SPGB Meetings (1994)

Party News from the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB Meetings (1988)

Party News from the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Click on the image to enlarge.

SPGB Meetings (1995)

Party News from the December 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

What the papers don't say (2): The broadsheets (1999)

From the June 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

We conclude our examination of the capitalist press. Last month we dealt with the tabloids. This month it's the broadsheets.

Although there has been a general contraction of newspaper reading since the 1960s, there is one area that has bucked the trend: this is financial journalism. Here we find in the British press almost a model of probity. Financial reporting is factual, reasonably accurate, and does not exhibit any of the hysteria rightly associated with the downmarket press. Whilst the tabloids may be screaming blue murder about some take-over by a foreign company of an English one (a notable example was the take-over of Rover by BMW), the Financial Times, by comparison, will actually report the intricate financial details—the financial facts.Why does the financial press behave like this? The papers take the power of the City seriously; as well they might since the City is seriously powerful. The levels and detail of financial journalism have increased steadily in all the broadsheet papers since the 1960s. In that time the Financial Times has become, arguably, the most successful heavyweight paper. One can only begin to imagine what its corporate sales must be like; it is difficult to imagine a financial department or institution anywhere in Britain that does not take at least one copy of the Financial Times. Unlike the tabloids, the broadsheets print detailed and accurate business information. Who reads these papers? Why the capitalists and those who run their businesses of course! Bullshit for the workers—but information for the capitalists.The financial press has, over the years, gained autonomy from other sections of the press, and has also cultivated a really rather cosy relationship with Whitehall and its various departments. For instance Denis Healey, who could never be described as having an easy time of it with the press during the 1974-79 Labour government, described his relationship with the financial press like this:

"I regularly invited the top editorial staff of the leading newspapers to dinner, and accepted their invitations in return. I would discuss my problems frankly with them, and never had a confidence betrayed. As a result, at least they understood what I was trying to do, even if they did not approve of it. However much I deplored their criticisms, I rarely felt it was unfair. This was true at least of the so-called 'quality press', including newspapers which supported the Conservatives." (The Time of My Life, pp. 442-3).

One important and identifiable role that the financial press came to play in the politics of the 1980s was the switch away from Keynesian economic policies which unravelled so disastrously in the late 1970s, to the Chicago Monetarist policies which unravelled so disastrously in the late 1980s. The major players in this scenario were Samuel Brittan of the Financial Times, and Peter Jay, and William Rees-Mogg of the Times. Also important here was Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1983-89, and who was a Financial Times journalist from 1956 onwards. All four of these men came from Oxford or Cambridge, and had remarkable family connections in the field of politics and finance, and were all converts to Friedmanite Monetarism. Wayne Parsons in his The Power of the Financial Press argues that the Times and the Financial Times introduced monetarism to Britain, ahead of the Treasury civil servants, the Bank of England, and the academic consultants.

In line with the increasing globalization of capitalism the Financial Times, in 1979, began its first foreign printing in Frankfurt. It currently gets 50 percent of its circulation and over half of its advertising revenue from outside Britain. The massive polarization is obvious: whilst The Sun exudes xenophobia "Up yours Delors", and "Hop off you Frogs", the capitalist papers of choice are international in scope, and provide hard facts.  

Lobby system

The tabloids deliberately limit the quantity and quality of their political coverage to screaming abuse, and then only for a small part of the paper, so as not to alienate the voters whose political party is being abused. The broadsheets, meanwhile, carry much more political news and comment. This is obtained through the lobby system. Very simply, this involves lobby journalists being allowed to speak informally to politicians in the lobby of the debating chamber in the Houses of Parliament; these stories can then be used on a "non-attributable" basis. Although television has impacted upon this scene with its various "on-the-record" interviews, the lobby system remains potent and mischievous. Here the picture gets very muddy indeed.

Politicians use lobby journalists to leak information that might:

• damage the opposition,
• damage a fellow politician with whom they have fallen out,
• to fly the kite as it were - to experiment with policy to see how it will go down,
• or simply as an opportunity to trade points of view.

This situation is made more problematic in that the lobby system is essentially self-policing, and self-censoring, according to unwritten and ill-defined rules. Nowadays the various spin-doctors are extremely adept at manipulating the journalists, in order to spin a story that may deflect attention from other things that are going on, or to put a different spin on another story from another non-attributable source, and so it goes on.

But arching over these various machinations is the market. Journalists need to move copy, and nothing does so like a crisis. Papers feed on crises. It is the media that provides the image and framework of "the crisis". Once the papers have reached the "crisis" conclusion, the government can either deny the crisis, and thus give the original story more weight and run the risk of "Crisis, what Crisis?" headlines, or ignore the situation and be accused of inaction and incompetence.

Jeremy Tunstall, in his book Newspaper Power, has identified a pattern to the media crisis. Once there has been one "crisis", this is usually followed by a couple more. Once the press's appetites have been whetted, and circulation temporarily increased by the "crisis"—another is the journalistic equivalent of manna from heaven, and so a rather ordinary event may be promoted to the crisis league.

So what have we learned? The press was recently described by the ex-chancellor Kenneth Clarke as a bucking bronco which he was continually forced to ride. For the Socialist the press can sometimes be a goldmine of information. Occasionally, in the oddest places, the press pay unwitting testimony to the lunacy of capitalism. We don't want to suggest for a moment, that there is nothing but lies in the press; rather that the capitalists, as the newspaper owners and users, as political movers and shakers, have the press as part of their armoury with which to dominate and subdue the working class.

At the same time they have inevitably created a warped and highly unstable instrument of communication, which has its own internal rules, and which plays a massive power game with the capitalists representatives in Parliament. The capitalists of the late twentieth century make sure that it is their message that gets across. Whilst the workers are encouraged to be parochial and xenophobic when the occasion demands, the capitalists and their papers have expanded their field of operations world-wide.

Intellectual vacuum

Newspapers exist in a dialectical relationship with the capitalist system, "bucking bronco", "a snapping rottweiler"; this kind of metaphor has been used by the politicians who benefit from press coverage. However, the press is there to sell papers and who can predict what they are going to have to do in future in order to achieve this.

There is a literary theorist called Pierre Macherey who wrote in his book A Theory of Literary Production that "a text says what it does not say". His argument is that the silences in a book or a play or indeed a newspaper are as significant as what is said. It is the work's silences that give it form. He argues that in order to really know a work we must, in his words, "move outside it". Then to question the work: "the work has its margins, an area of incompleteness from which we can observe its birth and its production. It is not what the work refuses to say that is important, but rather what it cannot say". Put simply we have to read between the lines, but more than that we have to understand why we are having to read between the lines, and to understand why certain things cannot be said by the press.

For example, when increased emphasis upon personalities replaces real political debate—this happens in all the papers and is justified by extremely erudite pieces in the heavyweights—why does this happen? From a Socialist's point of view it's easy: image increases in directly inverse proportion to content. The Nazi Nuremberg rallies were all lights, loud music, excessive amounts of Wagner, and ranting meaningless rhetoric; a bit like Tory and Labour conferences of today (except without the Wagner). The Nazi's rhetoric of blood and soil had to be couched in these terms, because like the politics of today it was an intellectual vacuum.

The future will re-evaluate the tabloids not for what they said, but for what they did not say. Imagine being in the position of having to explain to a couple of aliens from outer-space why the gold-blend couple (the couple from an advert) were given front page status in the biggest-selling newspapers in the land, when a third of the population of the world were starving. A monumentally difficult task to do without slipping into platitudes.

In a sane world information would be available not because it was saleable, but because it was necessary. Some information is boring, but necessary; some is interesting and fun. All will be available in a socialist society without the distorting lens of the market getting in the way to inflate, downgrade, change, or otherwise manipulate the information we need.

It's easy to disbelieve everything we read in the papers, the more difficult job is to realize what we are not reading in the papers, to identify where the silences and areas of incompleteness lie. Socialist understanding undoubtedly makes this job easier, but it is faced with a deluge of scrambled and partial truth, unconscious misrepresentation, and downright lies. Karl Marx once said, "The first condition of the freedom of the press is that it is not a business activity". How right he was.

Jacek Krause

What the papers don't say (1): The tabloids (1999)

From the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

This month we begin a two-part article on the capitalist press and its relationship to capitalism and capitalist politicians.

Anyone who takes any more than a passing interest in politics will know that the various media play an important part it. In the Top 300 Most Powerful People in England, published by the Observer last year, Rupert Murdoch (a man who does not even live in England), came second after Tony Blair. Anyone who is even remotely aware of the political leanings of the newspapers in Britain will know that the tabloid press had strong Tory leanings from about 1979 to 1992 and are largely now for Labour. As regards the last general election the Sun claimed that it was "The Sun Wot Won it". It is also common wisdom that one should not "believe everything you read in the papers".

So we, the working class, know that the papers are powerful, that they are political, that they deal in distortions of the truth. And yet, the overwhelming majority of us read the tabloid press. So why do we seemingly have an appetite for the lies and distortions of the popular press? Do we realise just how "unfree" our press actually is?

Although it is not the newspapers' job to tell the truth, they are not particularly there to tell lies either (though they do when the occasion demands). They exist, as does anything else in capitalism, to make profits for their owners.

When Murdoch broke the unions in 1986 by moving his entire operation to Wapping overnight, he began to refer to the newspapers of his News International stable as his "cash cows" (Jeremy Tunstall, The New National Press in Britain, p. 26). Piers Morgan, the sometime editor of the News of the World and now the "responsible" editor of the Daily Mirror, explained the situation very clearly: "I only judge a story on what sells and what doesn't" (Guardian, 30 November 1996). It is this element of the media that makes it at one and the same time the capitalists' friend, and also their enemy. The forces that generate the kind of copy we see in Britain and in other national papers around the globe are the same forces which also undermine governments' attempts to censor or to manipulate the media. Try censorship who dares: the media is a savage animal and it can bite your hand off.  

Before the mid-1960s the British press was relatively well behaved (from the point of view of the government). One reason for this was a hangover from the Second World War when newspapers were effectively self-censoring. Another important reason why the press did not attack governments as vitriolically as is the norm today was the widely held belief that in doing so you would inevitably alienate the section of your readership which supported the party you were attacking. Although certain papers have been readily identifiable as having certain leanings for some time, they have always had a significant minority who read the paper whilst voting "the other way".

Brown-nosing

The huge change in this view came when the Murdoch/News International group made the discovery in the 1980s that you could take an extreme anti-Labour stance whilst retaining millions of Labour voters as readers. This was done in a number of ways, such as rationing overt politics to one page of the paper (where the regular reader could avoid it) and by attacking currently unpopular and unsuccessful Tory Ministers. In this respect the Sun was entirely in the pocket of Margaret Thatcher. Larry Lamb was the editor of the Sun during the early Thatcher era, and he was rewarded with a knighthood for his services to Margaret Thatcher during the 1979 election campaign, along with John Junor of the Sunday Express and David English of the Daily Mail. Together, they made sure that pictorial coverage of Margaret Thatcher was six times greater than that of the Prime Minister James Callaghan, and who focused upon her in an increasingly presidential way. In the same way today Tony Blair receives almost ten times more coverage than the Tory leader (has anything to do with Blair's new cosy relationship with Murdoch?).

In the 1980s the tabloids made sure that the uncommitted voter received no informed election coverage. And it was they who generated the much-talked about "Maggie factor".

What happened to Margaret Thatcher was entirely new. Whilst the press had in the past focused upon Lloyd George, Ramsay MacDonald, and especially Winston Churchill during the Second World War, the presidential style of Thatcher's campaign was something entirely new in British politics. Her personal approval rating was always well above that of her party throughout her time in office (excluding the Poll Tax years). Throughout the 1980s the tabloid press went in for constant and consistently noisome brown-nosing which cemented Thatcher in the public mind.

This is not to argue for a kind of press-in-the-pocket-of-the-government conspiracy theory. This is not the case. The press is not necessarily in the pocket of the government; though the way they all climbed into Mrs. Thatcher's handbag in the 80s, and Tony Blair's trousers in the 90s might lead you to suspect otherwise. Recently we have seen how the press can bite the hand that feeds it.

When Thatcher was ousted, her replacement (John Major) was attacked vitriolically by the thenSun political columnist Richard Littlejohn (he is now a dreadful broadcaster). He was ferociously critical of John Major, indeed with the Tory government as a whole. He accused Major of being a political sleepwalker. "When you open your eyes you will find you are Prime Minister", he wrote in December 1992. As keenly as the Tory press brown-nosed to Margaret Thatcher, they attacked John Major.

Here a pattern emerges. We have already identified how the Sun vilified Tory ministers, and glorified Thatcher. Problems with policy, or, as in 1981 deep unpopularity of the government coupled with massive inner-city riots, could be ascribed to incompetent ministers. The glorious leaderine was, of course, untouchable. As a political tactic this is not new; the horrible 20th century of the Cult of the Personality, generally manifests itself in an absolution of the leader regardless of what their administration is doing.

This emphasis upon the individual has been an increasing symptom of the emptiness of capitalist politics. The emptier the politics, the bigger the personalities. It is usually explained by the simple fact that the political grandees are now more often in the limelight, and so need to be more attractive to win votes (the Kennedy factor). It is, of course, true that when the public is faced with a choice of politicians who will make little or no difference to their lives, they will chose the better-looking politician.

If, however, the politician that they were voting for was saying something which was going to make a difference to their lives, then it would not matter whether or not that politician had an ugly mug. We are not saying that Nelson Mandela has an ugly mug, but his face was for many years an almost invisible one. Did it matter what he looked like? Of course not. Opposition to a system which took away basic human rights was such a potent idea, that even as an almost invisible presence he commanded the support of the overwhelming majority of black South-Africans. However, in the absence of real politics people will vote for smooth--Tony Blair is; Michael Foot wasn't.

Political realignment

Although we saw a swing back towards Labour in the tabloids before the last election, the Financial Times had advised the voters to vote Labour the election before that. Senior figures in the world of business were expressing a deep liking for the new Labour Party well before the last election. As has happened in the past, the capitalist class was preparing itself to do business with Labour. They have normally done reasonably well out of Labour governments, and it would appear that the current one is equally "on message" as far as the capitalists are concerned.

The media moguls are, of course, part of this circuit of capitalists who see the way that the wind is blowing and consequently take a new tack. In the newspapers this can manifest itself in a political realignment of a paper. Since the press is not really selling opinions, or thinking through political questions, but selling a product; and that in reality there is no real difference to the capitalist class between Labour and the Conservatives, then such a "realignment" becomes very easy to imagine.

In this respect the broadsheets are different from the tabloids. They rely upon advertising income and not circulation for their revenue; consequently they are more at liberty to put forward their political opinions. However, for the tabloids the picture is much more confused.

When Rupert Murdoch bought the Sun in 1969, the paper (which had previously been the Daily Herald) "voted" Labour. Now it is no secret that Rupert Murdoch and Margaret Thatcher enjoyed a great rapport during the 1980s, especially over the way that Murdoch completely destroyed the unions in his move to Wapping in 1986. However, Murdoch had to be persuaded to have his paper "vote" Tory. It was not his liking or otherwise for the Tory party that swung the day (this is neither here nor there for a capitalist like Murdoch). No, what swung the allegiance of the Sun was the fact that of the three competing downmarket tabloids, the Daily Mirror already staked out a firm, partisan pro-Labour line. This left the other two players in the market being - the Daily Star, and the Sun.

Murdoch's rightward swing was simply a matter of market segmentation. In 1979, the Sun "voted" Tory for the very first time, subsequently the Sun executives only had to worry about the Daily Star. (They don't any more). They dealt with the Daily Star, not in the field of political ideas (if the Sun can be credited with any actual ideas), but in the field of bingo, and they trumped all the other tabloids with the most horrifically jingoistic coverage of the Falklands War. (Who can forget: "GOTCHA"?). Politics, war, bingo: it's all the same when you're a capitalist media mogul.

Rupert Murdoch served his apprenticeship in an Australian paper, and he knew that apart from wars and general elections, few political or foreign stories sell extra copies of newspapers. The big exception to this was the Kennedy assassination. So his first task as the owner of the Sun was to get rid of the foreign desk. Now none of the tabloids has any kind of foreign desk, and the mid-market papers have decreased the size of their foreign press contingent significantly.

For the down-market tabloids, the capitalists have decided upon xenophobia as the main structuring element of their foreign coverage. The mid-market papers such as the Daily Mail are less xenophobic but also carry very little non-British news. Please note that at no time has it been suggested that the reading public have no appetite for foreign or political stories: that's untested. The reason why these sections have been removed from the tabloids is that their inclusion does not increase the circulation of the paper. Why pay for expensive foreign correspondents, when you can have an equal number of readers with a staff of gossip columnists and horoscope writers?

Next month we conclude with an examination of the broadsheets.

Jacek Krause