Putting out the people's eyes: Machiavelli and the Press Complaints Commission
Article published: Wednesday, March 4th 2009
Media Lens comment on the Media Standards Trust report
Last month, the Media Standards Trust (MST), an independent charity, published a report assessing the British medias capacity to regulate itself under the Press Complaints Commission (PCC). The report found the current system is neither independent nor effective. Martin Moore, director of the MST comments:
The current system is paid for by the newspaper industry, its rules are written by working newspaper editors, and almost half the Commission itself is made up of newspaper and magazine editors.
You would be forgiven, as a member of the public, for thinking that the system was geared more towards protecting the interests of the press than the public.
Research commissioned by the MST reported only 7 per cent of the public say they trust national newspapers to behave responsibly a lower score even than banks. Some 75 per cent of people think newspapers frequently publish stories they know are inaccurate and almost three quarters would like the government to do more to ensure newspapers correct inaccurate stories.
Predictably, Sir Christopher Meyer, chairman of the PCC, rejected the report as a cuttings job masquerading as a serious inquiry.
Meyer, prior to becoming PCC chairman, was British ambassador to the United States (1997-2003). A glance at this earlier role helps explain why public trust in the mainstream media has all but evaporated.
In March 2005 Panorama disclosed a memo written by Meyer, dated 18 March 2002. The memo described high-level US-UK discussions on Iraq in which Meyer had been involved. He summarised the meetings:
We backed regime change, but the plan had to be clever and failure was not an option. It would be a tough sell for us domestically.
A key part of this clever plan involved deceiving the British media, public and parliament into believing that Bush and Blair were determined to find a diplomatic solution, when exactly the opposite was the case.
This, then, is the current chairman of the body responsible for protecting media honesty in Britain.
At the end of March, Meyer is due to be replaced by Peta Buscombe, currently chief executive of the Advertising Association. Comment seems superfluous.
Former New Statesman editor Peter Wilby noted in the Guardian last month that the MST report found public trust in the press has fallen below the level necessary for it to perform its proper role in a democratic society.
But this was nonsense, Wilby offered, because the public prefer rogues to honest, upstanding citizens. It is hard to believe anyone trusts the Sun or Mail to report news completely accurately or to behave responsiblyThey are trusted to provide good entertainment, scurrilous gossip and consistent articulation of popular prejudices.
In other words, he appeared to suggest, the public does not care for honesty, truth – all that other stuff.
We asked John Pilger for his view:
It’s true that many people are entertained by trashy newspapers. But it’s also true that the readership of newspapers, especially tabloids, has fallen steeply in the last 30 years. Why? My experience in popular journalism, in the press and on television, is that when people are engaged on issues that touch their lives and move them, and help them make sense of the world, they respond in remarkable ways and never cynically.
When the Daily Mirror devoted almost an entire issue to stricken Cambodia, it not only sold out completely, it raised millions of pounds, unsolicited, mostly from readers who could ill afford to help a faraway people. When my film on East Timor, Death of a Nation, was broadcast late at night on ITV, it was followed by 4,000 phone calls every minute into the early hours — a storm of public interest and concern. That’s the ‘hidden public’ that’s so often well ahead of journalists who dismiss or patronise its power.”
That has also been our experience. The public does not prefer rogues to people who are honest and compassionate. The reason politicians like Reagan, Clinton, Blair and Obama work so hard to sell themselves as kindly, caring regular guys is that this has been well understood since the time of Machiavelli. He listed the all important five qualities of mercy, good faith, integrity, humanity and religion that a Prince should seem to have.
As this suggests, a key function of the mainstream political system is to sell the public versions of truth, honesty and progressive change that in fact serve vested interests – illusions that inspire hope but do not deliver.
This naturally generates public cynicism, a feeling that nothing can be done to change things. But this cynicism is not an inevitable response to the world – it is a desired outcome of a system that is empowered by apathy and indifference.
This is a version of a Medialens alert edited with the authors’ permission. To read the full analysis, visit http://www.medialens.org/alerts/09/090217_putting_out_the.php
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