If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.
What do I know? When the first protestors set out to occupy Wall Street in September, I thought their achievements would be modest. After all, the first signs weren’t exactly promising. They were relatively few in number, so it would have been flattering to call them a movement. They were denied access to Wall Street, which meant their name looked a misnomer and the mainstream media ignored them.
As it happens they have inspired similar protests around the world and forced the issues of inequality and corporate greed onto the public agenda. As Paul Mason pointed out last week:
#OWS has, in just a few weeks, become global shorthand among policymakers for “what can happen” if they don’t regain control of the situation. Once you get a coalition of perfectly ordinary people saying “we’ve had enough”, and then you have to watch as the cops baton and taser them in the name of the trespass laws, you know you are in a reputational crisis.
The success of the Occupy movement – and it is a success – lies in its statement of the bloody obvious – greed and inequality are indefensible; the economy is run in the interests of 1% of the people with the other 99% suffering a democratic deficit. It’s not a subtle message. It’s not a sophisticate message but it resonates because it’s true.
The Tories can usually depend on their lickspittles in the media to tow the ideological line with stories of benefit cheats, bloated public sector pensions, feral youths and immigrants – all manner of coverage that serves to obfuscate and deflect from the elephant in the room. In this instance the elephant in the room is that democracy and capitalism are parting company.
In the recent edition of New Left Review (Sept-Oct 2011), sociologist, Wolfgang Streeck writes:
Democratic capitalism was fully established only after the Second World War and then only in the ‘Western’ parts of the world, North America and Western Europe. There it functioned extraordinarily well for the next two decades—so well, in fact, that this period of uninterrupted economic growth still dominates our ideas and expectations of what modern capitalism is, or could and should be.
Streeck argues that this brief post-war period was ‘truly exceptional’. Capitalism has reverted to type and the powerful narrative asserting that freedom and democracy are indivisible from free-markets now looks like a fairy-tale. Streeck again:
As we now read almost every day in the papers, ‘the markets’ have begun to dictate in unprecedented ways what presumably sovereign and democratic states may still do for their citizens and what they must refuse them. The same Manhattan-based ratings agencies that were instrumental in bringing about the disaster of the global money industry are now threatening to downgrade the bonds of states that accepted a previously unimaginable level of new debt to rescue that industry and the capitalist economy as a whole. Politics still contains and distorts markets, but only, it seems, at a level far remote from the daily experience and organizational capacities of normal people: the US, armed to the teeth not just with aircraft carriers but also with an unlimited supply of credit cards, still gets China to buy its mounting debt. All others have to listen to what ‘the markets’ tell them. As a result citizens increasingly perceive their governments, not as their agents, but as those of other states or of international organizations, such as the IMF or the European Union, immeasurably more insulated from electoral pressure than was the traditional nation-state. In countries like Greece and Ireland, anything resembling democracy will be effectively suspended for many years; in order to behave ‘responsibly’, as defined by international markets and institutions, national governments will have to impose strict austerity, at the price of becoming increasingly unresponsive to their citizens.
There used to be a complacent assumption that countries that abandoned command economies for capitalism would sooner of later find democracy irresistible. We could do business with China, for instance, because its capitalist reforms were a sure sign that democracy and an end to human rights abuses would follow. We’ve been looking down the wrong end of the telescope.
In Cannes this week, as the G20 met, Paul Mason noted that ‘the only confident body language comes from people with money. And who has money? China, Singapore, Russia, Brazil, the Saudis.’ He went on: ‘Are you noticing a pattern there? Each of these countries is an export giant, has experienced rapid-fire modernisation and income growth, has a heavily statised economy, practises some form of covert protectionism, and has – with the exception of Brazil – either zero or attenuated democracy.’
There has been confusion about what the the Occupy movement is proposing in place of capitalism. Admittedly it has been difficult to discern any coherent plans and this has been a criticism leveled at the protestors. But actually if you look closely enough you can see the alternative their attempts to assert democratic principles and practices in the very way they conduct themselves. This can be unwieldy, no doubt. As one journal commented: ‘There are the large, drawn-out General Assemblies, operating a process of consensus-based participatory democracy that sounds immensely complicated and boils down, in practice, to several hundred increasingly frustrated people waving their hands at each other until they decide who cleans the dishes after the revolution.’
These are fledgeling efforts and easily mocked. But democracy has got to be infinitely preferable to living under the jackboot of the markets.
- If you want a picture of the future…
- …imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.
Introducing Etsio. If you’re seeking work experience, it can put you in touch with ’amazing companies’ in a range of professions. Employers advertise positions on the Etsio website which people looking for internships can apply for. It’s brilliant. Here’s an example of what’s available in the world of film and TVproduction:
Did you notice the bit at the end? Fee to be paid by intern: £65 a day?
Now, it’s not uncommon for people on work experience to go unpaid – I think it’s fair to say that it’s par for the course – but this is the first time I’ve ever come across a situation where people are invited to pay for the privilege of working. Most of the fee goes to the employer, with Etsio holding back a small admin charge.
Now before you all get on your high horses about this, I should point out that it’s all about edukashun. As the Etsio website says, ‘You aren’t paying for a job. You’re buying experience.’ – something to go on the aul’ CV. ‘The intern is paying to learn, just as they pay to attend university.’
Is it ethical? Hell, yeah. As Etsio says, ‘With students now paying £40,00 for a university education – but zero useful experience for an employer – we don’t think it’s unreasonable for them to pay a few hundred pounds to get invaluable real life experience.’
I’m sure Etsio are not alone in discovering a market for putting prospective interns in touch with employers, but this is the first time I’ve come across such a thing. And, of course, I am apoplectic. Did you expect anything less?
My grandfather was a labourer on the Belfast docks before the Second World War, walking from the Shankill each morning to stand in a pen with other workers from which a foreman would pick out who among would have work that day.
Were my grandfather alive today he’d be surprised to see that the new economy in Northern Ireland is as dependent upon casual labour as it was then, and that despite all the rhetoric about digital revolutions and peace dividends, work in the wee six is becoming, if anything, even more precarious than it was in his day.
I’ve been reading up on the so-called creative and media industries in Northern Ireland, described in the strategic action plan published by Department of Culture Arts and Leisure (DCAL, 2008), as ‘one of the fastest growing and increasingly important sectors of the economy’. There are apparently 2500 ‘creative enterprises’ in Northern Ireland employing 34,600 people. For somewhere with a population of less than 2 million, that’s a significant proportion of the workforce.
If we’re talking about the creative media industries, specifically, then the figures are slightly less. An estimated 700 companies, employ 10,900 workers – smaller, but not insignificant. This all looks very healthy until you consider the quality of employment in this sector. On the surface, it’s a mixed picture. According to the Sector Skills Assessment for the Creative Media Industries in Northern Ireland, published in January this year (2011), there is an ‘oversupply of potential new entrants keen to enter an area commonly seen as glamorous and exciting’. In 2008-09 there were in the UK 720,000 students in further education and 757,000 in HE doing courses that might be said to be ‘relevant’ to the creative media industries. Only 10% of those students could anticipate securing work in the industry within 6 months of leaving education, although the better news for graduates of media studies courses is that the industry is made up of 51% of employees from relevant courses.
One consequence of the oversupply of graduates, explains the Skills Sector Assessment, is a high level of voluntary or unpaid work undertaken in order to get a foot in the door and a first paid job: ‘more than two fifths (46%) of the NI Creative Media Industries workforce had undertaken unpaid work in order to get into the industry – a similar proportion to the UK average’.
Another deeply troubling issue for graduates looking to enter the creative media industries is that almost half of the workers (48%) within the sector in Northern Ireland are ‘freelancers’. When I asked BECTU, the media and entertainment union, what the single biggest issue facing its members, I was told without hesitation, freelance work.
Let’s be clear, despite the groovy sounding moniker, freelancers are casual labour, an old heavy industry term that my grandfather would have understood very well.
Casual labour is pernicious. Although it is often presented as something desirable – ‘allowing people to be flexible’; giving them ‘freedom from routine’ – the most obvious effect of not knowing where the next pay check is coming from is anxiety and stress. The other consequence is that workers are made vulnerable to exploitation, because no freelancer wants a reputation for being anything less than compliant. But another consequence, according to the Skills Sector Assessment, is that freelancers miss out on staff development and training opportunities, since employers are unlikely to invest time and money in up-skilling temporary staff.
At last year’s Belfast Media Festival I heard employers lament a ‘skills deficit’, which they seemed to think was the responsibility of FE and HE to fix. As I said then, I doubt that colleges and universities have the resources to do this. And even if they did, all that employers are effectively saying is that vulnerable, temporary workers should pay for their own training and up-skilling, which give the conditions of their employment, they can probably ill-afford. If the media and creative industries suffer a skills deficit, then responsibility for that lies largely with themselves, given how careless they are with the existing skills base.
As workers in the sector get older, the news doesn’t get any better, especially for women. The Skills Sector Assessment says that the ‘oversupply of people wanting to enter the industry has also had implications for retention as well as recruitment… people who choose to start a family commonly find it difficult to combine this with a career in the creative media industries and the problem appears more acute for women’.
Women are poorly represented within the industry – only 22% compared with 47% across Northern Ireland, a figure that gets worse among older women, who are left to struggle, trying to balance raising a family with the unpredictable hours and, one would think, competitive nature of securing freelance employment.
The creative and media industries trade on glamour and excitement. They seem to hold out the promise of creative, fulfilling work. But the facts don’t seem to support the popular reputation that the sector enjoys in the minds of the young people who aspire to join it.
All of which leaves me with a number of questions:
For instance, what is the preferred personality of a prospective worker in the creative and media industries? And how do workers already within the industry articulate their experience –in other words, what do they say and how do they talk about their experience of work?
And there are other broader questions, such as how much should we invest in a sector which is so careless with its own skills-base and which depends so heavily upon casual labour? What sort of future does that propose?
The creative industries look set to grow, or perhaps the word is colonise the world of work, for it seems that there is little limit to the industries that can be appropriated by (or appropriate for themselves) the term ‘creative’, it is such an empty signifier. After all, isn’t every form of human industry at some level creative? What special claim can the new economy make to being ‘creative’ that industry in the recent past couldn’t?
I would argue that a key element to prefixing ‘industry’ with the word ‘creative’ has been the deepening of insecurity in work, the absence of welfare and diminished employee rights.
“I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to get old.”
On the day that we learnt that youth unemployment is pushing 1,000,000; on the day that the National Health Service was dealt another blow by the House of Lords; and as the UCU begins industrial action to protest at the attacks upon the pensions of university staff, I’ve had the words of two Labour politicians on my mind.
The first is Neil Kinnock’s warning in 1983 when a Tory general election victory was imminent. He said: ”I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to get old.”
The second is Nye Bevan’s speech on the eve of the National Health Service:
‘…no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. They condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation. Now the Tories are pouring out money in propaganda of all sorts and are hoping by this organised sustained mass suggestion to eradicate from our minds all memory of what we went through. But, I warn you young men and women, do not listen to what they are saying now. Do not listen to the seductions of Lord Woolton He is a very good salesman. If you are selling shoddy stuff you have to be a good salesman. But I warn you they have not changed, or if they have they are slightly worse than they were.’
I despise the Conservative Party. And have nothing but utter contempt for their Lib Dem lickspittles.
I don’t want to live in a country that thinks there is any virtue in making a profit out of the sick and dying.
I don’t want to live in a country that can throw 1.000,000 kids onto the dole and then talk about them like it’s somehow their fault for not being sufficiently employable.
And I don’t want to live in a country were the elderly and retired, after working all their adult lives, are treated like a burden.
So I’ll be taking every opportunity to do something about it. It’s a priority.
Work-related stress: take the blue pill…
Last week we learnt that stress is the most common cause of long term sick-leave from work. The survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and healthcare provider, Simplyhealth, points to job insecurity as one of the key factors triggering mental health problems among workers. Management styles were also indicted.
This story caught my eye because I’ve recently been to see my GP and the issue of work-related stress came up. I was actually there with a seemingly unrelated ailment. I’ve had acne since my teens, when I used to look like a pot of baked beans coming to the boil. I combated that with two courses of the nuclear option for this sort of thing, Roaccutane. That got rid of it. But I continue to suffer occasional bouts of acne rosacea. These outbreaks coincide with periods of stress, a condition, which as far as I can tell, is increasingly accepted as a mere occupational hazard in higher education.
For the rosacea, my GP suggested Oxytetracycline, which I was fine with until she explained that I’d be on this course of antibiotics for 3 months. I baulked at the idea. I’ve had enough antibiotics. Wasn’t there something more preventative I could do?
Well, said the GP, what did I think caused the acne rosacea?
Stress, I replied.
Would I mind elaborating, asked the GP. Was this stress related to my personal life?
I mumbled something about my problems being work-related.
Would I like to talk about it further?
Of course not. Stress is something middle class lightweights suffer from. The sons of Belfast lorry drivers wouldn’t entertain such a condition! Besides, I’m sure lots of people find work hard going but they just keep calm and carry on. What makes me so bloody special?
‘You know’, said the GP, ‘The number of people who present with stress and other mental health issues connected with work is growing all the time. It’s very common and nothing to be embarrassed about. We could prescribe tablets or get you a mental health professional to talk to.’
It felt a little like that moment in The Matrix when Morpheus offers Neo a choice between the red or blue pill, except there was only one pill being offered, the blue one; the one you take and ‘the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe’. I declined. Alcohol works fine and tastes better than prescription drugs of whatever colour. On the other hand, the idea of doing a ‘Tony Soprano’ has its attractions. Bi-weekly chats of a personal nature with an attractive therapist… but I said, no. I am deeply suspicious of the medicalization of work related-stress because its underlying assumption is that the system is fine, it’s the worker that needs fixing with therapy and drugs.
If work-related stress is on the increase, then I wonder how many among us are effectively doped to get us through the working day? And I wonder are we slipping into some sort of science fiction dystopia: a world where humans are sedated and psychologically reprogrammed to make them function better in the service of a monster of their own creation called the Market. A world where humans are subjected to a system that is administered by dull, middle managers whose job it is to endlessly audit performance, carry out staff appraisals and remind workers of how lucky they are to have a job. A world where a ubiquitous, celebrity-lifestyle culture celebrates shallow aspiration and random good fortune, inducing a sort of morbid cheerfulness in its drugged audience.
Maybe I should have taken the pills when they were offered…
A Sunday rant in which I despair at the BBC (again)
I know, I know. It’s Sunday and I’ve already been wound up by the inane Sunday Morning Live, the BBC’s flagship example of it’s tabloidisation. But it doesn’t end there. It never ends there. So, I ask you, how can BBC News 24 think that another Paul McCartney marriage is more important (or essentially news-worthy) than the protest currently underway on Westminster Bridge against the government’s plans for the NHS? I’ve just watched some breathless ‘journalist’ outside Sir Paul’s London residence tell the nation that the ex-Beatle and his soon-to-be-bride are looking relaxed.
‘What’s been happening?’ she was asked by the studio anchor.
‘Ohh, lots’, the correspondent cooed, before elaborating in a way that demonstrated beyond doubt that there was fuck all happening. She even admitted that all she had to go on was speculation, but she deliver this speculation in the tones of someone who had just witnessed the second coming.
When journalists camped outside a celebrity’s home refer to ‘speculation’ what they mean is that they’ve been talking to other journalists, all of whom have a vested interest in the story and therefore in the gross inflation of it’s importance. They have nothing.
Not to worry. There’s always the Michael Jackson tribute concert. Even this morbid, sentimental pop-fest was deemed more news-worthy than protests in defense of the NHS. But then again, even the news that Sainsbury’s has committed itself to matching the prices of its rivals has made it onto the BBC News website, where there is no mention of demonstrations on Westminster Bridge. Fuck. Why doesn’t the BBC just hand back the license fee and carry proper advertisements. Better still, why not just accept sponsorship from a large supermarket and have fucking done with.
News is shit. But the BBC, one feels, is in particular trouble. This is because the sort of constituency that regularly jumps to the corporation’s defense when governments threaten it are the same sort of people who take an interest in things like the defense of the NHS. People like me. Who don’t give a toss about for Sainsbury promotions and celebrity gossip.
Now that I’ve got that all of my chest, I read on Twitter that the BBC has at last mentioned the demonstration on Westminster Bridge. But I’m still fuming. It is Sunday after all. And I’ve got Downton Abbey to avoid tonight. Don’t get me started on ITV…
Update: Below is the BBC News 24 coverage. I am nothing if not fair. The report is nothing if not impeccably balanced.
______________________________________________
Stop press: This picture from CharlieMcMenamin, our correspondent on Westminster Bridge.
#occupywallstreet
In July, Adbusters, an anti-consumerist organisation, put out a call for protesters to occupy Wall Street, declaring: “It’s time for DEMOCRACY NOT CORPORATOCRACY.” Yesterday (17th September) saw that call answered with a demonstration in New York that sought to imitate those of the Arab Spring. 
At the time of writing it would appear that demonstrators have set up camp and spent the night in Lower Manhattan amid a heavy police presence. The protest has been peaceful and perhaps as a consequence, largely ignored by the media. Indeed, the suspicion that there is a deliberate media ‘blackout’ has been one of the constant complaints from the protesters using the Twitter hash-tag #occupywallstreet.
There were also accusations that Twitter had effectively censored the #occupywallstreet hash-tag yesterday by stopping it from trending. Others complained that they found it difficult to get reception on their mobile phones in Manhattan, which would be remarkable in the such a plush part of New York.
This may all be conspiracy theory. Perhaps the demonstration isn’t considered sufficiently newsworthy by journalists. Maybe it just hasn’t attract the numbers. In fact,there are vastly varying claims about the attendance: from a few hundred to 50,000! Although, how many people would it take to catch the media’s eye. After all, it seems that it only takes one ‘tea-bagger’ to clear his or her throat and a microphone is thrust in front of them. But you’d be a fool to expect fair-play from the corporate media, although that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep asking for it.
Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see how, and whether, the protest develops over the next few days; whether the USA is ready for a “Springtime’ of its own.
My initial reaction is to be sceptical. Trying to inspire Tahrir-style demonstrations in the USA might be difficult, because unlike Egyptians, there are probably sufficient numbers of Americans labouring under the illusion that they live in the greatest country in the world.
I’m no expert in this area but the USA looks to me like a country in serious economic decline, losing its influence in the world and militarily overstretched. In short, the model of America that many of us grew up with — world super-power; the American dream, land of hope and opportunity etc — is in its death-throes. And as Shakespeare once wrote, ‘Tis better playing with a lion’s whelp. Than with an old one dying.’
I have a terrible feeling that a declining USA will be an ugly affair — defined more by organisations like the nefarious Tea Party than Adbusters. I hope I’m wrong.
We live in a changing world – no shit, Sherlock!
Last year I had a meeting with the leader of the nursery school my youngest boy was attending. The school is a small cheerful place and the attendants are lovely, and meetings like these were a chance to hear how your wee one is progressing; all pretty informal, so not something to dread. That was until my last visit when I was assured that at 3 – 4 years old, all children at the nursery school were developing the skills they would need for careers in the future.
Let me just reiterate that incase you missed it. Some policy-wonk thinks it a good idea to encourage skills for working life among nursery school children.
I knew that the previous Labour administration had floated the idea that primary school children as young as 6 should be encouraged to think about future employment prospects. And I had, of coursed, advised my first-born (who was at that time five years old) that should anybody ask him what career he had in mind for the future, he should say without hesitation that he wanted to be a Jedi Knight.
In my own line of work as a university lecturer I am encouraged to embed ‘employability’ into my teaching, but Jesus, I never imagined for one moment that there were such sick, twisted, fucks out there who’d force such nonsense upon infants.
I stood in that once lovely nursery, looking forlornly at the building blocks and sand-pit, now stripped of their childish innocence, signifying only the ugly machinations of an adult world that can conceive of kids as nothing more than little economic units to be pressed into production. Fuck, I was depressed.
Then I looked at the children gathered around the dressing up box, putting on little costumes – miniature police and nurses’ uniforms, Bob the Builder and Fireman Sam costumes – and I noticed my own child dressed as a bear. Bollocks!
Happily he has survived nursery school and last month started the local primary. New uniform, all spick ‘n’ span. Lovely. Until we received a booklet all about the curriculum. It’s the sort of literature that government departments produce that are meant to reassure you that they have everything under control and everyone’s best interests at heart. In this instance it struck fear in me. On the opening page I learned that: “We live in a changing world. Our children will have more career choices than we did. To succeed, our children need to be able to respond to change and apply their knowledge and skills in a range of situations.”
Behind the bland gov-speak lies a message: our children are the equivalent of cannon fodder for the economy.
It’s when governments and institutions feel the need to state the blindingly obvious that I worry – ‘We live in a changing world.’ You’d be worried if we didn’t. You’d think there was something up if history stopped and everything stayed just as it was. I’m sure our parents and their parents (our grandparents, in case you’re struggling with that) knew that the world changed, moved on, kept rolling round the sun. So when some government pamphlet feels the need to mention it I know that I’m being softened up for something. And so I am. The message is that my child (and your child) need to malleable little pawns or face social oblivion.
When I first encountered this sort of horse-shit at university in the guise of ‘employability’ I was, quite frankly, confused. Employability? Had universities been producing unemployable people for decades and we’d only found out now? Were there masses of graduates without an inkling of how to get work. Of course not. Employability isn’t really about helping people get jobs it’s about instructing them in the ways of a new economic order where they need to internalise notions of flexibility and precariousness. It’s about producing a subjectivity that doesn’t expect security and welfare – a person who can embrace their own alienation.
WE LIVE IN A CHANGING WORLD.
STAND BY FOR FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.
BE READY TO RESPOND AS COMMANDED.
So as the youngest paddled off into his classroom for the first time, I had rather mixed feelings. The first day of school is always a landmark occasion: a right of passage, if you like. But I also felt like I was feeding him into a machine that doesn’t appreciate or care for his humanity just his utility.
Normal service will be resumed shortly. In the meantime watch this kitten playing with a ball of wool.
The climax to BBC2’s The Hour sees the idealistic young journalist, Freddie Lyons, make an impassioned plea for public debate and the right to question political leaders. These things he sees as integral to a healthy democracy. And he is not wrong.
- Freddie Lyons, The Hour (BBC2)
But as Freddie speaks directly to camera, during a live broadcast, the show is abruptly censored by his superiors, who literally pull-the-plug on him, leaving television screens all over the nation showing the apparently reassuring message that ‘normal service will be resumed shortly’. With nothing else to broadcast the BBC switch to an ‘interlude’ of a kitten playing on a chair.
The Hour is a drama about a pioneering news and current affairs programme struggling to provide accurate news coverage, comment and opinion in the stifling atmosphere of 1950s Britain during the Suez Crisis. In essence it’s a story about the heroism of journalists and media producers, but it all appears a little self-aggrandising given that the BBC and many other media outlets frequently leave us staring, metaphorically, at the cat playing on the chair and the promise of normal service to be resumed.
I’m going to offer a gross generalisation here but I think it’s called for: most of what is broadcast and printed is fucking atrocious and it is poisoning the democracy that The Hour’s Freddie Lyons stands up for. We saw this recently with the inclusion of David Starkey on a Newsnight panel to discuss the recent riots in English cities.
Nothing qualified Starkey to appear on the programme other than his ability to guarantee controversy. He brought no insight to the debate and indeed he served only to mystify the issues; his idiotic comments subsequently taking up more time that they deserved on the show and for days afterwards. But it’s not really Starkey who deserves a kicking over this: it’s the wanker who thought it appropriate to invite him on to Newsnight in the first place.
If Starkey was there purely for his value as ‘good TV’ then we must conclude that in the midst of a serious crisis Newsnight forsook public debate for a bit of Punch ‘n’ Judy. I think it’s symptomatic of how the media are increasingly disinterested in the real world of things and institutions and people and social relationships, and instead pre-occupied with media ‘product’, which is something that the real world is refracted through and then obliged to adjust to. I’ve seen it first-hand.
Occasionally I get invited to comment in the media about one thing or another and I’m always struck by how apparently disinterested broadcasters are in the actual content of their output. To be honest, I’ve been invited to speak about things that I have no real knowledge or expertise about, but being a bit of a media-whore I always say yes. I’m surprised that I get away with this, but I do, because it really doesn’t matter what I say once on air, providing I don’t curse or cause obvious offence (only well-established controversialists like David Starkey get to do that). The bottom line is that as long as I can talk and there are no embarrassing silences – no ‘dead-air’ – then it doesn’t matter too much what I say. The interviewer isn’t really listening. I’ve been tempted to recite The Lord’s Prayer, or a shopping list, or deliver the shipping forecast in reply to some inane question, just to see if anyone in the studio would notice, which I doubt.
In short, it seems we’ve reached a crisis point where the media is staffed by people who are skilled in filling up a massive and expanding range of media, and do so with noise, nonsense and bullshit. The priority is not to inform, educate and entertain but simply to keep the noise turned on at all costs.
So here are a few proposals that might return the media to the sort of democratic ambitions so eloquently expressed by Freddie Lyons.
1. Let’s have less media – especially, do away with 24 hour news.
2. Expertise and specialist knowledge are a premium – why should anyone be commenting or reporting on issues about which they know fuck all. Just because you can talk uninterrupted shit in front of a microphone for two hours a day doesn’t mean you should.
3. End the practice of temporary and unpaid work. Get people into positions, keep them there and let them learn how to do the job properly.
4. Don’t employ media studies graduates for anything but the most menial tasks!
Okay, the last one’s a bit harsh. But term starts soon and I’m getting my revenge in early…
