An Historical Overview of the Media and Class Struggle

international | arts and media | opinion/analysis Tuesday January 17, 2006 02:03 by Terry room101ucg at yahoo dot co dot uk

This is the second part of a three part series on the potential role of alternative net based media in political mobilisation, part one is here.

The state has long recognised the importance of the role of information in subversion and class struggle.
Moreover, media has been intimately involved with social protest and popular revolt, for instance the Springer press being a target of the student revolt in West Germany in 1968, or the Chartist movement being built around the ‘unstamped’ press, or the media providing a biased portrayal of social movements and strikers.

Brigadier Frank Kitson listed in his ‘Low Intensity Operations’ the growth in communications media as the second of three factors leading to a “rise in the incidence of subversion and insurgency.”

He writes: “Whether or not there is more discontent in the world than was formerly the case, there is no doubt whatsoever that the means of fanning it and exploiting it are infinitely greater than they used to be, because of the increase in literacy and the introduction of wireless and television sets in large numbers.”
“the production of news sheets by illegal printing presses and the making of broadcasts by illegal wireless stations…form a most important part of any subversive campaign, particularly in the early stages when the population is being mobilised to support the cause.” (1)

On the other side of the coin the C.I.A. was engaged for many years in running radio stations aimed at Eastern Europe – Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, continuing in existence today as private bodies, as well as various publications aimed at Western Europe. (2) A Radio Free Iraq was established a couple of years ago in a similar fashion.

On a more pedestrian level the Gardai build a relationship with the press, and use this to ends such as leaking to them the story that anti-Bush protesters planned to divert Air Force One from landing in Shannon by releasing large numbers of helium balloons.

Authoritarian regimes frequently censor, and this is sometimes employed in the West, for instance with Section 31, and with the sacking of the entire governing authority of RTE for broadcasting an interview with then IRA leader Sean MacStiofain in 1971. (3)

However state intervention into the flow of information is rarely necessary.
Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman argue that what gets to us through the mainstream private media is mediated through what they call the five filters. (4)

The first filter being ownership and the amount of capital necessary to have a stake in the media industry.

The second filter is advertising, they point to the collapse of the left wing Daily Herald in Britain in the 1960s, despite it having double the readership of the Times, Guardian and Financial Times put together.
It failed to get advertising revenue and there have been cases of publications and stations pulling stories for fear of offending advertisers, one Australian womens’ magazine cancelling an article on tampons and toxic shock syndrome for instance.

The third filter is sourcing. That is efforts on the part of the state or private industry to supply stories to the media, as above with the Garda and helium balloons.

The fourth filter they call flak, this is the work of organisations and private industry to orchestrate complaints against the media if it runs stories they don’t like. There are corporate funded organisations in the United States which do this.

The fifth filter is anti-communism, which, in the context of Cold War America they see as an all-pervasive ideology determining reporting of some events, e.g. massacres in Cambodia, but not others, e.g. massacres in East Timor.

How does this work in practise?

In the words of one miner active in the 1984 strike:
“Even before the strike, I did not have a very high regard for the media, especially the tabloids; in particular, The Sun, The Daily Star, the Daily Mail and the Express, there isn’t a good one among them. I object to the way that they have all personalised the strike as if it’s all between Arthur Scargill and MacGregor because that ignores all of us on strike and our views, along with the issues that we are striking for which are beginning to get lost.”
“The strike has really shown them up for what they are. They only ever show pickets throwing stones or hitting policemen, they never show it the other way. Someone must be afraid that the country will get to know what is really happening on the picket lines. Why else is coverage so biased?” (5)

Headlines of the time read “Britain cracks down on pit bully boys” and “Police step up war on pit bullies”.
(6)

According to Kornhauser: “Organised labour and management compete for public approval, political favour, and desired governmental actions as well as for direct industrial objectives. In this competition it can scarcely be questioned that the business viewpoint, the social interpretations and values congenial to management, are the ones predominantly circulated. Since the media of mass communications are preponderantly in the hands of businessmen and depend on the support of management interests (advertisers), this tends to be almost invariably the case.” (7)


In 1966 in West Germany 40% of the press was owned by Axel Springer, this included 80% of all regional dailies and 90% of all Sunday editions. (8) He maintained close editorial control over his papers’ ideological orientation.

The Springer press ran a massive campaign likening the student new left to the SA and ran headlines such as “Stop the Terror of the Young Reds”, this before the rise of the R.A.F., Rote Zora, etc… (9). One commentator even compared the language of Springer’s tabloid Bild to Nazi era periodical Der Sturmer (10)
This was countered with attacks on the Springer press group’s property, and attempts to stop the papers distribution as well as verbal and literary denouncements.

Media can work in the other direction, as we can see from the experience of Chartism in early C19th Britain.

In Britain in the 1830s printing technology was relatively cheap, there was well-developed networks for distribution, and large parts of the population were beyond the ideological reach of the establishment due to the expense of conventional media.
Hence the growth of a radical press and the significance of the ‘war of the unstamped’, the struggle to distribute newspapers which didn’t pay the license fee for publication, payment of which would have put up the running costs such that working class people couldn’t purchase the end product.

According to historian Dorothy Thompson: “The Chartist press was one of the foundations on which the movement was built…”
“What was new and powerful about this movement, however, was its national character and the speed with which ideas and proposals for action were disseminated. This speed and this national dimension were achieved largely through the press.” (11)
Chartism, was of course, the closet Britain has ever came to popular revolution.

This is not to suggest that people are simply passive receptacles for whatever information is provided to them, for example, opinion polls during the 1990 Poll Tax revolt showed the many people supported the forces of disorder during the Battle of Trafalgar riot, this despite the usual media vilification.

However, it would be ludicrous to argue that the mass media doesn’t have a massive effect. It is particularly potent in distorting peoples’ views of something a degree or two removed from them.
The classic example being the miners who thought the blacks were in the wrong in anti-police rioting in the early 1980s, a view changed in 1984.
Moreover it can undermine confidence, isolate, choose what to report and what not to report, fragment issues and remove them from their wider social context, as well as simply instilling a totally erroneous viewpoint.
I always get the feeling that something has really happened when it gets saturation media coverage, it gives a certain heightened sense of reality. The media is a powerful tool.

Now imagine widespread Internet usage co-existing with a relatively high level of class struggle or social protest.

An Indymedia style news source does not need anything like the capital needed for a newspaper or radio station, never mind television.

Likewise in regard to distribution networks, and there have been cases of commercial print distribution networks refusing to carry radical books, while to build a distribution network from the ground up would require a massive effort.

In that context such a news source would, I believe, be able to compete with the mainstream media, the digital divide does not alter this, as print and film can be distributed via the Internet.

Hence in such a context state interventions and the corporate media could be effectively countered.

References:

(1) Kitson, Frank, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping, Faber and Faber, London, this edition 1991 (originally 1971), page 17.

(2) Marchetti, Victor, and Marks, John D., The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, Jonathan Cape Ltd., London, 1974, page 167.

(3) Coogan, Tim Pat, The Troubles, Ireland’s Ordeal 1966 – 1995 and the search for peace, Hutchinson, London, 1995, page 319.

(4) Cited in Edwards, David, Free to be Human: Intellectual Self-Defence in an Age of Illusions, Resurgence/Green Books, Dartington, 1995.

(5) Quoted in Coulter, Jim, Miller, Susan, Walker, Martin, State of Siege: Miners’ Strike 1984: Politics and Policing in the Coal Fields, Canary Press, London, 1984, page 190.

(6) Quoted in Ibid. page 80.

(7) Quoted in Hyman, Richard, Strikes, Fontana/Collins, London, 1977 (originally 1972), pages 151/152.

(8) Hilwig, Stuart J., The Revolt Against the Establishment: Students Versus the Press in West Germany and Italy, in 1968: The World Transformed, edited by Fink, Carole, Gassert, Philipp, Junker, Detlef, German Historical Institute, Washington D.C., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, page 326

(9) Quoted in Ibid. Page 333.

(10) Cobler, Sebastian, Law, Order and Politics in West Germany, translated by McDonagh, Francis, Penguin Books, Middlesex, 1978, page 43.

(11) Thompson, Dorothy, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution, Pantheon Books, New York, 1984, page 37.