People's Democracy

(Weekly Organ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)


Vol. XXXVI

No. 43

October 28, 2012

ON CERTAIN KERALA EPISODES

 

Media Manoeuverings for

Manufacturing Consent-III

K K Ragesh

 

IT is precisely to target the CPI(M) that its leaders were deliberately made accused in these cases as part of the wanton political plot of the ruling political leadership in the state. Capitalising on fortuitous incidents, the UDF-media nexus launched a vigorous campaign to destabilse the CPI(M). Ridiculously, the same media is attempting to portray the UDF leadership as an icon of integrity and virtue. In order to avoid arresting the former UDF minister who was convicted by the Supreme Court for corruption, the UDF leadership had propagated that he was seriously ill and subsequently got him admitted in a five star private hospital. The UDF governments blatant bias that protected its minister P K Kunhalikkutty through a special investigation and its reluctance to file charges against K Sudhakaran MP and P K Basheer MLA were never interrogated in the media trial. Rather the media deceitfully blacked out these pertinent questions and subtly projected that the law proceeds in its own direction. When the law moves according to the vindictive direction set by the UDF leadership, the media cleverly covers it up under the rhetoric of equality before law and equal protection of law.

 

The rhetoric of Marxist violence is an all-time weapon of the rightist forces used to conceal their anti-people policies. The chief minister Oommen Chandy and team experiment the same jackal-trick to cover up its ruthless policies by painting the CPI(M) as a party of killers. The right wing media in the state subsequently become a mere megaphone of the UDF, so as to suit the UDF objective to implement its ruthless policies. The CPI(M) had to make tremendous sacrifices all through its way in the past. Even today, hundreds of comrades are being attacked and killed throughout the country, especially in West Bengal and Kerala. Amid all such brutal killings of the Party activists, the media conveniently hides such attacks against the CPI(M) and proliferates the cacophony of CPI(M) atrocities. 

 

The first episode of killing by stabbing in Kannur district was the murder of Ashraf, who was chairman of the Brennen College Union. He was stabbed by the Congress goons. The first event of bomb attack took place on Dinesh beedi company and Kolangareth Raghavan was killed in the attack. The Congress goons attacked the beedi company because its workers were supporters of the CPI(M). Former Congress leader Moyarath Sankaran, who had written the history of the INC, was beaten to death by Congress goons because he left the Congress and had joined the Communist Party. Nalpadi Vasu was shot dead on the direction of the Congress leader K Sudhakaran and it was the first incident of using gun against political opponents. Four comrades were burnt alive at Cheemeni by the Congress goons. It was the Congress party that initiated killings by various forms but the killers, hidden behind the fraudulent advocates of non-violence, were always described as angels in the media. Unfortunate murders were celebrated for scores of months not because of their genuine protest against a heinous crime but as a tool to hunt the CPI(M). The right wing agenda inherent behind this propaganda is nothing new because their anti-communist attitude is meant to protect the capitalists interests.

 

FREEDOM OF PRESS?

OR FREEDOM OF OWNERS? 

Most of the working journalists in Kerala have been Left-minded. While watching the reports filed by these journalists, most of who are former activists of the progressive student movement, one is left surprised. During personal talks, most of them express their helplessness as they were directed to file such reports. In that case what is the meaning of the freedom of press? Is it the right of the people to know? Or a journalists responsibility to make the people aware of? Or sheer affair and concern of the owner of the media enterprise? The freedom of the press should not be confined and defined as a mere freedom of the financier or the owner of the media establishment. Let us sympathise to the reporters who perform their part in the channel rooms and push their pen in the news paper desks as everyone cannot become Swadeshabhimani Ramakrishnapillai who made his pen as a sword to fight against injustice. It is a possible corollary when media activism is converted into paid-writings and presentation of sponsored news programmes. Most of the journalists have confined themselves under the perception that media activism is a mere show to impress upon the owner of the media. The ruling classes have the capability to confine the whole society under the ruling ideas by manufacturing consent using the mass media. Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci established the fact how the ruling ideas get to be accepted by the people without any dissent. While becoming the obedient devotees of the ruling class ideological hegemony, our journalists further produce breaking news and banner headings out of emptiness.

 

Media serves the interests of the dominant elite. In authoritarian States where monopolistic control over the media rests with the State through official censorship, such interest is apparent. But in the so-called democracies, where official censorship is absent, it is very difficult to make out a propaganda system at work that serves the dominant class. While blatantly serving the dominant elite the media poses to be independent by trying to actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest. What is not evident (and remains undiscussed in the media) is the limited nature of such critiques, as well as the huge inequality in command of resources, and its effect both on access to a private media system and on its behavior and performance. (Manufacturing Consent -- The Political Economy of the Mass Media; Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky). It is a fact that the owners of the most of the mass media firms have not set them up for the sake of the fourth estate, rather to serve the capitalists interests. Hence such critiques of the media cannot proceed further ahead of a certain boundary and thus it withdraws and covers up those issues from the public by way of its subtle focus on insignificant issues.

 

Media world today is highly professionalised and the professionals identify themselves as a commodity in the job market. Almost all so called professionals are under the perception that undermining of social commitment is an essential ingredient of a professional. Thus professionalisation of news becomes a significant objective and the media professionals take it as a task to manufacture targeted news-making and such professionals effectively shape the consciousness of the viewers thus proving themselves proficient media professionals. They are honored and being labeled as model journalists as their news effectively serves the interests of the ruling elite. The media today is eagerly involved in the investigation of making big news by filtering it using the filters that suite the ruling class elite.      

 

MANUFACTURING

CONSENT

In the German Ideology, Marx and Engels wrote that The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.

 

As Karl Marx explained in the above mentioned quote the ruling class, in order to confine the whole society in their class interest and to impose its ideological hegemony in the society, use the mass media also as a tool among many others. And the media professionals often become obedient followers of the ideological hegemony of the ruling class. Antonio Gramsci argues that the State is made up of two components, a political society which rules through coercion and a civil society which rules by way of manufacturing consent. He argues that hegemony is manufactured consent, created through the articulation of intellectuals in a public sphere, where bourgeois hegemony is reproduced in cultural life through the media, universities and religious institutions to manufacture consent and legitimacy. In a capitalist society, the ideological hegemony of the ruling class subsists as a common sense even in the absence of the ruling class political party. Such a common perception is moulded by the right wing media and the traditional intellectuals aid the ruling class.

 

THE MEDIA FILTER

OF ANTI-COMMUNISM

The mass media today adheres to a pre-designed propaganda model. Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky in their book focus on how inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. They reiterate the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalise dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public. The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news "filters," fall under the following headings: (1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) "anti-communism" as a national religion and control mechanism. These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns. The elite domination of the media and marginalisation of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news "objectively" and on the basis of professional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints, they often are objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable.

 

The five filters narrow the range of news that passes through the gates, and even more sharply limit what can become "big news," subject to sustained news campaigns. Contrasting the objective conception of the media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and their independence of authority, substituted the "societal purpose" of the media with instilling and defending the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the State. The media serve this purpose in many ways: through selection of topics, distribution of concerns, framing of issues, filtering of information, emphasis and tone, and by keeping debate within the bounds of acceptable premises. And thus Noam Chomsky argues "Propaganda is to democracy as violence is to dictatorship". The same propaganda technique is at work in Kerala too while attacking the CPI(M) with repeated news bulletins and manufactured big news and hence hide the policies of the government and its harmful impact on the people.