sglen
Friday 12th February 2010 12:07pm [Edited]
Manchester
599 posts
Quote: Cheesehoven @ February 12 2010, 4:40 AM GMT
You must have been watching an entirely different programme to me. I guess this proves that people's critical faculties are down when watching entertainment.
Brooker seems to have convinced many people, even here, that he is some sort anti-establishment hero speaking for the little guy. He's not. He's an authoritarian elitist, something which was obvious to me from the start, so I am unable to understand the high opinion he seems to have. His shows are constantly sneering at ordinary people while upholding the so-called liberal elite position. He is never critical of BBC/Guardian, Climate Change, Obama Worship etc while Nick Griffin is constantly portrayed as a bogeyman despite Griffin never really ever appearing in the news. I dislike Griffin and his racist views but he should be given a fair hearing.
A case in point, Brooker had a lengthy dig at an ordinary and elderly member of the public for "being boring". And this from a show which elsewhere is superficially critical of the media's obsession with celebrity (although Brooker obviously shares it) but when a real person appears, Brooker's response is to mock him. Hmmm.
The whole episode was basically a half hour long justification of totalitarianism. The Alan Curtis insert was expounding the idea that the elite knows best and that the ignorant masses should just see this. Public scepticism is just paranoia. This was made by a bizarre conspiracy theory which brings together three bogeymen of the far left: Nixon, Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch. How dare they diminish the role of the state! Much of what he said about the wisdom of Home Secretary Jenkins is highly debatable to say the least, and on a non-entertainment show, such ideas would be held up to scrutiny. Here it is given a free pass.
Later Doug Stanhope is given a soapbox to expand on the increasingly 'liberal' orthodoxy that population control is becoming essential to "save the planet". This idea comes from the same people who support mass immigration and are quite comfortable with the population of the UK increasing to 70 million. So no conflict of ideology there then.
Ok. It's up to you whether you like Brooker or not but when it comes to the Adam Curtis film.......*deep breath in*...
Adam Curtis is talking about the media effect on the masses (this is regardless of class though there might be some slight changes in the effect depending on lifestyle). I think Curtis would be the last person to say that the media had control over the masses. In truth the relationship between the media and public opinion is symbiotic. The media controls the release of information (in that we can only know what they tell us) but they have to shape that information around "what sells" - i.e. what we care about/want to hear about. So the media and the masses inform each other.
Now I can see where you got the idea of elitism from in that documentary. It looked like he was saying the limit of information was good for the masses. I'm not sure he was. In fact, he didn't give an opinion as far as I noticed (I've only watched it once). What he is saying is fact - things have changed. We are less elitist as a nation than we once were. The media is informed by culture and culture is informed by the media but culture is informed by a great many other things too. It's not a controllable thing and will change. We move along with it. We are now more anti-elitist as a nation. This has pros and cons. Being elitist had pros and cons too. Curtis showed how this started changing around the time of Nixon and went from there. Nixon will have been one of the factors that changed culture but he wasn't the only one.
The question that is raised by the documentary is not "would we be better off giving the masses less say" but "how have things changed to get to where we are now and why?" - the answer will include hundreds of factors but mostly the economy (and our heightened quality of life since the 60s), the political landscape (particularly war) and the media.
I think Curtis' films are normally quite balanced. I agree that this one was a little too black and white. The feeling I got from it was not of conspiracy theories or blame - someone used the word "repackaged" above and I think it's a good one. The theory is there but he has used Nixon as a storytelling device and made sweeping statements (presumably to save time). He has a point in each thing that he is saying but he's not balancing it. This wasn't "Nixon's fault" but Nixon was a big story and it will have had some effect. Curtis could have shown that it wasn't just that, though. As for the populism in politics - this struck me to be more about their behaviour with the media than their actual decisions. Though, you must admit, with the exception of the Iraq War (yes I know that's a big exception) the government do tend to flounder around trying to do whatever will get them a vote nowadays rather than make real changes. Before anyone says "well that's democracy" - democracy is voting in a representative who knows about politics and putting at least some trust in them to do something clever with their knowledge.
