mediajunk

Yesterday, as accomplished journalist and author John Pilger complained about the contemporary silence of writers on political issues in Znet (originally in The New Statesman), Patrick Weever of anti-spin.com wrote a damning essay for The Observer on newspapers’ dependence on PR.

The articles share a similar theme – the toothlessness and passivity of contemporary writing, in all its forms.

“For the great writers of the 20th century, art could not be separated from politics,” begins Pilger. “Today, there is a disturbing silence on the dark matters that should command our attention.”

“That the menace of great and violent power in our own times is apparently accepted by celebrated writers, and by many of those who guard the gates of literary criticism, is uncontroversial. Not for them the impossibility of writing and promoting literature bereft of politics. Not for them the responsibility to speak out – a responsibility felt by even the unpolitical Ernest Hemingway.”

So where, wonders Pilger, are today’s Hemingways, Orwells and Steinbecks? Similarly, Weever laments the contemporary dearth of investigative journalism.

“Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the Washington Post sleuths who exposed Watergate, are a dying breed,” he says.

Is journalism of all forms is being relegated to a by-product of corporate public relations?

“In the Eighties my old City editor on the Birmingham Post was still joking that the correct relationship between a journalist and a PR man was that of a dog and a lamp-post. But now the journalist is too often the lamppost and PR has taken over the world.”

Weever makes it clear he is not arguing that PR is inherently immoral or without value to the public, just that journalism needs to wean itself off the drug of PR news.

“The concentration of the media in a handful of multi-nationals is eroding journalistic values. Journalism is expensive, investigative journalism ferociously so. PR news is not just cheap, it is free. In the short term it aids the bottom line, in the long term it destroys the brand … [and] it may be expensive for democracy.”

The lack of political anger that Pilger laments in fiction writing, then, is mirrored in the lack of genuine social commentary that Weever identifies in the press, which in its heydey was described as the “fourth estate,” or the “government’s watchdog.”

But neither essay pointed out that there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon. The internet has provided us with a new way to produce and disseminate news. It is a medium that cannot, by virtue of its democratic infrastructure, readily be controlled by the corporate forces that now have a stranglehold on so many other broadcast or "one-to-many" media channels.

Already the blogosphere has provided an outlet for alternative voices (like those of the Iraqi warbloggers), while Google News strives to bring us versions of stories from news outlets (often in different countries) that we wouldn’t normally access.

The problem, however, may not lie with the publishing industry – but with the public. Pilger tacitly assumes that there is still an appetite for political writing. I believe the public, in the west at least, rarely hungers for matters that do not involve celebrity; glamour; wealth; the phoney gender war; or "reality" tv.

Maybe we don’t need to wean passive journalists off the drug of PR so much as we need to wean the passive public off the drug of old, conglomerate-controlled media.

I do not believe, as Pilger (in much of his writing) seems to, that we live in an Orwellian world. But we may, as Weever's essay suggests to me, live in a Huxleyian one.