RELATIVE AUTONOMY: MEDIA, FILM & POLITICS
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Murdoch-bashing: enough already?

2/5/2012

 
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It's been a fun-filled few weeks for the left-liberal commentariat, who have been all-too-smugly savouring the humiliation of the Murdochs at the Leveson Enquiry. Now, the publication of a damning House of Commons report on the News of the World phone-hacking scandal has deemed Murdoch senior to be 'not a fit person' to run a major company, providing a further shot of schadenfreude for the bien pensant pundits of the left. And as the Culture Secretary continues to feel the heat for his part in oiling the wheels of the News Corporation juggernaut in the run-up to its BSkyB bid last year, the same commentators have been enjoying the thrill of the Hunt.

That many on the left should harbour mortal animosity towards Murdoch is perfectly understandable, given Murdoch's role in attacking the working class, both in the media and in actuality, over the last few decades. But the problem is that this hatred is now being recuperated by left-liberals in defence of the status quo. For campaigning MPs like Labour's Tom Watson, the humbling of Murdoch and his political supporters represents a victory for the forces of democracy and transparency over the corrupt networks of power represented by News International and its political allies. It also, we are assured, demonstrates the adamantine impartiality of the British state. As Timothy Garton Ash enthuses in today's Guardian: 'Imagine a fiercely independent judicial enquiry, a cross-party parliamentary committee and a largely free press all investigating the Bo Xilai case in Beijing'.

It is indeed a heartening narrative if you believe it. Unfortunately, however, the story of Murdoch's fall from grace attests less to the marvels of British freedom and democracy than to the ability of the state to discipline elements that fall out of step with its agendas. Let's be clear about what happened last year: a dominant faction of the British establishment, clustered around the figures of Gordon Brown and Vince Cable, had grown increasingly anxious about News Corporation's market share and the organisation's pro-US politics - and went gunning for Murdoch. They finally brought down their prey on the eve of News Corp's bid for BSkyB. Ever since then, parliament, the judiciary and the press - far from exercising their independence, as Garton Ash maintains - have largely fallen into line with the Murdoch-bashing consensus.

In short, the humiliation of Murdoch was a classic take-down in which all of the apparatuses of state played their part. And the beauty of it all - from the ruling class's perspective, at least - is that, as in the case of Watergate forty years ago, a state-orchestrated campaign to discredit a political faction has been presented to the public as a moral crusade that demonstrates the virtues of a 'free press' and a democratic, self-regulating state.

None of this, of course, is to defend the Murdochs or their newspapers, as a few rogue Conservative Party politicians, such as Louise Mensch, and some journalists working for the Murdoch press, like David Aaronovitch, have been trying to do (as a cheerleader of the Iraq invasion, Aaronovitch has something of a history of defending the indefensible). But we should not confuse the state's battles against its enemies with our own struggle for a free, classless society and a genuinely democratic media.

John Molyneux's Marxist analysis of the media

28/12/2011

 
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John Molyneux, Will the revolution be televised?: A Marxist analysis of the media. London: Bookmarks Publications, 2011.

John Molyneux's pocket-sized book provides an accessible and enjoyable analysis of the news and entertainment media. Molyneux shows how a variety of British media formats and genres reflect and reinforce ruling class ideologies, concentrating mainly on television programmes with large audiences. Particularly fine is Molyneux's succinct but devastating critique of the British soap opera EastEnders (now there's a phrase I never thought I'd write!), which points to the drama's virtual absence of working class characters (most of the main characters are small business owners), its under-representation of racial minority groups, and the striking and wholly unrealistic absence of political or class consciousness among the good folk of Albert Square.

Happily, Molyneux - a Trotskyist and a member of the Socialist Workers Party - eschews many of the voguish assumptions of liberal media criticism. Mainstream media organisations should be criticised, Molyneux argues, not for being biased towards the right (which, as Molyneux correctly argues, they are not), but for their promotion of capitalist ideology. This point may seem familiar, or even obvious, but it is an important one to make when so many on the left today restrict their criticisms to 'neoliberal' capitalism (as though capitalism would be acceptable and/or workable with just a little more direction from a benevolent, 'democratic' state).

I would, nevertheless, take issue with one or two of Molyneux's arguments. My principal criticism relates to Molyneux's reading of the News of the World phone hacking scandal, the exposure of which Molyneux takes as evidence that powerful media institutions can be challenged and brought low. This point is fine as far as it goes; but it ignores the political context of the scandal, which was in essence an epiphenomenal manifestation of the ongoing struggle between pro-US and pro-independence factions of the British state (the International Communist Current's article on the scandal remains, to my knowledge, the only article that shows any real understanding of this political context). In view of this, the takedown of Murdoch is best seen not as an assertion of people power, but as a sign of the British state's increasing intolerance of News International's propaganda. Appalling as the activities of the News of the World phone hackers were - and welcome as their exposure was - it is not clear to me why the humbling of one powerful set of politico-ideological interests by the even more powerful forces of the British state and the liberal media should be celebrated as a democratic gain.

I suspect that Molyneux's relatively optimistic reading of Hackgate is informed by the typically left-liberal assumption that the US-supporting media, such as those owned by News International, necessarily constitute a greater ideological menace than the liberal media and public service broadcasters such as the BBC. Even during the Blair years, when British foreign policy tended to follow that of the US, this was questionable (of all the news organisations, the BBC, according to a Cardiff University study, provided the least critical news coverage of the invasion of Iraq). Today, as tensions between Britain and the US grow, and as Britain pursues a more independent foreign policy, I think that it is even less plausible. Indeed, as I have suggested in a recent polemic, the BBC is as clearly an organ of state propaganda as any commercial media institution, despite - or more probably because of - its long-standing reputation for independence, neutrality and objectivity.

But this is a minor quibble. Molyneux's short text offers a convincing, concise and inexpensive introduction to the Marxist critique of the media. I strongly recommend it to anybody seeking to understand the ideological functions of the contemporary mainstream media.

Neither the BBC nor News International: a communist perspective on Hackgate

2/9/2011

 
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I have already blogged at length about the News International 'scandal', so here I simply draw attention to a valuable analysis of the affair from the International Communist Current.

Say what you like about the ICC, their geo-political analyses are usually very solid. Their article is one of the few to move beyond the anti-Murdoch moralising of the left by contextualising the scandal in relation to global imperialism and, in particular, to the bitter struggle between two factions of the capitalist state - that is, between the broadly pro-Murdoch/US faction of the British state supported, of course, by the Murdoch press and the increasingly powerful pro-independence faction of the British state backed by the non-Murdoch media organisations which conspired to block Murdoch's takeover of BSkyB.

In common with left-liberal politicians, the non-Murdoch media and most liberal media commentators and scholars, the article condemns Murdoch's baleful political influence in recent decades. But the article also critiques the awesome (and probably greater) power of the BBC and the left-wing press as organs of state propaganda. Indeed, for those with a radical critique of society and media, it is a moot point whether there has ever been anything to choose between the anti-working class propaganda of the Murdoch media and that of their more paternalistic rivals at the BBC and The Guardian.

Finally, the ICC article makes the important point that 'hacking' and spying cannot be eradicated from British political life, since they are endemic to the capitalist state. In fact, as Myles Harris reminds us in an otherwise rather wretched piece in the now semi-defunct conservative journal The Salisbury Review, the phone hacking practices at The News of the World pale into insignificance compared with the British state's routine and extensive covert surveillance operations.

The News of the World scandal: recuperating the crisis

9/7/2011

 
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"It’s useless to react to the news of the day; instead we should understand each report as a maneuver in a hostile field of strategies to be decoded, operations designed to provoke a specific reaction"
 - The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

The phone hacking scandal at The News of the World has thrown a spotlight onto a murky culture of collusion and corruption among politicians, the press and the police, whose existence is unlikely to surprise anybody with a rudimentary understanding of those institutions. Nor, sadly, is it surprising that hundreds of News of the Worldworkers will now lose their jobs for the crimes and mistakes of News International managers. News International clearly regards its workers, along with the victims of its hacking, as fair game. In fact, this scandal presents some opportunities for the Murdoch empire. While the News of the World scandal clearly represents an enormous set-back for the Sun King, it will at least allow him to rationalise his newspaper business as the profitability of tabloid newspapers declines. For the non-Murdoch media (such as the BBC, The Guardian and The Daily Mail) and the anti-Murdoch factions of the British state, meanwhile, the scandal is a godsend.

Unsurprisingly, however, the political dimensions of the phone hacking affair have been ignored in the mainstream media, even by self-styled 'investigative' journalists. In a Spectator article entitled 'What the papers won't say', Peter Oborne castigates politicians and the media for failing to link the scandal to Murdoch's ambitions for BSkyB and asks what he sees as a neglected question: 'whether the owner of News International is any longer a "fit and proper" person to occupy such a dominant position in the British media'. Oborne is pushing at an open door here. The question of Murdoch's moral fitness for mega-moguldom certainly is being raised in those parts of the mainstream media not owned by him (such as The Spectator) and it now looks likely that the decision on Murdoch's BSkyB bid will be deferred, at the very least.

If Oborne really wants to ski off-piste, here are a few questions that actually havebeen ignored by the mainstream media. We know, of course, that the story was broken by The Guardian's Nick Davies; but the question remains: why? Which of Murdoch's many enemies 'pressed the button' on phone hacking? And why now? For obvious reasons, definitive answers to such specific questions are hard to come by; but there can be no doubt that there are elements within the British state that are hostile to Murdoch's pro-US agenda and for whom Murdoch's domination of the British media following a BSkyB takeover was not a welcome prospect. To understand the eruption of this scandal as a well-timed intervention in an inter-bourgeois faction fight is not to embrace a 'conspiracy theory', but to understand that the practical co-operation of various state factions is forever prone to breaking down, giving way to what Marx, in the third volume of Capital, called a 'fight of hostile brothers' whose outcome is 'decided by power and craftiness'.

And here's another largely neglected question: since 'respected' media organisations such as the BBC systematically mislead the public (to take only the most egregious current example, the BBC is blacking out news of the popular movements in Spain and Greece), why do we reserve our moral outrage only for the Murdoch press? The News of the World's news gathering practices are appallingly cynical, it is true. But amid all of the moralising about tabloid journalism, it is worth remembering that in terms of their fundamental ideological commitments, the BBC and Murdoch are on the same side. Indeed, left-liberal complaints about the 'corporate' media and 'neoliberalism' (a concept whose conceptual coherence I have questioned here) all too often underestimate the profound and relentless ideological manipulations of the liberal press and the public service broadcasters.

There may be trouble ahead for that toothless tiger the Press Complaints Commission and tighter press regulation is surely on its way. But there is every probability that this scandal will ultimately only reinforce the power of the British state and its propaganda system, as James Heartfield, with characteristic insight, suggests. In a process that recalls the ruling class's recuperation of the MPs' expenses scandal in 2009, the public outrage over the News of the World's malpractice is being exploited for moral capital by the liberal political and media establishments, as they congratulate themselves for fishing a few rotten apples from the barrel. Nick Clegg, for example, has been assuring the public that the ongoing investigations into the scandal constitute an opportunity to strengthen British democracy.

Meanwhile, left-wing figures such as Neil Kinnock and New Statesman's loyal Labour acolyte Mehdi Hasan have been praising the Labour leader Ed Milliband for standing up to the Murdoch empire, despite the painfully obvious fact that Milliband found his conscience, like all of the politicians, only after news of the scandal broke. The ex-Prime Minister Gordon Brown, meanwhile, is now claiming that he, too, consistently stood up to the Murdoch empire, resisting News Corporation's attempts to bully him into curtailing the activities of the media regulator Ofcom in 2009. But while Brown's disagreements with Murdoch points to the origin of this scandal in the political divisions within the ruling class, Brown's moral grandstanding will not wash: after all, Brown and his wife attended many News International events in recent years.

Clearly, even if we accept the dominant framing of the News of the World scandal as an unforeseen 'crisis' of journalism and not as a well-planned take-down, it is a crisis that is now being exploited by politicians as they seek to reassure the public of the fundamental soundness of the political and media systems.

In their reactions to the News of the World scandal, liberal academics, too, have tended to frame the phone hacking scandal as an aberration, stressing the need for a robustly ethical journalism that fulfils its proper mandate to question power and promote democratic deliberation. Yet all of this assumes that liberal democracy (or even, as the soft-nationalist platitude has it, 'our democracy') is desirable - and that the primary role of political journalism is to promote it. It also assumes that there can, under capitalism, be such a thing as a 'free press' that 'speaks truth to power' - a notion that has been nicely demolished by the International Communist Tendency.

These normative assumptions about democracy and the crusading role of journalism as a fourth estate may give comfort to those who have been understandably sickened by recent revelations. From a more radical perspective, however, they can be seen as discursive 'strategies of containment' (in Fredric Jameson's phrase) that serve to arrest critical reflection on the contradictions of capitalism and the macro-ideological operations of the news media. We should instead, I would argue, see the corruption revealed in the scandal not as an aberration, but as part and parcel of the ordinary workings of the democratic state. We should also see Murdoch's humbling not as a triumph for democratic transparency or a setback for global 'neoliberalism', as many on the left have done, but as the curbing and entrammelling of one faction of the British state by another. And we should be very clear that the ultimate function of mainstream political journalism - whether it comes from the BBC, The Guardian or News International - is not to question and investigate those in power, but to serve their interests.

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