[Media-watch] Caught in the Matrix

[David Miller]

Monday, 26 April 2004, 2:57 pm
Opinion: David Miller
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0404/S00206.htm
Caught in the Matrix
By David Miller

Political debate in the mainstream in the US and UK increasingly resembles
the dystopian vision encapsulated in the film the Matrix. Here the reality
of human bondage to the system is disguised by a sophisticated virtual
reality ñ the matrix ñ from which it is difficult, to break free.

In matrix world Iraq had and may still have Weapons of Mass Destruction. In
the real world it did not. In matrix world there were links between Iraq and
Al- Qaeda. In the real world there were not. In matrix world Lord Hutton is
a respected judge who produced an independent report. In the real world
Hutton was a whitewash. In matrix world Katherine Gun and Clare Short are
deeply irresponsible for breaching trust and revealing secret information.
In the real world they blew the whistle on illegal and immoral official
behaviour. 

Too many people who have witnessed the lies and deception of the past couple
of years our leader seem deranged. Blair and his clique seem to have a
tenuous grip on reality. How can it be - people wonder - that they can go on
and on and on about Weapons of mass destruction when even the head of the
Iraq Survey Group has concluded that they probably never existed? How can
they appear to take so seriously statements that most of us now know are
built on foundations no more secure than the shifting sands of the Iraqi
deserts which they no longer even pretend to search?

The attack on Iraq has revealed as never before the yawning gulf between the
political elite and the rest of us. It discloses an increasing separation
between 'matrix world' - where official pronouncements are treated with some
seriousness, even if subject to criticism - and 'real world' where their
lies are seen through and their crimes recognised. Matrix world and real
world exist in a kind of parallel universe. But the matrix is not entirely
hermetically sealed from the real world. Every so often the distance between
the two becomes too great and the matrix has to readjust. In the film itself
this is denoted by a glitch in the matrix where the character played by
Keanu Reeves sees the same black cat twice within seconds. Take the case of
the Hutton report. After Lord Hutton had finished reading his prepared
statement the matrix appeared to be performing its work. The government was
cleared of impropriety and the BBC damned. Tony Blair appeared almost
immediately in the House of Commons his face split by a victorious grin. But
Hutton's report was just too efficient and the real world started to crash
in to the edges of the matrix. Within hours the relief was gone and even key
sections of matrix world were able to show their disbelief. The next day's
Independent cleared the front page leaving acres of white space and the
single word 'Whitewash'. Blair's key ally Peter Mandelson regretfully tried
to recuperate the defeat for the matrix; 'It was as if we won a football
match 5-0 but the reporters covering it decided it was a draw and a couple
of days later decided we had lost.'[1]

When former minister Clare Short made allegations about UK involvement in
spying on the UN Secretary General the matrix shuddered again. Showing their
penchant for footballing metaphors, an anonymous Blair 'aide' said "It was
as if we were playing football and someone suddenly pulled out a knife.'[2]
For them, this is a game. A game with civilised rules. To point out a breach
of the rules is itself a breach of the rules. The 'great game' of power
politics necessitates suppressing uncomfortable facts, not least of which is
its lethal consequences, especially for people with brown skins. Their game
of football towers over the knife puller in its barbarity leaving up to
40,000 dead including over 10,000 civilians. Their deaths are so
inconsequential that they are airbrushed from the mainstream.

Yet increasingly whole sections of the population are breaking from the
common sense fostered by our rulers. The phenomenon was visible on the
streets of London as thousands protested against the Bush visit in November
2003. It was the day after the bombings against British interests in
Istanbul. TV journalists repeatedly asked demonstrators the former dread
question about 'playing into the hands of terrorists'. But protestor after
protestor responded by saying that Bush and Blair were to blame for the
bombings. Even more dramatically, the Aznar government in Spain was swept
from office by similar discontent, reportedly spread partly by word of
mouth, email and text message - but also crucially by a counter common sense
shared instinctively by increasing sections of the population. The
conclusion to draw from this is that the ideological strength of our rulers
is wavering as their common sense is challenged more and more consistently
from below. The more this happens, the more desperate they become and the
more extreme the lies. Lies and the propaganda machinery necessary to
produce them are, in other words, built into the very fabric of neo-liberal
governance.

What we are seeing in the UK are the birth pains of the neo-liberal
political order - the institutionalisation of lying and the destruction of
democracy. In order for it to flourish neo-liberalism needs to foster a
fundamentally distorted version of reality - the matrix. This version must
be believed or at least signed up to by the political elite in the
Conservative and Labour parties (and the Democracts and Republicans) in the
military and intelligence agencies and in the Transnational corporations.

The mainstream media are also part of the system and dissent is generally
kept within manageable bounds. What about the Mirror and the Independent and
the Guardian, say the defenders of the status quo? Isn't it in fact the case
that the media have 'taken up the role of "critique" of all governments
liberal and conservative, that was once the province of the left parties'[3]
as the 'eloquent apologist for the invasion of Iraq'[4] and theorist of the
'market state', Philip Bobbit puts it. Or, as another Blair advisor, Anthony
Giddens has argued: 'I doubt that corruption is more common in democratic
countries than it used to be - rather, in an information society it is more
visible than it used to be. The emergence of a global information society is
a powerful democratising force'[5]

Typically such grand statements mask an almost total lack of evidence on how
the media actually perform (never mind how they legitimise or undermine
great power) and are but a further indication of the close integration of
key sections of academia into the power elite - into the matrix. Just for
the record, empirical studies and all the available evidence shoes that the
mainstream media are systematically if variably biased in favour of official
pronouncements.[6] There is dissent at the margins and dissent has been more
prominent in the UK media over Iraq then in the gulf war of 1991. But as the
stunning analyses produced by Media-lens show, there are not only limits to
the dissent possible in even anti-war papers, but the much of the coverage
in papers like the Guardian and even the Independent conformed pretty well
to the official consensus in the run up to the attack on Iraq. The
Diplomatic editor of the independent, the self proclaimed 'arch sceptic' on
WMD on the paper, notes that: 'no one would have risked having this paper,
or probably any other,' question the existence of any serious WMD in Iraq
because 'The whole government-generated consensus was the other way' and
'you have to remember how strong the consensus was on Iraq's weapons
capability' [7] This speaks eloquently of the limits of possible dissent in
the mainstream media, but also of a constipated and unresponsive political
system.

Wholesale lying and misinformation by the political elite has been learnt in
part from the private sector and the PR industry which has done so much to
advance the interests of mobile global capital.[8] Unsurprisingly the PR
industry is now being welcomed into the heart of government in the UK.
Practically unnoticed in the mainstream, the Phillis report opened the way
for PR agencies to bid for government contracts. Phillis abolished the
Government Information and Communication Service which has acted as a brake
on spin. This was unsurprising since the committee was heavily weighted with
private sector PR agencies keen to open up a relatively new market.[9]
Within weeks the Scottish Executive had led the way by advertising a
contract to cover advertising, web design and PR for itself, ten agencies,
23 health bodies, 35 quangos and several government bodies. These include
the PR activities of the Scottish parliament. The obvious structural
conflict of interest if the Parliament, to which the Executive is supposed
to be accountable, has the same PR agency, appears not to be a barrier. The
contract is unsurprisingly regarded as 'highly attractive by the advertising
and PR industry. [10]

Meanwhile in Iraq on of the few British companies to get a contract from the
US administration is Bell Pottinger, part of the Chime PR conglomerate. It
'will oversee a massive public relations and advertising drive to begin the
transformation of Iraq into a successful democracy' reports the
Guardian.[11] Actually what Chime will do is attempt to ensure that
neoliberal 'market democracy' is constructed. This is after all what the
company headed by Lord Tim Bell has done in the UK and elsewhere since
itscreation in 1989.[12]

We live in an age of fakery; spin in government and PR manipulation in
business are used to force through unpopular policies or undermine
democratic decision making. All over the world our rulers are attempting to
hold the matrix together with ever extending propaganda programmmes. The GM
food lobby leads the way. In Johannesburg the third world farmers
demonstrating at the UN Summit on Sustainable Development in favour of GM
foods were 'fake'. Bussed in, marshalled, press released and given T shirts
with English slogans, a language they didn't speak.[13] On the internet, GM
interests have created 'fake persuaders' to manipulate debate on scientific
discussion groups and marginalise their critics.[14] In the US, the Bush
administration pays actors to produce fake news reports in favour of its
policy on Medicare [15] In Turkey BP's consultation on the Baku, Tiblisi
Ceyhan pipeline included a telephone survey of a Turkish village of
Hacibayram that, 'had been deserted for many years, its houses having fallen
into ruins. There were neither telephones nor anyone to answer them.'[16] In
the UK the Blair government 'consultation' on GM simply ignored the
overwhelming opposition of the public. It was, in other words, a fake
consultation.

At root the fakery and the misinformation are the necessary bi-product of
neo-liberal politics. In the post war period in conditions approaching
social democracy, popular demands had some impact on the governmental
apparatus whether Labour or Tory. The historic compromise between capital
and labour which led to the introduction of the welfare state, the NHS and
the nationalisation of key industries meant there was some link ñ however
tenuous ñ between popular demands and political and economic
decision-making. Under neo-liberalism the main parties are indistinguishable
and their policies have no popular basis. They must be imposed by
manipulation, fakery and deception.

The accelerating propaganda programmes and the machinery to put them into
practice needed to attempt to keep the matrix functioning. But the decline
of trust in governments, and the consequent disengagement from the matrix
manifested by millions of people across the globe are, as Noam Chomsky has
put it 'natural consequences of the specific design of "market democracy"
under business rule'. [17] The lies in other words will not end when Blair
or Bush go, they are the necessary product of the neo-liberal political
system. The necessity to lie will only be undermined when governments start
to enact the will of the people, in other words after the current system is
fundamentally reformed.

**************

Thanks to Emma Miller and Jean Shaoul

David Miller is Editor of Tell me Lies: Propaganda and media distortion in
the attack on Iraq, Pluto, 2004
http://staff.stir.ac.uk/david.miller/publications/Tellmelies.html

FOOTNOTES:


1.    Patrick Wintour 'Mandelson warns Iraq rebels Dissident Labour MPs told
they are harming PM's integrity and deliberately endangering chances of
re-election' 
The Guardian Wednesday February 11, 2004.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,3605,1145292,00.html

2.    Andrew Grice, 'UN SPYING ROW: WHY SHORT ROW MAY YET BE GOOD NEWS FOR
PM' The Independent 'February 28, 2004, Saturday, p. 5.
http://argument.independent.co.uk/regular_columnists/andrew_grice/story.jsp?
story=495915

3.    Philip Bobbitt 'Spooks and spin doctors The secret services and the
media are mutating, with each becoming more like the other ' The Guardian
Wednesday July 2, 2003
http://media.guardian.co.uk/iraqandthemedia/story/0,12823,989098,00.html

4.    GOPAL BALAKRISHNAN 'ALGORITHMS OF WAR' New Left Review 23,
September-October 2003 http://www.newleftreview.net/nlr25701.shtml

5.    Anthony Giddens, 'The Runaway World Debate: Democracy and Third Way
politics' http://www.lse.ac.uk/Giddens/RWDdemocracyandthirdway.htm

6.    'War Coverage and cover up', Media Tenor, April 2003
http://www.mediatenor.com/Iraq/sld001.htm ;David Miller 'Taking sides' The
Guardian Tuesday April 22, 2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/analysis/story/0,3604,940770,00.html; Justin Lewis
'Biased broadcasting corporation' The Guardian Friday July 4, 2003
http://media.guardian.co.uk/bbc/story/0,7521,991216,00.html

7.    MEDIA LENS MEDIA ALERT 22nd October 2003 MEDIA ALERT: OUT ON A LIMB -
PART 2 Senior Source at The Independent on Iraq, WMD and Editorials,
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/2003/031022_Out_On_Limb_2.HTM

8.    Miller, David and Dinan, William (2000) ëThe rise of the PR industry
in Britain 1979-1998í European Journal of Communication, 15(1) March: 5-35.
http://staff.stir.ac.uk/david.miller/publications/riseofpr.pdf

9.    David Miller 'The end of public service information: The Phillis
review of government communications' Free Press, No.138, February 2004
http://keywords.dsvr.co.uk/freepress/body.phtml?doctype=&id=646

10.    See V. Rodrick and M. Aitken, 'Outrage as McConnell spends £100
million on spin', Mail on Sunday, 29 February 2004, p13; Sharon Ward, 'Firms
to fight for share of £100m advertising and PR contract' The Scotsman, Sat 6
Mar 2004, http://business.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=261462004

11.    Claire Cozens 'Bell takes up Iraq challenge' The Guardian, Friday
March 12, 2004 
http://media.guardian.co.uk/iraqandthemedia/story/0,12823,1167420,00.html

12.    Mark Hollingsworth The Ultimate spin doctor: The life and fast ties
of Tim Bell, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1997.

13.    Jonathan Matthews 'The Fake Parade' Freezerbox, 12.3.2002
http://www.freezerbox.com/archive/article.asp?id=254

14.    George Monbiot 'The fake persuaders Corporations are inventing people
to rubbish their opponents on the internet' The Guardian Tuesday May 14,
2002 http://www.guardian.co.uk/internetnews/story/0,7369,715159,00.html

15.    Robert Pear 'U.S. Videos, for TV News, Come Under Scrutiny', New York
Times March 15, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/15/politics/15VIDE.html?th

16.    International Fact-Finding Mission, Preliminary Report Azerbaijan,
Georgia, Turkey Pipeline Project, Turkey Section Campagna per la Riforma
della Banca Mondiale, Kurdish Human Rights Project, The Corner House, Ilisu
Dam Campaign, PLATFORM, August 2002
http://www.bakuceyhan.org.uk/publications/pipelines-factfinding-turkey.pdf

17.    Noam Chomsky, 'Market Democracy in a Neoliberal Order: Doctrines and
Reality' Davie Lecture, University of Cape Town, May 1997
http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/chomksydavie.htm





 

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