In
May a Welsh politician tabled an amendment to a Bill .The amendment
did not move forward. It would have ‘made it a criminal offence for
a politician to deliberately mislead the public.’
https://nation.cymru/news/ban-on-politicians-lying-law-shelved-despite-cross-party-support/
One
would have to be cynical to the nth degree to even think that during
this past few weeks has been politicians and would be politicians
would ever stoop to speaking/publishing anything which was not of the
utmost veracity. Politicians telling whopping fibs in their pursuit
of election and power? Really sir, do you takes us for fules? British
democracy is the best in the world and Britain’s leaders are the
most fervent in upholding Truth, justice and the Capitalist Way.
For the record, there is only one political party which has laid the unvarnished truth in front of the electors and that is The Socialist Party.
The
below is from the From the July 2000 issue of the Socialist
Standard July 2000. It’s titled The Lying Game.
Our
rulers have a long and inglorious tradition of lying to stay in
power. Our only defence against this is to understand the basis of
this lie machine.
Just
ask anyone, they’ll tell you. “Of course the press lie,”
they’ll say, and whip out the latest tabloid, and show you proof
incontrovertible that there are porky pies in the Currant
Bun
It’s so obvious that the media are liars that one paper—the Daily
Sport—can
trade off on its pastiche of the press, telling blatant and obvious
lies, wherein the pleasure for the reader lies precisely in spotting
that it’s all false.
It
is, though, precisely through reference to the blatancy and flippancy
of the so-called “yellow press” that the power of media
propaganda lies. That the tabloids’ allergy to accuracy is passed
off as playfulness in the face of the grim-faced puritanism of the
“serious” media and apparent attempts to impose any agenda on
them, means that the reputation for honesty and accuracy of the
broadsheet and broadcast media is maintained. Yet, it is precisely
through the “serious” media that many of the lies that sustain
the system are promulgated.
A
simple examination of the modern media suffices to demonstrate that
propaganda is the norm, not the exception. You just have to look at
who the media are to begin to understand that they have a material
interest in going out of their way to defend the current system. The
media is composed of capitalist businesses, selling their news,
dependent on the markets; and—more specifically—they are
dependent upon selling advertising (i.e. getting money from other
capitalists) in order to keep operating. A careful glance at, say,
the Guardian would demonstrate just how much page space is
given over to advertising in proportion to the space given over to
reports. Freedom of the press belongs to those who own the press, and
capitalists own the press, both individually through media firms and
collectively through advertising. The threat to withdraw advertising
income from firms that incur the displeasure of the capitalist class
means that the media firms have a direct interest in avoiding certain
controversies.
This
situation pertains, even in the supposedly non-commercial BBC, since
it exists in competition with the other news providers, and is
subject to similar funding threats as well as political pressure, the
ending of the licence fee, or the appointment of governors, for
example. The model for government intervention in the culture
industry is “the arm’s-length principle”, thus the BBC, and
various arts boards are given grants and are nominally independent,
but, they are capable of losing funding, or being otherwise pressured
if they get too much out of control. This “arm’s-length
principle” is in effect the way that the whole capitalist class
relates to the media, preserving the appearance of neutrality and
objectivity, whilst retaining ultimate control.
Researching
and gathering information requires lots of time, patience and
diligence, something which adds to a media firm’s overheads—thus
cutting into profits. The pressure to lower costs, to churn out copy
on time, means that media firms cannot waste much time independently
searching out and verifying information. Thus they are heavily
dependent upon publicists (like the ubiquitous Max Clifford) and
public relations officers of both the state and other firms to
provide them with newsworthy items. Capitalist institutions
collectively spend billions of pounds per year on public relations
and media management.
The
relationship to official sources can be seen in the build-up of the
Zimbabwe story, which began with news stories reporting comments by
Robin Cook and Peter Hain expressing their concerns about conditions
in Zimbabwe. These comments, highlighted, no doubt, by so-called
“spin doctors” meant these concerns became a top news item. In
contradistinction, the fact the Cook did not give the story of the
British government negotiating Foday Sanko into coalition with the
Sierra Leonean government last year, meant it did not make the news.
The same holds true of the collapse and invasion of the Democratic
Republic of Congo, and the bloodbath of the Eritrean-Ethiopian war:
without being placed on the official agenda by the powers-that-be
these stories have only been given footnote treatment in the British
media. Even the collapse of liberal-democracy from the military coup
in Pakistan has been consigned to acceptance.
Private
Eye (2 June), in uncovering a significant aspect of the Sierra
Leone story—that the Sierra Leonean army is equally as murderous as
the RUF—makes a significant observation: when the embarrassing
story came to light, the government reacted by “burying the story
by ensuring the non-availability of official spokesmen or ministers”.
Without official documentation, and without the opportunity for
“balance” the news media did not run with the story. The power of
the information providers to withhold both data and access provides a
key strategy in their control of the news media.
These
international stories help highlight the way in which the supposedly
“free” press follows the line of their masters. Are media in
France or Germany putting the Zimbabwe story as their lead news item?
Undoubtedly not, because Zimbabwe is not an area of their concern, so
they do not focus on it so intently. Hence while thousands die each
year in Laos from bombs dropped by America in the 1970s, while
thousands are slaughtered in Colombia—all without a single comment
in the media. The murder or beating up of a single farmer in Zimbabwe
is top of the six o’clock news, complete with tearful interviews
from the victims and their families. Along with that, every news
report of the killings in Zimbabwe lists the number of white-skinned
farmers first, and then relegates the murdered black-skinned MDC
supporters to a footnote on that figure.
This
highlights a classic manoeuvre on behalf of the media—the selection
of worthy and unworthy victims. Two months back, people facing
starvation in Ethiopia were presented as, again, the worthy
recipients of the West’s largesse and charitable concern, yet, when
people starve and die in Iraq—as a direct consequence of the policy
of the Western powers—their story does not make the news headlines.
Acting to help worthy victims, and punish “bad guys” serves our
masters’ ends in that it helps them justify and thus mobilise for
their interventions.
A
part of the response of the British media to the Zimbabwe story owes
itself to older forms of class rule, in that the editors of the
newspapers, or their staff, have friends or relations living in
Zimbabwe who went over to administer colonialism. These personal
relations give further impetus to placing the story up the news
agenda.
The
control of personnel is in fact another key factor in ensuring the
capitalist control of the news agenda. A glaring example of this in
practice was evidenced by the Mayday riots in London this year.
Almost inexplicably the BBC sent along Nicholas Witchell, their
“Royal” correspondent, to cover the events. Obviously, anyone who
gets the “accolade” of being a royal correspondent is
sufficiently tame to serve their masters’ interest with gusto, as
indeed, Witchell did in his reportage of the day. The very fact that
he was moved from his usual brief to cover what was, in effect, a
small protest (with only 5,000 or so people present in Westminster)
clearly indicates the propaganda intentions of his editors.
In
the days leading up to the protest the media ran scare story after
scare story, about the police being prepared for massive violence,
about the army being on standby (and these stories were spread by the
“respectable” media, such as Radio 4’s Today programme). It was
clear that the agenda was worked out in advance, and carefully
prepared.
The
behaviour of reporters at the scene gives other indications how the
media coverage was an a priori agenda. Camera folk were seen hunting
out any grungy-appearing anarchist who’d overdone the drink and was
being sick. The Channel Five reporter described largely peaceful
events as “simmering all day”, in flagrant contradiction to the
experience of the vast majority of people attending. Indeed, the
media as much as possible pushed the line that the police were merely
responding to the thuggery of the protesters; repeating time after
time that the riot suits only came out after McDonald’s was
trashed; whereas eye-witness reports from Trafalgar Square note that
police there were waiting in riot gear, and could not have got
changed after the vandalism began. It was clearly in our masters’
interests to maintain that the police response was a reluctant
intervention, and that the blame lay on the protesters.
The
disorganisation and the non-accountable actions of individuals in
trashing the shop and vandalising the statues represented a gift to
the media so they could ignore the point of the demonstration and
push home their masters’ line and scare people into accepting more
control. Spectacular dissent failed dramatically because the
protesters had no means of controlling the social and political
context into which the protest was placed by the propaganda system.
The
mandarins of the state and their commissars in the media occasionally
and inadvertently admit the importance of media structures. During
the Kosovan war, they were forced into openly having to bully John
Simpson for his reports from Serbia for falling out of step with the
official line, while every other reporter placidly accepted the daily
dole of information from Jamie Shea. Further, by attacking the
Serbian broadcasting service, and claiming it as a legitimate target
of war, the powers-that-be revealed their true and thorough
understanding about the role of propaganda. The event was not without
precedents, as NATO forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina seized a
Bosnian-Serb television transmitter (see Socialist Standard,
January 1997) because it was broadcasting “enemy” propaganda.
Our
rulers have a long and inglorious tradition of lying to stay in
power, and our only defence against this is to understand the basis
of this lie machine, and to work to expose their lies as often as
possible. They tell different lies in different circumstances, and
set different agendas according to the intended news audience they
anticipate. Our interest lies in exploiting the divisions between the
divergent interests of different groups of capitalists, and showing
the contradictions involved. Thus our best weapon against the lies of
our masters, is to understand that we the workers of the world have a
common interest, and to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, sharing
information between ourselves, deliberately and consciously working
for our liberation without borders.
Pik
Smeet