Chapter 35
The Bad News
It’s worth quoting that passage here for you. Right, here goes. “Our initial work showed that all three channels offer a remarkably similar product. The number of stories they run from day to day, the types of stories and the presentation of the stories (the running order, who appears, choice of film, etc) only vary within very narrow limits ...” That’s really striking isn’t it? That’s when there were three channels. But in a supposedly very different world, where we are meant to have so much more freedom of choice, where we have 24 hour this and that, and instant access to all sorts, what’s changed? Take any random medium. Take any news bulletin. The lack of variety is striking. It still, as the Bad News guys would say, distorts people’s world view. And in the age of attention deficit is more harm being done? Well ...
There’s another great bit in Really Bad News where they are looking more closely at how industrial relations are presented. Disputes. Strikes. And the like. As the Bad News guys said: “The news is a manufactured product that is organised and constructed from within very limited ways of seeing the world.” They go on to tell the story of a TV news reporter who during the famous Winter of Discontent in 1979 was sent out to get appropriate film footage to illustrate a story about how a lorry drivers’ strike was killing off chickens. So he searches every chicken farm in the land, and does he find any dead chickens? Oh yeah. The film crew had installed all its gear in a coop, and when everything was ready to roll and the lights switched on 25 chickens died of shock. The only dead chickens they found that had died as an indirect result of the lorry drivers’ strike. Terrific. Not quite as funny as the chicken scene in the fantastic book John Dory by the great, great writer John Murray, but I don’t think anything is quite as funny as that.
We had our own brief brush with the news machine way back then too. It was shortly after the Zeebrugge ferry disaster, when the unfortunately named Herald of Free Enterprise went down. The ‘80s had their own series of disasters. The Lockerbie bombing, the Bradford City football fire, and so on. Each disaster was marked by disturbing footage of survivors being visited in hospital by members of the Government or the Royal Family. I can’t remember which disaster it was but there were some sinister shots of the Prime Minister leaning over this guy in a hospital bed telling him not to try to breathe. You could see where she was coming from, but her bedside manner left a lot to be desired. So we produced some cards for wallets. Take offs of donor cards. Saying in the event of an emergency I do not wish to be visited by well, whoever, really.
And let’s face it, political prejudices aside, if you take the Cabinet at the time. Guys like Geoffrey Howe, Douglas Hurd, Michael Heseltine, George Younger, Kenneth Baker, Norman Fowler, Cecil Parkinson, Nicholas Ridley, Paul Channon, Malcolm Rifkind, Tom King, Kenneth Clarke, John MacGregor, John Gummer, John Major and of course Norman Tebbit. The names still make me shudder. A reaction I’m sure not unique to me. And you just would not want such sinister coves coming to you in your hour of need would you? Let’s not even start on the Royal Family. So you see where we were coming from? We were providing a valuable public service in producing those cards.
This time too it wasn’t just an idea we threw around while listening to our old Kinks records. We saw something through to fruition. We got Our Friend Stan, who commanded the lock up next door but one to us, to put out feelers among his network of old contemptibles. Turns out he knew someone who could do a bit of design for us. And someone else who could get them printed up on the sly for us. We knew of friends and comrades who would help distribute, and chains of anarchists’ bookshops that would sell them. Free enterprise eh? The ball was rolling, and we were in business. Or something like that.
Now whether it was pure propinquity or sheer synchronicity, but through sweet serendipity we found out that someone else the other end of the country had come up with the same idea. And the local press had picked up on it. Then the national news being the parasite it is had picked up on the story, and were running it as a piece of wacky hey-everyone-look-at-what-the loony-left-is-up-to-now throwaway nonsense. I remember Our Friend Stan rang us up at home one night in a highly indignant frame of mind saying we’d been ripped off. Well, I confess when we saw the news item we were a little teensy weensy bit miffed, but the guy seemed genuine, and it was perfectly possible the same idea was put together at the same time in different places. It happened. We’d known groups who had never even spoken come up with the same melody. We shrugged and watched the news on the different channels, and heard what was being said on the radio.
That’s when it really struck us, as we zoomed and zapped around the airwaves, that all the broadcasts were pretty much the same. Our please-leave-me-alone cards were being reported in the same old way wherever we checked. And it was presented in such a way that the idea seemed petty and spiteful and in poor taste. As in haven’t these people got anything better to do? It made us cringe. The media has this wonderful knack of taking things out of context. Which I suppose is what the Glasgow University Media Group was getting at. It just made us glad that we didn’t find that it was us in the media spotlight. I don’t think we would have coped very well. And attention really wasn’t our sort of thing. We were very much the type to tick the no publicity box. That was our thing. Preferring to stay on the outside of everything. Good call really.
©
2008 John Carney
Illustration ©
2008 Alistair Fitchett