The Myth of a Free Press: Media Bias Explained

right newbie first things first welcome to the evening gazette it's uh great to have you on board you know it was a really tricky recruitment process and you got through because of your hard work dedication and only a little bit because i went to school with your dad you should be very very proud of yourself secondly i recognize that look in your eye that desire to want to shine a light in the darkness speak truth to power though i remember that feeling that naivety because i will not have any such complacency as merely wanting to speak the truth at this venerable newspaper no we do not merely report the truth we create it we reach out and grab the very matter of reality with our bare hands and mold it to our will or at least that of the owner that is the power that i grant to you this morning [Music] use it profitably [Music] [Music] let's talk about media bias in the past few years there's been an ongoing debate over the role that the news media whether that be tv radio newspapers or digital news plays in our society polling in both the uk and the us has documented a decline in trust in the accuracy of journalistic reporting and of course this isn't an entirely new debate since the very inception of the mass media some people have questioned the way that it reports on the world including its potential biases nevertheless over the past half decade the legitimacy of the mainstream media has become a central theme of our political discourse some of this has been the result of donald trump's repeated declarations that much of the us media represents fake news a term which has quickly gone from being the reserve of fringe conspiracy theorists to part of our everyday lexicon this disdain for the mainstream media among some portions of the population has since spread to other countries supporters of brexit in the uk for example have often levelled similar accusations of bias at the british press nevertheless such critiques have not only come from the political right supporters of left-wing candidates in both countries have constantly questioned whether the news media might be unduly biased against their favorite candidates naturally perhaps the media has pushed back at these accusations in 2017 in response to trump's anti-media rhetoric the washington post adopted the slogan democracy dies in darkness in doing so they appealed to the idealistic perception of the media shining a light on the activities of the powerful while also providing a warning as to what society might look like in its absence although if that's going to be your slogan maybe don't institute a hard pay wall defenses of the media have therefore attempted to channel a vision of the news as a crucial part of what jurgen habermas calls the public sphere in which ideas are debated and the exercise of power questioned when they've turned more pessimistic they've relied upon the notion that while we might not always like what we read see or hear in the news we'd miss it if it was gone in today's video i want to explore this question of media bias in doing so i'm going to draw primarily on the work of edward s hermann and noam chomsky in their 1988 book manufacturing consent and that of the british cultural theorist stuart hall we're going to explore the notion that as its critics across the political spectrum suggest the media doesn't merely reflect the world back at us in a neutral sense but encourages us to interpret the world in a certain way we're going to consider what biases we might be able to identify and how those are encouraged by the economic and institutional structures which govern the news that we get to read see and hear rather than focus on the coverage of representative politics however i'm going to use as a case study a recent news broadcast which focused on an event which has been the subject of some fairly contentious coverage for the most part in recent months the news has been preoccupied with covering the covid19 pandemic and the differing responses of governments companies and individuals to both the virus itself and the various measures that have and haven't been put in place to halt its spread in early 2020 however the british media decided to give me and my fellow brits a break from coronavirus updates in order to focus on what they referred to as the migrant crisis see the previous weeks had seen an increase in people crossing the english channel often in inflatable dinghies in order to seek asylum in the uk very quickly there seemed to be as many news reporters in the channel bobbing up and down in chartered boats in order to provide up close live coverage of these crossings the reporters seems to have taken influence from reporting by the u.s media in 2018 of what was often referred to then as the migrant caravan in the last part of that year a group of primarily honduran guatemalan and salvadoran refugees fleeing violence and poverty had been making their way through mexico in order to seek asylum in the u.s the american media took it upon itself to provide daily updates on the caravan's progress often tracking them with camera drones the british adaptation of this coverage was very on brand for the uk often seeming like a straight to vhs knockoff here the smooth filmic gliding of the american drones was replaced with shaky footage as camera operators attempted to steady their lenses against the undulations of the sea nevertheless the result was fairly similar a transformation of individual stories of struggle and displacement into a media spectacle to be consumed over breakfast furthermore as we'll see throughout these reports there were similar implications as to what our emotional and political response to these channel crossings should be in today's video i'm going to focus on just one example of this coverage a package which was broadcast as part of the bbc's flagship news and current affairs program news night we're going to explore the ways in which this report frames the channel crossings that it's reporting on as well as asking what aspects of the way in which our media operates might have led to this framing alongside giving an insight into how the british media is presently reporting on this particular event i hope that this video will provide you with the ability to similarly critique other news reports that you're faced with and to take a critical approach to engaging with the news media before we dive into some of the theory that we'll be drawing upon however let me give you a brief rundown of what is contained within this report [Music] i'm not going to show the full news report that we'll be discussing here for copyright reasons although i have linked it in the description if you want to watch it in full in this part of the video i'm therefore going to provide a bit of an overview of what is contained within it i'm going to do my best to undertake what clifford gates might refer to as a thin description of the report focusing as much as possible on simply stating what we can see and hear and leaving the analysis bit for in a moment what i am going to do however is divide this broadcast package up into sections which i think will aid our later discussion of it so as i see it there are six main sections to this report the first we'll call the introduction in this 20-second long segment we're showing a medium shot of 17 people heading towards the english coast in an inflatable dinghy the reporter tells us that this is a dangerous way to cross the english channel and establishes that the people in that boat are from iraq we'll call section 2 the numbers in this section which totals 46 seconds the reporter tells us that the reason that the people in this boat are newsworthy is because there has been an increase in the number of people crossing the english channel in this way during this year he provides us with a series of statistics telling us that there were over a hundred people picked up in the channel today including young children that's after a record 235 yesterday it takes the total to more than four thousand since january in section three which we'll call the union the reporters segues to an interview with a representative from the union for borders immigration and customs this interview section which comes in a whopping one minute and ten seconds again stresses the increase in the number of people crossing the english channel and implies that this is making work difficult for border force officers in one moment which will be crucial to our discussion later the interviewee tells the reporter that they've had to start to wear body armor because so many folk are being brought in there's not enough time to search them whilst they're still on the cutters so they're coming on to the cruise uh on the on the key side at tok haven without having been searched so the staff have to wear body armor we'll call section four the government in this 24 second section the reporter interviews rishi sunak the chancellor of the exchequer who suggests that people he never tells us exactly which people are frustrated at this increase in the number of these kind of channel crossings he tells us that we all want them by which he means these statistics to come down and begins to shift the focus of the conversation towards the actions of the french government implicitly suggesting that they should be stopping people from leaving france in the first place section 5 i'm going to call the french this section is 56 seconds long here the focus on the action or as its implied in actions of the french government continues the reporter undertakes a further interview with the local mp natalie elfic who like rishi sunak is a member of the right-wing conservative party this mp is more direct in her criticisms of the french telling the reporter that more needs to be done because too many are breaking through and getting into britain section 6 will refer to as the saviors in this final 24 seconds we returned to the boat with which we began its motor has broken and against the backdrop of the white cliffs of dover border force arrived to meet it the reporter describes the people on the board the boat as being picked up by border force with no further indication as to what will happen to them next throughout this video we're regularly going to return to this report in order to put some of the concept surrounding the media and representation which i'll be introducing into practice in a deep analysis of it we're going to question how the choices that have been made in research reporting filming and editing work to encourage us to view the people situated in that boat at the opening of the video in a certain light and we're also going to consider how this framing has been informed by the economic institutional and cultural workings of the media industry which produced it in their 1988 book manufacturing consent edward s herman and noam chomsky write that gaining a complete understanding of how the news media operates requires a macro alongside a micro story by story view of media operations in short they argue that in trying to understand media bias it's necessary to take account of both the big picture of who owns media outlets how they're governed and what their relationships are to other political economic and commercial institutions and actors as well as the smaller picture of how this inflects individual reports i want to begin by taking that micro view in order to establish some basic principles surrounding how news reports communicate and construct meaning see there are two polarizing views that people often have about how the news media works some people are of the opinion that the media constantly spins us outright lies about the world around us others are adamant that it is an oasis of truth amidst the desert of confusion that is our society in the context of the so-called west in the present day however neither of these positions are entirely accurate whilst one can likely find some isolated examples it is generally fairly rare for a mainstream media outlet to entirely fabricate a story for them to claim that something happened which simply never did yeah this doesn't mean that they present us with unfiltered objective truth either i want to draw here on stuart hall's 1997 lecture representation and the media to suggest that we can draw a useful distinction between events and meaning by an event i mean a thing that is being reported on in most instances we can assume that the event on which a news report focuses did take place again in our contemporary context in the so-called west complete fabrications are if not non-existent relatively rare nevertheless the news clearly does more than simply point to an event and say this happened a great deal of emphasis in news reporting is put on not only highlighting the fact that an event has taken place but also in telling us what it means in the news package that we're focusing on in this video the event is that on the morning of friday the 7th of august 2020 a bbc news crew came across 17 people in a dinghy in the english channel there was little doubt that this happened i would also suggest that there is little doubt that as the reporter goes on to tell us this crossing is dangerous and has cost lives once we move past section one of the report what i've called the introduction however the reporter and the people he interviews are clearly doing something far more than simply highlighting the existence of this event instead they are working to attach meaning to it to tell us why we should view it as significant and what questions we should be asking about it in some aspects of the report the fact that meaning is being attached to this event is fairly clear take section 5 which i've called the french here the local mp ashley elfic tells us that so we need to see the french authorities really step up their game and stop the votes leaving france in this interview we have a fairly clear attribution of meaning to this event the fact that this boat is in the english channel elfic encourages us to think means that the french state is failing to police their borders strictly enough furthermore meaning begets meaning the indication that this event means that there is a problem with the way in which france polices its borders also more broadly encourages us to view people crossing national borders as something that we should be bothered by perhaps even outraged act as i mentioned a moment ago however this part of the report is an interview and so the fact that the report is here going further than simply communicating the existence of an event and attributing meaning to it is to an even mildly critical viewer fairly obvious later in this video we'll certainly question the decision to choose certain interviewees over others what i want to focus on for now is the fact that this attribution of meaning also occurs in parts of the report which are framed as being relatively objective let's take section 2 which i've called the numbers as an example here the reporter moves away from describing the boat itself and those upon it and begins to provide us with some broader context his focus is on the number of people that have crossed the english channel in a similar way this year and in some regards the reporter is here simply giving us more information about the event being reported yet we have to remember that there are myriad different contextual factors that could have been chosen to highlight the reporter could have given us greater detail about why the people in that boat might have chosen to make such a dangerous journey for example this focus on the numbers however occludes any interpretation of this event which focuses on the welfare of the people in that boat encouraging us instead to view them as little more than statistics statistics that are broadly too high and of course even such as focus on statistics could have been sympathetic to the people in that boat it could have led to a discussion about how this crossing could be made safer nevertheless taking into account the later interviews it is evident that this section is laying the groundwork for an attribution of meaning to this event which holds that as the local mp later claims too many are breaking through and getting into britain the decision to focus on statistics therefore does more than simply add objective context to this event it is intrinsically involved in the attribution of meaning to it shortly we'll look at how the report doubles down on this line of thinking working to frame the people in that boat not only as a statistical problem but as a potential threat what i want to emphasize here however is the broader discovery that we've made about the way in which news reports operate stuart hall writes that the one thing you can say about an event is that there is no one true fixed meaning about it the true meaning of it will depend on what meaning people make of it and the meanings that they make will depend on how it is represented hopefully you've seen that almost every aspect of a news report even those which at first glance seem entirely objective are still involved in the attribution of meaning to events the question to ask of this and any other news report therefore is not necessarily is this true but how do the choices that have been made and how to represent the event which this report focuses on work to encourage me to attribute certain meanings to it if you're watching this video however my guess is that you want to be able to do more than identify the way in which the mainstream media attributes meaning to events you likely want to be able to establish why certain meanings are foregrounded over others in order to gain such an understanding we therefore need to take a step back from our micro view of how the media works and take a look at the macro view something we're going to do here through the lens of edward s hermann and noam chomsky's 1988 book manufacturing consent [Music] in the previous section we've hopefully established that objective unbiased reporting is essentially impossible every aspect of a news report works not only to highlight the existence of events but also to attribute meaning to them in simple terms bias in news reporting is inescapable it is impossible to report on an event without also emphasizing certain interpretations of what it means why we should be interested in it and how we should respond to it yet the biases that emerge from the impossibility of objective reporting in our contemporary media are not random although exceptional outlets and isolated instances of dissent exist the mainstream media in the so-called west consistently works to attribute to the events which it reports on meaning which serves the interests of the economic and political elite this is the central thesis of edward s hermann and gnome chomsky's 1988 book manufacturing consent which argues that the bias present in the mainstream media so consistently works to serve the interests of the wealthy and powerful that we can describe it as operating on a propaganda model the use of the term propaganda here is notable given the context in which herman and chomsky's book was published manufacturing consent was written and released at the tail end of the cold war and as jon fuzek has written an enduring narrative of that period was that the cold war represented a global struggle between the free world of us-led international capitalism and the slave world of soviet-led international communism this notion that the west was the locus of freedom extended into popular discourses surrounding the media people living in the capitalist nations were encouraged to celebrate the fact that where the media in the ussr and the various countries under its syria influence were owned and tightly controlled by the state they had access to numerous news sources which were free from official government censorship herman and chomsky however argued that this freedom from formal government control did not and does not mean that the news produced by the u.s media was or is without buyers instead they argue that various aspects of the way in which the u.s media functions including its ownership how it is governed and its relationships with other political economic and commercial institutions and actors means that it consistently works to attribute meaning to the events that it reports on which are favorable to the us government and u.s corporations in a manner which is not as dissimilar to propaganda as we are often led to believe well the result might be similar however herman and chomski are clear that the process through which the u.s media and then similar advanced capitalist nations comes to serve this propagandist function is quite different although cases of direct interference and censorship do exist they argue that for the most part the process through which the media is encouraged to support the interests of those with the most power in our society is more subtle they propose the existence of five filters each representative of a different economic institutional or cultural aspect of the way in which the contemporary media operates which any piece of news must pass through before reaching the general public they write that these filters not only decide what is newsworthy in the first place but also fix the premises of discourse and interpretation echoing our discussion in the previous section these five filters therefore work to influence both what events get reported on as well as what meanings come to be attributed to them the first of these filters is the size ownership and profit orientation of the mass media this filter primarily emphasizes the fact that most media entities in the us and similar countries are owned by a person or corporation with a vested interest in what gets published or broadcast by that outlet many owners of media companies will stress that they refrain from interfering in editorial decisions surrounding what is reported on and how nevertheless they are ultimately responsible for hiring editors and other executive level staff who are always very aware of who pays their wages while jeff bezos might not decide exactly what gets published in the washington post for example we'd be foolish to believe that the fact that everyone who works for that paper is aware of who their ultimate boss is doesn't have an impact on its reporting writing for the columbia journalism review matthew ingram suggested that while the washington post has published articles which are not entirely flattering of amazon there is a sense that it sometimes pulls its punches treating the company more favorably than it might treat others in a broader sense we have to be aware that media organizations are themselves companies that operate within and benefit from the existing capitalist organization of society as a result they are much less likely to publish articles which are overly critical of that system the second of hermann and chomsky's proposed filters is the advertising license to do business this filter highlights that news outlets of all forms are highly reliant on advertising revenue even if one pays for a newspaper or news channel this often doesn't even cover the cost of operation advertising is thus an important revenue stream for most media companies the result right herman and chomsky is that with advertising the free market does not yield a neutral system in which final by a choice decides the advertiser's choices influence media prosperity and survival in short media entities do not only live or die based on whether they appeal to the general public or not but also on how they appeal to advertisers again it's not necessarily the case that nestle will refuse to advertise in the commercial breaks of a newscast unless they promise never to say that smarties are anything but delicious but in a broader sense that advertisers are less likely to seek out and advertise with broadcasters or publications too critical of the various economic cultural social and political structures from which they benefit in truth this is not always entirely motivated by a desire to defend capitalism it is as likely to be influenced by the fact that news coverage which focuses too heavily on ingrained systemic injustice is pretty unlikely to put people in a buying mood either way the result is that it tends to be far easier to attract advertisers by defending the status quo than by criticizing it herman and chomsky titled their third filter sourcing mass media news this filter highlights the fact that news organizations have to get their news from somewhere and right herman and chomsky the media cannot afford to have reporters and cameras at all places where important stories might break economics dictates that they concentrate their resources where significant news often occurs where important rumors and leaks abound and where regular press conferences are held newspapers and broadcasters in the u.s for example will for reasons of ease usually have reporters who are permanently based at the white house the pentagon and the new york stock exchange and on the one hand this means that they are constantly present ready to ask questions about any controversies that occur in relation to these loci of power the flip side however is that it means that the people who work for governments and corporations have far greater access to the press than anyone else they are thus far more easily able to announce or leak stories which are favorable to them it also leads to a situation in which the media end up working closely with representatives from these organizations and that's become hesitant to do anything which might sour those relationships take for example the fact that many local news organizations will have a reporter whose job it is to cover the local police force their ability to do their job well is reliant on that police force continuing to feed them stories publishing a story too critical of the local police force risks making them less likely to do so when a big arrest is made or a significant crime committed that force might decide to notify another reporter first while having reporters stationed in the halls of power might provide an opportunity to question those institutions then this close relationship between the media and those with power often ends up working to the benefit of the latter more than to their detriment the fourth filter is flac and the enforcers this refers to the manner in which those with economic political and cultural power are able to essentially astroturf campaigns of outrage against news outlets if they deem themselves to have been reported on in an unflattering way nowhere has this been more apparent in recent years than in donald trump's accusations of fake news trump has constantly encouraged his reporters to act with hostility to reporters critical of him and to boycott the outlets that they work for in this case the media has proven relatively resilient absorbing this flak and continuing on regardless as we'll see shortly however in other cases such campaigns can prove highly effective encouraging news agencies to desist from covering certain topics in the future in order to avoid having the hassle of having to fire fight these outrage campaigns the final filter in herman and chomsky's propaganda system is anti-communism as a control mechanism this final filter emphasizes the way in which red scare tactics are used to paint even mild liberal critiques of the us its government and the capitalist system on which it functions as being anti-patriotic verging on outright evil herman and chomsky write that even liberals often accused of being pro-communist or insufficiently anti-communist are kept continuously on the defensive in a cultural milieu in which anti-communism is the dominant religion as we've seen in the coverage surrounding the socialist and social democrat politicians who have risen to prominence in the past few years the end of the cold war has not ended this need for journalists to prove their anti-communist credentials in their work being too heavily critical of the us government or american capitalism more broadly is therefore heavily discouraged even when the media points to instances of injustice it is often hesitant to attribute them to ingrained structural phenomena herman and chomsky's goal in outlining these five filters was to articulate how a capitalist media industry devoid of formal censorship can still operate in a manner not dissimilar to propaganda a key focus throughout manufacturing consent for example is the way that these filters encourage the us media to uncritically support u.s foreign policy positions every bit as jingoistically as would be the case for it to be owned and operated by the government itself let's take this propaganda model then and use it to contextualize that bbc newsnite report in order that we can gain a deeper more politicized understanding of how the news works and of how consent gets manufactured herman and chomski's five filters were conceived with reference to the mass media of the united states in most cases however the model coheres remarkably well with the functioning of the media in other similar capitalist liberal democracies where the report we're focusing on in this video differs slightly is that it was produced by the bbc as some of you might be aware the bbc is not a commercial entity but a public broadcaster funded by what's called the license fee a compulsory fee paid by anyone living in the uk who watches live television as none of the bbc's channels carry advertising we can therefore put to one side herman and chomsky's second filter the advertising license to do business because the bbc simply doesn't have to put any thought into pleasing advertisers i'm also for reasons of time going to skip over hermann chomsky's fifth filter anti-communism as a control mechanism that's not because i don't think it's relevant to the context of the uk or to the bbc the reason that the bbc started producing news bulletins in the first place was so that it could assist the uk government in bringing an end to the general strike of 1926 and throughout its history it has constantly felt the need to prove its anti-communist credentials during the cold war it asked mi5 to vet prospective employees to weed out potential subversives during the 1984-1985 minor strike it rearranged footage in order to excuse police violence against pikaters and during the most recent general election it consistently framed even mildly social democratic policies as ridiculous at one point asking labour mp angela rayna who had just been speaking incredibly eloquently about the climate emergency whether she wanted to nationalize sausages nevertheless anti-communism is not directly relevant to this broadcast and therefore we're going to divert our attention to the remaining three filters ownership sourcing and flac which we'll find to all be highly influential to the meaning that the bbc and its reporters attach to the event at the center of this report let's begin with the first filter size ownership and profit orientation of the mass media the bbc as we've mentioned differs from commercial news channels of the kind discussed in the previous section in that it is not privately but publicly owned the organization is governed by the bbc board with its day-to-day management being the responsibility of an executive committee led by the director general ostensibly this governance structure means that despite its public ownership the bbc is independent from the uk government in reality however the relationship between the british government and the bbc is fairly similar to that which we suggested likely exists between jeff bezos and the washington post as tom mills argues in his book the bbc myth of a public service the bbc has never been independent in the sense that its most enthusiastic supporters imagine senior executives are all political appointees and its major source of funding the license fee and its constitution are both routinely set by governments a fact which inevitably influences its reporting while the uk government might not generally intervene in the day-to-day running of the bbc then it both chooses who runs it and has control over its primary source of income this leads to huge conflicts of interest in september 2020 tim davey took over as director general of the bbc again essentially its biggest boss davey who was appointed under a conservative government has himself ran for public office as a conservative party candidate and was for a time the deputy chairman of his local conservative party it's therefore fair to say that he's not a particularly independent figure even when such egregiously partisan appointments are not being made the fact that the government holds the bbc's purse strings has since its inception led to it giving a much fairer hearing to whichever political party has been in office at any given time this is all acutely irrelevant to the report that we're discussing in this video for the present conservative party administration has been obsessed with immigration the party won the december 2019 general election on the slogan get brexit done and although other reasons for supporting the uk leaving the eu do exist immigration was certainly the defining issue of the brexit referendum the focus was supposedly on migration between countries within the eu nevertheless the talking points of pro-brexit campaigners consistently tapped into a much broader anti-immigrant sentiment and the present government has made reducing immigration a key priority this has included not only reducing the numbers of economic migrants coming to the uk but also those traveling to britain in order to claim refugee status the bbc newsnite report that we're discussing in this video constantly works to promote this agenda i've already highlighted the way in which the reporter focuses on numbers and statistics encouraging us to interpret the arrival of this boat on the british coast as representative of a problem in which to once again quote the local mp interviewed in the broadcast too many are breaking through and getting into britain as i mentioned before this focus on numbers works to include any interpretation of this event which focuses on the welfare of the people in that boat later when the representative from the union for borders immigration and customs tells us that border patrol agents have had to start wearing body armor this takes an even darker turn and we're encouraged to view the people in that boat as a potential threat we do have to recognize that both these statements are made by interviewees rather than the reporter himself yep neither the premise that there are too many people arriving at the uk border or the idea that they might be a threat is ever questioned the opportunity to point out that the uk gives sanctuary to far less refugees than germany italy france austria or sweden for example is completely passed by as is the opportunity to engage in any kind of discussion surrounding the uk's duty under international law to provide sanctuary for refugees or the moral question of whether we might do so out of our ethical obligation to our fellow human beings instead even when questioning members of the ruling conservative party the report consistently works to frame this issue in terms favorable to the government's anti-immigration and anti-refugee agenda one key factor in why this is the case has to be the fact that the government ultimately has control over the bbc's future if we skip over hermann chomsky's advertising related filter we arrive at filter three sourcing mass media news the most relevant focus here is on the choices that have been made surrounding who is interviewed during this report the first thing that we might note is that of the two politicians that are interviewed in this broadcast both are from the conservative party despite the bbc being required by its charter to apply due impartiality in its reporting neither the opposition party labour nor any other political party are given the opportunity to provide their response to this story what's more interesting to my mind however is the broader imbalance in terms of which relevant perspectives are given voice within this piece for the longest interview contained within this report comprising a quarter of its total run time is not with a politician but with a representative of the union for borders customs and immigration on the face of it what we have here is simply a contribution from someone on the ground someone who is not a politician but is here to tell us what the past few months have been like for those working with the asylum seekers who have been making these channel crossings on one page on its website the union for borders customs and immigration describes itself as non-political founded by operational staff for operational staff elsewhere on the same site however it decries the radical left-wing politics of the trade union congress the federation to which most uk unions are affiliated in short this is a deeply political right-wing union it's certainly a given that a spokesperson from a union which represents border force agents is going to provide a response which focuses on the concerns of those agents yet in almost every interview i've managed to unearth with this union spokesperson she's quick to paint asylum seekers such as those featured in this report as potentially violent in one interview with the radio station lbc this same representative even admits that everyone that they've met so far has been reasonably calm yet continues to talk about what would happen if someone they came across were potentially to be violent of the three interviewees featured in this report then all three are outright hostile towards the people in that boat they consistently either dehumanize them through discussing them merely as statistics or paint them as a threat through implying that they might be violent as per the union representatives comments about body armor or as akin to an invading force as per the local mps comment about breaking through into britain what is notable is that at no point during this report do we hear from anyone with the remotest bit of sympathy for the people in that boat we only hear from the asylum seekers themselves once when the reporter on the boat shouts where are you from at them and they reply iraq even taking into account the fact that it would perhaps have been difficult to conduct a proper interview with the people in the boat it's still pretty revealing that not a single word is included from a politician or a charity sympathetic to the reasons they might have decided to make this dangerous crossing we have to attribute some of the blame for this to the team who researched and compiled this report yep it's also important to recognize that it is also a result of some of the broader factors that we discussed in the previous section surrounding who has access to the media i've already discussed the way in which the media having dedicated reporters based at for example number 10 downing street here in the uk can often work in favor of politicians rather than against them ensuring that they are always the first to be able to comment on an event and enabling them to set the terms of the meaning that becomes attributed to it the representative from the union for borders customs and immigration is also interesting here however for one way in which powerful groups and organizations able to shape media coverage is by having dedicated spokespeople on hand these spokespeople spend every hour of the day building up relationships with journalists to ensure that if a relevant topic is being reported on they will have the ability to shape that coverage through providing quotes and as here interviews it therefore simply becomes easier for the reporters at the bbc to call up this union spokesperson for an on-the-ground perspective than it would be for them to try and find a way of including the perspective of asylum seekers whether out of choice or after these what we end up with is a news report constructed entirely from sources hostile towards the people who are ostensibly its central focus let's turn now to the fourth of hermann and chomsky's filters flac and the enforcers to recap this refers to the way in which those with the most wealth and power in our society are able to astroturf outrage campaigns at media outlets as a way of reprimanding them for producing coverage which they don't like this is again highly relevant here for at least since the 2016 brexit referendum the bbc has been the subject of a protracted campaign by the political right who have sought to castigate the corporation for supposed left-wing buyers following the general election in december 2019 for example the guardian reported that the corporation was inundated with feedback from members of the public who felt its coverage was skewed in favor of jeremy corbyn's party for reference this is an election campaign in which the bbc accidentally edited out the sound of an audience laughing at boris johnson during a debate in which the bbc accidentally replaced embarrassing footage of johnson placing a wreath upside down on a war memorial with footage of him placing a different wreath in 2016 and in which the bbc's political editor laura koonsberg orchestrated a twitter pylon of the father of a hospitalized child after he confronted johnson in hospital oh sorry we're not done yet because the same political editor also reported as fact a completely fabricated story about a labour activist punching a conservative advisor and potentially broke the law by suggesting that the results of early postal voting were looking grim for labor days before in-person voting had even begun so the idea that the bbc's coverage was in any way favorable to the labour party just doesn't hold water a report published in 2019 however found that many who view the bbc as being biased based their perceptions of bbc impartiality on other sources such as newspaper reports in short what actually appears on the tv screen is less important than how that coverage is then discussed in the papers the following day uk newspapers are overwhelmingly right wing and particularly in the last few years have constantly worked to establish this narrative of the bbc as in julian petley's terms a hotbed of leftism and remainery the remainery here once again referring to brexit in the previous section i suggested that the u.s media or so it seems from the outside at least has been fairly tough in the face of the fake news flak campaign which has been waged against them by donald trump and his supporters the bbc however has not been so resilient combined with the influence of its need to keep the current conservative government on side in order to protect its primary source of income the bbc has responded to this pressure by becoming more and more accommodating of overtly right-wing talking points this report is a prime example of that with every aspect of it feeling designed primarily to assuage both the virulently anti-immigrant right-wing press the owners of the papers at the heart of these flat campaigns and those papers readerships all of this hopefully allows us to see how the meaning which this report attributes to the event it focuses on is heavily influenced by the filters proposed by herman and chomsky each has in some way informed the way that the people in that boat featured at the beginning of the broadcast and asylum seekers more broadly are framed ultimately what we see is that this report is constructed in a manner which serves the interests of those with the most power in british society who would much rather we were focusing our anger asylum seekers than at the way in which the government employers and landlords have responded to the economic uncertainty brought about by the coveted 19 panda in fact it's hard to think of a more marginalized disempowered group in british society than asylum seekers who are both economically precarious and constantly vilified in the press the manner in which their voices are entirely left out from this report reflects that as we've discussed the broadcast orbit refuses to acknowledge these people as human beings or to consider what their stories or reasons for crossing the english channel might be so far our analysis of the report has mirrored that in the final section of this video i therefore want to draw upon a further aspect of herman and chomsky's manufacturing consent in order to enable us to place the people who are supposedly the primary focus of this report yet ultimately ignored within it at the center of our analysis generally speaking when i see manufacturing consent discussed online it is used to highlight the broad issue of how media bias is influenced by media ownership less attention is usually given to the actual case studies included in the book at least one of these however is acutely relevant to our discussion here the case studies in manufacturing consent primarily focus on u.s foreign policy herman and chomsky highlight the manner in which their five filters work to ensure that the mainstream media in the us represents events taking place in other countries in ways which support the foreign policy objectives of the us government most relevant here is chapter 2 in which herman and chomsky draw our attention to the differing ways in which the us mass media reports on suffering and violence in non-us countries depending on whether that suffering is the result of the actions of the u.s and its allies or whether that suffering is the result of the actions of governments or groups considered to be enemies of the us they write that the american mass media tends to portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy in short victims of the actions of enemy states and groups are represented as being worthy of our sympathy sorrow and anger we are encouraged to believe that something has to be done to stop this suffering about something often being embargoes or military intervention victims of the actions of the us or its allies however are framed as unworthy of the same level of sympathy their suffering might be unfortunate but it is positioned as ultimately inevitable or perhaps necessary in favor of some greater good this dichotomy of worthy and unworthy victims is useful for our analysis of the bbc newsnite reports for throughout the asylum seekers which the report supposedly focuses on are resolutely portrayed as unworthy victims unworthy of our sympathy and understanding again a multiple point is even implied that we should be fearful of them viewed through the lens provided by hermann and chomsky we can posit that part of the reason for this is that portraying them as worthy victims and asking why these iraqis have chosen to make this dangerous crossing so far from their homes would have to involve confronting some hard truths about the consequences of british foreign policy james blumel's 2020 documentary series once upon a time in iraq which for what it's worth was distributed and aired by the bbc documents the disastrous consequences of the us-led invasion of iraq in which the uk was a crucial participant while acknowledging that the invasion did lead to the overthrow of a brutal dictator it highlights how western intervention which involved occasions of brutal repression of the iraqi people fueled sectarian violence within the country and laid the groundwork for the rise of daesh by 2008 an estimated 2.4 million iraqi refugees had fled the country an exodus which continues to this day portraying these asylum seekers as worthy victims would therefore have to involve in engaging with the facts that they are at least in part victims of uk foreign policy by point of comparison anyone watching who is my age or older might remember that prior to that invasion and occupation of iraq in 2003 people living in the same towns and cities which these asylum seekers have fled were framed as intrinsically worthy victims coverage on the bbc and in other outlets foregrounded the atrocities committed by saddam hussein and framed those living under his rule as worthy of our sympathy concern and outrage the press constantly implied that it was our moral duty to do something to help these people when it served the interests of uk foreign policy then herman and chomsky's five filters worked to ensure the media represented iraqis as worthy victims now that displaced iraqis are suffering in part because of the actions of the uk and her allies those five filters work to encourage the media to frame them as unworthy of the same concern so to conclude in this video we've explored the massive issue of media bias through looking at the work of stuart hall we've established that reporting without any biases essentially impossible yet we've also found that the bias which does exist is not random and instead consistently works to support the interests of those with the most wealth and power in our society drawing upon hermann chomsky's manufacturing consent we've seen that despite the absence of formal censorship in the contemporary press various aspects of the way in which the mass media operates including its ownership and its relationships to other institutions works to ensure that it reports the news in a way which benefits the state corporations and the economic elite i hope that this video enables you to look differently at coverage surrounding the present situation in the english channel and the broader crisis of displacement yeah i also hope it gives you a set of tools which more broadly enable you to engage critically with the mainstream media and to understand why it gives certain emphases to certain interpretations of the events that it reports on if you've made it this far then thank you so much for sticking through what is by far my longest video to date and i hope it's been worthy of your time if you found it interesting then i'd love it if you'd consider sharing it with a friend or group of friends even who you think might also get something out of it thanks as always to michael v brown j fraser cartwright richard kaielau david brothers chris brown paul arrowsmith and max devos for being signed up to the top tier of my patreon if you'd like to join them in supporting what i do here as well as in getting early access to my videos commentary tracks to them copies of the script and more then you can find out how to do so at patreon.com forward slash tom nicholas thank you once again for watching and have a great week

Channel: Tom Nicholas

Views: 275,605

Rating: 4.9119387 out of 5

Keywords: media, media bias, free press, migrant crisis, manufacturing consent, Noam Chomsky, Stuart Hall, mainstream media, msm, fake news, what the theory, Tom Nicholas, Chomsky, representation and the media, the media, migrant caravan, Fox News, Murdoch press, trump, English Channel, channel crossings, BBC Newsnight, BBC News, corporate media, media studies, media bias crash course, bias in the media, media's bias, bias in media, liberal media, bias, biased, media ownership

Id: v-8t0EfLzQo

Length: 55min 1sec (3301 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/GabyMerJimenez]

Im starting to like this guy more and more.

[u/Maxarc]

When I see my man Tom, I upvote.

[u/[deleted]]

sorry for being an ignorant american, but why are migrants trying to get to the UK? if theyre able to make it to france and germany, why dont they seek asylum there instead of trying to cross the english channel?

[u/header]

Haven't watched the video yet, but Chris Hedges talks about his time working at The New York Times in Unspeakable. It's really interesting and worth the read, or listen.

[u/Cheechster4]

His content is getting better and better

[u/lamby]

I am glad Tom makes the remark — although 20 minutes in — that it is a logical/philosophical impossibility to avoid bias, something that a number of Enlightened Centrists erroneously believe. (This is not to say that no critique is possible, just the idea of ideology-free reporting in a dangerous mirage IMHO.)

EDIT: Curiously, at about 53 minutes, he makes the weaker claim that is "essentially" impossible. Anyway, good video, especially the implicit observation that the main consumer of BBC News is actually the editors of the national newspapers.

[u/ProtagonistForHire]

What news sources would you recommend?