It is very rare indeed that I realise that the morning news agenda requires that I watch a video of an event broadcast the night before. This morning it did.
I watched this video of Emily Maitlis' speech in Edinburgh last night. It is worth every minute of your time to watch it. I agree with a very great deal of it.
I am not at this moment going to analyse it. You decide. You can't be neutral about it:
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I love the fact that she alludes to Robbie Gibb, the poisonous presence in the BBC – an ex advisor to Theresa May and arch opinion shaper.
Gibb should not be anywhere near the BBC and removed.
If he was removed – and others like him Left or Right – and ‘Centre’ – I’d forgive the BBC and stop wanting it to be privatised. Maybe.
To inform public opinion all sides need to considered fairly. That’s not what we’ve had for some time. The BBC remains a failing organisation whilst such people are allowed to be part of it.
Agreed there PSR; Gibb being put into the BBC is yet another way in which Johnson has corrupted our public realm. He has no place in it and should be removed. It’s utterly intolerable that someone who set up a hard right channel like GB News which peddles right wing lies and propaganda should be at the heart of the Beeb.
I’d like to see GB News put someone like Jeremy Corbyn onto the board of GB News. How’s that for balance?
Read the review in The Guardian and was going to search for a link to it when I saw your blog and link so thanks for that, Richard. Every word spot on and many of our suspicions about what goes on – and is currently going on – at the BBC confirmed. Dangerous stuff that will no doubt be shouted down by the Tories today. I’d just add that coincidentally I’m currently reading ‘We are Bellingcat’ by Eliot Higgins. Anyone who thinks what Maitlis has to say is important should read it.
Thanks
Extract from the Guardian report
Despite queues at the British border and economic issues piling up, such outlets are still reluctant to discuss the impact of Brexit “in case they get labelled pessimistic, anti-populist, or worse still, as above: unpatriotic”.
She added: “And yet every day that we sidestep these issues with glaring omissions feels like a conspiracy against the British people;
It certainly does. The phrase ‘the arrogance of power’ comes to mind.
Never have needed courageous journalists as much as we do now.
We need a courageous state too. That could be a title for a book.
Oh, wait, yes it already is. Written by one Richard Murphy.
Thanks for the link RIchard. I have watched the whole lecture, (and I think one should hear it out to the end before commenting). It’s a very honest and personal analysis of the distortion of the truth we have experienced in recent years, and the media’s role in perpetuating it. It’s an important and timely contribution from a person with intimate knowledge of the system from the inside. She clearly has other colleagues onside, and I look forward to hearing the news podcast they are planning for the coming weeks.
I noted some comments below the YouTube video, complaining that Maitlis is still guilty, in this lecture, of the very “both-sideism” she complains of. There is some truth in this – her comments about Laura Kuenssberg, Corbyn, Cummings can be open to criticism, but Maitlis does address this very issue, at around 53 minutes. For this reason, I’m prepared to take her very seriously, and hope her insights, and her suggestions for solutions, find resonance among the public, and her fellow journalists.
She recognises her own errors and imperfections
We all have them
We should applaud those who acknowledge them
I don’t normally comment on here but I’m going to make an exception on this and because I’m taking a holiday.
I think the broad point that the desire for balance leads in some very strange directions, and how journalists and broadcasters tie themselves up in knots and end up amplifying messages that should not be amplified to that degree, therefore contributing to a distortion is broadly correct.
Fair enough as far as that goes. But the speech is also in some ways a very self indulgent, personalized account, and self validating account that actually misses the fundamental power relation at work, but also perversely ends up producing a distortion in its desire for balance.
She essentially ends up saying well the corbynistas complained about us just as much as the maga and gbd factions on the right, so it’s all a populist continuum and we bent over backwards to platform a corbyn complaint about us too.
Which rather strips the above of all context and ignores the underlying power relations, but also that they did do a job on corbyn with the coverage in the example she uses, that reinforced rather than challenged the dominant media narrative. The critics like the canary are not the same as the mail, the telegraph, the express, the times, the sun, iea, cchq, gb news, etc etc, and do not have the same power to construct and constitute political narratives and discourse.
The underlying power relation did start to come through a bit, but it was never stated and the speech was all the weaker for that, at least as a piece of analysis offering understanding of what has been going on.
At least since the time James Harding became news editor cchq have been colonising and seeking to control headline BBC news output, as a network, personnel and organisational stratgey. The maitlis Cummings affair to which she alludes is the zenith moment of that in a way. But this is government holding the future of the BBC in its hands seeking to bully, coerce, cajole, control and own BBC news coverage. I am afraid that fundamental power asymmetry which has shifted and taken sharper form since 2010 is missed and skated over.
Instead what we get is an analysis of populism, with
the implication that populism is a phenomenon that applies equally across left and right, I mean just look at corbyn. But again this is a misleading insinuation, a limited analysis and populism (and the rather crass blanket way it is applied here) is wholly the wrong concept. Populism is one strand of what has been going, but is too often used as a catch all for the current political moment, including here.
Appeals to the public, to the people, the real people and being true voice of the people is but one element of the strategy. The full strategy is closer to what I would term stealth politics, which involves lots of different things: populist and framing messaging as above; concealment of true economic intent, vision and preferences; ambiguity and vagueness on economic detail (see freeports); deliberate obfuscation and misinformation through rhetoric (maga, my people that the others have contempt for, protecting American jobs through protectionist sabre rattling trade and migration, while targeting tax cuts and deregulatory measures to the favour of the wealthiest, also see brexit); constant distraction of peripheral issues and dead car bounces to disguise important legislative and constitutional change; cheap sloganeering gbd, maga, build back better etc etc, – got to have a certain canter and be repeated endlessly; erosion of accountability mechanisms including media; legal narrowing and subtle constitutionalising of market reforms and favoured service providers; attack and control of media; secretive coy disguised agendas for the mega donors who are equally coy about their true economic preferences while doing all of the above to conceal true economic intent and messaging. The last of those is the core thesis in this book, but stealth politics, as I indicate above is a broader strategic approach covering all of the above. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo29143391.html
So why is all the above happening and what are it’s implications? Maitlis doesn’t really recognize it or come close to telling us why. First it should be fairly clear that the right have pioneered stealth politics and the left, have been left floundering and trailing in their wake. Maitlis claim is that the media have been equally blindsided. Fair enough. But the media have not been passive agents in this. They are not a group that this has just been done to, and her analysis seems to come close to implying that at times at least as far as newsnight is concerned. They have aided, abetted and contributed to it, and the BBC overall has been centre stage, as her analysis at times effectively shows.
Second, this fundamental shift in how politics is conducted and I would argue how economic ideas are used politically, follows from the financial crisis of 2008 and is cemented during the post crisis austerity years. Osborne’s clap trap about mending the roof, bankruptcy and credit cards was the first step on wilfully misleading economic messaging. But the impact of that is that the legitimacy of the neoliberal project has been shredded, so the right begin to fan anti-elite sentiment, while quietly and stealithly going even further in pursuing hyper economic liberal agendas. Cost of living is now the latest stealth Trojan horse being used to attack the excessive costly objective of net zero as the latest installment of the strategy. And the hard Brexit gang are back together again on that one.
Third concealment of true economic intent is relatively new as the overall macro political strategy. See how broadly Keynesian ideas were used to construct the post war settlement and the consensus on state demand management and welfare states. Thatcher and Reagan then used economic ideas, arguments and visions to deconstruct that settlement and build a new economic and political order that most today call neoliberalism – a nod to Milton freidman’s 1951 mont pelerin society paper that established the term and it’s agenda. In both of these periods economic ideas are playing a constitutive and constructive role in our politics. And relatively speaking most political and institutional actors are reasonably open and transparent about intent (notable exception being the mps backed iea in the 1950s and 60s before they became emboldened in the 1970s.)
Now we’ve entered a new era of disguise and double speak that is a direction function of the politics of maintaining neoliberalism in the face of it’s huge legitimacy crisis. Stealth politics is the new strategy of the right to that end, and everything maitlis describes, and I list above is a symptom and function of that.
AB
We can discuss this together – and should
I agree that Maitliss is on a road to recovery – but has not fully understood what that means. However, I welcome the start.
And on Corbyn we will have to disagree. The framing of an image on Newsmigth was crass – obviously. But then so was Corbyn in this as on most economic issues, and more recently on Ukraine. And let’s not pretend that this isn’t a form of left-wing populism – because again there is: the evidence is plain to see and it is as riddled with falsehoods as the right.
But, the essence here is the big threat. Maitliss did not name fascism: that was the big weakness in what she said. It’s not populism – it’s what right wing populism is promoting, and that does make it very different from the left.
What she also failed to criticise enough is labour’s current inability to say this – because there is a near total vacuum of sane politics within the pubkuc social demcratic / left space.
But as I say, we can discuss this.
Agree with the first part of that.
On corbyn I am not really denying there were populist elements and some/ much of it was very badly done. But there was some good stuff in there as you know, – better than anything we’ve seen for 20 or 30 years in British politics.
But the attacks on corbyn were relentless and many unfair. She admits that, but doesn’t consider how that is the result of very uneven structural media terrain and the power relations that produce and is produced by that.
My point is that even though there were ill informed elements of populism in the corbyn project, that is a qualitatively different thing from the wholesale strategy of stealth politics adopted by the right, where you deliberately conceal, misinform, obfuscate, bullshit in the frankfurtian sense, lie and confuse at every turn as a political strategy.
My point is if you say it’s just populism, you end up saying left is as bad as right, and miss how and why this is a new form of stealth politics the causes of that and it’s objectives. I was marginally more receptive to corbyn than you, but only marginally, and fully aware of the weaknesses and shortcomings.
Basically maitlis got swept up by and fell victim to wholesale stealth politics on steroids by a government and set of politicians that are prepared to say and do anything with no regard for the truth and to deliberately mislead, confuse, conceal. We haven’t seen that since ww2 at least. It is new terrain for contemporary liberal democracies. Maitlis gets a portion of that.
As for fascism I applied Britt’s 14 point criteria to the UK. Result: 28.6% strong; 50% medium; 21.4% weak. So still away to go but concerning direction of travel as it’s all one way and some growing strong traits. DUP come out as 71.4% strong, 28.6% medium as contrast, so decisively more fascist, but believe it not the Tories have taken lessons on strategy from dup. It becomes very clear when you work through Britt’s criteria.
AB
Much more to agree on
Where we will agree is that Maitlis might condemn populism, but she has yet to notice the system she thinks works is collapsing all around her.
R
Thanks for sharing – a very thought provoking lecture.
Looking at how this excellent speech has been reported by different medial outliers and social media comments, it is as if most people are wanting to prove Ms Maitlis correct rather than absorb her actual messages. Amusing if it were not so sad and worrying at the same time.
I am sure you know what you mean, but it needs elaboration if I am to do so
Great comments above. Both-sideism/ false equivalence was patently obvious to many Scottish Independence supporters in run-up to 2014 Referendum. If audiences had seen the level of support for Indy on the streets, that alone could have tipped the vote above 45% for Yes. But on the Saturday preceding the vote, BBC made it all look both unexceptional & bizarrely equal, whereas in fact the No campaigners’ street presence was fractional.
But that hypothesis aside, in support of Maitliss, journalists really ought to be schooled in something that could greatly enhance their work, which few people in UK have even heard of, namely, Informal Logic. So, yes, they do need a language they currently lack but the fundamentals of this already exist in numerous publications on Informal Logic/Argumentation.
As some others above note, she’s not getting down into the fundamentals to a sufficient extent, if at all. There’s a philosophical deficit in UK, which may have quite a bit to do with this. Be that as it may, it seems to me that there’s a very deep & pervasive problem that is essentially cultural. This problem goes far beyond journalism, & to redress it within the culture of journalism, would require a lot of *unlearning* of norms, attitudes, values, beliefs, language – that requires some truly demanding self-questioning.
Maitliss is of course right to address the central problem of complicity. But her seemingly personal (yet only thinly self-questioning) account again fails to grapple with *how* so many UK journalists, their teams, & TV presenters (let’s allow) unwittingly slide into complicity. For she says nothing about the tough problem of the educational & cultural preconditions of the media’s virtual or flagrant collusion with the very authority figures they ought to be confronting. Such proclivities towards collusion/complicity will have largely emerged from many strands of enculturation, but a substantial component of this must occur in journalists’, reporters’, & presenters’ educational backgrounds. I haven’t checked this, but it’s reasonable to assume that many familiar faces of the UK’s media, pass through educational systems in which they become part of the in-crowd, members (to varying degrees of loyalty, understanding, & personal friendship), of an extensive yet comparatively small club of highly privileged people. Many in this club & those who work for them, or who emulate them, tend towards the supercilious disdain, self-affirming expressions of *compassion*, false generosity, etc., that has variously typified the UK’s ruling classes for a very long time. How indeed could journalists deeply enmeshed in that club, stop boiling the frog before it was too late?
Thanks