Media Inquiry? Inconvenient facts go down the memory hole (part 2)

Do you remember the Independent Media Inquiry?

You might vaguely recall the Finkelstein inquiry…yes, rings a faint bell?

It’s OK, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d forgotten most of the details.

What do you remember?

Oh yes. Finkelstein, isn’t he the guy who wants to throw the champions of the fourth estate in jail for telling the truth about the nasty and unloved Ju-Liar government?

That’s right, that’s exactly right. Here’s a free online subscription to the Heart of the Nation.

According to many ‘exclusive’ stories in The Australian newspaper, the sole aim of the Independent Media Inquiry was to impose heavy sanctions on the news media because the Gillard government doesn’t handle criticism very well.

Take this story from media commentator Mark Day on 26 April 2012. It is so important it got top of page 1 treatment;

A new regulatory body, funded by government and with powers to impose fines and sanctions on news outlets is a key proposal of the long-awaited Convergence Review of the emedia sector.

Unfortunately, this story was wrong, wrong wrong.

The Convergence Review rejected any idea that there should be any such government-funded organisation with anything like the powers suggested in this breathless lead par.

However, since this story was published it has become standard operating procedure to continue the lie.

It is only possible to conclude one of four things:

a) the budget is so tight at News Limited that as many words as possible have to be recycled on a daily basis which means that key phrases are used over and over again to save money

b) the koolaid in the LimitedNews bunkers is real tasty and no one’s yet cottoned on that it is the source of the medicine that results in obligatory groupthink

c) there is a deliberate mis-information campaign going on designed to fool Australians into demanding Stephen Conroy’s head on a platter.

d) we are being fed a bowl of chump bait with fear-causing additives so we don’t see what’s really going on.

It’s probably a combination of all four.

If we’re stirred up about bloody attacks on ‘our’ freedom of speech and we can be made to think that only The Australian and the Institute of Public Affairs stands between us and a Stalino-Fascist dictatorship of ‘befuddled’ Greens from the ‘tofu belt’ aided and abetted by the ‘soft-Left media’ then maybe we’ll be goaded into action.

Seriously, you couldn’t make this stuff up even if you called yourself Chris Mitchell and spent your days dreaming of a world in which you could wield the absolute power that corrupts absolutely.

Naive DimPost editorialist up in arms …Who rights [sic] this drivel?

This post deserves a subtitle:

“Kick’em when they’re up; kick’em when they’re down” Don Henley (see below)

My concern this evening is a weird little editorial in today’s Dominion Post concerning the reportorial credentialing of one N Hager Esq.

To wit, in evidence I copy and paste the following:

Hager sees himself as an author and a journalist. In the common definition of the journalistic craft, he is not. He is a meticulous compiler and ferreter out of information that some people would wish to keep secret, and he is very good at it.

What? Can I just take a moment to let this sink in.

Nicky Hager’s not a journalist, at least as you [DomPost editorialist 13.9.2011] choose to define it.

How do you define it by the way?

Nicky’s not a journalist, but he might be an author though.

Is that good or bad?

Is that what you’re saying here?

I must have missed something, run that par by me again…

Hager sees himself as an author and a journalist. In the common definition of the journalistic craft, he is not. He is a meticulous compiler and ferreter out of information that some people would wish to keep secret, and he is very good at it.

I don’t think “ferreter” is a word in the context you’re trying to shoehorn it into.

But, leaving aside your poor composition skills, what you’re trying to say is that Nicky Hager is good at his job — ferreting out information that some people would wish to keep secret — but that’s not journalism as you define it. How do you define journalism by the way? That last bit sounds suspiciously like what journalism is. Or at least, what it should be.

I must be stupid, but I still don’t get it…tell me more.

The flaw in Hager’s modus operandi is that he amasses what he has learned and then presents it to the public through the prism that best suits his world view, without allowing for the possibility that there might be a plausible explanation for what he has “uncovered”. The case he builds is thus rarely troubled by opposing opinions and inconvenient facts, realities that journalists in the mainstream media are morally obliged to take into account, and present.

[Seeing Afghanistan through naive prism]

Excuse me, even the headline on this piece doesn’t stand up to lexical scrutiny.

OK, you can call me a media studies poser if you like. You won’t be the first. The fact remains, we have to deconstruct this argument to make sense of the DomPo’s position.

First of all, a disclaimer. I know and admire Nicky Hager. I consider him a friend and I’ve defended him before here at EM on similar charges from Fran O’sullivan.

I haven’t yet read Nicky’s latest book Other People’s Wars — the centre of this controversy — but I am told by reliable sources that it is brilliant and you should all read it. I’m picking up my copy from Unity Books in the morning and will read it on the plane home this weekend.

I think his work in Hollow Men is exemplary investigative journalism, despite this mean-spirited and misleading line in the DumPoo’s rite [sic] of reply.

Take his earlier book, The Hollow Men, for example, which – though not news to political junkies – made uncomfortable reading for some associated with the Don Brash-led National Party.

Not even faint praise in this damning dismissal from the Dismal Poke.

Speaking of definitions of journalism didn’t Lord Harmsworth once say that it was about “afflicting the comfortable”?

Like many a determined investigator, some of whom have worked at the DomPost and done brilliant work of journalism, Nicky takes excellent care of his sources and his facts. He does, in other words, exactly what those imbued with, and accountable to, the spirit of excellence in reporting, should do.

The sputtering [sic] rage of the Dim’s editorialist — whether real or feigned for 13 sovereigns — is best expressed in this nonsense:

In the common definition of the journalistic craft, he is not.

Did that make your eyes water? Ferfucksake! Is this grammatic and syntactic outrage the result of outsourced subbing? Is there nobody in the office to tell the editorialist they’ve written gibberish; up with which we will not put.

[Ahhem, so to speak]

Can we just look, for a brief indulgent moment, at the definition of a journalist that is common today.

Actually, we might need a few, here’s one to be going on with.

“Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It’s absolutely unavoidable. A journalist is someone who looks at the world and the way it works, someone who takes a close look at things every day and reports what she sees, someone who represents the world, the event, for others. She cannot do her work without judging what she sees.”

That’s from Marguerite Duras, it is echoed by many; including George Orwell. Regular readers of EM will know my line Orwell and Trotsky.

I’ll be back. In the meantime…

Newspeak in the 21st century – Media Lens and angry analysis

I’m currently reading a great book on the British media by the two guys behind Media Lens, David Edwards and David Cromwell.

Newspeak in the 21st Century is an angry, but analytical, and very damning report about the state of the British media and the soft-left, liberal veneer that coats the ugly conservative heart of the mainstream press and, it has to be said, the BBC.

The take-away message and one that I’m going to come back to in some detail when I’ve finished the book and have the time to write a good review is a simple one that’s going to offend some people, perhaps even some of my friends, but it has to be said.

Journalists like to invoke the mantra and the ideal belief that their job is to serve the public interest and that they best do this by holding the powerful to account. However, despite the best intentions of the best and the brightest, this rarely, if ever, really happens.

It is a powerful myth that liberal news outlets like The Guardian and the BBC are fighting the establishment. They’re not. Rather, the establishment media is all about propping up the establishment and propogating the lies that keep the system going. Like the lie that Israel is under attack and only acts in self-defence; or like the lie that Iraq had WMDs.

Newspeak in the 21st Century makes this very clear through a thorough content analysis of many of the key stories of the past 10 years or so; from the NATO bombing of Serbia in retaliation for alleged human rights abuses in Kosovo; through the whole lying and deceitful charade of the build-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, to Israel’s continuing aggression in Gaza to the beat up of Iranian nuclear weapons programmes.

The unfortunate truth is that the news media is complicit in keeping the truth from us, rather than exposing the lies at the heart of the system.

Two brief quotes for now:

Journalists have been demonising other countries for so long, it seems they cannot stop. Always it is the 1930s; always Hitler is plotting our destruction always we need to recoil in fear, disgust and horror. Is this the real world? Or is it journalism as pathology? (p.160)

This is the perfect link between Newspeak in the 21st Century and Orwell’s 1984.

For the mainstream media, an opinion barely exists if it doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t matter if it is not voiced by people who matter. The full range of opinion, then, represents the full range of power. In that sense the mainstream media is balanced. (p.161)

Finally, Edwards and Cromwell talk about “state capitalism” and they don’t mean Russia and the USSR pre-1989. They’re talking about the system we inhabit today as a global economy. I will return to this as well, because I think they’re right about that too.

Was Orwell Trotskyist?

New Zeal: S.A.P. 17 Dr Martin Hirst

This is an interesting rant from some far-right goons in GodZone, I feel like I’ve arrived on fucking Mars! Not really, as my mate Helen pointed out. It’s not a bad place at all. Just got the same quota of loony-tunes as any where else really.

If you bother to read the thread I’ve linked to you’ll see that the rampant revisionism of the right regarding Orwell is in full swing. In fact Orwell was basically a Trot. If you read Goldstein’s “The Principles of Oligarchical Collectivism” in the centre pages of Nineteen Eighty-four, you’ll clearly see that he was elucidating a theory of state capitalism.

media ethics, journalism

Changing the world, not just reporting it

it seems like I didn’t make a friend of Fairfax columnist Karl du Fresne at the EPMU’s Journalism Matters conference last weekend in Wellington. Karl’s written a column that appeared today in both the Press (Christchurch) and the Dominion Post (Wellington) Politics threaten media progress – Perspectives in which he criticises me for arguing that objectivity in journalism is dead and for declaring my socialist politics. You can read a previous post on market journalism and objectivity to see where I’m coming from.

I stand by what I said – that the point of journalism is to change the world, not just report it. I’ve written a letter to the editor in response to Karl’s column and here’s the text:

Letter to the editor

The Press

16 August 2007

I’d like to quickly respond to Karl du Fresne’s piece about the Journalism Matters conference in Wellington last weekend (The Press 16 August). The idea that journalism is more about changing the world than merely reporting it is not something new that has recently become entrenched in journalism schools. If readers care to look beyond the rhetoric it becomes clear that the news media has played this role for more than 200 years.

The original press in Britain, Europe and North America was a highly partisan operation. Newspapers took a stand on issues and attempted to influence their readers. The press was influential in changing public opinion about slavery for example. The French and American revolutions were also stirred by the press of the day. Radicals were keen to have their own press in order to inform and mobilise supporters.

If Karl thinks that this has ever disappeared from the news media he’s wrong. William Hearst and Joseph Pulitizer both used their newspapers to push the United States into a war with Mexico in the late 19^th centuries. The American press was a propaganda tool used to great effect to generate public sympathy for the allies’ cause in both world wars this century.

The news media took sides during the Cold War, the Korean War and the Vietnam conflict too. Today, Rupert Murdoch is proud of the role his newspapers and television networks played in building public support for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In a nutshell, the freedom of the press is now, and always has been, the freedom of the news owners to push their own views. On the other side of the ledger, some of the best journalism has also led to galvanised public opinion and, yes, world-moving change. The BBC’s Michael Burk reported famine in Africa and mad it clear that he was angry and upset about what he’d seen. This mobilised huge relief efforts that no doubt saved thousands of lives. The exposure of thalidomide in the UK in the late 1960s led to that drug being taken off the market as a treatment for morning sickness. John Pilger’s crusading work over many years is another example of what I describe as the journalism of engagement.

Objectivity as a principle of journalism is no longer the holy grail. The fact that some journalism educators are prepared to say so and to put such ideas in front of their students is just a recognition of this idea. In the respected Columbia Journalism Review, Brent Cunningham has written a thoughtful piece called “Rethinking Objectivity”. He makes the point that often it is an excuse for lazy journalism and that it forces reporters to rely on official sources. He also argues that it allows the news agenda to be captured by the “spin doctors”.

Finally, I would commend George Orwell’s famous essay “Why I write”, in which he argues for an engaged and partisan journalism that tackles the difficult political issues of the day. He was writing at the close of World War Two, but if you read between the lines, the sentiments expressed echo down the years. I come not to praise objectivity, but to bury it.

Martin Hirst,

AUT, Auckland

media ethics, journalism

The information age: George Orwell’s worst fear – Editors Weblog- Analysis

The information age: George Orwell’s worst fear – Editors Weblog- Analysis

This is a review of Paul Moreira’s latest book, Les Nouvelles Censures. Moreira is a French investigative journalist and this book discusses overt and covert manipulation of the news media by the spin meisters. I’d love to seen an English-language version. If you know of its existence in English, please let me know.

media ethics, journalism