Some of the most disturbing words I’ve heard for a long time came from the author of “The Handmaid’s Tale”, Margaret Atwood. In a recent interview on BBC Newsnight she said: “You know what the playbook for an impending dictatorship is, and when the boxes start getting checked off you get quite nervous”. Atwood was talking about the situation in the United States, but she could just as easily have been speaking about the United Kingdom.
Right-wing media figures are fond of saying that democracy is impossible without a free press. I have no argument with this. Without independent investigative journalism, government cannot be held accountable, and corruption, mismanagement and government misinformation could run without check. This gives the media enormous power, but with power comes responsibility. That responsibility requires that the public are fully and properly informed about the issues, because if the electorate are influenced in one direction or another then democracy becomes skewed, and a skewed democracy is no democracy at all. Of course, advocates of press freedom will say that the British people are not stupid and they are clever enough to see through the unarguable bias in parts of the media, especially that in the print media. The question of why they should bother pushing their agenda, is rather telling: if it has no effect why do they bother?
During the migrant crisis the Daily Mail, then edited by Paul Dacre ran front-page headline after headline about how the crisis was getting worse and worse. I am not in a position to know whether this was true, but if it wasn’t, the media panic created was bound to make a non-crisis into a real one, influencing both public opinion and, potentially, government policy. Without people like Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre, it seems unlikely that the Europe Question which opinion polls showed was effectively a non-issue to most voters was elevated to a national crisis demanding the nuclear option of Brexit. The point here is that the only interface people have with reality is the media. It is not about whether the British public is stupid, there is simply no other way, apart from a deeply unreliably social media, for them to know what is going on in the world.
I should put up my hand here and make it clear that I do not read national newspapers for reasons which by now will be clear. While there are newspapers that have a left-wing leaning like “The Guardian” there would be valid arguments about pots and kettles being called black if I was to subscribe to this newspaper. I will continue to boycott all newspapers until they get their acts in order.
We all need to know what is happening in the world, and for me the least biased media outlet is the BBC. While it too is subject to editorial choices of its un-elected management, at least, under its charter, and to the chagrin of Murdoch and others in his clique, are obliged to present both sides of any argument. How disturbing to hear this morning that Paul Dacre has reportedly been offered the directorship of the media regulator Ofcom, and that another right-wing enemy of balanced reporting, Lord Moore, has been proposed as Director General of The BBC.
How else should we think of this except as another of Atwood’s check-boxes: one more step along the road towards what the headline of this blog suggests is happening: Totalitarianism by Stealth.
Peter D Fisher 