Liberal media: the barking dog of institutional power (2026)

From the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

There was a recent Reuters investigation revealing that one fifth of sitting US Congress members, living presidents, and Supreme Court justices are direct descendants of slaveholders. Liberal circles celebrated this as exemplary accountability journalism. But this celebration reveals the sophisticated mechanism by which modern media manufactures consent. Not through falsehood, but through strategic structural omission.

The investigation was conducted by journalist Blake Morrison. He meticulously mapped genealogical connections between today’s political elite and their slaveholding ancestors. He traced lineages through census records, slave schedules, estate documents, and family bibles. He identified at least 100 members of the 117th Congress with ancestral ties. The investigation even named the enslaved individuals where records permitted, giving human names to those previously reduced to property listings alongside sorrel horses and folding tables.

The dog is on the chain

Morrison’s reporting frame focuses on the personal impact of discovering these genealogical connections. It frames the story through individual family history and curiosity. It systematically avoids examining the legal and financial mechanisms through which slaveholder wealth was preserved, compounded, and transferred into the present day.

The Reuters investigation, like much accountability journalism, perpetuates the fiction that wealth passes simply from father to son. This is not how dynastic wealth operates. The actual mechanisms, trust law, estate law, corporate inheritance, land title chains, and complex financial instruments, remain entirely unexamined. By failing to map and explain the legal instruments that protected and grew slaveholder wealth across generations, the investigation performs a crucial ideological function. It transforms a systemic analysis of racial capitalism into a personalised narrative of ancestral discovery. The story becomes about individual bad apples and their personal reckonings with family history, rather than about the structural continuity of wealth extraction from enslaved labour into contemporary financial and property systems.

The everyday reproduction of consent

This is not accidental. It represents the operational logic of what Walter Lippmann termed ‘the manufacture of consent’ in his 1922 book Public Opinion. Lippmann argued that the professional class should manage democracy because they know about power and because raw political reality is too complex for most people. Columbia University’s journalism school is the training arm of the institution most closely associated with Lippmann’s legacy. And it’s where Blake Morrison teaches interviewing and investigation.

Now consider a story that Reuters is not currently investigating. In March 2026, the Poynter Institute reported that Thomson Reuters (Reuters’ owner) has multiple contracts with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), one of which gives DHS access to number plate reader data. Reuters journalists themselves signed a letter demanding the company explain what human rights and civil liberties due diligence it has undertaken in relation to this contract.

This story is not historical. It’s happening now. And it is about US government surveillance. Thomson Reuters has a $22.8 million open contract with DHS that runs until 2026. Another company, LexisNexis has a separate $22.1 million contract. These contracts support ICE and Customs and Border Patrol operations, including immigration enforcement and deportations.

A YouTuber, Ali McForever, traces the connections between state power, media systems, and global economic structures. Her analysis reveals how the manufacture of consent operates not through crude propaganda but through the careful cultivation of partial visibility.

She argues that Reuters will trace a family tree across centuries but will not trace a contract across subsidiaries. They will name an enslaved ancestor but will not name the shell company receiving ICE funding. They will expose a genealogical connection but not a procurement chain.

She also argues that Morrison’s investigations are formulaic. Although the story is always factual, the conclusion is invariably some bad apples and a regulatory gap. That is deliberate, not incidental omission. Legal wealth transfer mechanisms or surveillance infrastructure never appear anywhere in the investigation. A story containing falsehoods can easily be debunked yet stories that are structurally true but conclude just before the system is made visible produce something more durable. The wagging tail of accountability without any bite.

She argues further that Morrison’s work occupies a space where a systemic critique would otherwise exist. It occupies this space deliberately while Thomson Reuters takes millions from the same agencies that Morrison claims to expose. The public receives confirmation that journalism performs its watchdog function while never barking against the actual levers of power.

Trust structures

Let’s consider what a genuinely systemic investigation would require. Mapping trust structures established in the 19th century that remain active today or tracing land titles through Jim Crow-era legal mechanisms designed to protect white property ownership. Examining how corporate charters and financial instruments allowed slaveholder capital to transform into industrial and banking capital without passing through the father to son inheritance model that Reuters implicitly assumes.

Tracing the Thomson Reuters contracts through their actual ownership layers. Revealing which data brokers operate the number plate reader databases for ICE. Exposing the procurement chains that connect historical slaveholder wealth to contemporary border militarisation. This is work that Ali McForever has done. This is the work that Reuters deliberately avoids because it would expose their own complicity.

Journalism that maintains intimate proximity to power while performing the ritual of critique is in thrall to King Capital. It names the brokers but not the banks. It traces the genealogy but not the wealth. It exposes the contract but not the procurement chain.

This is workers’ consent being manufactured in its most abstracted form. Not through raw propaganda, but the careful cultivation of partial visibility, we are shown enough to believe ourselves informed, while the actual mechanisms of power, legal, financial, structural, remain unexamined behind a veil of individual narrative and personal moral narrations.

For socialists, we know when the bourgeois press celebrates its own accountability, we must ask what remains unseen. What legal instruments go unexamined? What ownership layers remain obscured? What surveillance contracts go unexamined? The answer reveals not mere journalistic failure, but journalistic function. To manufacture the consent necessary for the continued operation of capital and its dog, the military industrial complex, one carefully framed investigation at a time.

A.T.

Proper Gander: Manipulated by the Monoform (2025)

The Proper Gander column from the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The mass media is a ‘systematically organised, one-way path from the producer to the spectator. Constantly. Constantly. And that is not communication. We should try and find some other word for it. And it’s certainly manipulation’, according to film-maker and theorist Peter Watkins, who has died at the age of 90. His words come from a 2001 video interview following the release of his film La Commune, through which he aimed to use the medium of film-making to communicate, rather than just present one interpretation. The film re-enacts the Paris Commune of 1871 and was made in a less hierarchical, more democratic way than found in the mass media’s usual output, by having non-professional actors improvising scenes and shown discussing the views of both their characters and themselves.

La Commune was the last film Watkins made, after which he honed his theories about how the media industry functions for his 2004 book The Media Crisis. His films, in one way or another, focus on conflict between states and between classes. Their subject matter includes nuclear war (The War Game, The Journey), oppression of political activists (Punishment Park, Evening Land) and historical flashpoints (Culloden, La Commune). His two productions of the late 1960s, Privilege and The Gladiators, share the theme of the elite using the media to divert and channel working class dissent. These films employ a setting of the near-future to examine this, while his theories about film-making investigate how this happens in real life.

Watkins argued that the mass audio-visual media (MAVM) industry moulds the reactions of its audience through the style and arrangement of its products. He called the prevailing template for films and programmes the ‘Monoform’. This is defined as ‘a formatted and repetitive TV language form of rapidly edited and fragmented images accompanied by a dense bombardment of sound, all held together by the classical narrative structure’ (Notes on the Media Crisis, Peter Watkins, 2010). This is a familiar description of dramas and documentaries with predictably linear plots, scenes too short to explore details and mood-accentuating soundtracks. This style is particularly noticeable in the common practice of documentaries starting with a quick summary of the programme to come, reducing what could be a complex subject into a couple of minutes (before then reducing the subject into only forty-or-so minutes for the rest of the duration). Watkins continues ‘Because of its extreme rapidity (especially the version developed over the past 20 years [ie, from circa 1990]), the Monoform gives no time for interaction, reflection or questioning […]. It is organised to create pre-determined responses, which means that before the audience sees any Monoform film or television programme, its producers already know how they (the audience) will react – or at least such is the intention’ (ibid). In emphasising how the format or approach adopted by film-makers can be used to push an agenda, Watkins is echoing Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan, who said ‘the medium is the message’ in his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. As the MAVM is owned by corporations, their films and programmes are intended to reinforce acceptance of the social framework of which the MAVM is a part, as well as make a profit for their shareholders. The Monoform followed by the MAVM’s products reinforces this acceptance by discouraging critical thinking about that social framework. Here, Watkins’ views have similarities with those of Frankfurt School luminary Herbert Marcuse, who described how capitalism utilises the mass media as a means of social control, including by stifling anti-capitalist thought.

A film or programme’s style, music and editing support the priorities of the media industry even if its content appears to criticise society. Watkins says ‘The fact that many filmmakers and media intellectuals believe that a radical subject or a powerful theme in themselves create an ‘alternative’ cinema is another paradox. In most cases it is only the content that could be considered alternative: a radical theme per se does not challenge the over-riding problem of hierarchical form, process and structure. In fact, it only confuses the issue, and is a prime reason why critical thinking on the role of the MAVM has not developed beyond a limited point’ (ibid). This may explain why films and TV programmes haven’t prompted truly radical political action, even when they often depict capitalism’s failings.

Another way that programme-making is shaped by its capitalist context is what Watkins called ‘the universal clock’. This refers to how television shows are made in uniform lengths to allow time for adverts within and between them on a fixed schedule. The prerogatives of the marketing industry are important enough to limit the running times of programmes, chiefly those on traditional broadcast channels. YouTube has its own norms for how advertising affects content, with commercials intruding upon videos mid-sentence, and vloggers interrupting their spiel to promote their sponsors, both in a crass way which makes the scheduling of TV commercial breaks almost seem polite in comparison.

Watkins gave a cogent, class-conscious account of how the media industry’s role in capitalist society impacts on the nature of its products. Films and TV programmes project the hierarchical structure of capitalism through the way they are edited and paced, regardless of their content. The template followed by MAVM output is intended to present a one-sided view, reinforcing acceptance of the status quo and discouraging critical discussion among the audience. In his own films, such as La Commune, Watkins tried to counter these tendencies through his collaborative, improvisational methods, with the consequence that his work became unattractive to major studios, distributors and broadcasters. His marginalisation, to some extent, proves his theories right. He has left us with not only a set of challenging, passionate films but also a valuable contribution to explaining how capitalism’s media industry has to operate, by manipulating us, its consumers.

Mike Foster

Blogger's Note:

Further reading on Peter Watkins from the Socialist Standard archives

• Oct 2015: Peter Watkins: A Revolutionary Film-Maker - Part 1
• Nov 2015: Peter Watkins: A Revolutionary Film-Maker - Part 2
• Jul 1966: Review of The War Game
• Oct 1980: Review of The War Game

Proper Gander: Heading down stream (2025)

The Proper Gander column from the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Two reports published around the start of August described troubles for the BBC, while also highlighting the trajectory television in general is following. The BBC itself didn’t draw attention to figures which show that for the first time, BBC News has lost its place as the most-watched news channel in Britain. According to the official ratings collator Barb, GB News had a higher share of viewers across July than BBC News (with Sky News trailing not far behind). Although both only had just over 1% of the audience share, reaching this point is a symptom of the increased popularity of right-wing media overall. Switch over to GB News and there’s likely to be content about immigration, ‘wokeism’ or ethnicity and crime, its tone not-so subtly reinforcing patriotism and nationalism, reflecting the uglier effects of alienation. The channel has more pundits and panel discussions than BBC News does, and because their banter seems more authentic than the comparatively staid tone of the BBC, the channel has more ‘personality’, even though the main trait is self-righteous smugness.

Another threat to Auntie Beeb comes from a different direction, as described in Ofcom’s annual Media Nations report. Google-owned YouTube has become the second most-watched media service in the UK, behind the BBC and ahead of ITV. The video-sharing platform’s popularity is not only due to its smorgasbord of vlogs and clips, but also because it has adopted formats from traditional TV: half its top-trending videos comprise long-form interviews and game shows. YouTube’s success lies partly in how it morphs itself into whatever is most appealing to each of us. Its algorithms create what looks like a personalised channel, with often eerily accurate recommendations based on what we’ve each previously viewed. One search for a Duran Duran video may also prompt suggestions of Spandau Ballet and lists of ‘80s fashion disasters. The data about our preferences gathered along the way is of use to advertisers in particular, to know the audiences at which to target their products. Much of YouTube’s revenue comes from the adverts which interrupt its videos at annoyingly random points, which on old-fashioned commercial TV channels are at least inserted more predictably so we know when to put the kettle on. Paying for YouTube’s Premium service avoids its adverts, but otherwise once you’ve got online YouTube is free to access. There’s still a price, of course: ‘If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product’, as said by technology ethicist Tristan Harris in the 2020 docudrama The Social Dilemma, referring to the wealth of data captured about people.

The Social Dilemma was broadcast on Netflix, which like other streaming channels such as Amazon Prime and Disney+ has a different business model, requiring viewers to pay for a subscription alongside some income from adverts. Advertising funds most of the traditionally broadcast channels, while the BBC has a subscription of sorts in its state-enforced licence fee, although its BBC Studios division is profit-driven. While the BBC tries to move with the times (such as with its iPlayer), its infrastructure, having been established long ago, is less adaptable to the modern climate compared with the newer channels more aligned to newer trends. Despite this, broadcast TV still makes up most of what people watch, at 56% overall according to the Media Nations report, although younger viewers tend to prefer streaming services. The trend is nearing a tipping point of streaming becoming dominant.

Perhaps the growth of streaming services helps explain why, despite encroaching on the BBC, GB News isn’t profitable, having lost more than £105m since its launch in 2021. Its revenue from advertising was reduced after campaigns by groups such as Stop Funding Hate prompted brands including Ikea and Specsavers to withdraw from using the channel to promote their wares. To try and increase income, membership and branded tat can be purchased from GB News’ website, and presumably chasing the American dollar is motivating plans to launch a programme based in Washington DC. Its owners, Dubai-based investment firm Legatum and hedge fund tycoon Sir Paul Marshall, have propped the channel up with millions of pounds, which they would only do if GB News was aligned to their interests. While GB News may be a challenge to the BBC on one level, the bigger picture is that both are being overtaken.

The shift in viewing habits away from traditional broadcast media with a schedule you have to follow, and towards pick-and-choose streaming services is made possible by advances in technology, from cathode-ray tube all the way to YouTube. These developments aren’t driven by what is best or most popular, though. Because tech and media companies are owned by the capitalist class (or, as with the BBC, by the state which represents them) they are run to further their privileged position. So, advancements in technology and media come through what is most profitable for capitalists. To some extent profitability is connected to popularity, in that more viewers equals more market share. To attract and hold on to audiences, data is harvested and used to manipulate our choices through adverts and algorithms. So, at every step, what we watch is moulded by money.

The wide choice of channels available disguises how ultimately they are run in the interests of a tiny minority. The gradual decline of the BBC demonstrates that other models are becoming more promising for the capitalist class. Streaming channels commodify television in a different way, made more intrusive by how our preferences are turned into market research. There’s room for a little optimism, though, in that there’s something socialistic about streaming’s potential for quick access to any programme, without the constraints and dictates of the capitalist system. And even now, platforms such as YouTube can be used by anyone to broadcast their views, including us.

Mike Foster

What their papers say (1982)

From the August 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is a popular belief that certain newspapers report things "the way they really are" — without bias. In fact, there are no such things as neutral news items, recognisable entities independent of journalists. Rather, there are those incidents and issues which are perceived by editors as "newsworthy".

Journalists are trained to spot particular aspects of social affairs as suitable material to report on with a bias or “angle". Although we find a slightly different point of view in the liberal, "quality" press from that expressed in the rest, all newspapers have a common standpoint on the profit system — they support it. It follows that what they tell us about the world cannot help but be politically slanted. Last year thirty million people died through lack of food while mountains of beef were produced; thousands were slaughtered in wars while the combatants wished for peace; and millions remained homeless while palatial accommodation stood empty. The press was unanimous in ignoring these contradictions and reserving its astonishment and critical analysis for royal weddings and trying to detect a "new" SDP policy.

Before it is represented in the press, reality is put through the great distorting process. The four main journalistic devices are to personalise, trivialise, historically fossilise and moralise.

They personalise

Society is presently organised on the basis of minority ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth. Production is geared to profit for the few, not for social need. Problems like industrial disputes, unemployment and wars are consequences of our social system but the press encourages us to look at them in terms of individual responsibilities. Hence, Margaret Thatcher is portrayed as the demon who has somehow personally engineered the unemployment of over three million people, or else a triumphal heroine who will put "Britain" back on its feet. Strikes are blamed on the personal irresponsibility of reckless trade union leaders. Even self-proclaimed non-revolutionaries like the former Longbridgc shop steward Derek Robinson and the GLC leader Ken Livingstone come in for prolonged campaigns of abuse in which they are reduced to being known as "Red Robbo” and “Red Ken". A variation on this technique of masquerading social issues as personal is to actually personify territories and to speak of "Britain fearing the proposed EEC policy" or “France will be taking steps to ensure that . . .". The persons created by this linguistic trick embody the interests of various sections of the ruling class, so that "Britain’s overseas investments” are in reality the investments of a small minority of wealth owners associated with Britain.

They trivialise

The papers are always littered with inconsequential revelations. We are prompted to turn our heads away from the condition of the world, our poverty and insecurity and busy our minds with matters such as “Why the Duke of Kent is to visit Darlington”, the new rhinoceros at a famous zoo and a thousand other inanities. Socialists are sometimes accused of being killjoys for not wishing to participate in discussions on such matters. But stop to consider why. As they are sliding the neutron bombs into their launching positions are we really expected to open a copy of the Daily Express, read about the man who fell into a vat of custard and still be slapping our thighs as the radioactive dust descends upon us?

They historically fossilise 

Society is in a constant state of change. The institutions, social relationships and problems of today have not always been with us and are only transitory. Journalists give us a misleading vision of society because they have a “photographic” perception of affairs rather than an historical one. They try to present an accurate picture of “the way things are” but they tend to freeze what they look at without seeing each situation as part of a much wider set of social relations which are not only changing all the time, but which we are capable of shaping for our own requirements. Thus, nation states, armies, managers, police and the wages system are all regarded as part of the fabric of society which is beyond any critical comment.

They moralise

On many issues that they examine, journalists pass moral judgement. They try to persuade us that something is good or bad, but the point is that the morality which they peddle is one which favours our social superiors and flies in the face of our own interests. Their moral precepts contort to keep us in place. So strikers who seek a paltry addition to their wage to try and make ends meet are greedy, while business tycoons who acquire additional companies have praiseworthy initiative and enterprise. If a man murders people in North Yorkshire for no reason he is an anti-social wretched villain. If the same man, trained by the SAS, commits the same acts for H.M. Government with a uniform on he will be hailed as a hero. When wealth producers reclaim goods from the wealth owners without paying for them this is theft and is morally reprehensible, but when the capitalists steal from us the fruits of our labour this is making a profit and is seen as morally virtuous.

The press like any other industry is owned by a few privileged people. Three major companies (News International, Reed International and Associated Newspaper Group) own three-quarters of all British newspapers and each company has similar interests in book and magazine publishing concerns, television companies and independent radio stations. In 1948 Lord Beaverbrook said to the Press Commission: “I publish my paper (Daily Express) purely for the purpose of making propaganda and for no other motive”.

Earlier this year. Rupert Murdoch sacked The Times editor Harold Evans because he resisted pressure to take a more right-wing editorial line supporting Thatcher and Tory economic policies. According to Anthony Holden, the features editor, “Mr. Murdoch wants a poodle as an editor” (Guardian, 13 March 1982). The press barons still like to enjoy control over exactly which arguments, about how capitalism should be run, are put in their papers, but there is not a conspiracy of newspaper magnates and most of the time connivance in capitalist propaganda is less explicit.

Nevertheless, the propaganda is always there. Take June 28 this year when there was a brief strike by the National Union of Railwaymen. All the papers were against the workers and with varying degrees of openness took the side of the bosses. Reports were brimming with comments and views from David Howell, the Transport Secretary, Peter Parker, the BR chairman and cabinet ministers, but no report came anywhere near presenting an adequate account of why the workers were dissatisfied with what they had been offered. The Daily Mail displayed a headline “Britain WILL Get to Work” and listed the ways in which workers should attempt to get in to produce profits. On 7 May 1926 the same paper had a similar message for suffering workers: “If you must go about walk as far as you can . . . don't buy more coal than usual. Keep a stout heart and smile at your troubles”. The Sun headline on 28 June was “STRIKE RABBLE" while the Daily Mirror (the paper which claims to stick up for the workers!) spoke shyly about the urgent need to end the strike and for “increased productivity”. The tirelessly liberal Guardian was also urging the railwaymen to “give reality a chance” — in other words “get back to work and stop complaining”. The Times and the Daily Telegraph had identical lines, only couched in more stilted language, whereas the Star took a similar line but with a bare minimum of written language.

Apart from imparting news, the papers also vie with each other to cultivate and cater for a popular culture for their markets. They reinforce ideas about desirable lifestyles, from the adverts in the Financial Times for special credit cards “for people who travel and entertain around the world. People whose lifestyle and income requires and justifies an additional range of financial services" (28 June 1982), to the crude horoscopes and cheap, brash “lighthearted" pages in the gutter press. Pleasure is promoted here as a spectator sport, something you need to get with cash, something where you are “being entertained". The lowest common denominator of interest among an estimated readership is exploited to the hilt to maximise sales. This converts the paper into another type of mass entertainment to be mechanically produced for profit on one side and passively consumed for gratification on the other. As Richard Hoggart observes in his book The Uses of Literacy:

These productions belong to a vicarious spectators' world; they offer nothing which can really grip the brain or heart. They assist a gradual drying-up of the more positive, the fuller, the more cooperative kinds of enjoyment. in which one gains by giving much (p. 340).

The only paper which represents the interest of the working class, because it stands for socialism and nothing else, is the Socialist Standard. The press and the other means of communication can only be used for their proper function — the unrestricted dissemination of ideas and other information — when they, along with everything else, are commonly owned. Raymond Williams approaches this point when he observes:

The irony is that the only practical use of communication is the sharing of real experience. To set anything above this is quite unpractical. To set selling above it may seem normal, but it is really only a perversion to which some people have got used: a way of looking at the world which must be right and normal because you have cut yourself down to its size (Communications, p. 26).

Remember knowledge is power, and every new reader of the Socialist Standard makes the movement for socialism stronger.

Gary Jay

Minority Rule (2025)

Book Review from the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Minority Rule. Adventures in the Culture War. By Ash Sarkar, Bloomsbury, 2025. 310pp.

This is a book that takes down with panache and enthusiasm the myths of race, nation and gender that are used to divide the class of wage and salary earners, the vast majority in society. Blending personal anecdote and lived experience with hard and well-documented fact, Ash Sarkar, journalist, broadcaster and social and political commentator, exposes the multiple ways in which the so-called ‘culture wars’ have been stoked and fostered by those with retrograde views who have been successful in spreading false notions about how groups such as anti-racists, immigrants, trans-activists and ‘Marxists’ are taking over the public platform, preventing free speech and thereby oppressing and silencing the majority.

She is clear that the system we live under (capitalism) is ’a product of economic interests, not abstract ideas’ and that this divides society into two main classes — workers (the vast majority) and capitalists (the tiny minority) – whose interests are diametrically opposed. She explores how this tiny minority (‘the real ruling minority of hedge fund managers, press barons, landlords and corporations’), who have control over ‘a planet-spanning and tightly interconnected system’, are, via the media and others with influence, happy to engage in a ‘misdirection of blame’, inflating minor issues and distracting workers from the real causes of the poverty, inequality, insecurity and lack of community that keep the majority divided among themselves. She is scathing about how ‘identity’ causes (race, gender, climate change, etc.) are blown up and labelled ‘culture wars’, putting barriers in the way of ‘a united working class’. This, she goes on, works ‘to inhibit, splinter and weaken class consciousness based on economic status and steer resentment instead towards an extreme fixation on culture and identity’. It makes scapegoats of minorities and directs ‘horizontally and downwards’ the anger of those ‘who have to live off wages and not asset wealth’. It thus encourages a view of the world as competing interests among groups of workers rather than in terms of a collective class interest. As she puts it, ‘division among identity lines is more useful to the ruling class – it keeps people from recognising their majority class status and shared material interests’. All this, she insists, serves the purpose of ‘keeping us divided and competing against one another’ and of ‘preserving an economic system that is destroying your well-being, your community and the very planet you live on’.

She is scathing too in her characterisation of some of the aspects of that system. She paints pictures such as ‘rough sleepers (…) curled up against storefronts, unsheltered and freezing on some of the most valuable real estate in the world’ and condemns the dehumanisation of asylum seekers whipped up by ‘press and political collusion’, causing ‘a frenzy of racist and indiscriminate loathing’. She reserves particular condemnation for social media and its effects, which she sees as part of the way in which ‘capitalism, in commodifying every aspect of our waking lives, has managed to come up with a form of leisure that’s even more alienating than labour’. And, as a media ‘insider’, she puts particular emphasis on what she sees as the media’s noxious role and, in particular, on its most recent iteration, social media. In a chapter entitled ‘Talk is Cheap’, she condemns, with a plethora of examples, the absurdly inflated focus on the ‘microevent’ (eg, a well-known actor slapping a well-known comedian at the 2022 Academy Awards), the misleading nature of many news headlines calculated to spread xenophobia, and social media’s ‘infinity pool of people posting nuts things’ where real news often gives way to ‘trivial, identity-driven controversies’. ‘The media machine that drives Minority Rule’, she concludes, ‘works by turning citizen against citizen; we’re more inclined to mistrust someone who shares our material conditions, than those who are in charge of shaping them’.

Overall this book, written with wit and brio, offers a sound, wide-ranging and well-informed analysis of the wrongs of capitalism, of the ongoing inability of the majority class in that society to see how they are being manipulated and of their failure to come together to do something about it. But it also has a disappointing aspect. The author calls herself a Marxist and her class analysis based on relationship to the means of production is consonant with Marxism. But her proposed solution for removing the minority class’s stranglehold over society strays far from this. She presents herself rather as a left Labourite critical of Keir Starmer’s current Labour government and its way of running capitalism but favourable to Jeremy Corbyn’s kind of Labourism, which, after the result of the 2017 General Election, she tells us she thought might herald a new era of Labour coming to power and bringing in massive pro-worker reforms. But if she is a Marxist, she should know that reforms any government can bring in are limited by the needs of capitalism and anyway are not capable of seriously redistributing wealth and bringing about economic equality – this is what the followers of Corbyn would have found if he had come to power. After all, in Marx’s own formulation, the state is the executive committee of the ruling class. Only the moneyless, stateless, classless society of free access based on from each according to ability to each according to need can achieve the economic equality which to be fair to Ash Sarkar is no doubt what she would like to see. But it is an illusion to think it can be achieved outside of such a society.

Howard Moss

Media musings (2002)

From the June 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Through the media, the working class is constantly exposed to a significant flow of mind-numbing drivel and misinformation. Important issues of the day are distorted, totally ignored or relegated to the margins of page eleven or broadcast as minor news items on the TV. Sensationalism is used to increase market shares and sell adverts, which thus brings in profits. In this latter regards newspapers can be said to be a means of exposing us to advertisers rather than of telling us what we need to know.. The market for a newspaper is advertisers – other business out to make a profit – and the product us! It would be no bold assertion to say that the editor of a daily tabloid is far more interested in the number of advertisers he attracts than the news he reports – though the latter pulls in the former. Thus the never-ending hunt by tabloid hacks for the latest sex scandal to feed a readership hungry for insignificant gossip and trivia, a readership consequently bare to hundreds of adverts a day.

It is easy to despair at endless streams of workers leaving their newsagents in the morning clutching the Sun or the Daily Star, knowing the news they will be reading during their lunch break will be that regarding the love life of a soap star, instead of a piece on US foreign policy or the situation in Israel. A recent issue of the Sun carried a full page photograph of David Beckham’s injured foot and readers were asked to put their hand on the foot at 12.00 midday and pray for its speedy recovery because the English football team were so dependent upon it. Reportedly many workers did just that in the belief that a concerted countrywide focus on the injury would miraculously heal it. If things were that easy, they could have printed a photo of the Queen Mum and asked for readers to place their hands on it and pray for her resurrection.

The fact that so many workers are prepared to buy such newspapers each day reveals how big the task facing socialists is. All these workers need a real education they will never receive via the press or TV. The capitalists are wonderfully aware of this – an unenlightened working class is hardly going to pose a threat to their interests; the real threat comes from a class conscious majority, hungry for useful information, who don’t give a shit about how many hamsters Freddy Starr eats or how many women Jack-the-lad from Coronation Street has bedded.

Everyday, British people are subject to the media for an estimated 4 hours every day, either via newspapers, radio or TV, so it is important for the master class that they can control and manipulate the media for their own ends. Major media corporations in Britain are enjoying a growing monopoly. Just five companies account for 85 percent of all newspaper sales, with Murdoch’s News Corporation controlling over 60 percent of newspaper circulation. As well as this it also has vast shares in Twentieth Century Fox, Harper Collins publishers, BSkyB and StarTV, which covers most of Asia and the Middle East, numerous newspapers and TV stations in Australia, Stream in Italy and Sky Perfect TV in Japan, giving it access to the minds of almost two-thirds of the global population. AOLTimeWarner – the world’s largest media company – owns CNN, 40 percent of US cable TV, 50 record labels, countless magazines, as well as being the world’s largest Internet Service Provider.

Needless to say, such media corporations and the likes of Rupert Murdoch, the right-wing media mogul, have interests that conflict with those of the workers. Thus it is in their interests that news and important issues we should know about are distorted and kept from us, or presented to us in such a way that we end up with tunnel and distorted vision, unable to make informed decisions or engage in intelligent discussion. Thus the media is very much a part of the indoctrination system, reinforcing the basic social values that ensures the survival of capitalism – passivity and sub-missiveness to authority, the virtue of greed and personal gain, lack of concern for others, fear of real or illusory enemies, a suspicion of anything outlandish or threatening to the status quo and national pride, etc.

Because people are misinformed, they are oblivious to the real nature of the system that exploits them. This then makes it easy for the media to confuse the workers by hiding real power from view. The result is – and this is intentional – is that they blame governments, their allegiance to political parties often switching overnight because of a newspaper’s slanted coverage of certain policies and social conditions. A newspaper like the Sun can make all the difference to a political party’s electoral chances. Hence Tony Blair’s visit to Australia to prostrate himself in front of Rupert Murdoch in 1997, fully aware that the Sun can run post election headlines such as “It was the Sun what won it” (which followed one Tory election victory). The fact that it is the capitalist system that is seriously faltering, creating problems governments just can’t cope with (because it is the system controlling them, not vice versa) would be too dangerous to print or report.

With the arrival and popularity of the internet and the consequent boom in computer use, opportunities for access to real information are now at an unprecedented high, giving anyone interested a chance to find out for themselves the real story behind news that the media otherwise would have us believe is inconsequential. The “information revolution” has placed a wonderful tool at the disposal of the working class. But a tool is only useful if used correctly. If we fail to use this tool to help us pursue our own class interests, then this “revolution” becomes just so much mind-numbing entertainment the masses will get addicted to and which the powers-that-be will eventually use to steer our thoughts away from the pressing matters of the day. Maybe there is more to Tony Blair’s plans to get a computer in every home by 2005 than we think! Would he really promote computer use if he thought the workers would be accessing informative websites in their spare time?

John Bissett

The media and the mob (2024)

From the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent riots, triggered but not caused by the Southport stabbings, have reopened the debate concerning who should have the right to disseminate information (news). The ‘establishment’ mainstream media have resumed their unceasing war against the ‘misinformation’ of social media.

At the heart of this debate lies the terror of our rulers and their media that they will lose control of the political narrative that they have monopolised for so long. They conveniently forget that their newspapers’ continual demonisation of immigrants has normalised racism for many and that in their desperation to evade EU banking rules through lying about the benefits of ‘Brexit’ it has been the mainstream media who have created the noxious racist atmosphere that fed the violence.

Loathsome internet ‘influencers’ like Tommy Robinson, Andrew Tate and Katie Hopkins would have no cultural platform were it not for the unceasing propaganda of the mainstream media. The media have created a Frankenstein monster and now that it has served its purpose they need to control and tame it. The elite of both left and right politics condemn the ‘mob’ violence without taking any responsibility for creating the toxic cultural atmosphere that made it inevitable.

‘Somebody — was it Burke? — called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time no doubt. But at the present moment it is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism’ (Oscar Wilde).

This was true until very recently when those outside of the media establishment (fourth estate) discovered the internet and found their voice. The powerful have always known that the control of information and, more importantly, its interpretation, is vital to their interests. Sometimes we are told that we have a ‘free press’ but the claim that it is not ‘state owned’ in no way guarantees that it is ‘free’. Owning the mass media has always been a preoccupation with the parasite class and the classic Murdoch versus Maxwell struggle was an example of this pissing contest for status within their class.

Their basic narrative is that capitalism is the only possible, and indeed the highest, creation of civilised economic organisation. This fact turns most of their ‘news’ content into mere political propaganda. Presumably they are aware that they are lying but it is not always as starkly simple as that; take the proposition that high taxes are bad for the economy since they deter investment and thus employment – and from a capitalist perspective this is true. But, from a working-class perspective, low taxation for the rich means an enfeebled infrastructure (schools, hospitals, etc) which impacts exclusively on their class and so renders the cuts bad for their economic and social needs – also equally true. No amount of ‘fact checking’ can resolve the reality of this class struggle as within capitalism such internal contradictions are always present. Indeed, this is the primary ‘fact’ contained in any interpretation of information – the rest is pure rhetoric.

From the time of Ancient Rome the ‘people’ are considered to be a mindless mob when they indulge in any protest against conditions. The protagonists of the ‘Farage riots’ were universally condemned as mindless thugs without any reference to their representatives in Parliament (Reform Party) or the legitimisation of such actions by none other than the former president of the USA Donald Trump who lionised the rioters at the Washington Capitol building. The rioters of the infamous ‘Gordon riots’ were similarly condemned with no reference to the toxic anti-Catholic culture which, like the anti-Muslim environment of the UK today, was created by the establishment for their own political needs.

The alleged disappointment of Nigel Farage when he discovered that the murderer in Southport was not a Muslim is an example of the instincts of the monstrous demagogues that capitalism creates. The present political system effectively locks out the people from any democratic expression of their concerns for five years so it is no surprise that such imposed political impotence will erupt into violence occasionally. Only the time-honoured right to a ‘petition of Parliament’ still exists but this cannot change anything in the absence of real democracy.

Although the ‘outrages’ of racist violence are universally condemned by agencies of the state they do provide a useful distraction from the real causes of the symptoms of capitalism. Immigration, racism, culture wars, two-tier policing and myriad other social problems conveniently divert the working class from prosecuting the class struggle.

All of these problems affect the majority who live in the real world of capitalist exploitation but not those who benefit from it. They have no concern for, or knowledge of, those living in poverty; without access to proper health care; poor education; terrible industrial relations, low wage jobs etc, etc.

The former Home Secretary under Thatcher, Willie Whitelaw, said, as he gazed out on the extensive grounds of his mansion, that the race riots of the early eighties did not belong in the England that he recognised. Most of the racist thugs who joyfully attacked hotels containing immigrants have no knowledge or understanding of that other world of luxury and decadence. They only know the daily struggle to make a living that occasionally fails completely to provide for their own and their family’s needs. Someone must be to blame for the misery and the capitalist media always have ready-made scapegoats available to distract the politically naive from the culpability of the parasites whose cause they slavishly serve.

Wez.

Proper Gander: Anti-social media (2024)

The Proper Gander column from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

ITVX’s recent drama serial Douglas Is Cancelled draws on several of society’s current trends to produce an unsettling description of how status impacts on people. Its writer, Steven Moffat, is known particularly for his contributions to more fantastical fare such as Doctor Who and Sherlock. His best scripts carefully guide how much information the viewers and characters have as the story progresses, often by playing around with story structure. Douglas Is Cancelled uses techniques (and actors) familiar from Moffat’s other work, with its subject matter being the television industry itself. Potential viewers are warned that ‘spoilers’ about how the plot is resolved are mentioned below.

The Douglas of the title, portrayed by Hugh Bonneville, is a longstanding TV journalist, co-hosting a popular news programme with the younger Madeline, played by Karen Gillan. A social media post accusing Douglas of telling a sexist joke at a wedding goes viral, leading to concerns among Douglas, his agent, and his producer Toby (Ben Miles), that enough of a negative reaction and suspicions of chauvinism will get him ‘cancelled’. The backdrop of social media being crucial in how we perceive people is a given. Anyone with a profile on X, Facebook, Instagram or TikTok knows they’ve put themselves in an arena where their words are scrutinised and judged publicly, with the stakes being higher for those already in the public eye, such as trusted television news presenters. Even a hint of scandal creates interest, and each repost, comment or like lucratively promotes the social media platform itself as well as whatever’s trending. The combative nature of online discourse is represented in the drama by Douglas’s teenage daughter, sensitive to any kind of perceived offence.

The focus of Douglas Is Cancelled isn’t ‘cancel culture’ though, but the culture of the news media industry. The script contains many cynical swipes at journalism, such as Toby saying of journalists, ‘having opinions about things we didn’t witness is the entire point of our existence’, and Madeline using ‘every dirty trick’ interviewers employ to get to their subject. Key to the plot is when Douglas angrily says ‘the truth needs a little help now and then… our audience wouldn’t understand the truth even if we had the guts to tell it or knew what it was in the first place’. In the context of the story, these lines lead to Douglas’s downfall because of how they dismiss both his audience and his profession, even though he’s right to recognise that journalism isn’t as objective as it pretends. The bias of a mainstream media outlet reflects the prerogatives of its owners, with their ‘truth’ being a stance which both reinforces their own position, however subtly, and less subtly, also attracts viewers and therefore income.

The media’s attitude to the truth isn’t really the focus of Douglas Is Cancelled, though. Its target turns out to be how the industry has mistreated women. Much of episode three is a flashback to just before Madeline secured the job as co-presenter, set in a hotel room where Toby is trying to manipulate her into having sex with him, using psychological tricks to confuse and control her. This thread of the story reminds us of the accusations of sexual harassment and rape made against American film mogul Harvey Weinstein and others, which revealed the extent of abuse in the industry. In the drama, Toby uses the influence he has as an established producer over Madeline, who is made vulnerable by being at the start of her career. He has this influence because of the imbalance of power between his position and hers. Employment, and the hierarchies which it involves, inherently encourages us to objectify people and treat them according to their status in the organisation. Some people, such as Toby and his real-life counterparts, represent how this attitude can lead to the most dehumanising and damaging extremes. The drama doesn’t only highlight how abusers have operated, but also that people like Douglas, who ignored the situation Madeline was in and then made jokes about it, enable the perpetrators. Even though the ‘casting couch culture’ is being exposed and tackled in real life, the conditions which create it remain.

Despite being promoted as a ‘comedy drama’, Douglas Is Cancelled describes a grim, sordid news industry, with relationships shaped by rank within the profession and by the cut and thrust of social media beyond. The similarities to real life situations make the serial very much a product of, and reflection of our times. But behind the modern trappings of social media and anti-social media executives, an old story is being retold. When a workplace, an industry and, indeed a society is structured so that some individuals are in a position of power over others, then the resulting hierarchies allow some people to become abusers. Legislation, policies and procedures aim to prevent and ameliorate harm, but can’t address the structural causes which enable abuse. Employment itself is exploitative, even if when it doesn’t involve people as toxic as presented in Douglas Is Cancelled. The damage caused by and to the characters is expertly acted by the serial’s small cast, helped by a precisely-crafted and perceptive script.

Mike Foster

What the papers say — and what they don’t (1978)

From the March 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many readers will be aware of a regular B.B.C. radio feature called What The Papers Say. It is a digest of the most important articles in the day’s press. For those of us who can’t afford/can’t stomach to read every daily newspaper it provides a useful summary of what they are saying. It has often seemed that a rather more enlightening feature would be What the Papers Don’t Say or, even better, Why the Papers Said What They Did. The idea implied by calling a newspaper The Daily Mirror is that the press works on a reflective basis, i.e. the publication in written form of the facts as they really happened. This is far from the case. In fact, the press works on the principle of selecting what events are suitable for public consumption, deciding how the ‘story’ is to be told in accordance with ‘editorial policy’ (which is a journalistic term for political bias) and making sure that the ‘facts’ are not likely to contradict illusions created by the advertisements. The role of the press is more to do with implanting views than spreading news. Indeed, when a news event interferes with the image that the editor wants perpetuated, then it must either be not referred to or else distorted, in such a way so as to back up rather than contradict the political line of the newspaper.

Editorial Selectivity

Workers in Britain are brought up to believe that we live in a free country. We are told that Britain is democratic because there is a ‘free press’. It is an illusion to believe that the press in a capitalist society can be anything but the propaganda tool of the minority class whose social survival depends on the political ignorance of the masses. That is not to say that newspapers are part of some kind of capitalist conspiracy to brainwash the working class. An important distinction must be made between conscious political indoctrination and more subtle editorial selectivity. Indoctrination requires a captive audience, i.e. one which has only one source of news which is controlled totally by the State. The press in countries where capitalism takes a more liberal form of work on the basis of giving support to the status quo, but criticising the leaders of capitalism on matters not likely to lead to fundamental social change. A clear comparison between the two methods of capitalist propaganda can be seen by looking at the press in Russia and in this country.

Undemocratic

Russia, despite its claim to be socialist, is one of the most brutal and undemocratic capitalist regimes in existence. The press has been developed by the ruling Communist Party as an elaborate and complex apparatus designed to shape the thinking of the Soviet working class. Krushchev, in 1956, said to a gathering of writers and artists

The press is our chief ideological weapon. It is called upon to rout the enemies of the working class, the enemies of the toilers (sic). Just as an army cannot fight without weapons, so the Party cannot successfully carry on its ideological work without such a sharp and militant weapon as the press. (Printed in Kommunist, no. 12, August 1957)

To ensure that the Soviet media carry out their task of indoctrination there exists a Department of Propaganda and Agitation, a Ministry of Culture, a Ministry of the Radio-Technical industry as well as a Press Commission. There are over 7,000 Soviet newspapers reaching over 100 million readers. All newspapers are controlled centrally—editorials are written by Communist Party officials and circulated for publication. All newspaper editors are appointed by the State and are subject to strict contiol from Moscow: each Soviet periodical must have the mark of authorisation from Glavslit, the government censorship agency.

Despite such attempts by the Soviet dictatorship to control the media, they have learnt that running a system of indoctrination presents problems:

there are serious chinks in the Soviet propaganda armour. The agitators, for example, are caught between the direct pressures and hostilities of the population from below, and the constant pressure of the Party from above demanding that they exhort and goad on the population to still greater efforts and sacrifice. As a result thousands each year abandon their work as agitators. Editors must constantly be reprimanded for ideological ‘deviations’ in their newspapers . . . And the regime is in many respects a prisoner of its own system. For, insofar as it wishes to judge the state of popular thinking, it must rely either on the secret police or on the reports of the agitators and the newspaper editors. (Developments in Soviet Mass Communications in Social Change in Soviet Russia, A. Inkeles, 1968)

The evolution of the British press has been along different lines because of the historical circumstances in which it emerged. It was created by the rising British capitalist class in the Eighteenth Century as a weapon in their struggle against the feudal State. The battle to publish parliamentary debates, to criticise the government and even to criticise the King, in the case of John Wilkes, was won by the capitalist class. Freedom to criticise is a tradition of the press which grew out of the division within the ruling class. Until the last two decades of the Nineteenth Century the press in Britain was independently owned, often by family concerns relying primarily on classified advertisements and regular sales. It was not possible for any one section of the ruling class to control the press as no one section owned it. It was the so-called Northcliffe revolution of the 1880’s which transformed the role of the press, for it was then that the previously independently owned newspapers were taken over by corporate press houses which were dependent on expensive, block display advertising. From then on newspapers became the province of large, capital intensive corporations, such as Beaverbrook, which endeavoured to direct editorial policy towards winning support for their class interest. The press in Britain is, therefore, free in that peculiar sense that freedom exists under capitalism: they are free to lie, distort, slander, publish trivia and exclude serious issues. Nevertheless, there does exist the freedom to publish alternative ideas, which is vital to the growth of the Socialist Party.

But the press under capitalism is not free in the Socialist sense, for to be so anyone would have access to the control of newspapers instead of a small group of businessmen or bureaucrats more committed to self-preservation than to providing useful information. How, then, can the aim of a free press be realised? One argument is that those who produce newspapers — editors, journalists, office staff, printers — should democratically participate in running them. The attempted ‘workers control’ of the Scottish Daily Express showed the unpractically of such reform within a society which places advertising revenue above democratic principles. Another argument, often advocated by the “Left”, is for the nationalisation of the print industry. As can be seen from the Russian example, State control of the means of communication, while politically benefiting those parties which are politically in agreement with the government of the day, can lead to discrimination against those seeking changes which are unwelcome to the State.

In fact, there is no way within capitalist society that the press can be made fully democratic. Capitalists will always provide newspapers with money for two reasons: to buy space to advertise their commodities to the workers who read the newspapers and to ensure the perpetration of capitalist ideology in a popular form — just as their great grandfathers supported the pulpit; they rely on huge sales to members of the working class. It is in the interest of all members of that class, whether they read The Times or The Sun to reject the lies and illusions of the capitalist press and support a journal which stands for their emancipation from the unfree society.

Steve Coleman

Voice From The Back: Lady Bountiful’s cast-offs (2001)

The Voice From The Back Column from the January 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lady Bountiful’s cast-offs

The working class are used to being insulted and patronised but the Labour government’s latest scheme to deal with the plight of the unemployed smacks of a “noblesse oblige” arrogance unsurpassed since Victorian times. “Female celebrities are queueing up to give their cast-off designer clothes to unemployed women to wear at job interviews. Potential employers are not too sure about the scheme in which they will be facing job applicants from Liverpool, Doncaster and London wearing Cherie Blair’s Paco Rabane trouser suit, Elizabeth Hurley’s scarlet Versace heels or a grey suit formerly worn by the Duchess of York . . . Tessa Jowell, the Employment Minister is backing the idea and has donated a jacket. Mo Mowlam will follow suit.” Times, 10 November.

Art s(m)ells

“Art today serves no socially worthwhile purpose. It’s an extravagant waste of money. Yes, people die from hunger and poverty every minute, and no work of art has ever done anything to save the world. Cloaca [his machine on exhibition in Antwerp’s Muhka Museum] if fed only our finest cuisine by people who can probably only afford a sandwich for lunch. The end product is both art and yet something we all produce ourselves every day. In a sense we’re all artists” visitors have to hold their noses and staff have gone on strike because of the foul smell, yet, according to the report in Scotland on Sunday, 29 October, . . . “the machine’s daily discharge of 200 grams is bottled, signed and sold for no less than £1000 a time.”

Capitalism is lethal

In this country, one in five girls aged between 13 and 25 has made a suicide attempt (a figure which echoes the findings of American research). More young British men—some 2,000 a year—now die by their own hand than by any other single cause except for car accidents. You magazine, 19 November.

You have been warned

Greg Dyke, boss of the BBC, has recently appointed Jeff Randall to be the BBC’s first business editor. According to Randall, he intends to be consulted on every programme dealing with business. So how did this self-confessed admirer of Rupert Murdoch and former City editor and associate editor of the Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times land this influential post? “In May he wrote an article about the BBC’s business coverage that attracted the attention of Greg Dyke. It included the assertion: ‘Running through the Corporation, from top to bottom, like the word Blackpool through a stick of rock, is a liberal agenda set by patronising, middle class, guilt-ridden do-gooders who dominate its corridors.” The article’s pay-off was just as likely to endear him to his new colleagues: ‘It’s about time he looked at the Corporation’s institutionalised bias against free enterprise wealth-creators and did something about it.” Times, 10 November.

Dam worrying

A report this week by the Chartered Insurance Institute on the impact of climate change in Britain is sure to cause alarm. Professor David Crichton of Middlesex University, who helped write the report, said yesterday: “Climate change will lead to an increased risk of dam failure. About half the 2,500 large dams have earth embankments, most of them constructed before heavy soil compaction equipment was available.” He also said that he was concerned at the secrecy surrounding the way that they were maintained. The report will say: “The thoroughness of inspection depends almost entirely on how much the dam owner is prepared to pay and the results are never published, not even to local authority emergency planning offices or the emergency services.”

Bullying, USA

One in six people has experienced some form of workplace bullying by a co-worker or superior, according to the Campaign Against Workplace Bullying, which started a two-day conference yesterday at Suffolk University Law School to bring to light the problem and look for a way to help . . . [R]eports of bullying are on the rise, in part due to the rising awareness of the problem and the profit demands of the new economy. “More of us work in investment-driven workplaces, and many see that as a license to be cruel to employees and do so with impunity,” Gary Namie explained. “What’s more, usually they’re promoted for it.” Berkshire Eagle, 28 October.

Hopping mad

A hopping landmine that can leap up to 10m into the air and fill gaps left by minefield clearance operations is being developed by the American military. With a powerful piston-driven foot, ultrasonic sensors and radios, the self-righting mines will be able to detect the distance to neighbouring mines and sense when some are missing. The remaining mines will then be able to hop around to once more form a regular pattern covering the original minefield area. military chiefs have asked that this be accomplished within ten seconds. Western Australian, 30 September.

Notes by the Way: Mutiny in King Street (1954)

The Notes by the Way Column from the December 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mutiny in King Street

It has happened, and all who said it could not are confounded. After more than 30 years of fawning and grovelling the British Communists have rebelled. Through the columns of the Daily Worker they have dared to criticise the action of a representative of the Moscow hierarchy. It happened in the Daily Worker, on Wednesday, 10 November, 1954, when their correspondent, reporting the match at Wembley between the Arsenal and the Russian Spartaks, held that the Russian referee Mr. Nikolai Latyshef, gave a wrong decision. True, this is not the first time that the Communists and the Daily Worker have found themselves “out of line,” but on past occasions—as for example the support of the war against Nazi Germany in 1939—it has been inadvertent, a momentary failure to reverse fast enough. But this time there was no withdrawal, no abject confession and apology, and the next day the correspondent coldly brazenly repeated his statement:—“From where I saw it, Mr. Latyshef was wrong.”

The disputed decision caused uproar at the match and will, as the Daily Worker wrote, “be a talking point for many months to come.” Now that international athletic contests are no longer games but State occasions for enhancing stupid national prestige the incident will no doubt add its little quota to national hatreds Apart from that the moral appears to be that there is no fury equal to that of football fans whose team has been defeated by a better team.

Labour’s Mock Indignation over Commercial T.V.

The Labour Party Opposition have been making the most of their opportunity of attacking the Government’s decision to set up a commercial television system in rivalry to the B.B.C. In the House and in the Press they stormed about this sacrifice of “national” to private interests. The Labour-supporting Daily Mirror for days on end had hysterical front-page denunciations of what they said was a sell-out to Tory controlled money making interests. The Labour Party "decided to table a motion of censure on the Government for their refusal to introduce legislation to prevent political bias in the choice of groups given commercial T.V. ‘plum’ contracts.” (Daily Mirror, 4/11/54).

And earlier Mr. Ness Edwards, Labour M.P., who had been Postmaster General in the Labour Government and therefore nominally responsible for the B.B.C., raged against the Tory decision on the ground that, “under the false plea of ‘let the people decide,' this Government is allowing Big Business to decide what the people shall be allowed to see.” (Forward, 24/7/54).

All of which is of course sanctimonious humbug. To start with what difference does it make from the standpoint of freedom from bias which group of financial and entertainment interests get contracts from the new Television Authority? It is stated by the Authority that any group contemplating applying must have financial resources running into three or four million pounds, so that only very wealthy groups of investors could be considered anyway, and such groups, whatever political leanings they have or if they have none at all, are and must be concerned with making a large profit out of it.

To which, the stock Labour Party reply is that the nationalised B.B.C. is, or can be, “above party” and concerned genuinely with giving expression to all views, including those of unpopular minorities. It is a plausible story, which, however, is shattered by the fact that for 30 years, irrespective of the Government in power, the B.B.C. would never agree to let the Socialist case of the S.P.G.B. be heard on the air. We don’t expect to fare any better from a commercially controlled organisation but at least we can’t fare any worse.

The Health Service versus Poverty

Like all reformists the men who conceived the idea of a National Health Service that was to be a radical cure for a social evil failed to reckon with the capitalist environment in which it was to operate. It required actual experience to teach some of them what Socialists told them beforehand. A chilling exposure is provided by “Hospital and Community,” by Professor Thomas Ferguson and Dr. A. N McPhail, published for the Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust by the Oxford University Press and reviewed in The Lancet (12 June, 1954). The authors write in their preface:—

"It seems clear that further breakdown is sometimes precipitated by the transition—often sudden and dramatic— from the protective care of the modern medical ward to spartan conditions outside. Hospital treatment is usually only an episode in the general care of the patient: and the health services cannot stand in isolation from other social services. There is a 'limit to what Medicine can do to preserve fitness in the face of bad conditions of living and working."

The Lancet continues as follows:—

“Their study was made between 1950 and 1953. Of the 705 patients originally seen in hospital, 548 were seen three months later in their own homes and 474 were seen two years after leaving hospital. By that time, 171 of the original group had died, and the remaining 60 were untraceable. Of the 474 seen after two years, 265 were working at their old jobs, though 30 were judged to need lighter work and 18 were unfit for work under ordinary conditions. Of 91 who had found new jobs, 3 were thought to be unfit for work, and 33 could have done their former jobs. Some 50 had done very little work, and 106 had done no work at all, since leaving hospital. Nearly a fifth of those in work at the end of two years were in jobs which were unsuitable, having regard to the demands of the job and the conditions of the men; and the proportion doing such unsuitable jobs was highest among those between the ages of 45 and 65, and among unskilled rather than skilled labourers. After two years, only 111 of these 474 men could be regarded as cured, though a further 193 had maintained the improvement achieved in hospital; 106 had not improved, and their health was unsatisfactory; 64 were worse than when they left hospital and some were going downhill. Moreover, 129 had been readmitted to hospital on more than one occasion during the two years. These figures gain life from the case-histories which FERGUSON and MACPHAIL quote. They write of gross overcrowding; of walls "soaking and falling down" or “running with water"; of parents and children sleeping in box-beds sunk in these soaking walls; of men with failing hearts housed at the top of tenements; of unskilled labourers with heart and lung conditions returning to their jobs as navvies; of stokers with angina shovelling coal; of men finding work within their compass, but being ordered to take on heavy extras by officious charge-hands: in short they describe unending waste—waste of life and health, waste of hospital resources. These authors are admittedly writing of an overcrowded industrial area where housing is notoriously shocking, and the paper by Professor LANE and his colleagues which we publish on p. 1229 shows that in Salford at least the picture of reablement and resettlement is far more cheerful. Nevertheless FERGUSON and MACPHAIL are able to quote surveys from other regions where the findings have been similar."

Among the remedies advocated by the authors is the need for better housing: “ . . . in many cases rehousing offers the only hope of improvement”

The Lancet says:—“The living conditions described by these authors were destroying the health not only of the patients who were studied, but of their wives and children.”

We can agree with the Lancet's conclusion that “this impressive study shows once more how our very intentness on cure can take our minds off prevention,” but what the authors and the reviewer fail to realise is that what they describe are aspects of the poverty problem, and the only cure for that is the “prevention” of capitalism by abolishing it.

Religion, Handmaiden of Russian Capitalism

Capitalism in Britain, France and many other countries has had to face the problem of preserving religion and the church, because they are a useful aid to the ruling class, and of curbing their power when they threaten to become a “State within a State.” Russia has followed a similar course and a new Government statement shows the dual attitude of simultaneously encouraging anti-religious propaganda while protecting the Church against too-zealous opponents who take literally the old Leninite denunciations of religion. The following is from the Daily Worker (12/11/54), in which their Moscow correspondent summarises a statement issued by the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party.

“Some Party officials and newspapers had gone too far in the campaign against religion by being offensive to the priesthood and churchgoers.

“These cases occurred when believers quite unjustifiably were considered politically. unreliable. Often anti-religious propaganda sunk to the level or trivial anecdotes.

“The central committee gave stern notice that it would in no circumstances countenance activities affronting clergy or believers.

“It was no good disregarding the fact that among loyal, active citizens there were some who held religious views. The Party's attitude toward such people should be tactful and considerate.

"It was foolish and harmful to have any suspicion about a Soviet citizen for his religious convictions.

"In Socialist lands, the Church played a different role than in capitalist countries where they supported the ruling classes, though this did not prevent some members of the clergy from sharing the viewpoint of the working class, the statement said.

“In the Soviet Union at present the clergy were generally loyal toward Soviet power—therefore, the battle should be only on ideological grounds.

“Mr. Khrushchev emphasised that correction of mistakes must not lead to the lessening of anti-religious propaganda “which is an integral part of the upbringing of the working masses.” He said the Party could not be impartial and neutral toward religion.”

This Overtime Business

The action of the dock strikers who fought to have overtime made voluntary instead of compulsory and whose leaders claimed a “complete victory” while telling them to go back and “do all the overtime you can” has drawn attention again to one of the lamentable developments of recent years, the widespread practice of overtime being a normal thing in industry. In past years trade unions fought continually to reduce hours of work with the intention of having more leisure, but since 1938 though standard hours have been generally reduced from 48 or 47 to 44 or less the average hours of work of adult men are actually slightly above the pre-war level, 47.7 hours in 1938 and 48.3 in April of this year. This is one of the reasons why, although wage-rates for the standard week have increased on average about the same as the cost of living, average earnings have risen considerably more; the hours worked in excess of the standard week of 44 hours are reckoned as overtime and paid at usual overtime rates.

A Times correspondent (26/10/54) wrote:—

“More overtime is being worked in Britain today than ever before in peacetime. In many industries employers rely on regular overtime to fulfil their commitments and workers rely on regular overtime to maintain their standard of living.” 

This development has come about with the tacit or open approval of many trade unions and was encouraged by the Labour Government as it is by the Government now in office, just as both Governments have sought to increase piece-work, another feature of capitalism that was once opposed by active trade unionists.

The irony of the situation is that whereas in the 19th century it was the employers and their newspapers that resisted workers demands for shorter hours it is now left to that organ of capitalism, The Times, to suggest (in an editorial 5/11/54) that “the excessive extension of systematic overtime is having a number of undesirable results,” and to ask for inquiry into the possibility of reducing it.

Edgar Hardcastle

Mike Wayne's Marxism and Media Studies (2003)

Book Review from the December 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marxism and Media Studies. By Mike Wayne. Pluto Press.

The big media are owned by big companies, so naturally enough they present a pro-capitalist view of the world. You might think there wasn’t much more to say about the media, but in this book Mike Wayne says quite a bit more. Be warned, though, that it is intended as a university textbook, and this is presumably what makes it so full of jargon (reification, ideologeme, for instance). The second half, in particular, is strong on jargon but remarkably weak on insight.

Wayne begins by wrestling with the question of whether “cultural workers” (writers, actors, etc.) are working class or not. He accepts that they produce commodities that realise surplus value, and notes that scriptwriters on Coronation Street had to increase their productivity when the soap changed to three episodes a week (as the actors had to as well). He has a point that actors and musicians who are established faces/voices cannot be simply replaced with other wage workers, but draws from this the odd conclusion that “intellectuals” are somehow located between capital and labour. The fact is that, leaving aside a small number of very highly-paid performers, those who work in the media are dependent on selling their ability to work and so count as wage workers. Even film directors can get sacked if they step out of line.

So-called public service broadcasting (the BBC, for instance) is often seen as motivated by considerations other than profit. But Wayne remarks on the political context in which such organisations were set up: the 1920s and 30s were a time of increased state intervention in the economy, and “public” broadcasting arose in line with such developments, designed to serve the overall interests of the capitalist class. The overtly commercial media, of course, are run on straightforward capitalist lines. The amount of advertising on TV has increased, to a permitted average of eight minutes per hour (next time you watch ER, check how much advertising the show’s 60 minutes contains).

Media conglomerates such as Disney are almost a law unto themselves, and their companies repeatedly plug films made by other Disney subsidiaries. Disney’s boss Michael Eisner and the ubiquitous Rupert Murdoch lobbied for China to be allowed into the World Trade Organisation, as both have their eyes on the potentially enormous Chinese market. But many governments regard their country’s media as a special case, not to be open to overseas takeovers and so needing “protection”. US capitalists, in particular, have been pressing for the WTO to enforce “liberalisation” of European media, so that they can be sold to the highest bidder. For instance, when the Kirch media group in Germany collapsed in 2002, Murdoch was prevented from acquiring a controlling interest.

Wayne presents an analysis of Big Brother in terms of the base-superstructure model. But we’ll refrain from quoting any of the more pretentious formulations in this, on the grounds that it would be too easy a target.

Paul Bennett