Page 297 - Culture Society and the Media

MEDIA, ‘REALITY’, SIGNIFICATION 287
‘biased in favour of parliamentary democracy’ (cited in Hall et al., 1976, p. 57).
At this level of analysis, I shall be principally concerned not with conscious bias
but with the ‘unconscious’ bias which results from the implicit, taken-for-granted
assumptions of consensus politics embodied in the ideologies and working
practices of professional communicators.
However, I shall also be concerned to point to some of the difficulties
associated with this tradition of media theory, particularly with regard to the way
in which its implicit retention of the mirror analogy impedes an adequate
theorization of the politics of signification. Owing to limitations of space,
however, it will be necessary to present these criticisms in programmatic form
rather than as part of a fully developed critique.

POLITICS AND THE MEDIA
In his essay ‘Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War’, Orwell wrote:

Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a
newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which
did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is
implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had
been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been
killed. I saw troops who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of
imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies
and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that
had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of
what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various
‘party lines’. (Orwell, 1974, p. 233)

In order to understand Orwell’s comments on the press coverage of the Civil
War, it is necessary to sketch in the background to the struggle in Spain. In broad
terms the political situation in Spain from 1930 to the end of the Civil War can
be understood in terms of a struggle for power between three contending
political forces: the bourgeois republican parties (the Republican Union, the
Catalan Left, the Basque Nationalists) subscribing to a bourgeois-democratic
programme of reforms; right-wing bourgeois forces of a pro-monarchy and
fascist hue led by Franco; and a variety of workingclass political forces
subscribing to a variety of communist, socialist and anarcho-syndicalist
ideologies. During the greater part of the early 1930s, nominal power was held
by a succession of administrations headed by bourgeois-republican forces. The
basis upon which power was exercised, however, was an excessively fragile one,
the bourgeois-republican democracy being susceptible to successive challenges
from both the left and the right. The final blow came in the July of 1936 when
Franco initiated a fascist uprising by calling on the army to support him in
establishing an authoritarian state.