“After all, there came a day when Edwin Reardon found himself regularly at work once more ticking off his stipulated quantum of manuscript each four-and-twenty hours.” (George Gissing, New GrubStreet, 1890)
Written in late 19th century when the embryo of last century was just uncoiling, Gissing, proponent of extreme naturalism school of writing, in his novel explored the insidious exploitative process whereby the splendid freedom of creativity becomes a mechanical process like any other commercial or industrial production.
Ironically, all the claims to ‘literary creation’, even then rang a hollow bell inside a veil woven to hide the basic economic pressures. After all, literature was reduced to a commodity. The exploitative scenario with the commoditification and reification of labour, strangely, even after a century has not changed and continues to hurtle on its path reducing every value to a marketable commodity. And if the economics of manufacturing of printed stuff passed off as
‘literature’ continues to remain the same, the Medusa of capitalism has now enveloped the news world also into its web. The situation of a journalist or a scribe or a hack is no different from that of Gissing’s well-meaning character Reardon.
The journalist- like Reardon- whether in print or in visual medium has to churn out a ‘stipulated quantum’ of words or verbiage, ‘each four-and-twenty-hours.” Since news, like the literature, has also become a commodity.
It is a circular prison where the hack churning out a ‘stipulated quantum’ of commodity, under economic duress, not only gets alienated but also allows the subjugation of his or her consciousness. Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs in History and Class Consciousness observed: ‘The commodity can only be understood in its undistorted essence when it becomes the universal category of society as a whole. Only in this context does the reification produced by commodity relations assume decisive importance both for the objective evolution of society and for the stance adopted by men towards it. Only then
does the commodity become crucial for the subjugation of men's consciousness to the forms in which this reification finds expression.... As labour is progressively rationalized and mechanized man's lack of will is reinforced by the way in which his activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative.’ And the forces which control the commodity in words of Herbert Marcuse, allows free choice of goods and services that sustain social
controls over life of toil and fear-by sustaining alienation so as to maximise “the efficacy of the controls.”
And if in 18th century or 19th century literature was commodified by Western powers to control the minds, in late 20th century it is the mass media which has been commodified. Anthony Smith in his study-The Geopolitics of Information: How Western Cultures Dominate the World New, observed that the “threat to independence in the late twentieth century from the new electronics could be greater than was colonialism itself…the new media have the power to penetrate more deeply into a ‘receiving,’ culture than any previous manifestation of Western technology.”
Thus the commodified news is changed into a spectacle. The spectacle emerges from media which in words of Guy Debord is “basically tautological character… flowing from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends. It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory.”
A simulation is created, and under the veneer of journalistic practices, society is carpet-bombed and a “Global brainwash,” is executed in words of developmental sociologist Gosovic Branislav. The simulation- a fabrication of reality or a world of “Absolute Fake,” is thus generated where fakes are doled out to recipients or people as real thing, who in the barrage of this Umberto Eco’s “hyper-reality,” turn into passive robots.
And the symptoms of this fake authenticity being doled out by the media round-the-clock is the recent news world scandal where scribes like fixers scurried to parrot the spin masters aka PR agencies or lobbyists or power-brokers.
The deeper malaise without jumping into the bandwagon, pontificating simplistic conspiracy theory lies in the facade of a political-economic system wherein the scribes conjuring the free society images on the screen, are reduced to becoming just instrumentalists and not directors. The directors of the images, of words-to-be-spoken, of the atmosphere to be created, sit in the PR agencies boardroom.
Public Relations (PR) Agencies- a misnomer for Press Relations or Publicity Agents or to put it simply power-brokers focussing primarily on the manipulation of news, in these times primary task is to control the media. And the producers funding them are the so-called glorified ‘corporate honchos.’
They control the media and their class interest shape, the kind of information that has to be doled out and the way it is to be doled out. Thus one finds political clash projected as an independent struggle between two warring political parties or personalities, while the reality lies in the turf war between industrial lobbies. There is never ever mention of the backing of interested industrial lobbies in political clashes. The masses are duped into a cathartic experience of having a ‘power,’ and being able to bring down a political party from the throne-- of course with the help of a ‘free media.’
And the rulers know the importance of the ‘free media,’ illusion. It effectively enthuses and injects hopes into the down and out masses, of a better future. The media, like a knife in the hands of thug clothed in surgeon’s traditional uniform is used to shore up public confidence in an unjust, crisis-riven financial and economic structure. Of course gloom and doom is permitted when an obvious crisis looms ahead harshly, but then the legitimacy of the system is never ever challenged or questioned.
And it is precisely for this reason that the commodification of news and corporatisation of news organisation became a necessity. This change paved the entry of PR agencies. In a strange twist of irony, PR people who till sometime back were looked down upon with distaste by journos, suddenly became sought after figures. The entry of PR agencies brought about the blurring of the lines between what was news and what is news in these times.
With the entry of PR agencies, the role, the nature and the essence of journalist and journalism also changed. Fabrication, manipulation, twisting by blending fact and fiction became the norm of the day. Seeking sensational news had always been a task of every reporter, but in the corporatized media, even sensational news needs to be manipulated to tailor the needs of the corporate interests.
And the tailoring is subtly done by the spin tailors strutting around the corridors of media offices as PR people. Quotes, sound bites see the light or air only if it does not threaten the very rationality of the system’s failure. And here again the PR people control and monitor the scribes and media. From the first syllable to the last word.
Thus, when some employees of a private airline went on a strike, the organisation hired a PR agency to engineer the media into spreading a canard against the striking employees and create a wave of sympathy towards the airline owners. Strangely, none of the so-called news organisation ever questioned the whopping amount paid to the PR agency by the airline which had gone around the town tom-tomming about its financial paucity and refusal to pay its employees. The media hacks were grovelling and justifying each and every irrational and inhuman action of the airline management, even though it smacked of distasteful servility.
Thus the recent scandal tapes involving conversations between hacks and PR agents, is nothing to be surprised of. Given the clout in the media world where appointments of not just reporters but also of editors are made on the recommendations of PR agencies, to hear about a hack snivelling and crawling in front of a lobbyist is not surprising.
Neither it is surprising to hear or see in the media offices the gradation of journalist being rated on the scale of fixing deals he or she manages in political-corporate nexus or how snugly is mollycoddled by a lobbyist or an industrialist. After all the aim of media in these times is not to present the truth but to blur lies.
The media today is like the pharmacological dictator of The Futurological Congress (A Polish novel-Stanislaw Lem) wherein everyone is made to hallucinate a feel-good-world even though the society, environs as well as people are on verge of collapse. Amidst this collective madness, when the main character comes regain his senses doesn’t know which of the reality is hallucination.
Prabhat Sharan is a Senior Journalist with interest in social, working class, wild-life conservation, media, philosophical and literary studies. He can be contacted at sharanprabhat@gmail.com
