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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'The WORD' - 'A democratic socialist paper'

by Brian Bamford

LAST night, JOHN Wilkins of the group 'Building Our Local Democracy' (BOLD) sent Northern Voices a pdf form of No.22 of 'THE WORD' - 'Britain's First Democratic Socialist Newspaper'.  It is a rare specimen, in so far as it is a British leftist paper that manages to cover politics with a sense of humour.

THE current June issue of THE WORD No.22  includes coverage of the controversal Jeremy Corbyn interview with Laura Kuenssberg, who attacked the Party’s tax agenda as ‘the politics of envy'.  Elsewhere in the paper (on page 32), it is claimed that Corbyn has been a victim of 'media bias':

David Dimbleby is quoted:

'I don’t think anyone could say that Corbyn has had a fair deal at the hands of the press, in a way that the Labour party did when it was more to the centre, but then we generally have a rightwing press.'

He also suggested the 'Labour leader has more support among the public than he does among the parliamentary Labour party.'

Then on  page 27 THE WORD reprints a post from this Northern Voices' Blog entitled 'Noam Chomsky on Labour', which was an exchange between me and Trevor Hoyle essentially abassaout the reasons for the lack of popularity and political sex appeal of the Labour Party.

On pages 16 and 17 there is an interview by Mara Levenskuhn with George Galloway an independent candidate in Gorton, Manchester, who says that he is the read Labour candidate.   THE WORD reports here that since an earlier interview taken on May15th, Sweden has withdrawn the accusations against Assange, 'making it more obvious that what George Galloway said here about Assange’s case is true and fair'. 

Mr. Galloway responds to a question thus:   'One accusation I keep stumbling against is your so called sexism.  I would like to clear this out for the socialist readers. I BELIEVE SEXISM AND AND IDENTITY POLITICS IS FREQUENTLY USED AS A WEAPON AGAINST DISSIDENTS, SO I’D LIKE TO CLEAR THIS MISCONCEPTION FOR THE “WORD” READERSHIP.'

Page 36 has a report on the 'Miners Pension Scheme' by Leslie Moore, ex Hatfeld Main Colliery (Yorkshire),

Other pages cover Food Banks; Dementia; UK citizens fighting in Syria; Homeless Votes; Privtising Royal Mail;  recipies on 'Baked River Trout on new potatoes and cherry tomatoes with anchovy rub'.

Most interestingly THE WORD has republished an article by Les May originally on this N.V. Blog entitled 'IN ROCHDALE, A LACK ON CURIOUSITY AT THE TOP?'   This last piece has been somewhat ignored by the rest of the local media in Rochdale.  

www.thewordmedia.org.uk/  

 http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/baffling-ballot-box-probe.html 

Tackling the Trump Phenomena?

How the liberal left fails to get it!

by Brian Bamford

ON the morning of the US presidential election the New York Times ran a leading article by a team of its journalists entitled 'With Trump, a storm below the calm' in which it was claimed ''Donald J. Trump is not sleeping much these days'.  As the US voters were turning out this New York Times' leading story reported:

'In the final days of the presidential campaign, Mr Trump's candidacy is a jarring split screen:  the choreographed show of calm and confidence orchestrated by his staff, and the neediness and vulnerability of the once-boastful candidate now uncertain of victory.'

This crack team of reporters then tell us under a headline 'FALLING INTO DESPAIR' that:

'The closing phase of Mr. Trump's campaign has been punctuated by swaying poll numbers and dizzying mood swings.  It started on Oct. 7 with the release of a recording in which Mr.Trump was caught bragging about forcibly kissing women and grabbing their genitals.  Many Republicans decided that Mr. Trump's already shaky campaign was over.  Some despondent young staff members at the Republican National Committee on Capital Hill.... took to leaving their desks early, in time for happy hour at bars.  They complained that Mr. Trump had not just lost the election but was dragging down House and Senate candidates, dooming the entire party.'  

After Mr. Trump won, one political pundit sympathetic to M. Trump seeking to make sense of the Trump phenomena urged us to re-read George Orwell's essay 'Wells, Hitler and the World State'  in Horizon in August 1941 .  What Orwell wrote of H.G. Wells in 1941 was that 'He was, and still is, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity.'

What we could call the Anglo-Saxon liberal left in the UK and the USA today, in the main, suffers from what Orwell had to say about H.G. Wells.  On this NV Blog we published a post-election report from the Avaaz team: a global campaign network that claims it 'works to ensure that the views and values of the world's people shape global decision making'. 

The Avaaz team says it is a '44-million-person global campaign network' and that 'Avaaz members live in every nation in the world; our team is spread across 18 countries on 6 continents and operates in 17 languages.' 

The Avaaz team in their analysis say:  'We wanted to write from the heart about what just happened in the US, and what's happening around the world', and of Mr. Trump they write '..... the most powerful nation in the world will be led by a breathtakingly ignorant, bigoted, violent, pathologically lying, sexually predatory, vengeful, authoritarian, corrupt reality TV star.'

The Avaaz team conclude in their study:

 'It's the Media Stupid -  Despite ALL the evidence to the contrary, the American public overwhelmingly sees Hillary Clinton as MORE dishonest and corrupt than Donald Trump.  This, by itself, is the reason why Trump is president.  And it's the media's fault.  ....  On the one side, we have ruthlessly sophisticated partisan propaganda media pushing Trump, and on the other an 2impartial” media that chases fake scandals and ratings and suggests false equivalence between the sides in the name of appearing balanced.  This is the dynamic that gave us Brexit as well.  We desperately need a smarter media...'

That is not something I can recognise from my own reading of the New York Times in the run-up to the US presidential election, consider the quotes above which were very typical of that newspaper's attitude to Donald Trump before the election.  It does seem to be true that there are similarities between the Trump victory and Brexit.  There seems to be a strong reaction against a kind of global mentality which has existed on both the left and the right.  The nationalistic spirit of our times as expressed by Trump and Brexit may not be a sane and sensible development, but it represents a powerful cultural force which the liberal left often underestimates.  The reason the left fails to grasp the importance of Trump and Brexit is that the left is too optimistic and too locked-up in the kind of mind-set that comes from the kind of Whig Theory of History that claims that things are always improving. 

The Avaaz team analysis falls back on :

'This (situation) is a HUGE opportunity, let's rise to it – change doesn't happen in a steady, linear way.  We human beings learn best from crisis and calamity.  Our brightest lights emerge from our deepest darknesses.  World War II gave us human rights and the United Nations.  And the darkness of Trumpism could help us build the most inspiring movement for human unity,....'

It is a quote that perhaps best illustrates the clear gulf that lies between the mind-set of the working-classes and the politically-minded classes in this country and seemingly the USA.  The Avaaz team idea is that 'the darkness of Trumpism could help us build the most inspiring movement for human unity and progress the world has EVER seen, to not only beat back Trumps in each of our countries, but to do so with a new, people-centered, high-integrity, inspiring politics that brings massive improvement to the status quo.' 

In a curious way the above analysis is a more optimistic version of how George Orwell in his essay on 'Catastrophic Gradualism', describe how some left-wing intellectuals explained away the crimes of the Stalin regime in the USSR thus:

'History necessarily proceeds by calamities, but each succeeding age will be as bad, or nearly as bad, as the last.  One must not protest against purges, deportations, secret police forces and so forth, because these are the price that one has to be paid for progress: but on the other hand “human nature” will always see to it that progress is slow or even imperceptible.'

(Common Wealth Review, November 1945)

Orwell in his correspondence with Dwight MacDonald in 1946, wrote 'If people think I am defending the status quo, that is..... because they have grown pessimistic and assume there is no alternative except dictatorship or laissez-faire capitalism.'  

Today, in the November issue of 'The Word - The People's Paper' - we can read the pessimistic thoughts of Tariq Ali and his verdict on the Trump victory: 

'A huge defeat for the liberal extreme centre establishment.  Read Friedman, Krugman in the NYT and Freedland in the Guardian for virtually identical grief:  it makes comic reading.... Many White workers who voted Obama did not vote for Clinton.  He failed them and she offered nothing new.  Nothing.  Unliked and untrusted, all she wanted was power.... The US Left has lacked a political party since Eugene Debs's time... '

Despite the best efforts of those on the left it is hard to see much to cheer about so long as the progressives fail to appreciate the nature of social change among working people in both the USA and the UK.