'The Media Age' chapter from Pilger's book 'Hidden Agendas'

Extract – Cloze Exercise – Source: http://multimedia.carlton.com/images/pilger/media/pdf/media.pdf

Reiner Luyken, a prize-winning journalist on the respected German newspaper Die Zeit, has reported from Britain for almost twenty years. He is the author of a series of perceptive articles about Murdoch’s impact in Britain, entitled ‘A Cultural Chernobyl’. ‘The most striking effect of Murdoch is 1. self-censorship,’ he wrote. ‘1. Self-censorship is now so commonplace in the British media, that journalists admit to it without blushing.’

We met outside the gates of Murdoch’s headquarters at Wapping, which Luyken called ‘a journalistic 2. penitentiary’ and a ‘new brave new world’. ‘If you look closely at this place,’ he said, ‘if you look at the electronic bars, the wire on the perimeter, the patrolling guards, you must ask yourself, “How can information and ideas flow freely in such a place?” Wapping is a factory for making money, yet it has become a kind of media model. Whether you read the Daily Mirror or the Telegraph or turn on the BBC, you get the feeling that the purpose of the 3. enterprise of journalism has been turned on its head and the new ethic is that journalism is a 4. commodity, purely to generate money. This is the Murdoch effect. Wapping is a cultural Chernobyl, spewing its poison across the whole journalistic landscape.’

The experience of Murdoch’s ‘new brave new world’ leaves many of the journalists on his papers with an 5. abiding ambivalence about him. Some will insist they were never told what to do, that there was never a ‘line’ – when the truth is that it was never necessary to tell them: they knew and accepted what was required of them.

Roy Greenslade, a critic of Murdoch, was Kelvin Mac-Kenzie’s number two on the Sun. ‘As a young man,’ wrote Peter Chippendale and Chris Horrie, ‘[Greenslade] had 6. embraced revolutionary Maoism. In his early days he had been a militant in the National Union of Journalists Chapel . . . But he had watered down his politics to the point where he could take a senior job on the 7. avowedly Thatcherite Sun with few qualms.’ 17

Greenslade was a witness to many of MacKenzie’s ‘triumphs’, such as his 8. jingoistic fabrication of much of the Falklands War 9. coverage. When MacKenzie called on his staff to cross the 10. picket line representing the 5,900 printers, secretaries, librarians and cleaners sacked by Murdoch in 1986, Greenslade crossed it.

In 1995, no longer employed by Murdoch, Greenslade mounted a devastating attack on the 11. ethos of Wapping, writing one of the most cogent explanations for the success of the Sun:

Murdoch had seized the time [he wrote], the old values of a 12. discredited Establishment were crumbling. An energetic working class had cast off 13. deference as an aberration of generations past. Television was god . . . What was once said only in the pub or the intimacy of your bedroom would be published in your 14. soaraway Sun [which] latched on to the permissiveness of the age.

Then, as the years passed, it perverted that ethos of liberalism for its own ends. It cultivated sex, yet 15. decried sexual licence in its leading articles. It 16. lured readers to play bingo for huge prizes while lecturing them on the vice of a something-for- nothing society. It encouraged people to sell their sexual secrets while holding them up to 17.  ridicule. It cultivated the shallow world of celebrity as a cynical 18. circulation device. It pushed back the boundaries of taste and decency while wringing its hands at the decline of standards. It employed the language of the lager lout while 19. lambasting the growth of youth culture. Its politics were opportunistic, conjoining the radical and the reactionary to extol the virtues of Margaret Thatcher, the supreme mistress of cultural 20. philistinism.

Greenslade called this ‘the degradation of the newspaper form [in which] the old notion of a public service press was replaced by newspapers as machines of private profit’. He described the scramble among 21. broadsheets as well as tabloids, to ape the ‘sales-winning formula . . . accommodating the cult of celebrity, games and television promotions [in which] 22. sleaze is a national pastime, tackiness is stylish, the lowest common denominator is the 23. bottom line. And the bottom line is all that counts . . .’

Greenslade told me his article (in the Literary Review) was ‘a recognition that much of what I took part in was wrong’. ‘You’re fired up by taking part in the technical process of producing a newspaper,’ he said. ‘It’s like the way [Nazi] Germany was . . . when you’re taking part in the technical process, you are blinded in many ways to what you’re actually doing. You’re so worried about the next story, the next 24. feature, filling that page and so on, that the overall thing eludes you . . . It isn’t as bad as Germany was, but I do think that you divide labour in the way they did and you do your own little bit . . .’

Greenslade met Murdoch on several occasions. ‘He’s not the Dirty Digger figure he’s painted,’ he said. ‘He’s an educated person. I found him to be a totally rational person, not just in financial terms but in the sort of questions he asked: “Will this sell? Should we give them more sports? Have we any sex surveys?” He asked questions in such a way that you didn’t actually think of the connotations . . . but when it got to politics, well . . .

‘There was a dinner in London around the time the Berlin Wall came down, and Murdoch was utterly 25. defiant, saying we in the West must keep a grip on the nuclear weaponry. You had right-wing executives of the Sunday Times arguing that there ought to be some kind of peace dividend, and he was saying, “No, no” and all the time quoting someone he called his “political adviser . . .” When he was asked who this was, he replied, “Richard Nixon . . .” ’