Slavoj Zizek on Trump & Fake News

[jayne lee wilson]

If you want to know who you might trust, look at those that were banned from the recent White House press briefing: Guardian, NY Times, CNN, BBC... don't cynically dismiss these outlets just because they don't always say what YOU want to hear, about Corbyn or anything else.

Why is there no political satire on UK terrestrial TV now? The dread curse of "balance", I guess. Something like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver currently running on Sky Atlantic, utterly merciless about all sides of the American political scene, but the Trumpian GOP most of all, of course. They did two fairly ruthless before-and-after takes on the Brexit Campaign too. If only they'd been seen more widely.
Shame that Saturday Night Live isn't easily available in Europe/GB, instead of grubbing around for excerpts...

But we need GB equivalents, like Spitting Image only.... harder-edged.

...worse things lurk just out of view...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/27/trump-free-speech-media-bans-tweets-internet-deregulation

[Lat-Literal]

I broadly agree with what is being implied or explicitly stated in the last four posts. However, I am prepared to play devil's advocate as I believe that the regulation of broadcasting and lack of advancement in technology in the 1970s and earlier meant that the standard was much higher. Consequently, I have some doubts as to whether the jungle that is the internet represents an improvement on news coverage to date although it is more liberal. That isn't to say that any proposals from Camp Trump are ever likely to be in the right direction. What perhaps they would be is somewhat more in line, sadly, with politics as it has been for an awful long time internationally. The last Social Democrat Prime Minister was Jim Callaghan and the last Prime Minister who had any real leanings towards One Nation Conservatism was Ted Heath. To see the battle taking place between Blairites and Corbynistas just strikes me as utterly ridiculous. There is one gigantic hole in the middle. As for the US and a level playing field, when? Carter. If not, Johnson. If not, Roosevelt.

Possibly the reason why there is not much in the way of satire - R4E does it a bit although it is to use a word of these moments "niche" - is that almost everyone in Britain knows that so much is beyond parody. My feeling is that the electorate is rather more sophisticated here. The BBC is a key part of it, not that it is perfect by any means, and that is why I am one of its biggest defenders. But it also needs to be said that fake news is not simply the hobby of one part of the political spectrum. In the past week, I have been asking as many people as I can why Mr Corbyn is so disliked. I can't see it myself - he seems alright to me - although I disagree with some of his policies. What I was told inevitably involved words like immigration and phrases like tax and spend. Predictable, yes, and as such not very interesting. But what did surprise me were the constant references to him as a liar. Why? A certain bit of fake news about him not getting a seat on one of Mr Branson's trains. I can't for the life of me comprehend why these people think they can get away with it.

[teamsaint]

So, might it be fair to categorise news/CA something like:

" Real" news. Based on actual or likely events, and subject to some reasonable level of scrutiny/verification by journalists or others.

News given undue emphasis.

News, or that reported as news reported with considerably too little verification/context.

Fake or essentially fake news.

What concerns me to an extent is that the second and third categories are part of the context for the flourishing of Fake News.

[french frank]

News given undue emphasis.

News, or that reported as news reported with considerably too little verification/context.

It seems to me that at the heart of the problem is the commercial competition. Newspaper editors, in particular, do keep a sharp eye on what their rivals are doing - or are likely to do. Some front pages splashes will sell a newspaper and some won't. If people are only buying one paper they will usually buy the one they usually read, but may be tempted to change if the front page angle and teasers are 'interesting' enough. Having a different story from the herd doesn't make an incentive to buy - and most news sources treated the Oscars fiasco as Big News.

You can analyse what sells by looking at circulation figures. Insofar as all newspapers have a 'natural' readership, so they all write to please that readership.

[Serial_Apologist]

So, might it be fair to categorise news/CA something like:

" Real" news. Based on actual or likely events, and subject to some reasonable level of scrutiny/verification by journalists or others.

News given undue emphasis.

News, or that reported as news reported with considerably too little verification/context.

Fake or essentially fake news.

What concerns me to an extent is that the second and third categories are part of the context for the flourishing of Fake News.

Yes, you've got it, teamy. The BBC's "impartiality" offers an equivalence of lèse majesté to the rest of the British mass media to fake news; this is where, in being one of its strongest critics, I fundamentally disagree with Lat.

One thing that does puzzle me is that we tend to put the right wing bias of the British voter down to the persuasive power of the likewise biased majority of its newspapers, whereas, unless my idea of what is left and right is skewed to what it was when I were a lad, the situation in the States appears to be the other way around. And I'd always thought Fox News pretty much representative of mainstream media bias in the States, apart from the Washington Post, their equivalent of our Grauniad. Is it just "too liberal" (ie left) by THEIR public's understanding?

[french frank]

Yes, you've got it, teamy. The BBC's "impartiality" offers an equivalence of lèse majesté to the rest of the British mass media to fake news; this is where, in being one of its strongest critics, I fundamentally disagree with Lat.

People collect their data on BBC reporting which shows a distinct bias. One way or another. Yet it's always been the Tory governments which have been most hostile to the BBC, with a determination to clobber it wherever it can. Not quite the way to treat your friends?

One thing that does puzzle me is that we tend to put the right wing bias of the British voter down to the persuasive power of the likewise biased majority of its newspapers, whereas, unless my idea of what is left and right is skewed to what it was when I were a lad, the situation in the States appears to be the other way around. And I'd always thought Fox News pretty much representative of mainstream media bias in the States, apart from the Washington Post, their equivalent of our Grauniad. Is it just "too liberal" (ie left) by THEIR public's understanding?

Not quite sure what you're saying here - that Fox News is mainstream compared with Breitbart?

[Serial_Apologist]

Not quite sure what you're saying here - that Fox News is mainstream compared with Breitbart?

It's all relative isn't it? We know that the word Socialism is tantamount to swearing in church to many a moral majority self-describing American, and the very whispering of Communism deserving of eternal hell fire: does this mean that what Trump considers too "liberal" (their euphemism for "left") in the putative bias of the US mass media would be considered a further to the right by mainstream middle ground consensual thinking people in this country than they are across the waters, is what my question is.

[jayne lee wilson]

You saw last night's Newsnight, with a White House Press Corps special? Excellent reportage where "impartiality" was more, not less revealing...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08h4mzl/newsnight-28022017

At around 19' and 27', interviews with Tom Reed and the ever-hilarious Ann Coulter... all you NEED to do here is - let them talk. I can't get enough of watching them, studying how they use language, how they think... I think it's that animal need to know your enemy...

So Ann Coulter here claims that "the media" (i.e BBC, Guardian, NYT etc.) lied about Trump lying about a terrorist attack in Sweden.... telling another lie herself in the process, as ever with the air of smug superiority. And we need to see all this, and understand it, as often as possible.

[Serial_Apologist]

You saw last night's Newsnight, with a White House Press Corps special? Excellent reportage where "impartiality" was more, not less revealing...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08h4mzl/newsnight-28022017

At around 19' and 27', interviews with Tom Reed and the ever-hilarious Ann Coulter... all you NEED to do here is - let them talk. I can't get enough of watching them, studying how they use language, how they think... I think it's that animal need to know your enemy...

So Ann Coulter here claims that "the media" (i.e BBC, Guardian, NYT etc.) lied about Trump lying about a terrorist attack in Sweden.... telling another lie herself in the process, as ever with the air of smug superiority. And we need to see all this, and understand it, as often as possible.

But they're just smooth wordsmith operators, covering their logically meaningless non-sequiturs with that slick snakeoil salespersons's smile certain Americans are so good at deploying to inveigle the unsuspecting with the supposed charm of those made cocksure by their position and wealth.

[french frank]

Idoes this mean that what Trump considers too "liberal" (their euphemism for "left") in the putative bias of the US mass media would be considered a further to the right by mainstream middle ground consensual thinking people in this country than they are across the waters, is what my question is.

I see what you mean. (I'd always thought of 'liberalism' and 'socialism' as being distinct/different. Not in party political terms but in socialism being more authoritarian.)

[jayne lee wilson]

But they're just smooth wordsmith operators, covering their logically meaningless non-sequiturs with that slick snakeoil salespersons's smile certain Americans are so good at deploying to inveigle the unsuspecting with the supposed charm of those made cocksure by their position and wealth.

Oh God, I think there's far more, and more dangerous, things going on than that, because they have the power now, with the "the people" always claimed as fiercely supportive .... it's terrifyingly close to Orwellian Newspeak with all that that implies...(GB parallel - the Brexiteering, dissent-suppressing press allied with their "people" and the May government...)

[Beef Oven!]

I see what you mean. (I'd always thought of 'liberalism' and 'socialism' as being distinct/different. Not in party political terms but in socialism being more authoritarian.)

I see modern liberalism as virtually the same as socialism. Classical liberalism was never authoritarian.

[Serial_Apologist]

I see what you mean. (I'd always thought of 'liberalism' and 'socialism' as being distinct/different. Not in party political terms but in socialism being more authoritarian.)

Has not authoritarianism got something to do with being raised to be able to negotiate the ways in which power is exercised within given structures or modes of being-with-others which function either by maintaining or changing its exercise? Authoritarianism defines itself through these relationships, either in the transmission of knowledge or consisting in protocols governing social admissability; it's flexible inasmuch that truths can change, but inflexible when for reasons of maintaining structures of unequal power truths are not to be questioned. The admittedly subjective reason that I would not equate socialism with authoritarianism is that, whatever its record, it was socialism, or socialist ideas, that best challenged the received wisdoms about "freedom" and "choice" on which I was brought up, and which to my mind continue to bedevil the ways in which we live. We are forced to negotiate whatever happen to be the governing protocols of a given society, or willy-nilly, whatever the outcome, be left powerless on the outside. If in voting by majority for strike action in the face of a mass redundancy situation, those not seen to stand by their workmates by ignoring the vote result and strike-breaking might be portrayed by a media that decides strike action of any kind as at best self-defeating as victims of any consequent ostracisation that may be deemed authoritarian. Arguments as to individual moral choices to be made then devolve onto much bigger questions, which in turn are either misrepresented or ignored, because the overriding framing context is one of divide-and-rule, so that those same issues can never be considered in any way, let alone in any depth. Ken Loach's dramas are centred on how people try and cope with issues such as these. However, to me, were socialism ever to ossify to the point where its authority was not allowed to be open to question, then it would no longer be socialism. Liberalism can mean almost anything, from Adam Smith's belief in the unrestricted market being the ultimate guarantor of individual freedom to the Liberal Party's espousal of legality in the use of cannabis.

[Lat-Literal]

Interesting posts.

I see any one word political philosophy as being towards authoritarianism. Libertarianism is potentially exceedingly authoritarian. It simply shifts uneven power from government (and business) to the streets and endorses that widening of it. The least authoritarian philosophies have a prefix or suffix incorporating a sense of partnership. eg social liberalism.

"New" and "modern" don't count in this regard, not being meaningful political terms!

The best solution to one parent's dominant worldview, whatever it may be, is not likely to be to reduce it to the level of another parent, ie nothing and replace it with big brother. A powerful so-called spokesman for little people turns on the media not because they distort what he says but because he distorts so he needs to be the media to cover that iniquity.

I see all the time that the view from this Ukipian if unequivocally Tory part of the London suburbs is that while many find Labour hard to stomach they really don't want its demise. Some move here to get the better bus pass and are outraged when the local authority ceases to be under Tory control. They know who introduced the pass but pretend they forget.

[Lat-Literal]

Yes, you've got it, teamy. The BBC's "impartiality" offers an equivalence of lèse majesté to the rest of the British mass media to fake news; this is where, in being one of its strongest critics, I fundamentally disagree with Lat.

One thing that does puzzle me is that we tend to put the right wing bias of the British voter down to the persuasive power of the likewise biased majority of its newspapers, whereas, unless my idea of what is left and right is skewed to what it was when I were a lad, the situation in the States appears to be the other way around. And I'd always thought Fox News pretty much representative of mainstream media bias in the States, apart from the Washington Post, their equivalent of our Grauniad. Is it just "too liberal" (ie left) by THEIR public's understanding?

Not sure that I understand your point about the BBC. Unless the victim of revisionism, a Corporation to some extent reflects its history. Reith supported appeasement in the 1930s and rather admired Mussolini. His immediate successors helped the Government to victory in war. Later under Jacob the BBC was impartially conservative but in that post war period there was also a substantial strand of what could be called conservative Labour ideals. Education of the masses via entertainment not that many would ever be ready for the highbrow. See also the Open University. By Greene in the mid-late 1960s, what was then often understood wrongly to be leftish liberalism was being not wholly easily weaved in.

Alongside, there were less socially contentious questions about freedom of expression. For example, sailing on the high seas under a pirate flag. That was curtailed, I think, by Tony Benn so that pop music was brought into establishment broadcasting under conservative management. The later Birt years were distinctly right wing. Throughout, news was just one part of an overall package so that it didn't dominate or sit artificially in its own domain. But Birt, of course, had followed on from the Conservatives' introduction of commercial radio in which among other things London was introduced via LBC to a form of "Radio Newsroom" although not in any way as blunt edged, unimaginative and angled as it is today.

We need to talk about the elites. I have seen them occur a decade or two after university. The Conservative accountants and the Blairite economists. They watch a lot of sport and they especially enjoy crass culture given that they wish to wind down from all of the important stuff they are doing "daytime" while still needing to retain a sense of superiority. Such tendencies enable them to form a majority unholy alliance with "ordinary people" whose tastes are in many ways the same. The concern from a position outside that venn diagram is that it looks so very much like US broadcasting and even US politics. When most of broadcasting rights are with Disney, 21st Century Fox and worse, it is all reduced to a popular Mickey Mouse, he said this and she said that, let's have a bun fight, viewed through a lens of world wide wrestling and whatever it is there that's supposedly a ball game.

That is not education or even entertainment at root but rather Amendment I-know-my-rights. That US newspapers may often be historically liberal is no doubt a key part of it in that historically the US was politically very conservative. In their day, they were to some extent freedom of expression and freedom of expression always has to win. Radio, in contrast, is the wild west. Shock jocks. Gun wielding preachers. They hadn't been there before when? 1990? But it fits the model of tele-evangelists just before them and the 1970s when The Eagles could be heard on 67 stations in a town of 50,000 people and isn't that just wonderful? No, not particularly. I will in broadcasting take British independence instead of some sort of project to turn us into another US state. The BBC's conservative/liberal/labour inclinations are such that the BBC is the best we have. I can't see it in any other way.