Direct involvement with politics almost always results in a move away from the man in the street and a move towards a rather specialised environment with its own vocabulary, its own points of reference and its own intrinsic assumptions. This isn’t a criticism; the same is true of joining a book club or a rugby team.
Yet it’s helpful to go back and look at some of the assumptions and points of reference every so often. For example, media bias. Almost everyone involved in politics considers the media to distort the truth; whether it’s the anti-BBC privateers or the Murdoch conspiracy theorists. So let’s look at this subject again.
For me, the explanatory power of Marxist analysis is its major attraction. A major bone of contention I have with the media, however, is the increasing prevalence of reporting for the sake of it, without any attempt at explanation, or sense of proportion for that matter. A recent BBC article about Italian politician Nichi Vendola highlights what I mean.
It states, ‘[Vendola] has been criticised for how he has managed Puglia’s health budget, which runs a deficit, and for his opposition to the privatisation of the water supply system.’
The article does not tell us who criticised him for opposing water privatisation. Nor does it set the attempt to privatise water supplies into either a national or global context. In fact it explains nothing about this criticism but uses it anyway. Such unattributable remarks are unacceptable in a Wikipedia article, so why is it acceptable in our national news and broadcasting service?
There are other parts to the article which seem to me objectionable. For example, in discussing Mr Vendola’s homosexuality and Catholicism, it states:
‘He is also a devout Catholic, and has no problem combining his faith with his sexuality. “Catholicism is like my homosexuality, like my political beliefs,” he says, “All these things are part of my identity.”
The quote is simply a reformulation of the original sentence. There is no attempt to actually explain how Mr Vendola reconciles these things. Since the article has chosen to highlight this element to the story, about an up-and-coming governor from Puglia and his beliefs, I think it hardly unreasonable to expect this.
Similarly, when attempting to ‘balance’ the article with some people who do not believe that Mr Vendola is the next Obama, rather than actually investigating the criticisms rendered by the chosen opponent, Rocco Palese, it simply gives over space to polemic, which goes unchallenged by the author of the piece.
I am indifferent to Vendola. I suspect that he is just another social democrat with a communist past and a fetish for identity politics, but I don’t know. My point in raising these issues was not to slap the BBC about for being left-wing or right-wing; it was to criticise the quality of reporting and the style of writing. It is my view that such an approach is near-universal when it comes to reporting on foreign countries. Rather than actually explaining, it simply asserts.
This approach to studying history has left us with endless vapid truisms about how Hitler and Mussolini ‘did some good things’ (often a reference to the autobahns and the trains running on time). Addressing foreign affairs in the same way is likely to leave us little better armed with understanding.
I’m not sure how many people consistently read news from abroad, except perhaps for the odd war or famine. My impression is that it isn’t that many. So what does it matter?
Superficiality encourages superficiality. Not everyone is an original thinker (certainly not me). It should surely be a consideration that, imbibed in quantities however small over a period of years, this damages any attempt at a consistent, collective approach to politics? This is how people end up professing love for the NHS and social welfare but joining the far right, whose real record when in office shows them to be more gung-ho privateers than the Tories. Repetition of assertion rather than explanation is plain dangerous.
It is even more dangerous than the annoying and endlessly self-referential witterings of Polly Toynbee, Martin Kettle and Jackie Whatserface, who are at least aiming at an audience already involved in their cosseted little world. Though, it must be said, they are equally dangerous in restricting the political consciousness of the Labour-voting type, not to mention by name any prolific young Labourite bloggers.
We can return to the Marxist trope that being determines consciousness – and in a great many cases that is true. Class background, the conditions of current struggle, how isolated one is from that and other formative influences all have a much greater part to play than the media do, I believe. But that small part is still worth focusing on, just as we focus on everything else – actual injustice, workers’ rights or discrimination – as a means to lay the path to a better future.
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