Media: Blurred Lies, Concaved Truths
By Prabhat Sharan
03 December, 2010
The Verdict Weekly
“After all, there came a day when Edwin Reardon found himself
regularly at work once more ticking off his stipulated quantum of
manuscript each four-and-twenty hours.”
(George Gissing, New GrubStreet, 1890)
Written in late 19th century when the embryo of last century was just
uncoiling, Gissing, proponent of extreme naturalism school of writing,
in his novel explored the insidious exploitative process whereby the
splendid freedom of creativity becomes a mechanical process like any
other commercial or industrial production.
Ironically, all the claims to ‘literary creation’, even then rang a
hollow bell inside a veil woven to hide the basic economic pressures.
After all, literature was reduced to a commodity. The exploitative
scenario with the commoditification and reification of labour,
strangely, even after a century has not changed and continues to
hurtle on its path reducing every value to a marketable commodity.
And if the economics of manufacturing of printed stuff passed off as
‘literature’ continues to remain the same, the Medusa of capitalism
has now enveloped the news world also into its web. The situation of a
journalist or a scribe or a hack is no different from that of
Gissing’s well-meaning character Reardon.
The journalist- like Reardon- whether in print or in visual medium
has to churn out a ‘stipulated quantum’ of words or verbiage, ‘each
four-and-twenty-hours.” Since news, like the literature, has also
become a commodity.
It is a circular prison where the hack churning out a ‘stipulated
quantum’ of commodity, under economic duress, not only gets alienated
but also allows the subjugation of his or her consciousness.
Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs in History and Class Consciousness
observed: ‘The commodity can only be understood in its undistorted
essence when it becomes the universal category of society as a whole.
Only in this context does the reification produced by commodity
relations assume decisive importance both for the objective evolution
of society and for the stance adopted by men towards it. Only then
does the commodity become crucial for the subjugation of men's
consciousness to the forms in which this reification finds
expression.... As labour is progressively rationalized and mechanized
man's lack of will is reinforced by the way in which his activity
becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative.’
And the forces which control the commodity in words of Herbert
Marcuse, allows free choice of goods and services that sustain social
controls over life of toil and fear-by sustaining alienation so as to
maximise “the efficacy of the controls.”
And if in 18th century or 19th century literature was commodified by
Western powers to control the minds, in late 20th century it is the
mass media which has been commodified. Anthony Smith in his study-The
Geopolitics of Information: How Western Cultures Dominate the World
New, observed that the “threat to independence in the late twentieth
century from the new electronics could be greater than was colonialism
itself…the new media have the power to penetrate more deeply into a
‘receiving,’ culture than any previous manifestation of Western
technology.”
Thus the commodified news is changed into a spectacle. The spectacle
emerges from media which in words of Guy Debord is “basically
tautological character… flowing from the simple fact that its means
are simultaneously its ends. It is the sun which never sets over the
empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world
and bathes endlessly in its own glory.”
A simulation is created, and under the veneer of journalistic
practices, society is carpet-bombed and a “Global brainwash,” is
executed in words of developmental sociologist Gosovic Branislav. The
simulation- a fabrication of reality or a world of “Absolute Fake,” is
thus generated where fakes are doled out to recipients or people as
real thing, who in the barrage of this Umberto Eco’s “hyper-reality,”
turn into passive robots.
And the symptoms of this fake authenticity being doled out by the
media round-the-clock is the recent news world scandal where scribes
like fixers scurried to parrot the spin masters aka PR agencies or
lobbyists or power-brokers.
The deeper malaise without jumping into the bandwagon, pontificating
simplistic conspiracy theory lies in the facade of a
political-economic system wherein the scribes conjuring the free
society images on the screen, are reduced to becoming just
instrumentalists and not directors. The directors of the images, of
words-to-be-spoken, of the atmosphere to be created, sit in the PR
agencies boardroom.
Public Relations (PR) Agencies- a misnomer for Press Relations or
Publicity Agents or to put it simply power-brokers focussing primarily
on the manipulation of news, in these times primary task is to control
the media. And the producers funding them are the so-called glorified
‘corporate honchos.’
They control the media and their class interest shape, the kind of
information that has to be doled out and the way it is to be doled
out. Thus one finds political clash projected as an independent
struggle between two warring political parties or personalities, while
the reality lies in the turf war between industrial lobbies. There is
never ever mention of the backing of interested industrial lobbies in
political clashes. The masses are duped into a cathartic experience of
having a ‘power,’ and being able to bring down a political party from
the throne-- of course with the help of a ‘free media.’
And the rulers know the importance of the ‘free media,’ illusion. It
effectively enthuses and injects hopes into the down and out masses,
of a better future. The media, like a knife in the hands of thug
clothed in surgeon’s traditional uniform is used to shore up public
confidence in an unjust, crisis-riven financial and economic
structure. Of course gloom and doom is permitted when an obvious
crisis looms ahead harshly, but then the legitimacy of the system is
never ever challenged or questioned.
And it is precisely for this reason that the commodification of news
and corporatisation of news organisation became a necessity. This
change paved the entry of PR agencies. In a strange twist of irony, PR
people who till sometime back were looked down upon with distaste by
journos, suddenly became sought after figures. The entry of PR
agencies brought about the blurring of the lines between what was news
and what is news in these times.
With the entry of PR agencies, the role, the nature and the essence of
journalist and journalism also changed. Fabrication, manipulation,
twisting by blending fact and fiction became the norm of the day.
Seeking sensational news had always been a task of every reporter, but
in the corporatized media, even sensational news needs to be
manipulated to tailor the needs of the corporate interests.
And the tailoring is subtly done by the spin tailors strutting around
the corridors of media offices as PR people. Quotes, sound bites see
the light or air only if it does not threaten the very rationality of
the system’s failure. And here again the PR people control and
monitor the scribes and media. From the first syllable to the last
word.
Thus, when some employees of a private airline went on a strike, the
organisation hired a PR agency to engineer the media into spreading a
canard against the striking employees and create a wave of sympathy
towards the airline owners. Strangely, none of the so-called news
organisation ever questioned the whopping amount paid to the PR agency
by the airline which had gone around the town tom-tomming about its
financial paucity and refusal to pay its employees. The media hacks
were grovelling and justifying each and every irrational and inhuman
action of the airline management, even though it smacked of
distasteful servility.
Thus the recent scandal tapes involving conversations between hacks
and PR agents, is nothing to be surprised of. Given the clout in the
media world where appointments of not just reporters but also of
editors are made on the recommendations of PR agencies, to hear about
a hack snivelling and crawling in front of a lobbyist is not
surprising.
Neither it is surprising to hear or see in the media offices the
gradation of journalist being rated on the scale of fixing deals he or
she manages in political-corporate nexus or how snugly is mollycoddled
by a lobbyist or an industrialist. After all the aim of media in these
times is not to present the truth but to blur lies.
The media today is like the pharmacological dictator of The
Futurological Congress (A Polish novel-Stanislaw Lem) wherein everyone
is made to hallucinate a feel-good-world even though the society,
environs as well as people are on verge of collapse. Amidst this
collective madness, when the main character comes regain his senses
doesn’t know which of the reality is hallucination.
Prabhat Sharan is a Senior Journalist with interest in social, working
class, wild-life conservation, media, philosophical and literary
studies. He can be contacted at [email protected]
