Could
Media Lens have found the practical answer to the above dilemmas through the
internet? I believe a solution is to be found in there somewhere.
Henry McCubbin is a founder member of scottishleftreview.org, an internet journal of the Left in Scotland.
