'The News' is propaganda.

national | arts and media | opinion/analysis Wednesday June 01, 2005 16:21 by saoririseoir - indyradio

Reclaim our Media I

The best television and newspaper ratings go to light entertainment. Looking at the news, it’s easy to understand why. It’s nicer to feel happy, albeit brain-dead, than depressed and powerless; though the two are not mutually exclusive. Most of us take for granted the whole concept of ‘news’, so much so that the question ‘what is news?’ almost seems ridiculous. Yet, when we reflect honestly on the unaccountable agenda-setting power of news editors over everyday conversations in parks, pubs, the canteen etc., we can only conclude that news has a tremendous influence over the thought of the public, and the question becomes more obvious, as does its variant; ‘who decides what’s news?’ News editors are deciding what we should think is important, and in doing so, defining each of our situations for us, as well as the situation of the World around us.

Truth tellers or mouthpieces for 'Official' Sources?

‘The News’ is Propaganda.

A survey of radio news reports for three days last week found the primary news sources to be gardaí/PSNI, stars in the political soap-opera, and reports or surveys (mainly by state-funded institutions). This survey however, didn’t include talk-based programmes which, no doubt, would have hosted authors selling their latest book, as well as purveyers of mostly recycled opinion.

When the mass-media report a story from a garda source, they almost never say so, despite usually quoting verbatim from what has been given to them. Even, by the media’s own self-proclaimed standards, this sourcing is problematic for two reasons.

Firstly, it calls into question the impartiality or objectivity of a media industry which is so reliant on police forces for a steady flow of stories, that, for example, The Irish Times was the only mainstream Irish newspaper to question the shooting of two post office raiders in Lusk on Friday May 27th – this, despite our voting to abolish the death penalty in June 2001. The gardaí are generally revered and unquestioned to such an extent that it is politically safe, and even prudent for politicians to say they want more of them on the streets.

Secondly, the integrity of our jury system is surely undermined by the almost instantaneous reporting of the arrest of individuals for whatever reason, since the garda version is always given first and in most cases never seriously questioned. A neighbour of mine first found out about the arrest of his brother-in-law on illegal possession of fire-arms charges through a radio news bulletin at nine in the evening. Innocence was not presumed in the broadcast. Some suspects are even flagged before arrest (e.g., Seán Haughe re Omagh bomb charges, April 2005). The fact that such coverage, and worse, is not held by defence lawyers to be prejudicial is a matter of some wonder. The worst media offenders in this regard are the Sunday papers, whose crime correspondents one suspects make more from crime than most criminals.

The daily stream of what one politician has said in response to another might be seen as good public service broadcasting if much of what is said was not so inconsequential and inane. Even outside the high-political arena we can’t escape it. Bertie’s private life is one thing, but the use of tragedy to aid the legitimation process is grotesque. After the bus-crash in Co. Meath the movements of Ministers of State were relayed, along with their condolences; the same people whose inaction has at least been partly responsible for such accidents. Their empty words continue to do us no favours and should not be reported ad nauseum as is common-place today.

Surveys and reports tend to be closer to the truth, but there are two provisos. First, asking the right question will always get you the answer you want to hear. Surveys about the economy may ignore inequality, or questionaires on a new postal codes neglect to mention to those questioned that An Post have already designed an advanced type of postal code before this latest committee was set up.

Secondly, where the truth is broached, however obvious it has seemed to the rest of us for so long, reports are never acted upon, not even those commissioned by the government itself. Yesterday, we heard a report telling us that the Children’s Courts do little in keeping their wards out of the cycle of crime and institutions. I suggest we don’t need a report to tell us that prisons and the whole justice system doesn’t work. If it did, most of its practitioners would not be in that line of work.

It may be some time before it becomes clear that some long-awaited report or other has not been acted on, but most of their recommendations play safe, and recommend a tinkering with the system – mindful that their conservative audience may commission yet another report in the near future. Whole forests have gone into dead reports, and a lot of wasted resources.

An example of a more top-down approach is ‘opinion’. It is to be found in the rantings of columnists and editorials in print, but worse still, the numbing vacuity of the same pundits (usually other journalists) on talk radio. That this opinion is anodyne is bad enough, but it is usually recycled by people who have no peronal experience and very little knkowledge of what is being discussed. Arguably, one might include in this, the sending of RTÉ’s ‘finest and best’ to report on the tsunami. What could they add to the common fund of knowledge? Better had resources been put into exploring and explaining why such regions had such an infrastructural deficit; but bad news sells better than analysis, and the public is encouraged to lurch from one paroxism of pity to another, each one supplanting the last in its apparent magnitude and importance. The tragedy of 800 million starving in the World each year is always there, but not newsworthy.

Opinion can be so dense indeed that it sometimes masquerades as fact. An instance in relation to Sinn Féin and the IRA illustrates this. On RTÉ 1’s Six-One News on March 11th, 2004, following the political opportunism of Azanar’s Spanish government, RTÉ connected Sinn Féin with the killing of over 200 in Madrid, and spent most of its flagship news programme hammering home this point. When, within a couple of days the Spanish people found out that they were being lied to, and that al-Quaeda were in fact behind the atrocity, they sacked the government. Would, that news editors were so accountable, or even subject to scrutiny.

Power and knowledge are related, so if our lens on the world is so distorted as to corrupt our knowledge of it, and ergo ourselves, this is surely no small matter. Commenting on RTÉ’s handling of the Madrid bombings, an RTÉ journalist told me in an interview that RTÉ news is objective, and that at the same time it reflects public opinion in the slant of its reportage.

The propaganda model of media has moved a long way from its infancy in the days of Hitler, Brezhnev, or even present-day China. In our model the journalists themselves are so normalised into ever-shrinking ideological parameters, that their work is bereft of critical analysis. They rarely question the motives of the powerful source – for starters, a simple question like ‘you would say that wouldn’t you…’ would suffice. In the meantime, let us not be told how or what to think; each of us is best equipped with that particular responsibility, and it should not be surrendered, ever.