Hello, Big Brother

[Guest guest]

http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/19421/

 

Hello, Big Brother

By Ian Williams, AlterNet

 

Posted on August 2, 2004,

 

http://www.alternet.org/story/19421/

 

The one unmitigated triumph of the Bush reign has been

a liberal artistic efflorescence. Not only has

publishing been rescued from the quasi-literate

stranglehold of the Rush Limbaughs and Ann Coulters,

with every Bush-bashing book flying off the shelves,

but the documentary film as a genre has taken the leap

from the higher numbered channels on the cable box to

the actual theatre.

 

Fahrenheit 9-11, Outfoxed, Bush's Brain, Control Room

and Danny Schechter's WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception)

all deal with different facets of our increasingly

Orwellian world, and it is no surprise that so many of

them draw on the vocabulary of George Orwell's 1984 to

describe what is happening.

 

In Orwell's seminal novel, Big Brother and the party

control the past, because by doing so, they control

the present and future. Enemies become allies

overnight, and all evidence to the contrary is put

down the memory holes in the Ministry of Truth, and

new archives written to back up the current version.

 

Robert Kane Pappas's documentary, Orwell Rolls in his

Grave, offers an overview about the reason for the

resurgence in reliance on Orwell: that Bush and his

supporters would spin all the way to graves, twirling

on everyone else's on the way.

 

Pappas tries, with some degree of success, to show the

skull beneath the skin of the modern media world. It

is not just that Bush has excited such opposition from

so many people, but that never before has that

opposition been so muted in the media.

 

In effect all those angry people are buying in books,

seeing in the cinemas, and buying as DVDs what it is

increasingly difficult to read in newspapers or on the

cable and broadcast channels: critical coverage of

what is easily the most partisan and doctrinaire

administration of our generation.

 

The first theatre screening for Orwell Rolls in His

Grave was at the Angelika in Greenwich Village in July

23. There were no red carpets, no velvet ropes or

cloud-illuminating floodlights, and the director,

Robert Pappas, only turned up towards the end – in

obligatory baseball cap rather than black tie. Which

is just as well really, since just a few minutes of

exposure to the performance, with pixilation and bad

synching, had him as indignant as a thought policeman

whose telescreens are on the blink. It was the

equipment, they decided after subsequent tests. He

pledges clean copies for future viewings, of which

there should be many.

 

The film's thesis, laid out carefully and

dispassionately, connects the 1980 election's October

Surprise and its effective burial by a deferential

media by easy stages – via the stealing of the Florida

electoral college results – to the performance of the

Federal Communications Commission under Michael

Powell, who has tried to take the monopolization of

American media even further than it has already

achieved. The implication is that the media are

returning the favor.

 

Orwell shows how words become their opposite in the

hands of the perpetually braying party line. It was

indeed a chilling foretaste of Fox- and MSNBC-style

news. On the Scarborough Country show, Scarborough

recently denied point blank that the US had ever

supported or condoned Saddam Hussein's barbarities

during the Iran-Iraq war – condemning the mere

suggestion as unpatriotic.

 

Of course, a quick look at the archives will give lie

to his assertions. But a lot more people look at his

type of show than go moseying around in archives,

whether paper or electronic. In fact, Big Brother was

intellectually superior to George W. Bush. He worried

about history and reshaping the past while W. neither

knows nor cares about it, confident that the constant

torrent of skewed media coverage will enhance the

contagious amnesia that already affects so many

American viewers and voters.

 

Pappas' film connects the way in which events

disappear from public view with the corporate control

of the media and its values. In effect, as

deregulation has concentrated media ownership, its

power has grown unchecked. It will not, of course,

report on itself with any objectivity, and not only

has deregulation weakened any government controls over

it, the power of the media over political careers has

led to a disastrously unhealthy and incestuous

combination between them.

 

Since deregulation ended even the appearance of

balance, direct intervention by proprietors in

newsrooms, even in music selection, has now become

unsubtle and obvious. Pappas shows how the media

consensus effectively killed the full enormity of the

stealing of the Florida election results, just as they

buried the strong evidence of Republican collusion

with the Ayatollahs over keeping the hostages until

Carter had lost the election.

 

A perennial problem with low-budget documentaries is

how to escape from the talking head format – and

another is to find new talking heads. Michael Moore,

who has made a film or two himself, appears in Pappas'

film, along with many of the people who are ubiquitous

on panels on the future of the media – Danny

Schechter, Bob McChesney, John Nichols, Mark Crispin

Miller, and more.

 

That said, however, what these heads are singing

becomes a swelling chorus, and Pappas points out that

his film has been out there, at festivals under

construction, even before many others in the current

crop. " You could say it's the sharp base of the

pyramid, " he smiles.

 

In fact he began the film several decades ago, when as

a film school student he took his camera in to

interview the city editor of Murdoch's Daily Post,

Michael Mitchelmore, and discovered that,

serendipitously, it was his last day on the job, and

so he was accordingly outspoken about the direction

the paper was taking.

 

The other reason for talking heads was an outcome of

the very process the film illuminates. He had hundreds

of hours of B-roll, but getting permission, even

paying it for it from the Fox TV's of this world would

have been a difficult task.

 

The people who claim fairness and balance would

litigate " fair use " into a corner for what he proudly

claims is a " basement film. " He adds " That's literally

where I made it. " It is of course a problem that has

beset many recent documentary makers working on Bush.

 

Perhaps the most chilling scenes of doublethink and

duckspeak are of the proceedings of the Federal

Communications Commission when Michael Powell and

Kathleen Q. Abernathy, stone-faced, claim a first

amendment right of free expression for monopolies to

control the airwaves, although Joe Klines of Fox News

was almost as spooky with his knowing leer as he

discusses news values. I checked up on Abernathy, who

does a creditably robotic imitation of a Stepford GOP

party host, and found that her concern for free speech

did not stop her waxing paroxysmic at the glimpse of

Janet Jackson's nipple.

 

Let me quote her: " Americans should not have to

tolerate such a gratuitous display of nudity.

Broadcasters should have more respect for their

viewers and exercise a greater degree of social

responsibility than what was shown last night. I am

pleased that this Commission is opening an immediate

investigation into last night's broadcast. I hope that

we can be responsive to the concerns raised by the

American people by addressing this matter

expeditiously. "

 

This is a woman who, as Pappas' film shows, could

ignore the unprecedented hundreds of thousands of

objections to handing Murdoch a potential media

monopoly, who can watch with equanimity as the small

stations are newspapers are swallowed up and harnessed

to a swelling tide of xenophobia and war. And a nipple

worries her?

 

Pappas ends with a warning. The Internet offers an

alternative. But for how much longer before the FCC,

under the guise of deregulation hands it over to the

same people who control the cable, broadcast, TV,

radio and print media?

 

Orwell is indeed the right reference for how chilling

such collusion between politicians and the media

moguls. " If you want a picture of the future, imagine

a boot stamping on a human face – for ever, " is indeed

scarier. But much more effective and dispiriting for

human progress is having a Scarborough, or a Limbaugh,

or an O'Reilly, braying lies on your screens –

forever.

© 2004 Independent Media Institute. All rights

reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/19421/

[Guest guest]

Once more, and eternally, media are not " deferential, " they're complicit.

Authors like Ian Williams, create the hopelessly improbable picture of

media, as driven by a bunch of imbeciles, incapable of thought or

clear-headed observation, and requiring that a few of us, in the general

population, look after them, and make them aware of reality. Just the

opposite is the case. It's the ordinary American that is kept in the dark,

and not by bumbling, half-asleep journalists, but by a class of media

professionals that know exactly what they're doing, and who they're doing it

for. They know when they " don't look " at some aspect or piece of the

political puzzle. They know when they're approaching some forbidden area of

the news. They know when they're overstepping their bounds. They know

who's paying their salary. They know which of the political parties runs

media. They know who can take their job away from them. Many journalists

actually don't know " the truths, " that some of the rest of us know. But it

isn't because they lack the professionalism, or the wits, or the skills.

It's because there are doors they will not open. They know exactly where

they're supposed to, and not supposed to look. They can't see behind the

door, not because they're " deferential, " or somnolent, or muddle-headed, but

because they knew from the beginning, or they were subtly, and not so

subtly, informed by those around them, to look the other way, and keep

certain doors closed.

 

Media is " big brother, " and the suggestion that you can be big-brother, and

not know it, is ludicrous.

 

JP

 

-

" Frank " <califpacific

<alternative_medicine_forum >

Monday, August 02, 2004 3:44 AM

Hello, Big Brother

 

 

> http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/19421/

>

> Hello, Big Brother

> By Ian Williams, AlterNet

(snip)

> The film's thesis, laid out carefully and

> dispassionately, connects the 1980 election's October

> Surprise and its effective burial by a deferential

> media.......................

(snip)