"The Sugar Pill" (1958)

Book Review from the August 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The Sugar Pill”—An Essay on Newspapers By T. S. Matthews Published by Victor Gollancz 

This serious, though lightly written, book is one of the most interesting that this writer has come across. The author, a retired American journalist, puts forward the thesis that the press—that is, the daily and weekly papers—are “not our daily bread, but our daily sugar pill.” By a character study of two newspapers, the Daily Mirror and the Manchester Guardian, which are considered to be representative of the whole range of the press, Mr. Mathews puts forward an argument that is more than convincing; not that we need convincing, we already knew.

He rounds off this 221 page book with a detailed examination of a day’s issue of the above newspapers which is extremely revealing.

There are not only two classes in society—capitalists and workers, but apparently two groups of newspapers, the quality press. The Times, Manchester Guardian and Daily Telegraph, and the popular press, the Express, Sketch, Mirror, etc. Not, of course, that these represent the conflicting classes, workers and capitalists, but rattier conflicting interests, that is, sectional ones, among the capitalists. This is true of the whole press in this country, with the exception of the Socialist Standard; from the Fascist paper Union on the so-called extreme right, to the Daily Worker on the so-called extreme left. They are all interested in perpetuating capitalism in one form or another. These two newspaper groups, like workers and capitalists, are in constant conflict, according to the author. “The real competition, in short, although it has not yet broken into open war, is between the popular press and the quality press. And the stake in that coming war will be survival. If the present trend continues—that is, if the more successful popular papers continue to capture more and more new readers—then the Popular Press will win, and eventually become what it already claims to be: the only press worth mentioning, the only press there is. It will first kill off ‘the more serious of the popular papers ’ and then turn its attention to the only competition remaining, the papers of the quality press. Perhaps it may be decided to let them live, as harmless traditional curiosities, like the Beefeaters at the Tower” (Page 170): All of which is quite illuminating, but is really all that one expects from this jungle world of capitalism, where dog eats dog, and the weakest always goes to the wall.

One thing that this writer finds most encouraging, although he has long surmised it, is that despite the seriousness with which all newspapers take themselves, apparently few of the millions of people who “read” newspapers in this country do more than glance at them. Front page, back page, comic strips, the body or bodies beautiful, and the odd eye-catching headline. The Mirror’s reading time is given as “six minutes a day.”

The Mirror, we are told, considers itself “a daily cocktail with fizz in it. Taken first thing in the morning (along with your dose of liver salts) at the start of another grey working day, it gives the reader a little spurt of liveliness—and makes him look forward to another cocktail tomorrow.” (Page 34.)

We are informed by the author that the press is part of the entertainment industry, and generally speaking, we would concur with that. For all that we should not underrate the power of the press; limited it may be, but along with other media it helps to mould and shape the opinions of the working class. We can be thankful that our journal is not of the shallow variety, and that our readers are not “skimmers.” We should not be complacent about this, though, for our readership is small, and the task of changing this society for one with free access, and full social responsibility, can only be brought about by a working class who have been weaned from their sugar pills on to a diet of Socialist literature.

Jon Keys.

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

Whitewash and be damned (1979)

From the July 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is no more certain a betrayer of the truth about the condition of the working class under capitalism than the political journalist. And nowhere is this more true than of those writing for the ‘quality’ newspapers: The Guardian, The Observer; the Daily and Sunday Telegraph.

This is not to suggest that journalists (or any others) who support the capitalist system should be denied a hearing. What is at issue is the exclusive nature of ‘editorial discretion’ and, consequently, the whole tone and content of the ‘serious’ newspapers — as contrasted with their loudly-trumpeted, clearly hypocritical posture as defenders of free speech.

The ‘heavies’, far from being the instruments of unfettered free speech their proprietors and editors would have us believe, are in no way different in their main aims and purposes from their bedfellows, the tabloids — blowzy tarts though they are. As with those publications, they must produce a profit; promote as assiduously as they can the political and economic interests of their owners; and fight off their increasingly carnivorous competitors. And to help readers swallow their capitalistic medicine, they must ensure that is is well sweetened. Hence the liberal supply of advertisements and features tailored to their ‘up-market’ requirements. (To go through The Observer's colour supplement is — for this ‘down-market’ contributor at least — a bit like window-shopping around Harrod’s with empty pockets on a wet Sunday afternoon.)

Long-standing familiarity with some of the ‘heavies’ has confirmed an unshakeable conviction that, considered as an exercise in democratic open-handedness, their political and economic ingredient constitutes a pitiful sham. It is the inevitable result of editorial policies as prohibitive as anything offered us by that other tightly controlled and highly effective filter of news and views, the BBC.

MERCENARY ART

To take just one well-known political columnist (who can serve as a typical example of all practitioners of that mercenary art): Peter Jenkins, of The Guardian. What he consistently offers us, however elaborately, is a hollow apology for all the crass inefficiencies of an outdated and corrupt system in decline, coupled with an ill-concealed attack on millions of ordinary wage-earners who are struggling to maintain a falling standard of living. In short, Jenkins’ efforts over the years have proved to be no more than a dismal and manifestly bankrupt attempt to convince us that the symptoms of capitalism can be cured while ignoring the disease the capitalist system itself.

Then we have capitalist politics as expressed through editorials. An amusing example was provided by The Observer during the recent general election campaign. Condescending to present us all with a breakdown on any and every issue relating to the struggle of British capitalism to survive its own inadequacies, The Observer had earlier pretended to coyness as to what it intended to exhort us to do at the polling booths. (We were expected, no doubt, to hold our breaths.) As if it made a scrap of difference to the working class what The Observer thought; or, come to that, which of capitalism's would-be executives formed the next government. As the election has once again demonstrated, capitalist politics has reduced itself to the level of a Whitehall farce in which the participants share the same bed.

VOYEURISTIC INCLINATIONS

Should you - knowing your place - consider yourself a member of the self-styled middle classes (you are a grocer’s daughter, perhaps), you will probably prefer to slum it with Peregrine Worsthorne and the Daily Telegraph. That organ’s correspondence columns can read like a page out of Mary Whitehouse’s diary. And should you feel like indulging your more voyeuristic inclinations, then its super gossip columnist, who displays his shoddy merchandise over the pseudonym of Peterborough, is very definitely your man. Never a one to deny himself an opportunity for sycophantic name-dropping or sly innuendo, this urban scribe will happily conduct you around the world of the well-heeled: the current ‘in’ people, the power-holders and seekers, Belgravian socialites, senior churchmen, royal personages, and other parasites having no visible means of support. (It is instructive to note how few of Peterborough’s subjects are without that instantly recognisable imprimatur of the capitalists and their hangers-on: the ability to live high-off-the-hog without the need to resort to so sordid and time-wasting an activity as work.)

From the foregoing it may correctly be deduced that we cast a jaundiced eye over the ‘serious’ press. This is born of many years of critical observation, years during which ‘responsible’ journalists have consistently demonstrated, through wordy outpourings, their servile conformity to the requirements of their owners and the capitalist system in which they operate. And all this in the name of democracy and free speech.

Of course, such dogged loyalty must not be allowed to go unrewarded. This can be achieved in a variety of ways. One of them springs immediately to mind. By the time this article appears in print the recent general election campaign will have become history. Capitalism’s executive committee will have settled into its pile carpets and its chauffered limousines — all ready to dispense the inevitable patronage in one form or another to its more effective and obliging friends. We may be confident that among the earliest recipients will figure not a few of the most diligent of them all: those drawn from the upper echelons of Fleet Street.

Richard Cooper