Let's Face It-The State Has Lost Its Mind: The Media Coverage of This Past Election Was a Pastiche. Our Right to Know What Our Rulers Are Doing to People the World over Is Being Lost in the New Propaganda Consensus

Pilger, John, New Statesman (1996)

In 1987, the sociologist Alex Carey, a second Orwell in his prophesies, wrote "Managing Public Opinion: the corporate offensive". He described how in the United States "great progress [had been] made towards the ideal of a propaganda-managed democracy", whose principal aim was to identify a rapacious business state "with every cherished human value". The power and meaning of true democracy, of the franchise itself, would be "transferred" to the propaganda of advertising, public relations and corporate-run news. This "model of ideological control", he predicted, would be adopted by other countries, such as Britain.

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To many who work conscientiously in the media, this will sound alarmist; it is not like that in Britain, they will say. Ask them about censorship by omission or the promotion of business ideology and war propaganda as news, a promotion both subtle and crude, and their defensive response will be that no one ever instructed them to follow any line: no one ever said not to question the Prime Minister about the horror he had helped to inflict on Iraq: his epic criminality. "Blair always enjoys his interviews with Paxo," says Roger Mosey, the head of BBC Television News, without a hint of irony.

Blair should enjoy them; he is always spared the imperious bombast that is now a pastiche and kept mostly for official demons. "Watch George Galloway clash with Jeremy Paxman," says the BBC News homepage like a circus barker. Once under the big top of Newsnight, you get the usual set-up: a nonsensical question about whether or not Galloway was "proud of having got rid of one of the few black women in parliament", followed by mockery …

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Publication information: Article title: Let's Face It-The State Has Lost Its Mind: The Media Coverage of This Past Election Was a Pastiche. Our Right to Know What Our Rulers Are Doing to People the World over Is Being Lost in the New Propaganda Consensus. Contributors: Pilger, John - Author. Magazine title: New Statesman (1996). Volume: 134. Issue: 4740 Publication date: May 16, 2005. Page number: 12+. © Not available. COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group.

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