Between the Lines: All the news that's fit to finance (1987)

'What did the Socialist Standard say about us, luv?'

The Between the Lines column from the October 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

All the news that's fit to finance

Brass Tacks (BBC2,8.30pm. Wed. 26 August and 2 September) devoted two programmes to investigating the question of whether Britain has fair, decent, honest, free newspapers. Now. these adjectives are not ones which immediately spring to mind when one thinks of the press. Distorted, debased, dishonest and unfree are the more appropriate words which offer themselves as descriptions. Surely there can be few people in Britain who are unaware that if your name is Murdoch or Maxwell the press is just as free as you want to pay for it to be, but if you are looking for information you will be wasting your time sifting through most of the outpourings of Wapping Lies Ltd. and the other millionaire mouthpieces which constitute the illusion of the free British press.

In the first of the programmes Brass Tacks looked at four new newspapers and the editorial problems faced by the men who control them. Being commodities — like cans of dog food (but more tasteless) and strippergram girls — the newspapers have a principal aim to sell more copies, regardless of the journalistic standards which have to be abandoned in that sordid pursuit. So, as the newly appointed editor of the News on Sunday pointed out, despite the left-wing claims of that newspaper before and when it was established, the dictates of the market meant that vicar-beat-choirgirl-with-elephant-trunk type stories had to give way to exposes of brutality by the Greater Manchester police. You don’t make profits out of principles. The programme looked at the Today newspaper which has recently been pocketed by Rupert Murdoch, the man who has done for journalistic freedom what Adolf Hitler did for community harmony. David Montgomery. Murdoch’s editor of Today, summed up the answer to those people who stamp their feet with anger when it is suggested that the handful of capitalists who own the press are the dictators who decide what will go in it: "Clearly there’s bound to be a coinciding of Rupert Murdoch’s philosophy and the philosophy of his editors, but we have disagreements with him about style and content and we argue our corner. I suppose if the difference becomes so great then someone’s got to leave and it probably won't be Rupert Murdoch".

The second “Brass Tacks” analysis of the press took the form of a studio discussion. Facing the four editors who sat as a panel were people who had been victims of press distortion and manipulation. Predictably, the discussion divided into liberal sentiments about fairness in opposition to the real voice of capitalism: if it sells print it, if lies sell better make them big ones, if they will buy soft porn why give them news? Mike Gabbert, who was then editorial director of the Sunday Sport and is now editor of the new, "lustier" Daily Star, participated in the debate with all the elegance and eloquence of a football hooligan with a word processor. In response to women who objected to selling newspapers by displaying naked female flesh in between editorials moralising against rape, Gabbert blurted that they only held those views because they were too fat. This oaf needed a free education, not a free press. 

Speaking of press distortion 

While we are on the subject of the gutter press, let us turn our attention to The People (a nasty little Sunday rag) of 16 August. In it Ian Brandes writes a column headlined TV SOAP IS JUST A PLOT BY THE STATE!’ The article purports to be about comments made about soap operas, and Crossroads in particular, which appeared in this column in the August Socialist Standard. This party was not contacted by Brandes before he wrote his distorted nonsense. Despite letters from this journal to Brandes and to his editor insisting that the lies in The People article be corrected, we have not even received an acknowledgement, let alone a published correction. So. let us look at Brandes' article with a view to showing just how honest the dear old British press is. The article begins as follows: "The loony Labour left has launched a blistering attack on TV soap operas as the modern opium of the masses'." But the article deals only with comments made in this column in this journal which is published by The Socialist Party of Great Britain, a party which was formed two years before the Labour Party and has no connection with Labour or its left-wing. Brandes need only to have contacted us to find this out — or, easier still, he need only have read the August issue of this journal in order to find at least three articles referring explicitly to The Socialist Party’s opposition to the Labour Party. Second lie: The People article's headline suggests that we are claiming that soaps are a conspiracy or plot to fix workers' minds: in the article Brandes writes that "It (The Socialist Standard) claims that the nation's weekly favourites are just part of a sinister capitalist plot to keep viewers docile, while the bosses exploit their power." Compare this to what the Standard article actually stated: "It is not being claimed that soaps are a conspiracy to make workers accept capitalism". Third lie: in The People's account of our article it is said that we assert that "There would be no need at all for TV soaps" in a socialist society. What we printed was rather different: "Will there be soap operas in a socialist society? Who can tell? It is not for a small minority of socialists in 1987 to lay down a blueprint for how the socialist majority will decide to live”. In no sense can that be interpreted as stating that soap operas will not be shown on TV once we establish a socialist society. And lie number four: The People falsely claims that we were saying that there will be no soap operas in a socialist society: "There would be no need for TV soaps at all, the journal claims, if Britain would only embrace socialism". This column has never advocated the absurd, nationalist notion of "British socialism". If Brandes had taken the trouble to read the inside cover of the August Standard (as in this one) he would have read a series of clear questions and answers about what we stand for; in answer to the question. "What is the meaning of socialism?" we state in terms which are clear enough for even a People journalist to comprehend: "Socialism does not yet exist. When it is established it must be on a worldwide basis, as an alternative to the outdated system of world capitalism". So. in a newspaper article of less than two hundred words Ian Brandes and The People make four erroneous. dishonest statements about the contents of this column. What are they going to do about it? We'll be letting you know.

An after-dinner ramble 

UK Late (C4. Friday) is described as a programme of witty, punchy, after-dinner discussion. Quite who finishes their dinner at 11.30pm is uncertain, but we might suspect that if they take as long to cook the kebabs as they do to get to the point in these witty, punchy intellectual rambles they were lucky to have had dinner at all. On 4 September the collection of witty, punchy (rather dull, actually) conversationalists included a judge and a second-hand car dealer who had served a sentence or two for fraud. "We really think alike on most things, us two" said the judge, after an hour of exuding gas about crime and punishment. The criminologist, Jock Young, who is about as witty and punchy as a 1953 Boys ' Own annual, tried in vain to persuade the assembled guests to understand that criminality is a label usually placed by the state upon poor people, while at the same time City robbers (sorry, "entrepreneurs") are raking in millions as a result of their fiddles. What he did not mention were the millions more pounds being accumulated by the capitalists in the City, not as a result of illegal dealing, but due to good old honest robbery called making a profit, i.e. exploiting wage labour. The witty, punchy, after-dinner discussion about the meaning of class on 21 August was no more satisfying. The TV audience (that is. those of us who don't have after-dinner shouting matches of our own. so have to resort to the telly for a bit of genuine, semi-pissed prejudice) were treated to a collection of people who were able to say all kinds of punchy and witty things except a) what class means, b) why it exists, and c) how we can get rid of it. For answers to those questions read The Socialist Standard - as opposed to the half-witted, punch-drunk Sunday People.

Steve Coleman