Distant Voices (10 page)

Czechoslovakia is a case in point. In 1977 I interviewed many of the Charter 77 people shortly after their organisation was forced underground. I was much moved by their political and intellectual courage in seeking democratic forms of their own. They were adamant in rejecting, as one of them put it, ‘the way of Washington, Germany, London'.

They knew that, just as socialism had been subverted in their own country, so democracy had been devalued and often degraded in the West. I attended a secret meeting in Prague in which speaker after speaker warned of the dangers of adopting the ‘values' embodied in NATO, an organisation which had legitimised the Brezhnev Doctrine and thereby reinforced their own oppression.

They also understood – unlike many of us in the West – that state power in the democracies is enforced not with tanks but with illusions, notably that of free expression: in which the voice of the people is heard but what it says is subject to a rich variety of controls. Writing in the 1920s, the American sage Walter Lippmann called this the ‘manufacture of consent' (i.e. brainwashing). ‘The common interests',
he wrote, ‘very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class'. The public is to be ‘put in its place' as ‘interested spectators'.
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In this way, illusions of ‘consensus' are created, rendering a free society passive and obedient.

In 1977 the banned Czech writer Zdener Urbanak told me, ‘You in the West have a problem. You are unsure when you are being lied to, when you are being tricked. We do not suffer from this; and unlike you, we have acquired the skill of reading between the lines.'
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In Britain today we need to develop this skill urgently, for as freedom is gained in former communist Europe, it is being lost here. Our ‘new age' is to be an information society, the product of a ‘communications revolution', as Rupert Murdoch likes to call it. But this is a fraud. We are in danger of mistaking media for information, of being led into a media society in which unrestricted information is unwelcome, even a threat.

The narrowness of the British media, our primary source of information, is a national disgrace. This is not to say the
Sun
, the ‘market leader', is a mere comic; on the contrary, it is intensely ideological with a coherent world view of our ‘new age' society: one in which you stand on your own two feet, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and trust nobody; one in which money is what matters – the ‘bottom line' – not to mention voyeurism: looking on at misfortune and violence. Objectors to this are ‘loony'. Mrs Thatcher has said as much.

The damage runs deep. Racism, for example, is all but acceptable. ‘The Press', says a Runnymede Trust report, ‘plays a very significant role in maintaining and strengthening and justifying racism at all levels of society, providing a cover for racist activity, especially racist violence . . .'
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The ‘quality press' is very different from the
Sun
and its pale shadows, but there are common strands. Censorship by omission is one; and I wonder if younger journalists on the serious newspapers are aware of the subtle influences of Murdochism on their own work, notably the cynicism. When
in recent times have the now voluminous Sunday quality papers published anything that might pose a sustained challenge to the status quo? Salman Rushdie's brilliant defence of his work in the
Independent on Sunday
was an exception.
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Increasingly, languid commentary and tombstones of vacuous stylism, owing much to the language of advertising, occupy the space of keen writing and provocative journalism. In the
Observer
a recently hired columnist, who on his first day wondered who he was and what he stood for, still apparently wonders. In the same pages Clive James is brought back from television to continue his self-celebration and empty repertoire. Perhaps this is meant as parody; certainly it is a metaphor.
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Most of the quality press shares the same triumphalism as the
Sun.
The ‘new age' corporate truth is upon us; there is nothing to challenge and scant need of a second opinion, except as a token, because everyone is agreed: ‘we' have won.

On Eastern Europe, a genteel McCarthyism is evident. Communists are ‘on the run' or slinking away from the ‘irrefutable' truth that the free-market system ‘works'. Such simplistic nonsense, however decorous in word and display, remains simplistic nonsense. Let there be a free-ranging critique of communism, whatever communism may mean, but let there also be an equally rigorous review of ‘liberal capitalism'. For these days it is barely mentioned that a world war is being fought by ‘the system that works' against the majority of humanity: a war over foreign debt which has interest as its main weapon, a war whose victims are millions of malnourished and dying children.

Television news, from which most people learn about the world, is a moving belt of headlines, caricatures and buzzwords, with pretensions that it is otherwise. In this way the Russian threat pervaded the nightly Cold War saga of good guys and bad guys; and the habit is hard to break. The bad guys may have slipped from view, but the principal good guys cannot be deserted.

‘It's up to the United States,' we are told, ‘to sort out its Central American backyard.' The coverage of the American
invasion of Panama was not quite as bad as in the United States. There were dissenting voices in the British media, but they were not well-informed and so served to legitimise the Accredited Truth: that the whole fiasco was a cowboys-and-Indians pursuit of Old Pineapple Face.

Noriega, of course, had precious little to do with it. George Bush ran the CIA when Noriega was their man; and drugs have long been a CIA currency. The aim was to put Panama, its canal and its US base under direct American sovereignty, managed by other Noriegas. The Panamanian police chief appointed by Washington, Juan Guizado, is the same thug whose troops attacked the presidential candidates last May.

Consider how our perspective is shaped. It now seems certain that more than 2,000 Panamanians were killed in the American bombardment: more than died at the hands of the People's Liberation Army in Beijing last June. And which victims do we remember, I wonder, and the politicians honour? Not those in Panama, to be sure. Thus, our ‘manufactured consent' allows the British Government to give its obsequious support to the American invasion, having condemned for a decade the Vietnamese expulsion of the genocidal Pol Pot.

In his book
McCarthy and the Press,
Edwin P. Baley, a distinguished American reporter of the 1950s, reveals how he and his colleagues became the tools of McCarthyism by reporting ‘objectively' propaganda and seldom challenging its assumptions.
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In Britain today, the ‘free market and a strong State' doctrine belongs to another ‘ism', but many of its effects are no less menacing and its dangers no less great, not least the process of indoctrination itself.

The Thatcher Government's secrets legislation is as sweeping as the notorious ‘loyalty pledges' of the McCarthy period. Old-style civil servants, with a genuine sense of public service, are being replaced by the new ‘privateers', who, as recent disclosures about the water industry demonstrate, are prepared to show their loyalty to government by misleading the public. This is a trend throughout the bureaucracy.

‘Loyalists' are being introduced at every level of the health service to implement the White Paper, perhaps to dismantle the NHS by stealth. The doctors and nurses understand this ‘hidden agenda'. But it is not the message reaching the public because the media, too, has its powerful loyalists.

When is there to be an effective opposition to a plethora of laws which give this country a distinction shared with no other Western democracy: that of legislated sycophancy, at virtually every level of current affairs journalism? Not a single broadcasting institution has challenged in court the government edict that makes criminals of television and radio journalists who interview certain Irish politicians, including those elected to Westminster.

Moreover, propaganda today bears little likeness to its historic models. Since 1979, the public relations and advertising industries have developed as powerful instruments of government propaganda. Consider the share-issue campaigns in which millions of pounds have been spent promoting the sale of public assets. Today, almost half of all advertising is originated by central government.

At the very least, a genuinely free society should forge the link between Macaulay's ‘fourth estate of the realm' and the rights of liberty and political democracy for all. This is the heart of it. A gathering silence ensures that freedom, real freedom, is denied: that nine million British working people will continue to live on or below the Council of Europe's ‘poverty threshold' and one in four British children will experience poverty, thousands of them incarcerated in bed and breakfast hotels and on crumbling estates. There are millions of Britons like that; another, unseen nation not far from the bijou doors and Roman blinds, and who are now so crushed they are probably unable to share a vision of anything.

And what if they did? Lech Walesa's revolution could not happen in Britain, where the right to strike and the right to assemble and associate have been virtually destroyed. Those rights being fought for and restored in Eastern Europe are those under review and in receivership here – Habeas Corpus,
trial by jury, the right to silence, and so on. No other regime has been brought before the European Commission on Human Rights so often as that of the United Kingdom; and no other has so often been found guilty.

The Thatcher Government understands the importance of the media immeasurably more than its predecessors. That is why a ‘reforming' Broadcasting Bill is being hurried through Parliament. ‘Economic analysis', noted a Home Office study, ‘tends to view broadcasting as an economic commodity – a service from which consumers derive satisfaction much as they might from a kitchen appliance and whose value to society should be assessed accordingly.'
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That is the doctrine of the British revolution in which the price of ‘consumer satisfaction' is a state discarding its democratic veils. There is no counter revolution, of course; we have not yet learned to read between the lines. But there is a profound unease. So, when will Macaulay's link be forged? When will journalists and broadcasters reaffirm surely the most vital and noble obligation of their craft: that of warning people when their rights are being taken away, and of reminding them of the historic consequences of vigilance lost. ‘The struggle of people against power', wrote Milan Kundera, ‘is the struggle of memory against forgetting.'
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February 12, 1990

ON THE DAY
Robert Maxwell died, an estimated 6,000 people were killed in a typhoon in the Philippines, most of them in one town. Maxwell's death consumed the British media. It made an intriguing story, with few facts. Speculation and offerings by former retainers were unrelenting. His yacht was described in all its opulent detail; there was the great bed the man had slept in and the crystal he and potentates had drunk from. It was said he consumed £60,000 worth of caviar in a year. And there was the man himself: in shorts, in shades, in a turban, with Elton John on the sports pages.

The death of the Filipinos, the equivalent of the sudden extinction of a Welsh mining village, with many more children killed than at Aberfan, was mentioned in passing, if at all. On the BBC's
Nine O'Clock News
Maxwell was the first item; the disaster in the Philippines was one of the last in a round-up of ‘fillers'.
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In one sense, the two events were connected. Although promoted as an ‘outsider', Maxwell embodied the new age of imperialist wealth: of triumphant rapacity based on asset-stripping, ‘off-shore' secrecies, government collusion and, above all, debt. The people who were swept to their deaths at Ormoc on the island of Leyte were also part of the new age. In an area with no previous experience of natural calamity, most of them died in flooding and mud slides that may well have been the result of deforestation. ‘It's a man-made disaster abetted by nature,' said Leyte's governor.

With almost half their national budget committed to
paying the interest on debt owed to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Western commercial banks, Filipinos are raping their beautiful country in order to export anything that brings in dollars and yen. Coral reefs are poisoned with cyanide to provide goldfish for the goldfish bowls of America. Forests are logged illegally to satisfy a Japan long ago stripped of trees.

This is not news, just as the deaths of the victims are, at most, ‘slow' news. ‘Small earthquake: not many dead' is not quite the joke it used to be. Natural disasters in the Third World
are
reported; it is the manner of the reporting, and the subtext, that helps to secure for the majority of humanity the marginal place allotted them by the world's media managers.

A typhoon, an earthquake, a war: and they are news of a fleeting kind, from which they emerge solely as victims, accepting passively their predicament as a precondition for Western acknowledgement and charity. That is one reason why independence movements are treated so negatively in the Western media: they smash the beloved stereotype of dependence.

Consider the strictly controlled Western perspective of Africa. The fact that Africa's recurring famines and extreme poverty – a poverty whose rapid increase is a feature of the ‘new age' – have political causes rooted in the West is not regarded as news. How many of us were aware during 1985 – the year of the Ethiopian famine and of ‘Live Aid' – that the hungriest countries in Africa gave twice as much money to
us
in the West as we gave to them: billions of dollars just in interest payments.
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