News of the World: Why It's Your Fault

You may have noticed that there's a massive campaign afoot to make corporations drop their advertising in the News of the World.

OK, so far so bad. The newspaper has illegally accessed the telephones of politicians, entertainers, a murdered teenager, murdered kids' parents, terrorism victims' friends and families and dead soldiers' families.

But we shouldn't be fooled into thinking that these advertisers (and the Royal British Legion, which has just dropped its 'relationship' with the paper) are in any way better than the News of the World. These allegations have been public knowledge, to some extent, for several years. More widely, the News of the World, the Daily Mail, the Sun, the Express and other papers have been using illegal methods to gather information for decades. You can spot the guilty papers by their lack of coverage of this story over recent years.



Basically: the advertisers know what newspapers do. They've forked over millions of pounds to tabloids which explicitly specialise in vicious, bitter, moralistic, hypocritical, prurient, titillating gossip for decades. To suddenly decide that they can't (temporarily) stand it any longer isn't a sign that these companies exist on a higher moral plane than the papers. For all their handwringing ('I'm shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on in here'), they don't have moral values. They have accountants, and they have PR departments, who are both telling them that the outrage dollar (as Bill Hicks would have it) is more lucrative than the News of the World dollar, for now.

Which brings me to my final point. Why do major corporations advertise in the News of the World? Because it's the best-selling Sunday newspaper in the UK. Why is it the best-selling newspaper in the UK? Because millions of otherwise un-evil citizens make a deliberate choice of a Sunday to read vicious, bitter, moralistic, hypocritical, prurient, titillating gossip. Sure, individuals aren't responsible for the cultural soup in which they swim, but you have a choice. You could decide that the sex lives of TV weather presenters, Bolton's second-string fullback, and Big Brother losers simply isn't news, or relevant to you. You could decide that if you really must leer over the breasts of a teenage girl, to have some guts and buy an actual porn mag, or head to the internet, where I'm told flesh is easily found. You could stop dialling the sex-lines which fill the back pages. You could make a resolution to avoid the shrieking racism which pervades these repulsive papers.

And if you're reading this smugly congratulating yourself for not being a News of the World reader, you can wipe that smile off your face, particularly if you have a Sky subscription. 'Oh', you might be whinging, 'I've no choice. I love Boardwalk Empire, and big movies, and live sport, Vole, how can I live without live sport?'. Tough. They're all just commodities, sticky open jam pots designed to suck you in and sell you to advertisers - despite the fact that you've paid a subscription too. If you like films, go to the cinema or even better, the theatre, and make an occasion of it. Read a book. Sports fans: go to a live match, or play in one. Every penny you give to News International or one of its competitors - because blaming NI alone is to deny that there's a structural political, economic and cultural problem - you don't just fund what you're watching. You reward the News of the World and its friends. Ironically, paying to watch your favourite footballer perform involves paying for the 'celebrity news' which has replaced actual news, and funds the hacking, telephoto lens, kiss-and-tells and all the other paraphernalia which will be turned on that very footballer if a media outlet senses sales in the offing.

This isn't new: here's an extract from George Orwell's 1946 The Decline of the English Murder:

It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?

Naturally, about a murder.

With all this in mind one can construct what would be, from a News of the World reader's point of view, the "perfect" murder. The murderer should be a little man of the professional class — a dentist or a solicitor, say — living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs, and preferably in a semi-detached house, which will allow the neighbours to hear suspicious sounds through the wall. He should be either chairman of the local Conservative Party branch, or a leading Nonconformist and strong Temperance advocate. He should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a rival professional man, and should only bring himself to the point of murder after long and terrible wrestles with his conscience. Having decided on murder, he should plan it all with the utmost cunning, and only slip up over some tiny unforeseeable detail. The means chosen should, of course, be poison. In the last analysis he should commit murder because this seems to him less disgraceful, and less damaging to his career, than being detected in adultery. With this kind of background, a crime can have dramatic and even tragic qualities which make it memorable and excite pity for both victim and murderer. 

So when anyone wonders out loud whose fault it is, you can tell them: it's your fault. You buy the papers. You accept that celebrity gossip is news. You somehow have a definite opinion on who killed Maddie McCann. You let the tabloids define the terms for debates on anything from immigration to public sector pensions. The word you're looking for is 'complicit'.

Who hacked those phones? You did.

(And as an aside: given this week's events, I hope all you snobs will now revise your opinions about media studies).

I'm feeling a little welmish today

Emma has drawn my attention to SavetheWords.org, a promotional gimmick by the OED to draw attention to itself by highlighting the rapidity with which words are falling out of use.

For instance, my friend Mark is suffering from a range of illnesses at the moment. He has also recently suffered feline bereavement. This leads me to suspect that he's contracted pilimiction - the presence of hair-like bodies in the urine, which leads me to suspect that he has eaten his cat.

My favourite words are 'fescue' (a teacher's pointer and also a generic term for a family of grasses) and 'defenestrate' (to throw someone through a window). Neither are obscure, but they're satisfying. So is 'micturate' (to urinate) and 'osculate' - to kiss. I basically like words ending in -ate. In the 19th and early 20th centuries there was a move to de-Latinise English in favour of Saxonification, influenced by the English sense of kinship with Germany (from where they'd acquired their royal family). Hardy, Dickens and rather late to the party, Orwell (see his 'Politics and the English Language') contributed to this effort:

Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers 

Predictably enough, Wor(l)d War 1 put an end to that in any meaningful fashion, though Poul Anderson's 1989 Uncleftish Beholding tries to explain atomic theory in Germanic words only. See also Cowley's (dubious) How We'd Talk If The English Had Won In 1066 (dubious because 'England' was a series of Anglo-Saxon and Norse states, all with close ties to European nations, including the Normans. 'English' is a very retrospective term for 1066.

Your contributions please.

While you think about them, this is what Orwell has to say about writing in 1946. How I wish I could stamp this onto essays:

 As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? 

Orwell also knows that language is a disguise for atrocity - think of the current collateral damage, for instance:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.  

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. 

This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. 

Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.  

 And remember, during this period of adjustment, we're all in this together. Shut up about control orders, start paying your graduate contribution and supporting the war on terror. Support the Big Society and Welfare Reform. Doesn't all that sound better than a depression in which we abandon the poor, tax students to the hilt and bomb Muslim countries into behaving?

Dear me. I really should do some work. Got a bit carried away. Do use the comments section to add your favourite obscure words and weaselly uses of language.

More pages rustled

Only two books in the post today: 'The Complete Edition' of Alastair Campbell's Diaries: Volume One; Prelude to Power and a free inspection copy of Suman Gupta's Globalization and Literature (or, as the cover has it, suman gupta's globalization and literature).

The complicated title of Campbell's memoir is because he lost power a few years before New Labour did. Needing a large injection of cash, he wrote a censored version so that he could profit without sticking the knife into his party comrades too hard. Like a fool, I bought it. Now that Labour's out of government, Campbell can spin away to his heart's content and not worry about turning the public away from the party. Still, now I have both, there's a comparative critical discourse analysis project waiting to happen. I would like my money back after buying the first version though.

The other book is, under the new regime I live-blogged last night, destined to be contraband because it considers literature within a social, cultural and political context. Going by what I heard yesterday, we're meant to be telling students that they are 'singularities' who shouldn't see themselves as part of ethnic, racial, political, gendered or sexual categories at all. Never mind that many of my students are only just discovering that there are real reasons for their social positions, rather than luck: they're now to be treated as floating points in time - existing in a world of Twitter feeds and status updates, in NOW - rather than as part of humanity.

Basically, a privileged white academic from an imperialist nation is going to tell my students that they need to get over being black/white/Islamic/atheist/Christian/poor/gay/straight because 'identity' turns you into a victim scared to experience new things. Which is utter, utter bollocks, isn't it children? I recommend Dyer's White as corrective reading.

As a colleague points out, Orwell spotted this as elitist manipulation a long time ago: the proles in 1984 are refused a past, a history and therefore an identity. Gupta's book looks like a really good primer in the ways that literary texts have dealt with globalization in its many forms. It also suggests that there are potentially rich rewards to be had from cross-fertilising globalization studies and literary studies. I look forward to getting to grips with it.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

You may have seen some rather Orwellian police adverts around recently. This site has collected some subvertised versions you may enjoy. The one I've chosen was funny before. Now Ian Tomlinson's dead, it's rather more sombre.

Competitive bird-seeing

My chums are getting competitive about their birdwatching - degenerating into spotting really. Cynical Ben is especially pleased that he's seen fringilla montifringilla (depicted above courtesy of the RSPB who love birds except for pheasants). Seen one finch, seen them all, I say. He's overjoyed that Dan didn't because he got the wrong bus in Wigan. If you have to go to Wigan to see a bird, it's not worth it. Orwell didn't give up his wanderings there for no reason, you know. Even Stoke didn't make him turn round. 

Dan's response is, of course, masterly. He quietly pointed out that Ben hasn't yet seen 'the rather more common pied wagtail'. Stick that in your binoculars!

I wandered past a nasty pub today. It annoyed me, as it always does, because it's called 'The Moon Under the Water', which is the name Orwell gave his imagined perfect pub in one of his essays (I'm a lazy man and can't be bothered to find the reference for one reader). It isn't the perfect pub, it's a run-down Wetherspoon's. I wouldn't begrudge this theft if the chain made the effort to follow GO's prescription, but it's horrible, although the beer is very good. 

Anyway, outside this pub was a smoking Goth. Or rather, a Goth, smoking. I like Goths, having lived with some gentle, vegetarian Goths in Bangor. This one annoyed me because smoking was clearly a part of his rebellious image. I know Goths have, like all subcultures as Hebdige pointed out, been appropriated and diluted for marketing purposes, but they think they're rebellious. I wanted to point out that in a corporate world, smoking is the ultimate act of non-rebellion. Sure, governments tell us not to smoke, but they're far less important than corporations as far as our daily lives go. Governments should be far more intrusive but they've been captured by corporate interests. Deliberately shortening your life and reducing your physical strength (and financial power) by smoking just make you a slave. I have more respect for kerb-crawlers: at least both sides are getting something out of that transaction. 

These boots are made for walking…

Unless it's actually snowing tomorrow, I'm going up the Cheshire Matterhorn: it's said to be bleak and steep. So far it's Dan, Neal and myself, but others may be foolhardy enough to join the Map Twats. 

Then in keeping with Orwell's description of middle-class liberals

'that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking to the smell of progress like bluebottles to a dead cat … fuzzy-haired intellectuals in pullover sweaters'

(The Road to Wigan Pier, Part 2, Chapter 11)

I'm off to see Dick Gaughan (Scottish lefty folk singer) in the evening! He sounds better than he looks…

I'm not exactly an Orwell fan, but you have to admit that he had a talent for winding people up (also from The Road to Wigan Pier): 

'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

Anyone know why this thing is ignoring my formatting?