The Press - Problem Rather Than Solution

Those who know their Heidegger will be aware of the concept of Gerede or 'idle chatter', the fallen and inauthentic mode of speech used in every day life. In fact we cannot do without it. It is essential to social cohesion which is an inauthentic necessity as far as the individual is concerned but has its own authenticity as one element amongst many in constructing a framework of relations within which individuality can express itself. To speak of 'Gerede' is not to take a moral or value standard against it but simply to note that it is fallen and inauthentic in respect to 'Dasein' - the human being whose mind cannot be known by other minds and who cannot know other minds and (to express the grim aspect of Heideggerian philosophy) must face their own death alone. This aloneness of death applies to the late Queen Elizabeth II as much as to the man who dies more obviously alone in a hospice in some small town without relatives or friends. Social Gerede includes our commentary on the deaths of others and their doings. 

What does all this have to do with the media? Only that our responses to events as social chatter have always had to deal with a 'higher level' of inauthenticity and fallen-ness which is the chittter-chatter of journalists and intellectuals as 'public discourse' where the cohesion being encouraged is not that of the ordinary human relations designed to help us get things done in the world and survive but the cohesion of a ruling caste that is simultaneously determined on its own hegemony and terrified of losing control of the chatter in case loss collapses that hegemony. The recent Coronation of King Charles II was an object lesson in these matters - private reactions bonding families and communities at the lowest level in a dialectic with a myth in which ancient mystery had been replaced with the magic of 'glamour' and a higher level traditional discourse that bonded society through the marriage of Church and State and the subordination of the political to the socially cohesive irrational.

The mediation between these worlds is (as the word implies) the media but how many of us were thoroughly irritated by the inane chatter from journalists that we heard before, during and after the Coronation - and that we hear before, during and after every major event, inbetween the music we hear on radio and programmed as nothing more than inane chatter on broadcast channels and in newspaper columns. This mental wall paper, democratised through social media (which mainstream journalists use but deeply resent as rival to their hegemonic control of information flows and opinion), is not only inane but serves a dysfunction in simultaneously communicating socially cohesive messaging from above while anarchically destabilising society in order to provide more fuel for the chatter. 

As fossil fuels are said to pollute and heat up our planet so the sheer scale of inane chatter pollutes and heats up our society - and yet, despite the fact that we are told we must restrict ourselves in the use of carbon, there is no attempt to restrain or manage this inane chatter which might be likened to a memetic Ponzi Scheme with the worst offenders now demanding social restrictions on potential worse offenders to come to protect their own collapsing monopoly on idiocy. The mainstream media, in short, and the politicians, in their attacks on the platforms are not interested in turning inane chatter into something educational, analytical, factual and thoughtful but only in preserving their own right to offer what they see as a vaguely more rational form of inanity rather than give that right of inanity to all of us.

Some months ago, journalists got terribly excited about some of their type being picked up by the police at a highly disruptive eco-demonstration. Journalists like to stoke outrage in their readers but are never so outraged as when one of their own gets into trouble. I am not interested here in the specific case. I don't know the facts of an essentially trivial incident any more than I care about George Galloway's or Matt Hancock's appearances on popular TV shows. The probability is that, under pressure, the police made a mistake which they then had to unwind, that the 'Press' were intrusive on an operation in which perhaps lives and certainly individual safety were at stake and that there was no intention whatsoever by the 'State' to limit the freedom of the Press on that day and in that place. 

More concerning should be that a pub which represented the livelihood of a family has had to close down because a couple of holier-than-thou corporations refused to supply them with key product thanks to publicity about a stupid police raid on their collection of golliwogs. The politicians caused the police to blunder, the media created hysteria and the 'corporate liberals' stepped in to destroy a small business. That is the 'regime' in a nutshell - confused authority, inept politicians, narcissistic journalists and complicit Uriah Heep-like capitalists creating a vortex of destruction for the 'little man'. 

We might also cite the idiocy around the Oath of Allegiance to the Coronation. It always was voluntary. It was a relatively minor addition to the Service put forward in good faith by Church and Crown almost certainly at the behest of the former (which has been busy turning the event into a soft power assertion of its own authority). An oath is serious to some (mostly to the military). Trivial to others (mostly the public). It was a nice idea for traditionalists without negative implications for sceptics. If you can't say it, don't take up your invitation to Westminster Abbey and stay silent at home. The media turned something voluntary, restricted in force to a few hundred people in an Abbey and private for most people into a divisive 'story', adding yet another brick of negativity into our dying culture.

In the eco-case, the poor Plods were trying to find a way to restore the freedom to travel safely of significant numbers of people while not endangering the life of any narcissist who decided to protest at their expense. The arrests of protesters before the Coronation are more troubling perhaps except that, on further thought, this tiny minority of activists were not actually putting forward arguments for republicanism and creating a political organisation capable of winning elections to impose it in accordance with the will of the people but simply ruining the day for a lot of other people and risking violence and disorder during a difficult high security operation. After all, there are some worse people even than activists and journalists out there.

 

Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps the police are on the verge of imposing monarchical tyranny (rather than rank stupidity) and perhaps the Press are the only effective barrier between ourselves and authoritarian rule but I think not. England is England, marked out more by blunders than malice. The Press have no interest but advertising revenue, jobs for journalists, telling tales (rather than the mysterious 'truth') and allowing their posher end to rant at their owners' expense. The frustration for the public was that the eco-protests caused real distress and misery for many individuals and that they existed in good part because of a collusive relationship between protesters and the media, creating a vicious cycle in which more outrageous protests get more publicity which encourages more protests. Instead of a cycle of socially cohesive idle chatter with space for criticism, a transmission belt from below as well as from above in stabilising society and reforming it, we have cycles of inane chatter which destroy social cohesion and block off intelligent analytical criticism of society when and wherever it fails. There is a sound criticism of monarchy in the UK and there are dipshit protesters at the margins and the latter always destroy the ability of the former to be heard.

Here is another example. If you believed the media, the Passport Office is in total disarray and the civil service is falling apart. This is the accepted version doled out to people with no immediate connection to the service based on the complaints of the few in a genuinely complex system. Yet, in our household, two passport applications were handled effectively within three weeks and my request for some facts on pension arrangements was delivered in writing within the promised time-scale. Freedom increasingly seems to be defined by the 'right' of activists to engage in performative street 'art' at the expense of others and by the 'right' of the media to tell 'stories' where stories are as likely to mean 'lies' as the word is often used in popular parlance as not. The half-baked accounts of the Ukraine War are simply the relation of one-sided dossiers issued by psychological operations specialists. NGOs produce 'papers' designed to manipulate. Journalists lap up PR material. We live in a miasma of story-telling.

 

This 'freedom' to engage in a concatenation of half-truths helps to enable a presumed right to interfere in other peoples' lives, insult their values beyond fair reason (of which Pussy Riot behaving badly in an Russian Orthodox Church must be exemplar) and place people at risk. All on the dubious basis that (for example) direct extreme action (say) got the women the vote as opposed to reliance on civil disobedience, peaceful protest and political action ... you know, the hard way but the sure way. African-American strategies to win civil rights are models of their kind in which major social change took place because a mass of people (like women) needed it and not because a few crusties or obsessives wanted it. In fact, extreme direct action put back the suffragette movement whose final victory was inevitable on the strength of the social forces involved.

 

We have seen a similar destructive relationship between terrorism and the media. Terrorists can be assured of sometimes hysterical coverage creating fear and anxiety that then expresses itself in over-reaction by the authorities who then restrict the civil liberties of everyone except the media who are at the root of creating the initial crisis of anxiety in the first place. Unlike most people, I am not hysterical about terrorism. Exhausted doctors and truck drivers are more of a threat to me and my family than loons with a bomb. But the Islamist errorist wave of the 1990s and 2000s was never adequately analysed in the media as a) the fruit of inept foreign policy, b) a marginal threat to the vast majority of the population for the vast majority of the time, c) an opportunity to whip up hysteria by special interests to ensure budgetary allocations and d) a greater opportunity for ambitious technocrats to get their noses in the trough. The media never really exposed a) or made b) clear and were wholly complicit in the pursuing the ambitions of those concerned with c) and d).

 

It seems that terrorism was also a terribly convenient excuse for the authorities to impose excessive surveillance and social controls and to build huge industrial-security complexes creating jobs for the pals. The media have been as important in creating a less pleasant and authoritarian society as they have been in stoking up the war-mongering of the neo-cons and the absurd foreign policies of a bunch of NATO incompetents. Radically, I would go so far as to say that the role of the media is also to ensure that we forget the right of violent resistance where there is a radical imbalance of power and where power resides in an authority that is not accountable to its subjects. Let me explain the issue here which is that any regime must work or be subject to the Mandate of Heaven and fall. Western liberal democracy today and its accountability is a Potemkin Village, We have reached the tragic point where only the media may be gluing the paper together at the same time as it is playing with matches around it. 

 

The media have taken on the role of making power accountable on paper but they do nothing of the kind in actuality. Indeed, the media is part of Power. Its interest tends to be merely in maintaining politics as a soap opera and getting political scalps in an eternal game of political musical chairs. National liberation remains a worthy struggle as does the overthrow of tyrannies from within (without foreign interference) or foreign occupation but, honestly, Britain today is, if anything, at the other end of the tyrannical spectrum, not a tyranny but an unstable mess. What we need now is to face this fact and start to reform how we do things within our ancient traditions where they do not get in the way. It is the media that are getting in the way.

 

Britain is a failing State led by bunglers but with the opportunity for us all (even if inadequately taken) to overthrow the bunglers through effective political organisation and persuade the slightly less stupid bunglers through argument and peaceful protest. Of course, the fact that we invariably replace one set of bunglers with another is not the point ... being a democracy, we could theoretically remove all bunglers if we were not so lazy, distracted and poorly educated even if we did not do so. We willnot do so because we are lazy, distracted and poorly educated and that's just how it goes. But we could still have a more effective, more intelligent and more capable elite whose first allegiance was, at least in principle, to the People rather than to its own class or to the liberal internationalist and neoliberal ideologies that got us into the mess we are in in the first place.

 

A strong State serving a strong People would place social cohesion alongside justifiable analytical criticism (not emotional performance art) at a premium. The media has become complicit in our collective weakness and so complicit in the dodgy panicked attempts of the authorities to plug holes in the dam holding back anarchy instead of building new and stronger dams. Our freedoms are in danger because of the media more than we will accept. As we say, the issue must be whether our ruling caste has the Mandate of Heaven or not. If it does, it should be accepted, If it does not, it should be overthrown. We are at the point, thanks to weak politicians, narcissistic activists and the media, where what should be preserved is moving into territory where overthrow becomes not merely a possibility but may become a duty one day. We are not there yet but the almost inevitable failure of the next Government and world conditions may bring us close to the precipice ... pushed constantly in that direction by an irresponsible media!

Of course, this problem of the media as hysterical licence in the face of a weak State holding together a collapsing society is probably not fully resolvable in a free society and freedom must remain a core value in our society. But freedom always collapses when society collapses. Perhaps the chaos of social media will do the job for us. The benefits of a free and open media usually and generally outweigh the risks created by such a media and the benefits of freedom of speech, responsible protest and free political organisation are unarguable but we should be under no illusions about what is going on here. The mainstream media have become a socially corrosive and destructive element in society (far more than the claimed negative effects of social media) about which nothing can be done under the current regime just as, ultimately, a weak State can do little effective to deal with social corrosion - whether poverty, illegal migration, administrative incapacity, lack of resources, terrorism (when it is determined enough), organised crime or destructive protest. 

 

Why? Because certain liberal interest groups ensure that it will not even discuss appropriate and proportionate action in legislatures. (The appalling quality of our political class is another issue for another time). We are slipping into a vortex of social collapse as a result. The media represent an important trigger for that collapse because it self-censors any radical voice with the ability to deal with the issues head-on. New ideas are systematically silenced as inconvenient or uncomfortable. The media are no longer (to the extent that they ever did) acting as responsible reporters of fact and analysis but, instead, only as hungry creators of narratives designed to excite and trigger strong emotions in order to attract eyeballs. We are now all supposed to emote and judge complex political and international issues on the basis of individual 'stories' which appeal to our 'humanity' but apparently not to our reasoning capacity. As a result, we get fables, fairy stories at worst and the 'profession' (actually a 'trade') is filled with desperate narcissists looking at the main chance because their employment is precarious and their moral sense is constructed from the rules of their profession and nothing higher.

So, let journalists fight the struggles for other journalists' 'freedoms' but I suspect many of the rest of us may think there are other more important battles to fight. We might be inclined to fight their own solipsistic wars about Freedom of the Press more vigorously if only the media itself was a little morally correct and a lot more active in supporting the real heroes who are prepared to strip away the hypocrisies and lies of official systems (such as Assange) rather than dedicate their limited resources to promoting extreme actions by non-state small-scale actors and attractive figureheads like 'Greta'. 

 

The flow of journalists in and out of political offices also creates embedded conflicts of interest. There was the depressingly easy acceptance in the Thatcher era of 'honours' by Editors. There is the noticeable and shameful degree to which the BBC bends itself to the narrative of the political establishment. There is the flow of funds into 'campaigning' journalism that clearly meets the agenda of Western fixers in the international relations world. There is the back-scratching and back-biting involved in leaks and sources designed to break this or that political spine or promote the career of this or that rising manipulative psychopath. There is the aura of terror for individuals and corporations if some small blunder is exploded into a 'story' that wrecks careers out of all proportion to the 'crime' and disrupts any ability to solve a problem and move on. We often have visions here of the media with firebrands and pitchforks setting out to vanquish a monster as if we lived in a Universal horror movie.

 

And yet so much is swept under the carpet or not investigated because it is too complicated or inconvenient for the short term mentalities and butterfly minds of the media. There is the length of time it took to investigate child abuse in the care home sector, the lack of interest in the details of the crisis in the NHS rather than its results, the lack of interest in the weird and wonderful financial wheezes that pop out now and then to threaten the stability of the capitalist system on which we all currently depend to survive, the easy acceptance of any bit of propagandistic crud issued out of Kiev, the lack of investigation into the relationship between inflation and dumb foreign policy decisions and the utter disinterest in the structures and meaning of organised crime and its relationship to illegal migration until thousands start bobbing in little boats over the Channel in a perverse parody of Dunkirk.

 

As to the lost heroes, Julian Assange is now in danger of being sent to rot in an American jail after many years of vicious persecution yet he exposed serious wrong-doing in a way rarely done by a mainstream media protective of its symbiotic relationship with 'sources'. He is flawed but has not deserved this level of cruel and vengeful persecution. Instead of fighting for Assange (after all, he is not 'one of them'), the mainstream media ignore him as inconvenient. They prefer to worry not about getting more honest truths out of a dodgy system but 'maintaining their sources' and backing manipulative campaigners trying to provide us with yet more half truths to pile on the punter like Pelion on Ossa. It is a system of complicity in which a game of mutual manipulation has long since departed from both truth and social responsibility.

Journalism seems to have become a closed world of mutual back-scratchers, fundamentally irresponsible, as careful of its 'rights' as any factory shop steward but also incapable of understanding how its publicity can trigger dangerous extreme actions in the political process, encourage extreme illegalities and disruption and yet fail to support serious exposures of wrong-doing in the political and social structures into which it is embedded and on which it is as dependent as on a Class A drug. Contemporary journalism has long been part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Something must be done ...