Page 299 - Culture Society and the Media

MEDIA, ‘REALITY’, SIGNIFICATION 289
Britain. The fact that the more specifically proletarian aspects of republican Spain
—the workers’ committees running the factories, the mass seizure of the land by
the peasantry, the initially democratic structure of the army, etc.—were
underplayed or simply not mentioned at all, also served to limit the development
of ties of international proletarian solidarity with the Spanish working class.
Time and again, in Homage to Catalonia, Orwell records his sheer disbelief, on
returning from the front to France and England, at the number of not only
‘fellowtravellers’, like himself, but also working-class militants in those
countries who were simply not aware of the proto-revolutionary aspects to the
conflict in Spain. This was reinforced by the tendency to report the events in
Spain within a ‘democracy versus fascism’ political construction at the expense
of stressing the respects in which the activity of the Spanish workers had also
placed revolutionary socialist objectives on the agenda. Again, Orwell is
instructive here. For he records that many of the tradeunion militants and members
of the liberal intelligentsia, himself included, who went to Spain to join the
International Brigade believed that they were going to the defence of democracy
in an abstract sense, and he notes that it was only by directly participating in the
struggle in Spain that he gradually became aware of its specifically proletarian
and socialist aspects.
Although with some qualifications, Anthony Aldgate’s recent study of the
British newsreel companies’ coverage of the Spanish Civil War confirms the
general thrust of Orwell’s criticisms. However, Aldgate suggests that the specific
inflection of the events in Spain effected by the newsreels was determined less
by any outright hostility to the republican cause than by the need to recruit support
for the government’s policy of non-intervention, itself dictated by Britain’s
commitment to the political initiatives being made at the time for disarmament in
Europe. In view of these considerations, Aldgate argues, the early newsreel
coverage of the Civil War tended to sympathize with neither the republican nor
the insurgent forces but sought rather to draw a contrast between the miseries of
war-torn Spain and the ordered, peaceful and improving quality of life in Britain
in support of fostering an anti-war climate of opinion. This also partly explains
why the part played in Spain by both the Soviet Union and the fascist forces of
Hitler and Mussolini tended to be underplayed as part of an attempt to limit the
significance of events in Spain, to present the War as a purely local dispute (this
being contrary to the policy pursued within the press) and thereby—through
controlling definitions in this way—to reduce the chances of the Civil War
becoming the touchstone that might spark off a general European conflagration.
Given this qualification, however, the newsreels can by no means be
exonerated from the charge that their coverage was biased against the republican
forces, although this was effected more by omissions—but highly significant
omissions—than by any explicitly biased editorial comment. Whilst the Russian
assistance to the republican forces was occasionally dealt with, for example, all
the major newsreel companies maintained a virtually total conspiracy of silence
concerning the assistance Hitler and Mussolini rendered the insurgent forces—a