[Media-watch] No longer obeying orders

[David J McKnight]

     No Longer Obeying Orders
     <http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/10/06/no-longer-obeying-orders/>

Filed under:

   * interviews and debates
     <http://www.monbiot.com/archives/category/interviews-and-debates/>
   * media <http://www.monbiot.com/archives/category/media/>

Speech to the Enviromedia conference, Johannesburg, South Africa.

By George Monbiot, 5th October 2004.

I would like to begin by discussing the context in which all journalists
operate.

If we concentrate, for the moment, on the mainstream media, there is a
very limited number of outlets that I would broadly describe as ?free?.
By free I don?t mean that the product is given away. I mean that it is
free from the direct influence of private proprietors. I will give you a
couple of examples from my own country.

The most famous is the BBC. It is not free of all influence, by any
means. It is run by the state and financed by a tax on the ownership of
televisions, called the licence fee. From time to time it is
spectacularly and disastrously disciplined by the government, generally
acting in concert with the right-wing press. It operates in a hostile
environment, and the perspectives of its enemies ? the enemies of free
speech ? often inform its coverage of the world?s affairs. But there is
no proprietor to tell it ?you cannot do such and such because that
offends the interests of my shareholders?.

My second example is the newspaper I write for, the Guardian. Like its
sister paper, the Observer, it is owned by an organisation called the
Scott Trust, which in turn is run (but not owned) by a board of liberal
trustees, among whom are a couple of Guardian journalists. It is not
wholly free from the influence of power, partly because it relies for
much of its funding from advertisers, partly because it has to recruit
many of its journalists from other newspapers, who bring with them the
political baggage they have accumulated on their journey to the promised
land. It tends to be close ? often too close in my view ? to the Labour
Party. But there is no one to tell us what to think, and no one to say
you may not write this or that because it will damage my interests.

But media such as the Guardian and the BBC are unusual, in that they are
big, they are well-funded and they don?t belong to anyone. In almost all
other cases, the big well-funded media are owned by corporations or rich
individuals.

Now to own a national newspaper or television or radio station, you need
to be rich; very rich indeed. I once saw the costings for the takeover
of a tabloid newspaper: it required a minimum capitalisation of £400
million: almost four billion rand. You need, in other words, to be a
multi-millionaire.

Now what multi-millionaires want is what everybody wants: a better world
for people like themselves. A better world for multi-millionaires is, by
definition, a worse world for everybody else, for the simple reason that
it relies upon vast levels of inequality. They don?t want everyone to
become a multi-millionaire: in such circumstances there would be no
point in being one. They want to remain richer and more powerful than
everyone else.

So they have a problem. Their interests are plainly at variance with
those of their readers or viewers, who are much poorer than they are.
They can?t instruct their editors to write ?we want a better world for
people like us, and a worse world for people like you.? What they must
do instead is to present a picture of the world which favours their
interests. In other words, they must misrepresent the key issues. They
must misrepresent the choices we face. They must portray those choices
which are in our interests as being against our interests, and portray
those choices which are in their interests as being in our interests.
They must create a world which is in many ways the opposite of the real one.

This is not to say that the proprietor is on the phone every day to the
editor saying ?I demand you distort your coverage in my favour.? Though
it does happen. I would like to quote from the autobiography of Max
Hastings, formerly editor of the Daily Telegraph, which was, at the
time, owned by the multi-millionaire Conrad Black.

?Like most tycoons, Conrad was seldom unconscious of his
responsibilities as a member of the rich men?s trade union. Those who
have built large fortunes seldom lose their nervousness that some
ill-wisher will find means to take their money away from them. They feel
an instinctive sympathy for fellow multi-millionaires, however their
fortunes have been achieved. ... Not infrequently, adverse comment in
our newspaper about some fellow mogul provoked Conrad?s wrath. Our
excellent art critic, Richard Dorment, once wrote scathingly about the
malign influence on the international art market of the vastly rich
Walter Annenberg ? It took some days of patient argument to dissuade
Conrad from insisting upon Dorment?s execution for speaking unkindly of
his old friend Walter.?

But normally such direct intervention is unnecessary. The proprietor
appoints an editor in his own image: the corporate god?s representative
on earth. That editor knows precisely where the proprietor?s interests
lie, and precisely what assists them and what harms them. He will stay
in his job as long as he continues to interpret them correctly. And so
will the journalists who work for him. On the whole, no one needs to be
told what to do. You very quickly evolve an accurate conception of where
the limits are, and what you have to do to work within them.

This is the environment in which almost all mainstream journalists work.

It is not likely to improve very much. As the neoliberal, market-driven
model of governance sweeps all before it, no one in government seems
brave enough to challenge the multi-millionaires. And of all the
multi-millionaires, the owners of the newspapers and media channels are
the most powerful. When they say jump, governments respond ?off which
high building?? When they demand deregulation, they get it. When they
demand the right to build their media empires to the point at which they
can almost monopolise public perceptions, the government lets them do
so. Governments don?t tell them what to do. They tell governments what
to do. Their growing power is a major impediment to democracy. It is a
major constraint on human freedom. But if you want to work in the
mainstream press, these are, unless you are very lucky ? and I consider
myself very lucky ? the circumstances in which you will have to operate.

A journalist who is concerned about the destruction of the environment
will by definition find herself at odds with the prevailing media
culture. This is because the interests of the men who own the media
don?t end with the media. Many of them have a direct financial
involvement in dozens of different kinds of business. And as the quote
about Conrad Black suggests, even if they don?t, they associate with
those who do. And multi-millionaires who run, for example, extractive
industries or public utilities, want exactly what the multi-millionaires
who run the media want: complete freedom to swing their fist, whether or
not your nose is in the way. They want, in other words, deregulation.

So let us picture a journalist who is interested in the environment, and
who works for a newspaper run by a rich man with rich friends. Let?s say
she wants to write about climate change, and that she knows that much of
it results from the carbon dioxide emissions produced by coal-fired
power stations. Straight away she runs into a problem: the power
stations are owned and run by members of the rich men?s trade union. She
has several options.

The first is to publish and be damned: to write an article which tells
the whole story of climate change: what it is, where it is coming from,
what its effects will be, what should be done about it. In doing so, she
would make a clear connection between climate change and the way our
power is generated. In determining what should be done about it, she
would call for a change in government policy, to phase out coal- burning
power stations of the kind owned by her boss or her boss?s friends. When
she is challenged by her editor, she will stick to her guns and say:
this is how the world is, so this is how I should write about it. In
doing so, she will make her immediate superiors unhappy. She will make
her editor unhappy. She will make her proprietor unhappy. She will
damage her prospects of promotion. She might even damage her prospects
of keeping her job.

Her second option is to write three-quarters of the story. She will
identify what climate change is, where it is coming from and what its
effects will be, but she will, because she knows how much trouble it
would cause her, stop short of recommending what should be done. This
the kind of self-censorship in which most journalists engage on most
working days. The pressure to cop out at the end of the article can be
immense. I was once commissioned to write an article for a well-known
British tabloid, about the contribution to climate change made by sports
utility vehicles. Before I wrote it, the section editor quizzed me about
what it would say. I told him that I would summarise the research
concerning the fuel consumption of SUVs, and how that consumption was
contributing to climate change.

?And what will your conclusion be??, he asked. ?There should be more
research??

?No!?, I said. ?All the important research has already been done. We
already know what the answers are. We should discourage people from
driving SUVs by taxing them heavily.?

?Er, right,? he said.

Well I wrote my article, and concluded that SUVs should be heavily
taxed. To my surprise it was published. But when I read the conclusion
to the piece, it said ?plainly what we need is more research.?

By such means, environmental problems, even when they are acknowledged
as existing within the sphere of possible realities, are constantly
deferred into an ever- receding future. They are repeatedly portrayed as
things that might happen, rather than as things that ARE happening. And
this permits the reader or the viewer to imagine that the impacts of
environmental destruction might happen one day to someone else, but will
never happen to us. Nothing could be so corrosive of the idea that we
should act today, rather than waiting until somebody else, in some
imaginary future, is prompted to respond.

Well, not quite nothing. There?s another means for journalists to let
the multimillionaires off the hook, and that is something called
Corporate Social Responsibility. Instead of calling for governments to
regulate the corporations, our journalist can call for the corporations
to regulate themselves, which is precisely what the corporations want.

They want it for one simple reason: it doesn?t work. It doesn?t work
because it is voluntary. As soon as it becomes inconvenient for a
company to reduce its carbon emissions or stop dumping pollutants in the
river, it can drop its commitment to do so. Please do not forget that
the directors of publicly-listed corporations have a legal duty ? its
called their ?fiduciary duty? ? to maximise the financial returns to
their shareholders. They can be disqualified, they can even go to
prison, if they don?t uphold it. Now in a situation in which they are
faced with a choice of neglecting their fiduciary duty or neglecting
their voluntary, unenforceable commitments to corporate social
responsibility, what decision do you think they will take?

All the evidence we have shows that purely voluntary commitments aren?t
worth the paper they?re written on. A recent study by the Organisation
of Economic Development and Cooperation, for example, shows that
companies which claimed they would voluntarily reduce their carbon
emissions performed no better than companies which had made no such
promise, unless the government had made credible threats of major
penalties if they didn?t clean up their act.

Another study, commissioned by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group,
showed that the so-called ?Responsible Care? programme adopted by the US
chemicals industry in 1990 has resulted in no decline whatsoever in
chemical releases into the environment and the deaths of workers through
chemical poisoning.

Similarly, in the United Kingdom, when the Conservative government
decided in 1996 to switch from the regulation of health and safety to
voluntary compliance, and reduced enforcement activities by 25%, the
number of deaths at work immediately rose by 20%: the first rise in more
than 20 years.

There are plenty of other examples. The entire corporate social
responsibility agenda is a fraud. It has been developed as a means of
avoiding regulation, by trying to persuade the public that there is no
need for the government to act, because the corporations are acting
already. Study after study shows that the only thing which works is the
threat of legal penalties. And yet the press repeatedly champions
corporate social responsibility as the way forward. It?s not hard to see
why.

So those are options 1 and 2 : enrage your editor, or water down the
message until it?s no longer threatening to the multi-millionaires.

Option 3 is the one taken by most journalists, and that is to ignore the
issue altogether, because it causes more trouble for them than it?s
worth. Most journalists are relatively prosperous. They belong, as a
whole, to the class which can, for the moment at least, buy its way out
of trouble. When the water starts to run out, they are the ones who can
still afford it. When their suburb becomes polluted, they are the ones
who can afford to move. Journalists are among the last people to be
directly affected by environmental destruction, so they can afford to be
complacent about it. Our journalist has a powerful incentive to ignore
it: the potential wrath of her editor. She has no direct incentive to
cover it.

But the options don?t end there. There is a fourth one. This is to deny
it, and to attack the people who draw attention to it. This is the only
option which permits you to cover the environment and actually IMPROVE
your career prospects within a media organisation run by a
multi-millionaire. And journalists all over the world have been jumping
on this opportunity.

Let me give you a couple of examples from my own country. The first is a
series which was broadcast by the television station Channel 4 in 1997,
called Against Nature.

The series argued that there was no environmental problem, that the
whole issue had been invented by environmentalists. It claimed that
environmental activists in rich countries were responsible for the
deprivation and death of millions of children in poor ones. What
impoverished people in the South needed were vast hydroelectric projects
like India?s Narmada Dam, whose construction had been suspended because
of campaigns by First World environmentalists. In their callous
disregard for human welfare and their fetishism of nature, the greens,
it maintained drew their inspiration from the Nazis.

Indian peasants, according to Against Nature, desperately wanted the
Sardar Sarova dam on the Narmada river to be built, in order to get
fresh drinking water.

In reality, the Narmada Dam had no drinking water component. It will
divert water away from peasant villages and towards the sugar
plantations of the richest and most politically powerful people in the
state. Its construction was halted not, as the series claimed, by
Northern environmentalists, but by the Indian Supreme Court, in response
to a suit filed by a local people?s movement. Indeed, since 1988,
hundreds of thousands of local people have been protesting against the
dam, and the drowning of villages, risk of floods, corruption and fraud
it involves. They were not mentioned by Against Nature. I could go on
and on, cataloging an extraordinary number of unsupported allegations
and straightforward distortions. But this series was given three
one-hour prime slots on Sunday evenings. After it was broadcast, the
Independent Television Commission handed down one of the most damning
rulings it has ever made: the programme makers ?distorted by selective
editing? the views of the environmentalists they interviewed and
?misled? them about the ?content and purpose of the programmes when they
agreed to take part.? Channel 4 was forced to make a humiliating prime
time apology. But this did not stop the series from being sold to
television stations all over the world.

The second example is the publication of a book by the Danish
statistician Bjorn Lomborg, called the Sceptical Environmentalist. This
book also claimed that most environmental problems had either been
exaggerated or made up altogether, and that even where they did exist,
there was no point in seeking to do anything about them. Now there have
been thousands, probably tens of thousands, of books about the
environment published in Britain, but none of them has had anything like
the media treatment this one received. You couldn?t go anywhere without
seeing front page extracts from the book, high-profile interviews with
the author, programmes presented by him. He became an overnight hero for
the corporate media, and they pushed and pushed his book as hard as they
could.

Needless to say, while championing his scepticism towards the claims of
environmentalists, they applied no scepticism of their own towards the
claims he made. Yet they were plainly in need of rigorous examination.
To give you just one example, Lomborg claimed to have calculated that
global warming will cause $5 trillion of damage, and would cost $4
trillion to ameliorate. The money, he insisted, would be better spent
elsewhere.

The idea that we can attach a single, meaningful figure to the costs
incurred by global warming is simply laughable. Climate change is a
non-linear process, whose likely impacts cannot be totted up like the
expenses for a works outing to the seaside. Even those outcomes we can
predict are impossible to cost. We now know, for example, that many of
the Himalayan glaciers which feed the Ganges, the Bramaputra, the
Mekong, the Yangtze and the other great Asian rivers are likely to
disappear within 40 years. If these rivers dry up during the irrigation
season, then the rice production which currently feeds over one third of
humanity collapses, and the world goes into net food deficit. If Lomborg
believes he can put a price on that, he has plainly spent too much of
his life with his calculator and not enough with human beings. But no
such points have ever been raised about his book in the corporate media.

***

So I have looked at the choices facing a journalist working for the
corporate media, and at the pressures placed upon that journalist to
diminish, dismiss or deny the dangers of environmental destruction in
order to keep her bosses happy. But that isn?t the only problem we face.
There?s an even bigger one, and this is that the environmentalist
message contradicts almost everything else we have been led to believe.

Let me mention some of the founding myths of industrial society. These
myths are dominant in both capitalist and communist thought.

The first one is that there is no limit to human potential. We can be
anything we want to be, we can do anything we want to do. Our potential
awaits only further economic and technological development. One day
everyone will be able to run a four-miniute mile. One day everyone will
live to be 200. One day, if we choose, we could all abandon the planet
we live on and move to another one. As economies and technologies
develop, we can expect to see the welfare of everyone on earth improve:
what the neoliberal economists call the rising tide which lifts all boats.

This leads to the second myth: the confusion of progress with
progressivity. In other words, the assumption that industrial and
post-industrial development will automatically distribute wealth, rather
than concentrating it.

Both these myths are entirely dependent on a third one: that the
resources required to bring this utopia about are infinite. The world
can keep providing for its people, however many there are, and however
much they want to consume. In the capitalist mythology, the market will
magically cause new resources to materialise when the old ones run out.
In the communist mythology, the free development of each leading to free
development of all will mystically discharge the same function. They are
both variants of a far older belief: we might have messed up our chances
of survival, but the Lord, or the gods, or the spirits will nevertheless
provide. Today we say: technology will provide, the market will provide.
We place our faith in them just as we once placed our faith in God. The
industrial worldview, in either of its dominant forms, is entirely
incapable of engaging with the problem of finity.

All these beliefs are plainly irrational, and bear no relation to what
is actually happening on earth. They overlook some basic facts of
material existence. Let me list a few.

Basic Fact Number One:

At any rate of use, non-renewable resoures are, by definition, depleted.
They will not come back. As soon as you begin to use one, the clock
starts ticking towards the day on which it becomes exhausted. This
applies even to the non-renewable resource on which the entire modern
economy is built: namely petroleum. Global oil production will soon
reach its peak and then decline, at which point the Age of Growth will
give way to the Age of Entropy.

Not immediately, of course, but unless another source of energy, just as
cheap, with just as high a ratio of ?energy return on energy invested?
is discovered or developed, there will be a gradual decline in our
ability to generate the growth required to keep the debt-based financial
system from collapsing.

Those of us who are alive today have been lucky enough to have been
brought up in an age of energy surplus. This is a remarkable historical
and biological anomaly. A supply of oil that exceeds demand has
permitted us to do what all species strive to do ? expand the ecological
space we occupy ? but without encountering direct competition for the
limiting resource. The surplus has led us to believe in the possibility
of universal peace and universal comfort, for a global population of 6
billion, or 9 or 10. If kindness and comfort are, as I suspect, the
results of an energy surplus, then, as the supply contracts, we could be
expected to start fighting once again like cats in a sack. In the
presence of entropy, virtue might be impossible.

Basic Fact Number Two:

Beyond a certain rate of use, renewable resources are depleted. There is
no clearer example of the limits of human action than the paradoxical
fact that the global resources which are running out first are not the
non-renewable ones, but the renewable ones. Fisheries, forests, fresh
water, soil. Their decline is our momento mori, our reminder of the
limits of finity, of the fact that we and the resources on which we
depend are mortal: a fact which all of us would prefer to ignore.

Basic Fact Number Three:

Beyond a certain rate of exploitation, renewable resources become
non-renewable resources. If you hit them too hard, you destroy the
ecosystem which permits them to regenerate. This we have seen already in
certain fisheries and forests and hydrological systems.

Basic Fact Number Four:

The earth?s capacity to absorb pollution is limited. This applies to the
atmosphere as much as it does to our rivers. Beyond a certain level of
carbon dioxide emissions, human life becomes impossible. The upper limit
for temperature rises this century predicted by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change is six degrees centigrade. The last time there
was a global temperature rise of six degrees was at the end of the
Permian period, 250 million years ago. The result was an almost complete
collapse of biological productivity: the total mass of biological
matter. Around 90% of the earth?s species were wiped out. No animal
bigger than a medium-sized pig survived.

But already several eminent climatologists are challenging the
Intergovernmental Panel?s figures: on the grounds that they are too low.
Some are predicting an upper range of 7 or 10 or 12 degrees of climate
change this century.

Basic Fact Number Five:

The system which governs our economic lives, which we call capitalism,
is itself is a limited resource. Capitalism is a pyramid scheme. Let me
try to explain this.

It is a built on a system called fractional reserve banking. Almost the
entire money supply ? generally, depending on where you live, between 90
and 95% of it ? is issued not by the state, but the commercial banks. It
is issued not in the form of notes and coins, but in the form of loans.
Between 90 and 95% of the money supply, in other words, is debt.

To pay off the debt that is issued today, the banks must issue more debt
tomorrow, and so on and so forth. In a world which is not based on
material realities, the world which might exist, for an example, in a
computer model, it could expand for ever. But in the real world, the
supply of money is linked to material realities called collateral: the
real wealth which gives the loans meaning, and without which the whole
scheme would be exposed as a fraud. Eventually the amount of lending
must inevitably exceed the availability of meaningful collateral, for
the simple reason that the material world is finite while the possible
issue of credit is not. That is the point at which the whole structure
comes tumbling down.

Basic Fact Number Six:

The people who get hit first and hit hardest by any one of these
realities are not the rich but the poor. The depletion of resources is
inherently regressive: it might enrich the wealthy, but it makes the
lives of those who are already poor still harder.

These are the realities, but the three great myths of the industrial era
still prevail. Almost everyone on earth, to one degree or another,
accepts them. Despite everything I know to be true, sometimes I catch
myself believing them.

And this, I believe, is the result of an even deeper problem, an
inherent human characteristic which long pre-dates the industrial era.

It is as follows. We do not live in a world of reason. We live in a
dreamworld. With a small, rational part of the brain, we recognise that
our existence is governed by material realities. We recognise that as
those realities change, so will our lives. But underlying this awareness
is a deep semi-consciousness. This absorbs the moment in which we live,
then generalises it, projecting our future lives as repeated instances
of the present. This, not the superficial world of our reason, is our
true reality.

***

So the task of the environmental journalist is not just to highlight
damage to the environment. It is not just to challenge some of
humankind?s most fundamental perceptions. It is to challenge humanity
itself. I hope I am not putting you off.

And you will not be congratulated for doing so. Having spent nearly
twenty years banging my head against the wall, I have developed a maxim
which I am immodest enough to call Monbiot?s first law of journalism. It
is this. Tell people something they know already, and they will thank
you for it. Tell them something new, and they will hate you for it.

If you write something which corresponds to the prejudices and
preconceptions of your readers, you will be inundated with messages of
congratulation. People will tell you that you are insightful, brilliant,
courageous, when all they are really saying is that you believe the same
thing as they do. But if you write something which challenges the
prejudices and preconceptions of your readers, and especially something
of this nature which is based on hard fact, you will either be ignored
altogether, or you will be inundated with messages of abuse. You will be
called dumb, out of touch, even, paradoxically, cowardly. You will learn
words you never knew existed.

***

So here we are, as environmental journalists, responsible for conveying
to the public that its most fundamental beliefs are wrong, and for doing
this in a working environment and a social environment which are, by and
large, deeply hostile to that message. How on earth is this possible?
This is the question I would like all of you to address in the course of
this conference. I believe that there are ways of navigating the
circumstances in which we must work. There is the potential to find
chinks in the corporate wall, and there is huge potential, as some South
Africans have been discovering, for the development of alternative media
outlets which are not governed by the demands of multi-millionaires.
What I want to hear from you over the next three days is how we can best
discover this potential, and how we can best make use of it once we have
found it.

But for now I would like to leave you with this thought: what all of us
are engaged in is not just a career. It is not just a means of bringing
home the rent. We are engaging with reality here, with deeper realities
than almost any other profession has to face. And this means that there
are no excuses. It is not sufficient to say, when doing the will of a
multimillionaire, ?I was only obeying orders?. In choosing to become an
environmental journalist, you have taken on a vast responsibility: the
responsibility to persuade people that we cannot continue to live as we
do without appalling consequences. I know that if you did not take that
responsibility seriously, you would not be here. So I thank you for what
you doing, and I ask you never to forget the responsibilities you have
taken on, and the size of the challenge you must confront.

-- 

Whatever you Wanadoo:
http://www.wanadoo.co.uk/time/

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