[Media-watch] {SPAM?} Thanks

Fri Apr 2 00:27:38 BST 2004

Dear List-members,

Thanks to those of you who posted kind words in response to the most recent 'rant', it was nice to see a flurry of media-watch submissions spilling into the Inbox.

Regarding David Miller's reiteration of the 'purpose' of media-watch, here perhaps is one practical tool which everyone can use - faxyourmp (forget if it's dot-com or dot-org) is a cracking facility, you type in your post-code and up comes a big photie of your MP (so beware !), constituency details etc, and an e-mail form to fill in with your complaint, suggestion etc, and they make sure it's sent and received, then follow-up to see if you've had any response etc. It's very easy to use. I'd never ever written to my MP before but have done so twice (one reply so far) and heartily recommend it.

It may be useful, or encouraging for people who are unsure of their command of language, or, as David stated, 'put off by the erudition of some complainants' to remember that the most effective messages to mass-media are short, get straight to the point and use the simplest language possible. Consider radio, which relies so heavily on language, no silence allowed - lengthy, detailed, 'erudite' slabs of knowledge and/or polemic are virtually never aired if submitted by listeners, no matter how esteemed or 'expert' they may be. The constant intrusion of news/traffic/weather updates and regional broadcasting variations mean that (in the case of BBC Radio Scotland) there is no time for 'real', natural debate about anything and the desperation of producers to 'give everyone their say' leads, more often than not, to a 'spoiled broth' where important strands of discussion are left truncated, unexplored. I've submitted many messages to the Riddoch Show, and the ones they've used have always been brief, three short(ish) sentences at most, and if you can manage to work in a bit of humour or a gentle dig at whoever she's interviewing then that seems to increase the chances of your contribution being aired.

I apologise if my 'rants' are outwith the scope of what media-watch was intended to do, but I can't help it - having witnessed the development of the project, and learned so much from it, it's disheartening when it slumps, when the voices trail away and then are quiet. Many years ago, when David Bowie released his 'Scary Monsters' album, the music press went mental, gigantic detailed reviews of the lyrics etc etc, and one critic, Charles Shaar Murray, commented - 'This is a time in which intelligent people do well to be afraid.'  Well, a typical dictionary definition of an 'intellectual' is 'someone who uses his/her mind', and using that definition, most folk would be deeply offended not to be described as 'intellectual'. But we all know that most of us don't use our minds to anywhere near capacity, that that potential will never be fully realised, but conversely, we cannot be fooled all of the time, and it may now be that the success of online projects such as this is starting to have a real effect on broader, public debate, perhaps even starting to undermine the monopoly position hitherto enjoyed by mass-media. 

The 'point' I'm groping towards is that this project, like mass-media itself, is based on language, on simple words being strung together. There are all manner of debates to be had regarding language-use, whether all language is inherently political, whether 'thought' itself is prescribed by the available vocabulary (i.e. 'you can't think the thought if you don't know the word' etc etc). If we choose to take the words written by others and send them to our friends and colleagues, fair enough, especially if the writer has tackled some subject which we aren't 'qualified' to comment upon with any authority, or if the writer has managed to convey a feeling or reaction in a way which we would like to have done, but haven't the ability to. In such cases, 'posting' other folk's work seems entirely reasonable, even generous, and in many cases is a genuine compliment to the original writer. 

But, dear list-members, there is no substitute for your own voice, your own thoughts. Yes, media-watch is not a chat-room, but we've all been witnessing - especially in this past year -how that bloody invasion of Iraq has affected our lives in so many ways, and there comes a point where the sheer frustration caused by seeing such flagrant mass-media duplicity and utter subservience to the liars in Whitehall and Washington becomes painful, unbearable. Of course, it's better to talk to 'real' people face-to-face when it all becomes too much, but many people don't want to talk about war, pain, death etc etc, and no-one can blame them. In most of the responses to my rant there was a clear theme, and that was Time - no time, no space, not enough of it at any rate to devote a chunk to reading this type of thing and 'penning' responses. Many of us never, ever meet people in 'real' life with whom we can discuss this material, it's simply not right to do so, and even when we do, the feeling that we're dong something wrong, something 'conspiratorial' grows stronger with every TERROR ALERT flashing across the screen.

Consider the obscene Press Conference yesterday, hosted by the self-confessedly 'institutionally racist' Metropolitan Police - two of the Yard's finest were brought out to display, for the benefit of the cameras ( those of you who react badly to strobe-like lighting should look away NOW !!) a big plastic bag. That's what it was, a gigantic polly-bag. It wasn't the one which they found, the one which contained a half-ton of ammonium nitrate, but it was a big polly-bag just like the one they did find, so it was important we should all know exactly what such bags look like. Further to the farcical Press call, the mainstream broadcasters then dutifully pursued the unwitting P&R folk representing potential 'ACME Terrorism Suppliers' such as B&Q, Homebase etc, demanding to know if they were monitoring purchases of this devilish material.

So, how does all of this affect us directly ? Well, Al Qaeda 'probably', 'almost certainly' has cells in Scotland. Yes, indeed. Last Sunday (March 28th), on the 'Scotland Today'  6.30 news, up popped a Mr David Capitanchik. 'Who he ?' said moi, dribbling beer all over my kebab, and, obligingly (almost in a kismet-type manner) the wee banner flashed onto the screen, and thus did it say,  'Terrorism Expert.'  So, me staggered upstairs, 'googled' Mr Capitanchik, and very interesting reading it is too. I recommend you do the same if you want to find out who the 'experts' on Terrorism are in Scotland i.e. the 'experts' who are called upon by Scottish Media to give their informed opinion on the threat we currently face. Mr Capitanchik was not holding up a gigantic polly-bag (to be fair, one man, however learned or expert, can never hope to be a match for two of the Yard's finest and expertly-trained polly-bag-elevators) but one was left with the distinct impression that, had Mr C been willing to do so, some other 'expert' would have been drafted in to assist him in the task - 'They're coming for us, and they're going to use big gigantic polly-bags, just like this one !!'

Al Qaeda in Scotland. They must be the guys who drew the short straws, the ones who weren't assigned a hot-bed of fundamentalist/sectarian hatred to draw succour and public support from.  (Doh !!) But worry not, the authorities are on to them, and soon we'll all be asking 'Is that your bag ?', 'Is that your dog ?', 'Are you reading that paper you're sitting on ?' 

Orwell could never have made this stuff up. His work has been mis-read and abused. '1984' wasn't a dystopian fiction, as it's so often patly (yes, I mean 'patly', not 'aptly') described. It was the publisher who changed Orwell's original title, '1948'. Orwell wasn't trying to be prophetic, visionary etc etc. He was describing the bombed-out London he knew, the city of rations and misery, and behind the 'stiff upper lip' which had been drummed into him he knew, thanks to his propaganda work with the Beeb, that all was language and language was all as far as the 'masses' were concerned.  Me's no Orwell-scholar, nor pretending to be so, but my humble take is that '1984' was never intended as a prophecy, it was, like Animal Farm, a dark cartoon, a 'fairy-story'. His preoccupation was language first and foremost, honesty next, because he knew that the latter could never ever happen unless the former was capable of accomodating it. And so, right now, we on this wee list, we send each other bits and pieces, we perhaps attach short comments on our own 'take' on things, but any hope we may have that something like 'truth' will ever be a priority for media, despite our complaints and lobbying, is pure delusion.  'War on Terror' is, de facto, a nonsense, a non-sequiter. (I wish I knew more Latin, French or some other language to illustrate how mad and sad and bad it is, but I don't.)  Both are abstract nouns, and so the 'war' is abstract, it is not, in its essentials, 'real'.  That fundamental fact has now been glossed-over, has been allowed to disappear from the debate. CH4 is perhaps the last terrestrial broadcaster which still refers to the 'so-called' War on Terror - for all other outlets it has now become a fact that there is a 'War' and it is on 'Terror'. 

The mass-media will have to accomodate the net-writers, the 'posters', eventually, and occasionally does, and in time the 'rules' of journalism will change, they will have to. But that depends on the efforts of 'real' writers i.e. not salaried journalists, to push hard, to develop an entirely new form of journalism which is, in it's essentials, is human and hearfelt, not corporate-funded and edited-to-death.

And that means you. 

Regardless of what you feel may be your limitations writing-wise, punctuation, paragraphs, grammar, whatever, it does not matter. What matters is that people speak, tell their truth, speak back to those who disagree, and keep doing it, even if it's just for ten minutes a night - most humans happily spend much longer than that sitting on the toilet pan. So, every time you're on the pan and enjoying it, think about cutting it short (so to speak) and getting online, sounding off, if not via this site, then the others which are out there, write to that councillor, that MP, whoever, just do a wee tiny thing, it'll make you feel better, and who knows, you might end up getting to know people, even if it is 'virtually' - we all know, by now, relationships, families which have been changed because of people sitting alone at night, tapping in words, just wee words, just language...

But, until that happens, the job of 'discussing' what's really going on is paid for, by all of us. We pay the government to fund that thing called the BBC, and theirs is the task of revealing, exploring and detailing the often unpleasant facts about the world, the facts we are in no position for find out for ourselves, the facts many of us would much rather ignore. Today, on BBC News 24, I noticed that they've started running their self-congratulatory 'ads' every half-hour or so, those ones where tasteful, 'arty' shots of well-kent correspondents are jazzily spliced along to some rousing, urgent music while the narrator sounds-off about the Beeb having 200 correspondents in 150 countries. Thankfully, they didn't feature a graphic of a rotating Earth with a United Kingdom the same size as Africa, but they didn't have to - the immovable gravitas of the voice did that perfectly. Is 'Corporate Masturbation' an established term ? 

(Well, it is now !)

I'm not sending any more 'rants' unless other people start sending them as well.

So there ! 

Goodnight !

Best Regards,

Ian Brotherhood

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