Say Anything Blog

By Graham Cunningham
This is about the BBC, but it also applies to our own MSM, in spades.

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Now you know that some brutal murders merit grief on a national scale whilst others deserve barely a passing mention. You know that jumping up and down at rock concerts will help to save the world from poverty. You know that man made global warming is threatening to destroy the planet and it’s all the fault of capitalism. Just like you know that capitalism was virtually brought down on the stroke of midnight in 2000 by something called the Millenium Bug. Older people know that the world was very nearly overwhelmed in the 1970’s by The Next Ice Age. You know that if you have ever stood next to someone smoking a cigarette it might one day kill you.  Best of all you know what the most important thing going on in the world at any one time is because it is the thing that headlines the news. Thus has the mass media deluged people’s consciousness with trashy certainties at huge cost to their freedom of spirit. Killing off The Age of Reason and replacing it with the Age of Feeling.

It is not even that the BBC and its like are deliberately trying to present a distorted perspective on current affairs or anything else. It is worse than that; the distortion is so embedded in media culture that it collectively fails to comprehend that there are other perspectives. The BBC and its hinterland of favoured contributors teems with champagne lefties, celebrity poseurs and assorted other have-your-cake-and-eat-it fellow travellers of the liberal establishment elite.

And it is a veritable honey pot for the not so big wide world of the arts and academia. The joke is that they all think of themselves as radicals and guardians of freedom. Funny business radicalism; the word suggests boldness, independent mindedness, freethinking. The reality is the opposite. It is a me- too mentality of fitting in with the prevailing ethos, often first absorbed during student days. I remember when I was at university in the 1970’s, one or two lonely guys in tweeds and sports jackets flitting furtively across the psychedelic bead strewn quadrangle clutching their briefcases. I remember thinking those guys are the real radicals here. The thoroughly predictable ‘radical’ offerings from the BBC in-crowd are invariably dripping with media establishment mythology and the depressing fact that the BBC is often hailed as a great bastion of intellectual independence merely demonstrates the overwhelming brainwashing power that the little box in the corner now has on our intellectual horizons.

The last half-century was so dominated by the spectre of the totalitarian state that no one foresaw what was really coming down the line. George Orwell partly saw the future that we now inhabit - but with one crucial difference.  In his nightmare 1984, a political elite controlled the television in the corner of the room and used it to brainwash the citizenry. Whereas in the real post 1984 nightmare, a pervasive mass media - a cancerous organism out of the control of anyone, even its own media elite - brainwashes everyone, politicians included. It is not that anyone is actively trying to brainwash you; it is more that a powerful tendency to group-think is the very nature of mass broadcasting.

And of course this has been going on irrespective of which political party has been supposedly in power. All the mainstream political parties are running scared of media power. A couple of years ago I listened to a very telling discussion on BBC radio. The panel were all media presenters of one sort or another. One of them - a well known ex-politician turned media figure - was asked whether he missed having his hands on the levers of power. He laughed and said something like Don’t be silly; we all know that we have far more power than any Member of Parliament. They all chuckled knowingly and then quickly changed the subject.

The media is the least accountable institution in our society by far. And yet, for many decades now this enormous power has gone unchallenged - almost unnoticed. They have schooled us in the ways of attacking everyone else - everyone but themselves. We have become schooled into the idea that the media does the challenging on our behalf. Surely the media is our defender against the power of politicians and big business etc; isn’t it?

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Until free thinking individuals - true liberals in other words - turn some of their intellectual fire power on to the mass media machine itself, Western society will continue on its current trajectory. After all, arguably, it was late 20th century media promotion of victim culture that - more than anything else - was the root cause of the global conflicts which it now so glibly and piously tut tuts at on our tv screens.

Read the whole thing.

This might just as well have been written about the US media.
The only place we can get both sides of the story is the “alternate media” - talk radio and the ‘net.