It's too easy to control journalists - so we need to end media monopolies

The value of a diverse media lies not in education of people, but in maintaining diversity of world-view in society. Since news is easy to manipulate through soft censorship, media monopolies must be discouraged - because they threaten the social conflict on which meaningful democracy is based.

The Soviet states pulled out toenails in order to get people to say the right things. In Western media, however, a lot of journalists seem to say the "right" things in support of certain agendas without having to be threatened at all.

I will take it as fact that censorship still exists (I have a lot of time for Media Lens, for example) but the techniques are softer. Not always much softer, if stories I hear about the Maxwell years at the Mirror and Murdoch's reinvention of the Sun are anything to go by. But softer nonetheless.

I want to note that I don’t think soft censorship and media control are a conspiracy – at least, not quite. I don’t believe in a faceless cartel planning together to subvert the media. Nor do I believe the mass media designed to be vulnerable to control.

Nonetheless, I do think segments of the mass media are being used to propound a certain way of looking at the world, and I do believe mass media lends itself to certain kinds of control. This is because of the kind of thing the media is and how news production is structured.

The basic hierarchy relating to news in a newspaper starts at the bottom with reporters, who are answerable to the news editor, who is answerable to the Editor of the paper, who is answerable to the paper’s owner/s.

Editors are hired and fired for their ability to put together a paper that satisfies the owners (financially, ideologically, or both). News editors are hired and fired according to their ability to produce a news section which satisfies the editor. Reporters are hired and fired according to their ability to find stories and write them up in time.

In short, everyone is dependent on pleasing the editor in order to keep their jobs: the news editor puts together a news schedule which he thinks will keep the editor off his back; reporters write the stories with the slant necessary for them to keep the news editor happy.

Which stories are covered and the angle of coverage are therefore tightly controlled, in a way similar to what you would find in a company PR department. The difference is that in a PR department, employees knowingly submit to an explicit agenda – whereas in a newspaper the agenda is not often explicitly stated.

I guess the reason is that it suits the media owners to perpetuate the illusion that journalists are trustworthy. If media magnates were open about the control they are able to exercise, they might find it harder to get away with censoring and shaping what we read.

It’s probably worth digressing into the question of why journalists accept so much control - why the Pilgers and Monbiots of this world are exceptions in a mass of reporters who don’t speak out about the pressures on them to conform.

I don’t think it’s just the threat of losing their jobs which keeps journalists in line. To some extent, I think they willingly buy into the system – in fact, I don’t think they even realise they are being manipulated. (This might be heart of Maxwell’s and Murdoch’s legacies – they broke the popular media like you would break a horse. But more on that in future.)

The problem journalists have, which explains why they are so accepting of the status quo, is they are not only journalists but also members of the public. They get most of their information from the same sources as the public. They have been raised and live in the same culture as the public. They therefore have the same set of background beliefs and values which form the context in which they make judgements.

If the public’s world-view is tolerant of the mass media, then it is no surprise that journalists are also tolerant of the mass media: they have the same point of view.

The trouble the Soviet Union had with journalists came about precisely because there was a chasm between what the public and the journalists were supposed to say and what the journalists and public thought. The threat of violence had to be ever-present in order to ensure conformity. There is no such need in our system.

All this serves to emphasise why the media must not be controlled by a very few businessmen. If it is so controlled, then there will be only one value system dispensing information to the public.

Although there will be superficial differences between papers to appeal to their readership, the underlying values promoted by the papers will be the same. The large-scale coverage of major events will be the same, as the owners will have the same vested interests in them.

As a result, everyone will end up having fundamentally the same beliefs. The conflict between classes and political parties will be neutralised and replaced by a homogenous, business-centric world-view. We will all agree with each other on the important issues of major events - regardless of whether that viewpoint benefits us or not.

And there is the danger: the value of a free media lies not in its ability to educate people and keep them exposed to other points of view. In general, people have their points of view and read the papers they agree with. The value of a free media lies in keeping a diverse set of world-views in society, so that there is conflict between classes and political parties, so that concessions have to be made.

Without conflict there can be no democracy. If everyone thinks the same, it means only one viewpoint is having its way.

Although I don't believe that people are all that different, we do all come from different backgrounds and live in different economic and social strata. I therefore cannot believe that one viewpoint and one politics is able to serve us all.

Because we all have different interests, not all of which can be fulfilled completely and simultaneously, there must therefore be conflict in society - and this conflict must be resolved through compromise.

If there is no conflict and no act of compromise, entire social demographics must be buying into a system that does not serve their interests - as sure as if this is small landowners under communism, or the working classes under unregulated capitalism.

If we are unaware of what we need, I do not see how we can be happy or free. This is why the great victory of the tycoon - manipulation and control the system of distributing information to change the values of a reasonably free society – must not be allowed to happen. And the first step to that must be to prevent ownership of the media gathering in the hands of a few.

** Questions? Leave them below in the comments. Or join discussion at the sixteenvoices google group. Sign up today! **

Why Chomsky ain't yet dead

Naive despots set up a conflict between people's innate commitment to truthfulness and people's desire to live a successful life (family, job, money, whatever). Smart despots know it is much more effective to produce citizens who don’t value truthfulness - because then Chomsky can talk all he wants, but his words will have no effect.

It is not in the interests of a political hegemony dependent for its survival on widespread misunderstanding of its activities to encourage its subjects to take too deep an interest in social and political matters. Its subjects should be encouraged to place more value on objects such as having a job, or a family, or education, or some such, than finding out what is really going on and whether or not what is really going on is the kind of thing that should be going on.

That is to say, the ruling class shouldn't encourage its subjects to over-value truthfulness - it should dampen the will to find out what is really going on - because the leadership has much more freedom if the populace is not inclined to inquire too deeply into what the leadership is doing.

The model of State suppression of inquisitive tendencies with which I am most familiar with is the kind employed under Soviet rule in eastern Europe after WW2. The system basically worked in the way that, so long as you agreed not to ask awkward questions, or voice your concerns about the leadership’s actions, or say anything that contradicted party doctrine, you were allowed to live a quiet life in peace. You had a reasonable job, your children could go to high school and university, you had a pension.

If you didn’t cooperate, you could expect to lose your job and social benefits, go to prison, suffer police persecution and generally live a pretty miserable existence. It was generally understood that you had a choice: you could either try to expose and oppose the corruption of the State and suffer for it - or you could live as though everything were fine and live a peaceful existence.

The puzzle is why this model of state control is not applied today in countries in Europe and the United States. There is no obvious conflict in the US between a commitment to truthfulness and living a life: we are free to inquire if we want, and to criticize without fear of violent reprisals.

How is it that Chomsky gets published and avoids being shot or locked up? How come I can read Chomsky’s books and check his claims against declassified policy planning documents? It is inconceivable that this could have happened in Eastern Europe before 1989.

I guess some people must be shot or locked up for knowing and saying too much - but why hasn’t the US, Britain and much of Europe gone the way of the despotic, closed, nakedly totalitarian regimes so prevalent in much of the world?

I suppose that some might respond that it's because the truth is sacred in our society. I reject that. There is plenty of evidence to show that the truth is far from sacred. The question just asks itself again: what has happened, such that we live in a society where truth indeed appears to be sacred? Part of the answer, I think, lies in recognizing some of the defects in the communist-despotic approach.

By engineering a society in which you could only have either truthfulness or some other thing which you valued, the Soviet leadership created a social context in which truthfulness clearly conflicted with other values, where you had to choose either one or the other, and in which you were aware of the sacrifice you were making.

This produced a schizophrenic society, especially in Eastern Europe. Because they lived in a social situation in which truthfulness conflicted with other ideals, many people were committed to truthfulness but forced to choose something else. They knew something was wrong, so there was an audience for the dissidents: the dissidents could speak, and people knew they were telling the truth. People went to bed at night knowing they had struck a compromise with the State: peace in exchange for silence.

The behaviour of the State reinforced the sense that something was wrong: people who opposed the State were spirited away, arrested and - in the early days - shot. A large effort went into propaganda to try to persuade Soviet subjects that the victims of state oppression deserved it, but a large group of people were profoundly unconvinced.

In short, the Soviet system suppressed questioning but failed to eliminate the desire to question. The leadership effectively created an underclass of subdued opponents, tolerant of the either/or deal they were offered while the leadership was still strong enough to enforce it, but neither at heart loyal nor at all ignorant of the social injustices which they suffered.

What would work better than the Soviet system? (It's time to put on my policy-planning hat.)

If I wanted to be part of an economic and political elite, I would need a good economy and a political situation in which revolution (or any kind of regime change) was as unlikely as possible. Secrecy is necessary for me fulfilling my goals, but the Soviet system of suppression is incompatible with my primary objectives. I need a better way to keep out of sight, something economically preferable that doesn’t create an angry underclass.

I think it would be better to figure out a way to dissolve the dilemma, rather than crush dissent whilst allowing the dilemma to continue existing in peoples’ consciousness. I would discourage questioning of the leadership by giving people other things to do (walk off rather than ask questions). I would also give people the impression that they understand what is going on when in fact they don’t (through intelligent media control rather than blatant suppression of dissent and publishing obvious propaganda).

Critically, I would not actually go very far to hide anything. I would allow people who are interested in reading declassified documents to read them. I would allow people to openly discuss whatever they felt was worth discussing, in order to make people feel secure and that the leadership is open and trustworthy, whilst doing everything I could to manufacture a society that doesn’t question, is not interested in politics, and above all that won’t listen to the dissenting few who point at my failings and what is said in the declassified documents that reveal what is really going on behind the appearances and the rhetoric.

If I had Chomsky shot, or if I banned his books, I would be sending the message that what he said was important enough that it needed covering up. I would be better off tolerating him and creating a society that doesn’t listen to him. Shooting him would be utterly counter-productive because it would help create a society that listens. I would accept that dissent must exist in a stable society. What I would do is create a social context in which dissent doesn’t matter.

That's why Chomsky isn't dead yet.

** Join discussion at the sixteenvoices google group. Sign up today! **

The intelligent postmodern contention

Foucault draws our attention to a historical fallacy. We forget when interpreting events that our concepts are a product of those events. Since our concepts didn't exist before the events, we can't legitimately draw on them to explain the events.

The intelligent postmodernist contention is that the network of concepts which form part of a social institution cannot be used to explain how the institution has come to have the form it does: the concepts are a product of these changes, and therefore can't have a causal role in the development of the system.

These concepts are part and product of the development of the system - they have their own history, their own contingency, and need explaining and evaluating as much as the system they describe. In fact, you can't describe the history of the system without paying attention to the history of the concepts in the system: earlier concepts gave birth to the system and the resulting concepts.

For example, there was a drastic change in the institution of punishment between 1750 and 1850. The change was well-known to historians of the penal system, but until Foucault came along the change was generally explained in terms of an increasing humanisation of the system, brought about by greater recognition of the rights of the criminal (or some such).

Foucault's observation in Discipline and Punish is that the increased degree of humanity exhibited in the modern penal process is a phenomenon that itself needs to be accounted for: to state that increased humanity is the reason for the new system would be to mistake an effect for a cause. The question for Foucault is - what happened which allowed the concept of prisoners' rights to take hold? What happened so that we can even think about and interpret the history of the penal system in those terms?

In his account of the reform process, Foucault describes how much of the reform debate centred not around acknowledging the criminal's rights, but replacing a system which through its uneven activity was providing a locus for opposition against the crown and inhibiting the activity of the bourgeoisie. Reform was not born of a new sensibility, but the was the product of the ruling elite's need for a regularised system of justice.

That need for regularisation produced the ideal of the system which we have today: where punishment fits the crime; where there is a system of surveillance which ensures criminal behaviour goes detected and punished; where courts are disconnected from the influences that make their judgements discontinuous; where punishment only happens after an offence has been verified; where someone is innocent until proven guilty.

This idea of justice has since come loose from its origin and taken on a life of its own, no doubt because it is a vital conceptual weapon for the average citizen looking to defend himself against an omnipotent state. Nonetheless, its existence is an historical accident, whatever its contemporary importance in framing debates around penal reform, identifying miscarriages of justice, and protecting individuals from the state.

In this account, Foucault is highlighting a historical fallacy: it doesn't follow from your ability to interpret a change in a certain way that the concepts you are using in fact explain that change - accurate interpretation is much harder to achieve than that. The fallacy is made when it is forgotten that concepts have their own history, so cannot be assumed in interpretation.

The lesson is to avoid the mistake of using current concepts to explain historical changes: the first job of the historians of cultural change is to learn which concepts were being used at the time of the change they are studying. It is only their second job is to figure out what happened that produced the systemic change they are studying: what caused the old system to break down and disappear, and what happened so that the new system has the form that it does?

For me, this is a very significant lesson in postmodernism, although it rather pulls the interpreting rug out from under your feet. You end up trying to give a history of developments in some area, using concepts which have a history, with your own concepts that have their own history. You can never get out of the system to some point where you can observe all the conceptual moves. You just swim around inside it forever.

Is this a contradiction at the heart of postmodernism, that renders inquiry itself unintelligible? Or is it a discovery about human inquiry? I think it's a discovery. I think it is possible to do historical research within these limits - better research than the penal theorists whom Foucault was criticising, certainly - so there is no loss.

It might be interesting to ask in conclusion: If what Foucault says is so damaging to inquiry and undermining of our concept of truth and ability to interpret, then why was he such a painstaking and relentlessly thorough historian? Why did he try so hard to uncover errors? He wasn't a stereotypical postmodern waffler - so what gives?

** Join discussion at the sixteenvoices google group. Sign up today! **

knowing vs Knowing

I have a suspicion that if there is a type of knowing that merits a capital letter (a different spelling) then you already acknowledge that it's not knowing, but something different. But if you are talking about something different to knowing when you talk about Knowing, then what do you reveal about knowledge?

The author of the SEP entry on Descartes's Epistemology thinks that it is helpful to split knowing into two kinds: the defeasible kind (knowing) and the indefeasible kind (Knowing).

I'm puzzled as to why he would do this. Descartes was, presumably, only talking about one kind of knowing - or at least, he thought he was. I don't remember him ever saying that the demon only wrecks one kind of knowledge, but it's OK - there's this other kind of knowledge out there.

The thing I find weirdest about this knowing/Knowing distinction, is why anyone would think that such a conceptual division could be explanatory. Obviously this person must think the split is intuitive and explanatory, otherwise they wouldn't have done it. But what motivates them to split the concepts, rather than decide they've screwed up and need to start again?

I guess the answer is pretty easy. The temptation to make the distinction between two kinds of knowledge lies in our intuition that we often say we know things like football scores, which bus goes near our flat in the evenings, and so forth, but which don't survive the method of sceptical doubt.

Since we want to continue to describe this ordinary stuff as knowledge, even though it can be doubted, then we need a weak concept of knowledge. But weak knowledge isn't everything - there is the second kind of knowing, that does survive sceptical doubt. That's the kind of Knowledge we really want. So, there are two kinds of knowledge.

Note that Descartes didn't make this distinction. As far as he was concerned, if you could doubt it then you couldn't know it. In order to preserve knowledge (with a small "k"), he had to invoke a benevolent God who would ensure that we weren't fooled about ordinary things. He didn't split knowledge into two varieties.

And nor should he have. We can't solve the problem of knowing by conjuring a new concept (not unless discovery of a sceptical argument creates a new class of knowledge). We're in the business of explaining and understanding the concepts we have - we can't just create new concepts to resolve these conceptual difficulties.

When Descartes talks about certainty, he at least believes he is talking about knowing. If he thought he was talking about a better, rarefied form of Knowing, then he wouldn't have written the Meditations as a manual for acquiring proper knowledge, but as an account of his amazing discovery of something called Knowledge (like knowledge, but Better).

You can post a comment - or join discussion at the sixteenvoices google group. Sign up today!

Shouldn't knowledge be described, not defined?

This is a response to a comment: "Any argument that shows that we can't know anything has a misguided concept of knowledge." I think the poster misunderstood my point (my bad) - my complaint is not about sceptical conclusions.

My complaint is with assumptions: Nozick starts his argument with the assumption that it's possible for us to be systematically wrong. I think scepticism is a symptom of a deeper problem, not a problem that itself needs to be solved, so I don't see how Nozick helps.

The problem I have with Nozick and his attempts to get around the troubles of defining knowledge as TJB+ is not his success (or maybe lack thereof) in coming up with a definition. From what I can understand, his definition is pretty water-tight. My problem is that he's been very successful in a project which I can't understand the value of.

I think that, whatever it means to have knowledge, the concept means what it does as a result of social interactions that render the word meaningful: the word "knowledge" means whatever has to obtain in order for the sentences containing the word to be true; and the particular meaning comes from the social interactions involving the word between people who live in a world.

That's pretty much Davidson plus whatever it takes to eliminate the "wrong" theories of meaning - there's a blog post related to this over here. Or at least, my own mangled understanding of the issue.

The thing is, these social interactions don't have much to do with truth (except insofar as utterances are nearly all true), and less stil to do with "counterfactuals" (unless you are living in a philosophy department, perhaps). Since Nozick has developed his concept of knowledge using his own concepts, I don't see how he has helped explain what it means to have knowledge: he has created a concept, rather than explained one.

The concept Nozick has created may even be co-extensive with knowledge; it may even be co-extensive enough that we can compare what we think we know with his counterfactual scheme, and come to some conclusion about whether in fact we know this thing we think we know or not. At least, it would be if we could travel to possible worlds.

But that still doesn't mean he has told us anything about this peculiar condition of knowing which is inflicted on human beings; that is there one minute yet disintegrates so readily under the sceptical ruminations of a Frenchman in a cellar. For my part, when I say I "know" something, it has bugger-all to do with counterfactuals. (Trust me.)

Why should I be interested in a theory of knowledge that explains a concept without any reference to my use of the word?