Media Manipulation

[rebness]

I have a serious rant to subject you to with regards to that old chestnut, the media.

These are front page headlines from the Daily Express over the last few months:

CYANIDE TERROR OF COLA BOMBS!

WE OWE ARABS NOTHING!

GIPSIE (sic) INVASION!

The sensationalism in these headlines beggars belief. If one compares the more dignified Spanish newspapers in the aftermath of the atrocities committed there, how can this stupidity be justified?

The British tabloids have always given in to sensationalism. However, when people have been killed as a direct result of media manipulation, when a new era of worrying racism is seemingly prompted by a journalist rushing to please a boss, shouldn't something be done?

Why is the Express, once a middle-of-the-road sort of paper, giving in to this silliness? Well, it's all because of a porn baron by the name of Richard Desmond...



The tabloids in Britain have a somewhat mixed market. People may buy a tabloid because it offers a free holiday, or because one might prefer to read silly but fun sensationalised accounts of a footballer's three-in-a-bed romp rather than of Kosovo or famine or war.

At the other end of the scale, we have people for whom these tabloids and the popular television soaps are about their only media source. They may not be internet-savvy; they may not care to read Derrida or even Grisham. They still take in media, they still like to read and the tabloid is their chosen literature.

The Sun is one such paper. This, we were taught in journalism, is deliberately aimed at those with a reading age of eight. Again, this is not necessarily something to pour scorn upon; better to have a reduced reading age than to be fully illiterate. However, this paper has pulled many tricks. Here are three that have been most annoying :-

1. Headline for election poll: IT WOS THE SUN WOT WON IT!

Where to begin?

2. But seriously... in 1989, at Hillsborough football stadium, a tragedy took place. Poor police control led, inevitably, to the stadium becoming too packed. 98 Liverpool supporters were crushed to death when they were forced into stands with iron gates and metal bars to prevent crowds escaping onto the terraces. It was a human tragedy and an agonising blow to the people of Liverpool. A great proportion of the people were under 25. All who died were law-abiding citizens, simply there for a good day's sport.

The Sun subsequently ran headlines of how Liverpool supporters rifled the pockets of the dead, how corpses were defiled, how it was the Liverpool mentality which prompted this tragedy. The people of Liverpool were enraged, the Sun apologised. However, that slanderous stain remains on both Liverpudlians and this rag which based its claims on...well, they never said.

3. A few years ago, a lovely young girl by the name of Sarah Payne was murdered one summer's day. A nation was shocked (in a country with a low murder rate) at the savage death she endured. Her body was defiled. She was sexually molested.

The murderer, a paedophile, has subsequently been brought to book. The Sun felt that it was a good idea to run a campaign-- going over the heads of all the police, the councils, the psychiatrists who worked with paedophiles -- to 'name and shame them'. Oh, and also to run their photographs in the papers, giving details of where they lived.

The Witchfinder General would have been impressed with the subsequent mobs who gathered on estates to 'Kill the peedofiles', marching with their children to houses. And firebombing them. Beating people to death.

Paedophilia is an emotive issue. One of the cases we have been working on in the psychiatry department details a young man who was raped and molested as a child. Subsequently, he has urges to see children touch themselves. He has never, ever acted upon these feelings. He feels shame and disgust at himself. His life lies in tatters. However, for security, his name has to be entered onto the sex offenders' register.

The Sun would happily have seen this man strung from the nearest lamp post. In scenes reminiscent of the worst newsreels of lynch mobs, we learnt of beatings and, in the extreme cases, murder. A young woman was beaten up by a mob. Her crime? To let it be known that she was a paediatrician. It beggars belief.

And now we have the Express. The same paper who gleefully showed pictures of dead Iraqis during Bush's phoney war, the same paper who sensationalises on terror, has turned its beady little eyes to... gypsies. Or Gipsies, as they like to spell it :-

Express poll, eerily reminiscent of a Fox poll: "Should we let gipsies invade England?"

"1.6 million gipsies poverty-stricken gipsies plotting a life of luxury in England"

Ad infinitum.

It's one thing to support an illegal war and be openly hostile to those who oppose it. It's an entirely different matter altogether to promote hatred and sensationalised accounts of invading foreigners. Look, we signed up to the European Union. We can now go and settle in France or Greece or Spain or Italy or...hell, Poland if we so wish without red tape. They can do the same. What on earth is the problem?

What the hell is wrong with these people? How can the staff be university educated, yet so full of spite and stupidity?

Britain is, by and large, a Celtic nation.

The Celts originated from Eastern Europe, from Greece, from the Baltic States.

Gypsies are from these same places

Hence, We are all the bloody same. Some of us just got there a little earlier.

Finally, what's more offensive? Some non-recycling, fast food wrapper-throwing, loud kid screaming, two-car owning, expensive building site creating cretin scarring the land forever, or someone in a mobile home setting up in a muddy field somewhere? Why do the journalists not address this issue?

The media watchdog, the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) had this to say:

"Journalists at the Daily Express feel they are being pressured into writing anti-Roma articles. They have called on the PCC to intervene. Some 70 staff agreed the following motion at a special National Union of Journalists (NUJ) meeting at at the end of January:

"This workplace is concerned that Express journalists are coming under pressure to write anti-gypsy articles. We call for a letter to be sent to the PCC reminding it of the need to protect journalists who are unwilling to write racist articles, which are contrary to the NUJ's code."

Porn baron Richard Desmond took over the newspaper when it went up for a sale a few years ago. Alongside "British Anal Babes" and "Big Knockers Monthly", he also owns celebrity-worshipping magazine "OK!"

Subsequently, in a Rupert Murdoch-esque move, he forced his paper to fall into his line of thinking. If he doesn't like something, say, oh, gypsies... the paper must report how awful gypsies are. He wanted Iraq to suffer war... the paper supported it. Because he wanted to drum up support for OK, staff were forced into inserting the word "OK" into the paper as often as possible. The office became unbearable, a life's striving to write, to report and all that hard work to force upon an unsuspecting public the opinions of a close-minded, idiotic little man.

That prompted the editorial I outlined at the beginning of this rant. That prompted the journalist in question to be sacked from his new job, having tried to alert the public to Desmond's stupidity and the journalists' annoyance with being forced into writing a paper that reads more like a pamphlet by Goebbels nowadays.

I've always been proud of the British media. I truly do think that we have some of the best writers in the world, that our press, though eager to strike anyone down, is also sharp and speaks out for us. But this is shameful. It makes us appear like the fools of Europe. I fear it heralds a new era of dumbing down, of mobs ruled by puppetmaster-esque porn barons and right-wing tycoons. Forget Big Brother, it's the media that is performing the true manipulation, it is the media that has blood on its hands.

Granted, we always knew that. But for it to be done so openly, for it to cause death and near-apartheid, is sickening. Orwell must be spinning in his grave.

In the words of disaffected journalist Stephen Pollard, who spelt out a nice little message in his final editorial at the Express, fuck you, Desmond.


http://www.statewatch.org/news/2004/feb/10roma.htm

Comments

[saffronlie.livejournal.com]

But you have nice, normal broadsheet newspapers, right? Ones that still try to hold on to some shred of journalistic integrity? I know that doesn't help much when the majority is going to rely on the tabloids for their main source, but as long as someone, somewhere, is still trying to pursue truth and report hard news the right way, then that's something, don't you think?

Number 3. on this list struck me as particularly vulgar. I don't know what the laws are there, but here you cannot call anyone a paedophile unless they have, in face, been convicted of the crime, AND (here's the kicker) they have to have pleaded guilty at their trial. You may have been convicted of, say, armed robbery, but if your plea was 'not guilty', and the press refers to you as an armed robber, then you can hit them with defamation. But I suppose paedophiles aren't allowed to have lawyers and wage defamation suits because they're only half-human anyway and should all be burnt at the stake. Obviously.

Also, almost all the newspapers in Australia are owned by one of two corporations (good old Rupert Murdoch... and, uh, the other one), and both exercised right-wing influence in the lead up to the war on Iraq. I just love it when a view is presented totally unopposed.

The media has so much power; it's such a shame that the power is almost never channelled towards anything worthwhile, but focussed instead on money-making sensationalism. This is the bit where I congratulate myself on quitting the journalism study.

[rebness.livejournal.com]

Don't let me sink into hyperbole here; you're right, of course, in that there are a handful of broadsheets that help to combat the stupidity of the tabloid press. That said, their readership is several millions behind the tabloids and it's more a case of preaching to the choir—nobody ever excepts "muesli-eating, sandal-wearing liberal Guardian readers" to wander the suburbs in lynch mobs.

The press in Britain enjoys much more diversity and freedom than a lot of other countries, particularly where spiteful git Rupert Murdoch has control, but therein lies the rub; the BBC and the broadsheets and hell, even some of the tabloids are held up as paragons as virtue when they're anything but.

In America, it seems people are ready to dismiss Fox et al as rubbish news-lite. Here, prejudice and stupidity is dressed up beneath banners with the royal crest on them, and to make matters worse? These stupid papers are then distributed across the rest of Europe.

I don't know how well-publicised it is, but Europe is experiencing growing racism of late, particularly anti-Semitism. I find it astonishing that the Jewish owner of the Express, Richard Desmond, is perpetuating race hatred on a par with the despicable anti-Semitic attacks across Europe. It beggars belief.

And as for the journalism thing—well, again, it's such a mixed bag. I think journalists (of the non-scummy kind) play an important part in society. I believe the media is a necessary evil. It's just that it seems an awful lot of idiots are being allowed to wield a lot of power – all to sell more papers.