Media Hypocrisy

Not just all day, but all night, the media election coverage has spoken of nothing else but Gordon Brown, and his comments in Rochdale. What it has demonstrated, more than anything, is the total hypocrisy of the media. Several weeks ago, the media was promoting the book by Andrew Rawnsley that supposedly exposed Gordon Brown as a bully, intolerant etc. Today, Rawnsely was wheeled out again and the story told that Brown's reaction showed that Rawnsley had been proved right. But, anyone who has heard Brown's comments in the car must realise that, if anything, they completely undermine Rawnsley's claims. Brown was not happy about how he thought the situation had gone, but his comments were totally calm and rational. There was no shouting, no recriminations against staff, there was no thumping the seat or stabbing with pens of seats, no throwing of phones etc. In short, his reaction was no more, no less than that of pretty much anyone else who had just had a discussion on camera with someone whose views they thought would give the media a story.

Then the media make a story out of that too. They say that Brown's comments in the car, that the interview would be used by the media, showed him to be over sensitive! But, hasn't his view been confirmed precisely by the actions of the media during the whole of the day and night, in not wanting to talk about anything else?? And, the fact is that no matter how many times the media rake over the event, to suggest that Brown was being hypocritical, the fact is - as many ordinary people commented on screen and over the net - that there is no shortage of outtake programmes that show TV personalities, including well-paid journalists doing exactly the same thing! Are we to believe that TV interviewers do not say all kinds of derogatory things about the people they interview off screen? In fact, don't we all do exactly what Brown did? If I had been Brown, and wanted to dissuade someone of bigoted views, after all, I wouldn't begin by saying to them that they were themselves a bigot!!!

I remember some years ago, when our kids were little, we had been given a tablecloth by the in-laws. We'd commented that we didn't know why they had chosen it, because it didn't go with anything. The next time the in-laws came, we came to put the tablecloth out, and one of the kids said, why are you going to use that, because you said it didn't go with anything. Yes, we had, but like many more people we wouldn't say what we thought out of politeness. Should we not expect a Prime Minister to act politely and not necessarily say to someones face what they actually think. After all the words "polite", "politic", and "politics", all have the same root. Of course, we do need to address bigoted ideas - and the ideas about Eastern Europeans flooding the country, taking jobs and houses have been expanded upon by many other ordinary people, interviewed in Rochdale and elsewhere today - but that does not at all require us to do so, by deliberately offending, and personalising those views to those who hold them. But, nor, if asked to be honest, should we hold back from calling a spade a spade.

If someone said that men in Rochdale were not getting jobs because women were taking those jobs, today most people - though by no means all - would have no problem in identifying such views as being bigoted against women. But, claiming that workers in Rochdale or anywhere else were not getting jobs due to immigrants filling those jobs is no different. The same is true about claims about housing being taken etc. The responsibility for lack of jobs does not lie with immigrants from Eastern Europe or anywhere else, it lies with a Capitalist system that cannot guarantee jobs for workers, it lies with BRITISH bosses who, in order to maximise profits decide to locate production overseas etc. Those are the facts that Labour should have been arguing for years now in order to undermine these bigoted views about immigration. They have not done so, because the Labour Party remains bound by the ideas of bourgeois society. As such, it is not able to place the blame where it belongs, on the shoulders of a Capitalist system, which ultimately it seeks not to replace, but at best to reform.

But, the other hypocrisy of the media is that at the same time that it shows indignation at the fact that it has to deal with the BNP, it is the media itself that has fed those underlying ideas about immigration. At worst, the gutter press whip up that hysteria to sell papers, at best organisations like the BBC fail to confront those ideas. Even today, it has simply reported the mass of anti-immigrant sentiments being unleashed without in any way questioning the validity of those ideas. All sections of the media are as guilty as the mainstream parties for the growth of intolerance, and for the rise of the BNP. Their indignance is wholly hypocritical. They should look to themselves.