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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 181 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 181, December 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Behind the Screens
Ed: Stuart Hood
Lawrence and Wishart £12.99
In the 1970s and 1980s some left wing academia in media studies did useful research. Stuart Hood, James Curran and Jean Seaton examined how the ruling class controlled the media – killing off the 19th century radical press and later creating a tame broadcasting system with ‘the illusion of independence’. Meanwhile studies like Bad News and More Bad News by the Glasgow Media Group systematically exposed the media’s class bias.
Though this book is partly the result of a conference billed as Broadcasting and the Left, the excitement and radicalisation has gone. With the exception of Colin Sparks’ excellent essay on management’s offensive against the broadcasting unions, there isn’t even any attempt to analyse the motives behind the ruling class broadcasting reforms of the last ten years.
Instead we merely get a description of television output. Though there are some complaints – Mike Wayne makes some interesting points about why the ratings war makes for bland television – most of the authors seem to think today’s television is not too bad. The once radical Sylvia Harvey ends her essay on Channel 4 quoting the channel’s boss Jeremy Isaacs favourably and saying, ‘it will take considerable managerial skill and a clear cultural vision to hold onto the genuinely pluralistic programming policies established in the 1980s’.
The contributors are uncritical of public service broadcasting but their defence of it is feeble. Graham Murdoch sometimes used to be called a Marxist but his defence of the BBC is pure Blairspeak: ‘Public broadcasting must negotiate the new economics of the television marketplace ... it also needs to respond to shifts in the cultural landscape represented by the new politics of difference’.
Many of them were radicalised by the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s but never accepted that workers’ struggle was the key to social change.
When the struggle receded, they believed they could fight on regardless, inside the ‘ideological apparatus’ making programmes that would radicalise people from on high. In fact they were isolated and easily tamed.
Their expectations are tragically low. The once inspiring playwright John McGrath can only whimper, ‘in terms of struggle I think the only place people can anchor themselves, though it’s a rather threadbare hope, is to the Labour Party’.
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