Media power

This past summer, the British have been privy to a gargantuan demonstration of the power of the media in the political arena. The Hutton inquiry into the death of David Kelly – the ministry of defence weapons expert who committed suicide after being revealed as the source of a BBC report by one of its defence correspondents, Andrew Gilligan, that aides to the Prime Minister had knowingly falsified a document on Saddam Hussein – has been an object lesson on the matter.

For if a government, up to its prime minister, can become so engaged in refuting an allegation aired in its pure form (it was later slightly modified) at 6.17 in the morning that it reveals, to its own embarrassment, its inner workings and vast amounts of detail on its own secret services, then the broadcasters must be mighty indeed.

They are. The media is now among the first powers in the world. Its power is the greater for being disguised, including from itself. Its own estimation – that it is the medium through which power is held to account – obscures, most of all from journalists, its huge ability to give versions of the world – from a local planning decision to global movements of capital, people or terror – that deeply affect the actions of leaders and followers at every level.

Media power is often discussed in terms of ownership, and that is a reasonable prism through which to view it. But it is only reasonable if it is recognised that in most cases, at least in advanced and also in many developing countries, “ownership” is never a purely a matter of an owner enjoying his own and being able to dictate the terms under which he owns it – in the case of the media, to dictate what it prints or broadcasts. Media are nearly always the object of three kinds of ownership: by private owners, by the state and by the journalists and others who ceaselessly create and recreate the media’s versions of the world, 24 hours a day, almost everywhere.

This is still a largely unexplored universe – unexplored in the sense that we are at a primitive stage of our knowledge on what the media do to our societies, since it is only fitfully in the interests of the owners of the media to inquire into these effects. There is much name calling across the divides between these owners, a species of argument that both defines and constricts the debate and inquiry. Owners tend to think journalists are too liberal and irresponsibly radical. Journalists view owners, both the state and private, as repressive. The state sees journalists and owners as prejudiced against the public sphere…and so on.

It is not that these arguments are always, everywhere wholly wrong: they often have considerable force. It is that they do not rest on the fact of the matter: that all owners, state, private and professional, strive for increased power and tend to see the correct balance of power as that which favours their own position. Yet, at the same time, they present themselves as the victims of the machinations of the other powers: the state libelled by the journalists and the owners, the owners at the mercy of the power of the state, the journalists’ quest for the truth quashed by both public and private power.

The key matter is that the media are a field for competing powers – and that, when these powers strive to aggrandise themselves and most of all when they conflict on the proper borders of their power and on the balance between and among them, what suffers is the aim to which they all pay fulsome lip service: the “public’s right to know”. All publics suffer from this at times: though it must also be said that the public constitutes itself a separate power, which often demonstrates its influence by refusing to be interested in what the media, especially when the subject is politics, have to say. And all national publics are very different: for while it is true that news can be available globally, the media, like politics, are organized largely in national clusters, and their characters differ greatly from state to state. So we can illustrate the nature of the interplay of powers from state examples: Russia; the USA; Italy and Britain.

The British are undergoing a deeply educative experience. The Hutton Inquiry into the death of David Kelly shows us something of what modern media are, how they operate and how they seek and gain power. It shows them, on a careful reading, how our reality is constructed, and how the world is made up for us day by day, hour by hour.

It does this in two ways. First, by the revelations the Inquiry itself produces: and second, by the way in which these revelations are themselves reported. The first is showing us – spasmodically, confusingly, contradictorily – how the media and the state deal with each other. The second shows us how bad much of the British media have become, and how they are likely to stay that way.

The Inquiry has also produced its first undoubted victim: the Today Programme defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan. Gilligan backed away from the central assertion of his report: that the government knew the claim that Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes to be wrong. In doing so, he destroyed the stance he had taken, and the stance the BBC had taken, since the affair began. The massed ranks of the Corporation stood by his story: Gilligan, the Today Programme, the head of news and current affairs, the director general and the Board of Governors.

They asserted that what he had broadcast was the truth: the government it was that lied. And then Gilligan said: well, no, not exactly. Not quite like that, perhaps. No better lesson could have been devised for showing us the standards of truth, accuracy and balance that were deployed in his reporting for the prime current affairs slot in the whole of the Corporation’s output, TV, radio, Internet and all.

One can see Gilligan as a British equivalent to the figure of Jayson Blair. Blair is the New York Times reporter who, through his systematic falsification of his reports and the indulgence he received from his editors, brought the world’s best newspaper into disrepute, and ultimately caused the resignation of its two top executives. But Gilligan is not a destroyer, as was Blair. He is a victim.

He was a product of a culture, a mindset and a practice. He came from that part of the BBC (it is too big and sprawling and diverse and, in parts, magnificent to have one overall approach – a fact that may yet save it) that sees the government as a bunch of spinners, obfuscators and, ultimately, liars. He was taken on because he was “edgy”: had had a reputation at the Daily Telegraph, his previous employer, for being a man who would stick it to the government. It was that which made him attractive to the heads of current affairs at the BBC.

He was hired as an attack dog and proved instantly and constantly worthy of his hire. Were the BBC to produce an anthology of his reports during the Iraq invasion – which would be a service – we could hear again the tenor of his reporting. It was a style that took the fact or event most embarrassing or inconvenient to the government – there were many to choose from – and made it into the explanatory vehicle for the conduct of the war. The fact itself would be “right” in the sense that something like it had happened, unlike the “sexing” of the dossier. But its treatment would be of his own making.

This is what we might call laser journalism: the opposite of journalism-in-the-round. Laser journalism shines a bright and relentless light on one spot in the chaos of detail and riot of opinion that makes up real events. It isolates the fact, preferably the “killer fact”, the matter which so clearly and so fatally exposes the wickedness or mendacity at the heart of the state machine that heads must roll.

It operates on the unstated belief that such mendacity is the rule, not the exception: and that thus all that is needed is aggressive, directed investigation. In this diabolic account of our state, such figures as Alastair Campbell, the prime minister’s chief press secretary naturally become vastly important. They are the liars-in-chief, the gatekeepers of vaults of dirty big secrets that wait for the deployment of journalistic diligence and courage to be uncovered.

This is not what British government is. Composed as it is of men and women, it has liars, fantasists and self-publicists in its ranks. But we know enough – all of us, from observation and reading and listening know enough – to know such an assumption is unwarranted. The ills of our society do not include a state that systematically twists reality. Reality, or what version of it we wish to live in, is available to be discovered.

Why did the BBC fall for this malign vision of the British state? For the worst of reasons: it did not think about it. It saw, in the newspaper culture, a journalistic practice of attack. It came to share the view that this was the way true journalists should behave. It took the position that since the government had an unassailable majority, and the Conservative Party was weak and badly led, that it must thus substitute for the opposition.

In this, the Today Programme was the vanguard. The one programme almost everyone in high public life was sure to hear something of, broadcast at an hour when daily agendas were being set, it has unrivalled influence. It embraced Gilligan because it had already embraced his values.

It wanted lasers because it regarded journalism-in-the-round as boring. Journalism-in-the-round is conscious that there are at least two sides to a story. In the old fashioned BBC version, it did not go too far. It said what the government said, what Her Majesty’s Opposition said, and left it at that. It could, indeed, be boring.

But at its best, journalism-in-the-round is an attempt to come to grips with the complexity, nuances and constant shifts of public life. In constructing that part of reality called “the news”, it seeks transparency for itself: to allow the reader or viewer to see that the facts assembled at high speed and printed or broadcast under constraints of time, lack of full knowledge and competitive pressure, is a first and almost certainly imperfect draft of what will become history.

It is what the BBC should be doing: and what it sometimes, in other parts of its dense forest, does do, though rather more about foreign events – such as the Norma Percy-Brian Lapping account of the fall of Milosevic broadcast last year, a beacon of care and real journalistic courage. But it did not think it through: and with Greg Dyke as its director general, it will not. Dyke, who believes the myth of the lying state, has always preferred the sensational to the careful. For him, as for those he employs to do the news, “boring” is, first and last, the greatest crime the BBC can commit.

The Inquiry unfolds, and will continue to unfold, through the media: that is how we learn of everything outside our restricted personal circles. And the media now are taking sides: against the government, or against the BBC – or, on good days, against both. The spin in the headlines, in the writing of the stories or bulletins, in the selection of images and comment, is relentless. We see a culture of media spin revealed through a culture of media spin.

Russia

Russia presents the picture of a media which enjoyed a frolic of freedom, and is now experiencing a reaction-in part from the public, in larger part from the state. The TV networks are now all either in state hands or, as NTV (N is for Nezavisimiye (Independent), now something of a satire) controlled by the gas corporation which is controlled by the state. This does not mean that nothing critical appears: journalists who have learned some of the lessons of independence do not give up easily. But it means that little comes on the screen which properly explains the nature of power, or which questions the actions of those, in the public or private arenas, wield power.

“This is a real change for Russia,” said Yasen Yasursky, the dean of the faculty of journalism at Moscow State University in a recent interview. “In the last few years we have lost all four private TV channels.”

Andrei Norkin, an anchor for Ekho TV – a channel that produces programmes in Moscow for export only to the Russian diaspora in Israel – told the Baltimore Sun this month: “In the Kremlin, they believe that to achieve some real results you have to be in control of the mass media.” Ekho TV is owned by the expatriate oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky, currently in Greece and fighting an extradition demand from Russia. Gusinsky, who would face charges of tax evasion if he is brought back to Russia, is the former owner of NTV.

Gusinsky, a volatile figure, financed the broadcast and newspaper outlets that employed the best of the independent Russian journalists. His baton has been picked up by a fellow oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the owner of the vast Yukos oil company – who is financing opposition newspapers and has employed Yevgenny Kiselyov, NTV’s chief news anchorman, as an editor of one of these, Moskovskiye Novosti. At the same time, Khodorkovsky has put Yegor Yakovlev, a veteran of the period of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, at the head of the paper’s supervisory board.

Khodorkovsky, a fabulously wealthy man, is now the largest barrier to a general state control that Russia presently has. Andrei Piontovsky, one of the foremost of Russia’s political analysts, said of the appointments to Moskovskiye Novosti that they were “very good news”. it is Yukos’ way of saying it won’t surrender easily to the advancing Chekists (KGB – a reference to the past employment of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and that of many of his aides).

Yukos is, however, itself under attack: a senior executive, Platon Lebedev, has been imprisoned on charges of stealing state property. Yukos’ financing of opposition parties has also attracted Kremlin displeasure. Media freedom is not snuffed out: but it is in danger, and only big capital is presently able to pose at its saviour.

United states

The United States is disturbing in European eyes because it is a more raucously democratic state that any in Europe. Its practice of electing people for public office rather than appointing them as in Europe – judges and sheriffs – is one aspect; the other is the spread of its news media, from left-liberal to libertarian right. The recent appearance of Fox News, the news division of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox Network, has caused much mockery from Europeans (and from liberal Americans). But it is important to recognise the difference between the nature of these criticisms, for they illuminate a difference between the two cultures.

For non-Fox viewing Americans, the station is reprehensible because it does not adhere to balance and distance. Its coverage of the Iraq war, which won it millions of viewers, was patriotic in the extreme: in being so, it eschewed most of the accepted canons: objectivity, balance and explanation. For Europeans, it is reprehensible because it’s right wing: Europeans have been accustomed to broadcast media that are obliged to be balanced between political positions.

The larger issue, however, is US TV’s inextricably close relationship with politics. Candidates for political office need TV to reach the masses: to do so, they must buy time – and the less the networks cover politics and public affairs, the more money they must spend bringing public affairs, and the candidates’ position on them, to the viewers.

The US commentator Mark Damner has put this best:
“American politics subsidises American television – to the tune, this year (2000) of US$600m for the networks and broadcast stations alone (not counting cable). With the decline of local party organisation, TV has long since become the essential way – virtually the only way – to reach voters. And as TBV time has become more and more expensive, the American political world has come increasingly to resemble Republican Rome, in which the wealthy and powerful expend their largesse to make it possible for their chosen candidate to reach and thereby seduce the masses. American politicians have been forced to become a species of bagmen who collect money from the wealthy and deliver it to television in order to sell themselves to the voters”.

This is a privatisation of politics that benefits TV is in tune with a general trend that sees politics, public affairs and debate as tedious, corralled into off-peak times, or “sexed up” by aggression and confrontation. When TV provides decreasing amounts of news; when TV’s owners increase their profits; when candidates go into debt to pay their TV bills; when politics ceases to be a central concern of the most powerful medium – then voters become not only alienated, but increasingly uninformed.

Italy

The prime minister of Italy controls almost all the TV channels watched by Italians: the three channels operated by Mediaset, owned by Silvio Berlusconi (there is one other private TV channel): and the three channels of Radio Televisione Italiana (RAI), which he controls by virtue of holding the political majority in the country. This involves him in two differing, and enormous, conflicts of interest: one, that his political power can, as in his manipulations of the judicial system, directly benefit his commercial interests; and more seriously, his near monopoly of the most powerful communication medium in the state directly contradicts liberal assumptions about both politics and media’s role in a democratic society.

Berlusconi built up Mediaset through the acquisition of the hundreds – at their peak in 1980 1,300 – of local TV stations he strung together into a national network to get round the legislation protecting the RAI national monopoly. The capstone was set by the state: the Mammi law, named after the then minister of telecommunications, was passed by the Socialist government, cementing in the RAI-Mediaset duopoly that remains to the present (the Maccanico Act of 1997 changed little of fundamental importance). By the beginning of the decade that saw his rise to supreme, and presently largely unchallenged political power, Berlusconi had control of three channels of national television. They gave him the huge cash revenue generated by their advertising; and they gave him far more influence than any other media mogul in the world had or has within his own state.

Many Italians of the left compare Berlusconi to Mussolini: but it mis-states his importance. He is not an haranguer but a seducer; and one of the means of his seduction is to pose as the underdog, and the champion of underdogs – one who, intolerably oppressed, lifts the weight from the oppressed. Thus he and his associates constantly point to the domination of RAI, especially its news and cultural programmes, by leftists: a charge in which there is some truth. This is both because, as in most states, current affairs and cultural journalists tend to be liberal-left and in Italy that often meant supporting of the Communist Party; and more pertinently, because RAI is as politicised as any other major institution of the state, with carve ups of the channels and managerial posts accorded to political interests.

The writer Alexander Stille, writing in the New York Review of Books (October 9/2003) encapsulates Berlusconi’s importance: “As a country that was late to unify and industrialise, Italy is a place where all the strains and problems of modern life are present but with few of the safeguards that exist in older, more stable nations: ideas get taken to their logical extreme. The increasingly close relations between big money, politics and television are important everywhere, but in Italy, thanks to Berlusconi’s domination of the networks and the press, they have achieved a kind of apotheosis.”