Zombie Media 83
Strategist Steve Bannon identified as one of the most effective sources
of opposition to Trump in terms of an independent media, calling
the mainstream media the “opposition party”. In an interview with The
New York Times at the end of January 2017, Bannon told editors of the
paper that they failed to understand how the country had elected Donald Trump as the president and needed to “keep their mouth shut”.
21
As
such, the constant epithet of fake news functions very simply as propaganda, coming close even to the simple assertion of the Big Lie (as refined
by Goebbels), whereby if something is repeated enough times it will be
believed by a substantial portion of the populace. In a more sophisticated use of the term, the redefinition of fake news follows Jowett and
O’Donnell’s definition of propaganda as deliberate and pre-meditated
communications, systematically carried out with organised regularity in
an attempt to shape perceptions.
22
As propaganda, such redefinitions of
fake news as have been set forth by the Trump administration can and
should be resisted, and yet there remains the point that the ready acceptance of at least parts of the wider public to accept these redefinitions
arises from a series of structural problems that affect journalism more
widely.
Perhaps the most fundamental of these, and the most difficult for both
journalists and the wider public to understand, is the essential difficulty
regarding objectivity itself. For a great many professional journalists,
objectivity has been held up as an essential tenet of journalism, the reporting of facts that can be verified by demonstrable evidence. The skein
of such evidence, however, tends to be a difficult one to completely comprehend; much of it relies on the testimony of witnesses or documentary
evidence that requires interpretation and thus the possibility of bias.
As Megan Knight and Claire Cook observe, objectivity is a myth that
has been
thoroughly unpicked and discredited among the media theorists…
[yet] remains firmly entrenched in the professional practice of journalism, and the more the profession comes under fire, the more
objectivity is defended as a necessary part of the contribution that
news organisations make to society as a whole.
23
Such things as statutory obligations upon broadcasters in the UK to remain impartial do not mitigate the epistemological problems of objectivity as a concept. For example, as Stuart Hall observed back in the 1970s,
there is a tendency to depend on those officials in positions of power,
those “primary definers” such as judges, police, teachers, doctors, to
provide an authenticated version of the truth, and who have in the past
15 years too often shown themselves willing to manipulate the media
for their own ends. For Hall and other cultural theorists of journalism,
news is an activity based around social production, but for journalists
Strategist Steve Bannon identified as one of the most effective sources
of opposition to Trump in terms of an independent media, calling
the mainstream media the “opposition party”. In an interview with The
New York Times at the end of January 2017, Bannon told editors of the
paper that they failed to understand how the country had elected Donald Trump as the president and needed to “keep their mouth shut”.
21
As
such, the constant epithet of fake news functions very simply as propaganda, coming close even to the simple assertion of the Big Lie (as refined
by Goebbels), whereby if something is repeated enough times it will be
believed by a substantial portion of the populace. In a more sophisticated use of the term, the redefinition of fake news follows Jowett and
O’Donnell’s definition of propaganda as deliberate and pre-meditated
communications, systematically carried out with organised regularity in
an attempt to shape perceptions.
22
As propaganda, such redefinitions of
fake news as have been set forth by the Trump administration can and
should be resisted, and yet there remains the point that the ready acceptance of at least parts of the wider public to accept these redefinitions
arises from a series of structural problems that affect journalism more
widely.
Perhaps the most fundamental of these, and the most difficult for both
journalists and the wider public to understand, is the essential difficulty
regarding objectivity itself. For a great many professional journalists,
objectivity has been held up as an essential tenet of journalism, the reporting of facts that can be verified by demonstrable evidence. The skein
of such evidence, however, tends to be a difficult one to completely comprehend; much of it relies on the testimony of witnesses or documentary
evidence that requires interpretation and thus the possibility of bias.
As Megan Knight and Claire Cook observe, objectivity is a myth that
has been
thoroughly unpicked and discredited among the media theorists…
[yet] remains firmly entrenched in the professional practice of journalism, and the more the profession comes under fire, the more
objectivity is defended as a necessary part of the contribution that
news organisations make to society as a whole.
23
Such things as statutory obligations upon broadcasters in the UK to remain impartial do not mitigate the epistemological problems of objectivity as a concept. For example, as Stuart Hall observed back in the 1970s,
there is a tendency to depend on those officials in positions of power,
those “primary definers” such as judges, police, teachers, doctors, to
provide an authenticated version of the truth, and who have in the past
15 years too often shown themselves willing to manipulate the media
for their own ends. For Hall and other cultural theorists of journalism,
news is an activity based around social production, but for journalists