Moral
Panic
In
1984, a music group called The Apostles (in which I played a minor role)
was interviewed by Garry Bushell, a journalist for a sordid little
fashion magazine called Sounds. I had earlier made a wager with one of
the other band members that I could have us interviewed by one of their
journalists before the end of the year. I wrote letters to their letters
page; I sent them a copy of one of our records with a letter designed to
appeal what I believed to be the main obsessions of the main journalists
who contributed to the paper. To cut a long story short, I won the
wager, collected my £5 and we made complete fools of ourselves on page
7 of this paltry publication. After that, I realised I had committed one
of the few major errors of my career and I promised myself that never
again would I be interviewed by any commercial newspaper or media
channel. If this seems an extreme, if not monastic attitude, consider
how the press and media actually operate.
Older
readers – those of my age – may remember that infamous photograph of
Leah Betts on a hospital bed with plastic tubes up her nose in various
newspapers during the early 1990s, small pictures of her parents
underneath looking understandably distraught. Ms Betts was a teenage
girl who allegedly died in hospital as a result of taking an ecstasy
tablet at a rave party. The press vengefully fulminated against these
drug peddling thugs who epitomised the rave scene. In reality, ‘these
drug peddling thugs’ were usually other teenagers who were simply
fortunate enough to obtain a decent supply of E’s on a certain night.
Your
parents or grandparents may remember shock horror stories of a similar
nature with regard to mods versus rockers, hippies versus skinheads and
punks versus just about everyone. In each case various youth subcultures
are subjected to a media campaign that virtually amounts to persecution,
an attitude the media bag justifies by its alleged defence of the
decency of the general public. (Note: this is the same decent general
public who voted in Thatcher and then Blair for no less than three terms
each with the result that in just 29 years, Great Britain has now become
a virtual police state.) All this adheres to an organised and quite
deliberate formula constructed by the media as a means by which to
increase newspaper sales and maintain television viewer ratings. This
disgusting apparatus of cynicism devoted purely to profit and prestige
originated in the 1950s.
The
1950s – Teddy Boys
During
the decade that followed the end of world war two, Great Britain endured
many turbulent changes to its character, its industry and its people.
Food rationing ended, petrol rationing ended and televisions became
sufficiently affordable that most people could possess them by 1960. In
fact it was the royal coronation in 1953 that consolidated the advent of
television as a nationally accepted adjunct to the wireless and the
cinema. (By the end of the next decade, it would reign with such
supremacy that it would supplant both the radio and the cinema in
importance, but that’s a later story.) Then in 1958 the Windrush
travelled from the West Indies to dock in Liverpool and unload the first
major wave of immigrants into the country.
Two
further changes are important here. The abolition of conscription was
supported by many military leaders since it implied that only those
young men who really wanted to join the armed forces would apply and
therefore the strength, quality and integrity of the army, navy and air
force would be significantly improved as a result. As the nation
gradually but steadfastly rebuilt its infrastructure after the
devastating bomber raids of the war, there were plenty of jobs in the
construction industry. A consequence of both these factors was that the
nation witnessed teenagers with money to spend and time to fill. London,
Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and most of all Coventry were
pockmarked by bomb craters and wrecked buildings – an appropriately
prescient landscape on which the first real youth subculture could
display its rituals. Teddy Boys (the name derived from the long
Edwardian coats favoured by the young men) swiftly made a reputation for
themselves as violent louts who loitered around cafes, carried flick
knives and ripped up the seats in cinemas. Their music was rock and
roll, a harmless, insipid dilution of rhythm and blues, neutered and
sanitised for the white market since the kind of music created by those
black boys in Yankee-land was still too raw and strange for most British
youths to comprehend. That said, they did accept the more popular
elements like Little Richard, Fats Domino and Chuck Berry.
To
the newspapers, the radio and the television editors and executives,
this new youth trend was a marvel. Reports of the phenomenon, when
printed accurately, provided a slight increase in sales and viewer
ratings but when their behaviour was exaggerated and embellished,
profits went through the roof. The media machine thus enjoyed its very
first venture into the creation of a moral panic. Their methods were
clumsy and naïve but since the population was still recovering from the
war and trying to keep pace with all the other changes happening in the
country, nobody realised this at the time. As the cold war between
Russia and America developed and the commencement of the space age was
heralded on October 14th 1957 with the launch of Sputnik 1, the Teddy
Boy phenomenon became old fashioned and irrelevant.
The
1960s – Mods & Rockers
The
early 1960s witnessed an increase in financial security, a decrease in
unemployment and a greater sophistication among the teenagers of Britain
as they soaked up the latest trends and fashions imported from America,
in particular the beatnik movement and the less commercial form of black
rhythm and blues. After the initial excitement of the Liverpool beat
music scene, heralded by The Beatles, British teenagers graduated to the
London R&B scene epitomised by The Rolling Stones, The Who, The
Small Faces, The Kinks, Manfred Man and The Graham Bond Organisation.
The term ‘mod’ was derived from a fashion magazine of the period in
which new trendy clothes were modelled by Cathy McGowan – and a new
youth subculture was born. The emphasis was upon looking sharp and
taking pride in your appearance. If Mods worshipped a character from
Greek mythology, it would be Narcissus. In short, it was a movement with
nothing to say but it looked well smart while doing so.
This
period also marked the advent of another media invented term: the
generation gap. Newspaper writers were encouraged to propagate the idea
that teenagers and parents were inevitably alienated from each other by
the generation gap, portrayed as an abyss over which no bridge could be
built. Anyone who sat and used their brain for more than 3 minutes soon
realised that the notion was quite preposterous, of course, but for a
while the notion convinced many people among the lower orders that this
mysterious generation gap did indeed exist and was another ‘sign of
the times’ (another media concoction), like drugs, long hair and a
lack of respect for authority.
The
Rockers were motorcycle enthusiasts who can be regarded as the
prototypes for what became the Hells Angels by the end of the decade.
Their uniform was primarily black leather and their music harked back to
the old days of rock and roll. They rode BSA and Triumph motorcycles,
generally of well over 100cc engine capacity. The Mods disdained such
brute power – they preferred Italian made Vespas and Lambrettas
adorned with many badges and mirrors so that these 50cc scooters
puttered along like so many metallic peacocks. Some of the more
adventurous young men even took to wearing eye make-up. The response
from the rockers was predictable: utter disdain and contempt. I can
empathise entirely – had I been born 15 years earlier, I would
definitely have been a rocker!
The
1970s – Hippies & Skinheads
The
cold war appeared to grow decidedly hot as the war monger John Kennedy
was assassinated, American troops invaded Vietnam and Mao Tse Tung
declared a cultural revolution in 1966. There were riots in France in
1968. Violent demonstrations against the invasion of Vietnam spread
across Europe. (As a poignant digression, we should note that virtually
every demonstration against the invasion of Vietnam held in Europe
voiced a protest in defence of the Vietnamese against the incursion of
American militarism, such that rarely was any direct sympathy expressed
for the American soldiers themselves; the mass rallies in America were
held to demand the return of the American troops, not because they
wished an end to the slaughter of innocent Vietnamese people but because
they believed it was grossly unjust that so many American soldiers
should be maimed and killed in a futile war.) Militant black rights
activist Malcolm X had already been murdered at a public meeting in
1965; the pacifist Christian civil rights activist Martin Luther King
was then assassinated in 1968. A group of militant socialist students
called The Red Army Faction in Germany kidnapped and executed war
criminal Aldo Moro. A similar group called The Angry Brigade set of
bombs and machine gun attacks on the streets of Britain, their targets
(in which nobody was ever killed) being police chiefs, the police
computer, fashion boutiques and the Miss World competition, among
others. Suddenly the world was no longer a safe place in which to live.
The
advent of skinheads toward the end of the decade represents one of the
more curious phenomena in British youth subculture. Unlike the teddy
boys and hippies, the skinheads were not only of British invention but
they could hardly have originated from any other country. The uniform
– savagely short hair, union shirts, ill fitting trousers held up with
braces and big boots – was such a dramatic change from the prevailing
freak mode of dress that many parents initially welcomed its adherents.
In fact, hippies and skinheads both owe their genesis to the evolution
of mods. The more cerebral and generally middle class mods mutated into
hippies while their intellectually challenged and primarily working
class brethren devolved into skinheads. Note: that is a profoundly
sweeping generalisation and there were plenty of exceptions. We must
avoid the cliché that working class = dim, middle class = bright, after
all.
The
media were initially uncertain how to tackle skinheads. That they were a
new youth subculture indicated a probable source of sales revenue for
the newspapers but here were young people (mainly men) who were clean,
smart, sported short hair, generally refused illicit drugs, claimed to
be patriotic and they despised hippies. If you omit the words
‘clean’ and ‘smart’, what you have there is an accurate
description of the majority of British men, then and now. The Daily
Express and the Daily Mail (predictably) greeted skinheads with
considerable approbation, primarily as a means to pursue further attacks
against hippies.
Ben
Sherman shirts, narrow cut two-tone suits and Chelsea boots were common
appurtenances to mod attire. These clothes were always expensive and one
advantage of the stripped down skinhead uniform is that it doesn’t
demand such an excessive slice taken out of the wage packet at the end
of the week. The hair was generally kept fairly short for mods until the
mid sixties when everyone and their father started to acquire sideburns,
moustaches and ears covered by hair. (Even some politicians, attempting
to be trendy and fashionable, would grow their hair a little longer than
was previously acceptable – although typically they only latched onto
this idea during the early seventies, i.e. 5 years late.) In 1969 when
the first skinheads appeared, Ben Sherman shirts were in evidence but
the ‘smart skinhead’ look, complete with sheepskin coat, was not
common until the end of the year, no doubt prompted by the girls who
became impatient with their boys looking too much like escaped
psychiatric patients for their tastes.
The
adoption of music performed almost exclusively by black musicians
remains a curious aspect of the cult. Mods were passionate about
American soul, true, but only a small number of them had much time for
blue beat, ska and its more famous progeny, reggae. For two or three
years, reggae became the musical standard for skinheads, some of whom
sported razor cuts (thin lines shaved along the scalp where a parting
would normally be), a fashion directly stolen from West Indian youths
known as rude boys. This is the prime difference between the first wave
of skinheads (1969-1971) and the revival (1980-1985). In 1982 the band
Skrewdriver released a 12” single called Back With A Bang, an anthem
written to celebrate the skinhead revival in all its dubious glory. At
this time, perhaps in response to the increasingly arcane sentiments
expressed by punks, skinheads adopted their own form of fashion and
music, known as ‘Oi’. This was ‘their’ cult – only, it
wasn’t. The term ‘Oi’ was invented by a third rate, middle class
music journalist called Garry Bushell who wrote for a second rate pop
music magazine called Sounds which was to music magazines what The Sun
is to national newspapers. By 1983 there was an impressive stable of
white nationalist bands to provide the soundtrack to the skinhead
pantomime: Brutal Attack, The Afflicted, Combat 84 and Skrewdriver being
the most obvious examples. For the record, The 4 Skins and The Last
Resort were never ‘white nationalist’ groups per se although most of
the band members of both groups would express sympathy with such
sentiments.
The
mods’ use of the union flag (erroneously called the union jack by the
press – actually our national flag is only called this when flying
from a ship) was quickly discarded by the hippies who generally regarded
any symbol of national pride with contempt. This decidedly unpatriotic
attitude was completely logical for a nation of young people who lived
in a country run by a government who regarded America as its older
brother and that older brother was busy terrorising innocent farmers and
peasants in Vietnam. However, the skinheads (also known as ‘bovver
boys’ at this time) adopted the symbol in a more strident manner. For
some, it was merely a shroud behind which stood a swastika. That said,
it was not until the second wave of skinheads appeared during the early
1980s that the astringently fascist elements of the cult became de
rigeuer. When I was at school, we were shown a recording of a BBC
television ‘play for today’ starring Michael Robbins as the father
of a teenager who becomes a skinhead. There is an excellent verbal
exchange in which the father, after close scrutiny of his son dressed in
his regalia for the first time, remarks ‘Look at the state of you. How
much did all that clobber cost? Anyway, I don’t know why you bothered
– you should’ve joined the army, son, they’d give you all that for
free.’
This
was a most perceptive statement by the writer since every aspect of the
uniform is indicative of the old fashioned working class combined with
signs of servitude: the shaved hair equates with prisoners, with mental
asylums and the armed forces. The union shirt with its lack of a collar
and the ill fitting trousers held up by braces are straight out of so
many paintings by Lowry – when you went to work for your master in the
fields or the factories, you didn’t wear your collar; that was
reserved for your Sunday best when you went to church and offered
prayers to God that you were still alive and able to eke out a wretched
existence on whatever pittance you were paid for your labour each week.
The steel toe capped boots were a further necessity for men who worked
in fields and factories where heavy gear was shifted and damage to the
feet was best avoided by such protective footwear. So to summarise,
skinheads were a parody of the old fashioned British working class and
further they were the epitome of right wing reactionary values advocated
by people frightened of change and progress. For this reason, skinheads
were far more acceptable to many ordinary people in Britain than hippies
with their left wing, revolutionary beliefs and outlandish attire.
The
hippies derive their name from a beatnik slang word – hip – as in
‘being hip to what’s going on’. However, the people the press
called ‘hippies’ never used the term to describe themselves. Their
chosen epithet was ‘freaks’. During the latter days of the mods,
experimentation with drugs had become frequent. Their enthusiasm for
amphetamines (such as blues and purple hearts) had gradually been
supplanted by a new appreciation of hallucinogenic substances imported
from America, the most ubiquitous being LSD. As this crazy substance
acquired ever more consumers, mods began to mutate into freaks – the
hair became longer, the trousers more flared, the clothes more colourful,
the music more bizarre. However, LSD alone was only a contributor, not a
prime mover. The treatment of Irish nationalists by the British state
and the brutal horror inflicted on innocent Vietnamese people by the
American military were regarded by students around the world as typical
symptoms of capitalism. Capitalists were conservative, grey suited
middle class middle aged supporters of military regimes and the
oppression of minority groups – indeed these properties were essential
in order for vast profits to be accrued by their exponents. You don’t
become wealthy by being decent.
The
second half of the decade witnessed the oil crisis and the collapse of
the nation as a result of a weak government that allowed itself to be
bullied by Marxist rat-bags who infested the unions. With a dramatic
increase in both unemployment and homelessness, coupled with power cuts
and the three-day working week, the star struck mysticism of the hippies
quickly became not only irrelevant to the majority of working class
youth but also actually rather offensive. The sudden eruption of punk
rock in 1976 was inevitable since it was a vituperative response to a
subculture that had long ceased to represent the issues that affected
working class young people. The irony is that the hippie movement
gradually evolved from the beatniks who were disaffected middle class
intellectuals from bourgeois families; the culture was therefore organic
and derived largely from the people it represented. However, punk rock
was completely fabricated by fashion designers like Vivian Westwood and
art school philistines like Malcolm McLaren whose cynical manipulation
of public malcontent was clever but callous and utterly self serving.
Such people had far more in common with Tories than terrorists.
Therefore, punk could never seriously represent ordinary working class
youth despite its pretence at doing just that – a pretence that was
alarmingly successful for a couple of years.
The
1980s – Punks
For
the media, the 1980s could have been very tedious if youth subcultures
were their only source of horror stories. This is because there were no
genuinely new subcultures available for them to create a foundation upon
which to construct a new moral panic. Punks still existed but they had
become serious, grim and boring; the skinhead revival offered nothing of
much interest apart from their allegiance to neo-nazi political groups
but even that was hardly new. An early newspaper editorial (from the
Daily Express) spent three paragraphs fulminating against punks with a
stream of sarcasm, verbal vitriol and outright bigotry; it then
concluded that a small gang of football hooligans could ‘see off’
these punks any day of the week. The implication here was that football
hooligans were more socially acceptable (at least to the editors of the
Daily Express) than punks – a bizarre conceit when we read how the
same newspaper called for every public sanction possible from
conscription to permanent incarceration for these same football
hooligans. When confronted with the media we soon learn that this years
foes are next years friends and vice versa.
For
anyone over 30 years of age, the 1980s will be associated indelibly with
riots, civil disorder, the promotion of war, the protection of privilege
and the brutal oppression of homeless people by draconian laws against
the use of empty property. The unions were finally crushed. The miners
were robbed of their right to protect their livelihood and the true face
of parliament was revealed as the false veneer of democracy melted under
the medusa glare of the tin pot lady. Since newspaper editors and media
moguls accrued profits from the system of government that prevailed in
Britain at this time, it was evidently in their interest to support it
and therefore to attack any individual or group who voiced protest or
criticism. Certain intelligent elements within the punk scene (despite
the apparent contradiction in terms implied by that choice of words)
combined with articulate representatives of the protest movement (such
as Class War) offered a cogent critique to the bellicose warmongering of
the Thatcher regime and increasing numbers of the public began to take
notice. This was quite unacceptable to the government so where ever
police truncheons failed, the printed word and the moving image were
invoked – with considerable success.
This
was achieved not by attacking the punks directly but by suggesting that
whenever ordinary people instigated or participated in civil rebellion
against the more disgusting examples of state violence, in reality the
true instigators were anarchists and punks, that it was the
participation of these criminal elements that were actually responsible
for the burnt, smoking vehicles, looted chain stores and injured
policemen. Before the end of the decade, the words ‘punk’,
‘anarchist’ and ‘criminal’ had become as interchangeable as
‘robber’, ‘thief’ and ‘bailiff’. Through newspapers,
television and radio, the population were told that the ordinary British
public would never riot and behave so dreadfully, that these incidents
were merely provoked by punks, anarchists and other criminal elements.
So the ‘problem’ was defined as anarchist punks set on causing
trouble purely for the hell of it with people like Ian Bone as their
spokesperson. Ian Bone was chastised in a banner headline by the Daily
Mail as ‘the most dangerous man in Britain’.
This
is interesting since a decade earlier, Tom O’Carroll (the leader of
the Paedophile Information Exchange, a perfectly legal body set up to
represent and provide a discussion forum for paedophiles) was greeted
one morning with his photograph in the News Of The World over a banner
headline that read ‘the most evil man in Britain’. I am unusually
fortunate to have met both these gentlemen. Mr O’Carroll was neither a
child molester nor an active paedophile – but those facts did not
induce people to purchase newspapers so the News Of The World opted for
a more engaging epithet with which to entice public interest. Mr Bone
certainly hates inherited wealth and unbridled privilege, especially
when people endowed with those qualities use their position to maintain
the poverty of ordinary people – but then so do plenty of honest
clergymen (and such people do exist, difficult though that be to
believe).
The
cause was simplified as greed and selfishness on behalf of these
‘criminal elements’ – this coming from people (newspaper editors
and media moguls) who are themselves the epitome of greed and
selfishness. Once again the key participants (Crass, Ian Bone, Class
War, Ronan Bennett, Iris Mills and so on) were stigmatised. By this time
many of the leader writers began to believe their own fairy tales and
their calls for government action became perfectly hysterical. A
response from the authorities was ultimately provoked when in the
infamous ‘battle of the bean field’ near Stonehenge a large crowd of
unarmed and peaceful freaks, punks and travellers were physically
assaulted by heavily armed police thugs which resulted in dozens of
innocent people being hospitalised while not one policeman was ever
indicted. The socialists predictably blamed the government for this
outrage – we blamed the true guilty party, namely the newspapers and
the media.
The
1990s – Ravers
By
the 1990s the media bag pattern had become so familiar that we, with the
advent of the Internet to assist us, had become rather too knowledgeable
and too sophisticated for the process to function quite so smoothly.
Since the ravers did not seek enemies or confrontation with other
subcults, the media were not able to fabricate the youth wars of
previous decades. However, being bad losers, they resorted to another
tried and tested means of assault upon our culture: fear and the family
with drugs as the pivot upon which this ridiculous edifice teetered. The
press and the police were often initially supportive or at least
articulated mild commendation in their reports of early raves. They
expressed an appreciation of the scarcity of alcohol, the absence of
violence and the significant number of different ethnic minorities
included among the clubbers. However, reports of this nature do not sell
many newspapers or increase television viewer ratings. So, rather than
tell the truth, the media searched for a scapegoat – and, thanks to
our perennial desire to alter our state of consciousness, they found one
and it was a beauty: ecstasy.
When
Leah Betts took an ecstasy pill at a private party in the early 1990s,
the media machine enjoyed a field day; they loved every moment of it.
There was never any genuine sympathy for the poor parents. Each tear
shed by her mother was another tick in a profit margin box for a
newspaper and the newscasters of each channel drooled over the luxury of
being able to express their meticulously contrived outrage. Richard
Branson, the pathetic loser and failed human being who has relentlessly
tried, without success, to convince us all that money is all you need in
order to have a decent life, went public with his call for a ban on
‘acid parties’, not because he cared one iota about what young
people actually did at raves but because he sought to identify himself
as a respectable pillar of the establishment in order to encourage
confidence among shareholders for Virgin Airlines and Virgin Railways,
the two ailing, failing companies he desperately wished to save from
extinction.
Would
this media campaign have been so successful had Leah Betts not been
female, young, pretty and white? Of course not – the media machine has
always thrived upon the depiction of innocent pretty young white women
as victims in its pages. This is not merely editorial laziness; it is an
expression of the lurid perversion exhibited by typical editors and
producers who tend to be white, male, fat, middle class, middle aged and
unhappily married. Strong, independent women who refuse to be victims
are not the kind of people the media machine ever finds particularly
interesting unless there is a drug scandal or lesbian angle they can
exploit. Meanwhile, the problem remained: the media machine has always
found it expedient to nurture perceived differences between youth
subcultures and actually invent differences should none originally
exist. Thus the ravers, bereft of an opposing gang, were subjected to
the only other means by which the media could attack it: direct assaults
upon every aspect of their lifestyles, complete with fallacious
‘facts’ quite blatantly fabricated in order to incite public
consternation and resentment.
The
Public Order Act of 1994 presented us with the very first utterly
blatant example of social control in the manner of national socialism,
that is where no attempt was made to disguise the fact. This was a law
that deliberately tried to prevent people from holding their own parties
on their own premises with their own money. Even more impertinently, it
actually tried to define a musical form in order then to criminalize it.
Thus we had foisted upon us these strange Daily Mail definitions of rave
music concocted by the State that were designed to provide boundaries
beyond which our cultural expression was not allowed to stray. In
Germany in the 1930s, jazz was outlawed as degenerate Negro music and
banned; the 1990s British government of John Major tried to outlaw rave
music in precisely the same manner. That it failed is a credit to our
ability not only to merely break the law but to disregard it entirely.
Besides, there was too much money to be made from it in the new clubs
where diluted electronic sonic doodles often replaced the genuine
article but by that time (i.e. the late 1990s) most younger clubbers
either couldn’t tell the difference or no longer cared anyway.
Moral
Panic
So
exactly how does this ‘disgusting apparatus’ function? It operates
in accordance with 5 distinct stages.
1)
Identify A Problem.
With mods and rockers, the problem was the extreme violence of
inter-gang fights at seaside resorts. That this was vastly exaggerated
(and occasionally even invented) was ignored at the time so it was able
to became normal practise for all newspapers, radio and television news
programmes. With skinheads the problem was defined as physical assaults
on innocent spectators at football matches. With hippies the problems
were drug abuse, unacceptable political activity and laziness. With
ravers, the problem was almost exclusively drugs with occasional
emphasis on noise and antisocial behaviour.
2)
Simplify The Causes.
The media machine generally seeks to hide or at least disguise the real
reasons behind antisocial behaviour, especially if these reasons provide
any justification for it or are likely to induce public sympathy for the
recipients of the media scrutiny. Therefore, any cause that may motivate
a form of behaviour will be reduced to its most basic component, even if
this process results in an account that is so inaccurate and unfair as
to verge on fiction. This even applies to miscreants outside youth
subcultures. For example in the recent industrial action taken by
postmen, most newspapers reduced the cause of their strike to mere
greed: they claimed the postal union demanded more money, when virtually
every complaint by the postmen was actually based on gross ill treatment
of ordinary workers by supervisors and managers with unfair work
practises and draconian restrictions on what should be basic employee
rights.
3)
Stigmatise The Key Participants. In any youth subculture a
spokesperson is identified, even if that spokesman actually has only a
tenuous connection with the tribe concerned. For example, when the Daily
Mail (and other papers) chose to identify Ian Bone as the prime exponent
of the riots and civil disorder that spread throughout Britain, he was
portrayed as leading the punks who, being younger and gullible, followed
him with blind obedience. Anyone who has ever met Mr Bone will soon
realise that he has never been a punk, has never been directly involved
in the punk movement and certainly has never set himself up as a leader
of anything. Indeed, on the few occasions when people have attempted to
follow him as an icon of anarchism, he has been rigorous in dissuading
erstwhile fans from such behaviour – he is an anarchist, after all,
and a highly intelligent and articulate one. The media soon dropped
their interest in him once they realised he was too decent and sensible
a person to serve their purpose. The American media managed to use
Charles Manson as the epitome of the hippie movement in order to
discredit it, even though Manson had never been a hippie – in Britain
the press tried (ultimately in vain) to find a similar character with
which to discredit the punk scene and the anarchist movement.
4)
Organise A Media Campaign For ‘Action’. Whether it be
mods and rockers battling on the beaches, hippies and police trading
truncheons and flowers on the streets or Class War punks hurling bricks
at boaters in the Henley Regatta, the media never fails to find an
excuse to call for government action on a problem that usually does not
even exist except inside the imaginations of newspaper editors and
television producers. Many media moguls entertain the notion that they
possess sufficient power to persuade members of parliament to act on
their behalf, irrespective of whether or not such an action would be
beneficial to the general public. Occasionally, governments do indeed
act, but we can be certain such actions are always for the benefit of
the parliamentary members involved rather than to appease any mere media
monkey.
5)
Provoke A Response From The Authorities. In the early
1990s the nation witnessed how it was possible for the media to induce
the government to respond to a problem that did not actually exist –
and the result was a crowd of hospitalised men, women and children whose
only ‘crime’ was to travel around the country in caravans rather
than live in tower blocks. For the newspapers, television and radio this
was marvellous, of course, because after calling for action against
these ‘ravers’ (who were also called ‘punks’, ‘hippies’ or
‘travellers’, depending on the mood or age of the writer), they
could then claim the police had acted like nazi thugs and encourage
public sympathy for these poor freaks etc.
The
lesson here is simple: the media can never, ever be your ally. They
cannot even be trusted to be loyal to their own supporters. This is the
primary reason why we have always, but always, resisted any offer to be
interviewed by the establishment press or media.
Andy
Martin © 2009.
