Media Freedom in Oldham & Beyond

From journalism's Oven-Ready Corporate Cooks
to a kind of 'Cook Your Own Local Media' 
by Brian Bamford

YESTERDAY Chris Rea, the President of the Manchester Branch of the National Union of Journalists, addressed a packed Focus Day:  'Creating Our Own Media' [sponsored by The WORD] aimed at promoting a move towards grassroots media by encouraging and energising the emergence of a free and independent journalism based in the community.

Chris said that control the national press in this country was in the hands of three companies:  News UK; the Rothermere group and Trinity Mirror.  He added that the local press is owned by only about ten companies. 

This media corporatism, he argued required the 'development of of our own institutions'. 

The problem of the decline of liberal culture

In his essay 'The Prevention of Literature' [Tribune 4th, January 1946], George Orwell wrote:

'In the future it is possible that a new kind of literature will arises, but no such thing is at present is imaginable.  It seems much likelier that if the liberal culture that we have lived in since the Renaissance actually comes to an end, the literary art will perish with it.'

Is the liberal culture we once took for granted coming to an end with the shift from reading printed hard copy media?

In some of the workshops at yesterday's Focus Day, some of the participants were concerned about print journalism's rapid decline.  A workshop discussed the technicalities of production of an alternative media in both print and on-line journalism.  The problems of distribution, circulation, finance and advertising was considered.  The content, the lack of a coherent 'House Style', and the layout of The Word newspaper were examined critically.  

The Word newspaper, it was admitted, had not always had a clear 'House Style':  Slabs of column-justified print smothered in some cases a full A3 size page from side to side and in some cases from top to bottom without the relief of a picture.  It was claimed that what was needed was short snappy articles, sometimes with quirky story-lines and photos was what was needed.

It was pointed out that these problems were not unique to the present time, and that George Orwell had discussed the issues of straight forward language in the presentation of ideas.  That fanciful writing often resulted in confusing the meaning of what we are saying, even from ourselves.

One lass from Romania argued for a free press and suggested that 'identity politics' in her view was an underlying threat in this country to the liberties her people had struggled to get in Romania when it was ruled by a regime of Romanian leader Nicolae Ceaușescu.

Orwell himself had predicted in 1946 [The Prevention of Literature] that:
'Newspapers will presumably continue until television techniques reaches a higher level, but apart from newspapers it is doubtful even now whether the great mass of people in industrialised countries feel the need for any kind of literature.'

He added:  'Probably novels and stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions.  Or perhaps some kind of low-grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyor belt process that reduces human initiative to a minimum.'

The Shape of Modern Media 

Well, newspapers are not surviving very well even in the main stream.  Any idea of truth being presented fearlessly in the press often seems to be an illusion.  Yet, even when Orwell was around he was then able to write:  'Radio features are commonly written by tired hacks to whom the subject and manner of treatment are dictated beforehand: even so, what they write is merely a kind of raw material to be chopped into shape by producers and censors.'

So need the participants at the Oldham's Focus Day worry about this historic development down hill?  It may explain why in 1979, when the conduct of Cyril Smith abusing lads at Cambridge House was first exposed, it was the alternative newspaper RAP [Rochdale's Alternative Paper] that then ran the story and not the mainstream press.  Indeed, the national press and local papers backed off when threatened by possible court action.  Nationally, at that time only Private Eye published the RAP revelations about Cyril Smith, and in consequence the man who became the Rochdale MP went on to serve for 20-years until 1992; only to be denounced in 2012 on this NV Blog discredited.

What we have now got is as Orwell argued, is a kind of self censorship rooted in 'stupidity' and 'economic self interest' or as he puts it more precisely: 

'The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. …  The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics.  But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio.' 

If anything with the coming of corporate media this situation has deteriorated since the time Orwell was writing in 1946.

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