Page 302 - Culture Society and the Media

292 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
implemented by administrations which included members of the Spanish
Communist Party.
The Communist Party press, reflecting the Comintern’s position,
sought constantly to interpret the Spanish situation in terms of the logic of the
Popular Front and, as Orwell noted with incredulity, accordingly excluded
virtually all mention of the distinctively proletarian edge which the Spanish
workers and peasants had themselves given to their struggle. It sought also to
discredit Trotskyist forces in Spain by presenting the leaders of POUM as fascist
agents-provocateurs bent on encouraging the Spanish proletariat to take an
increasingly revolutionary stance in order to justify a direct German invasion of
Spain.
Looking back, much of this seems scarcely credible. Yet it needs to be borne
in mind that we have been made aware of the proletarian dimensions of the
struggle in Spain only posthumously. For, at the time, there was a large degree of
complicity between the ways in which the communist and the western capitalist
press reported (or did not report) and interpreted events in Spain. Both, for their
different reasons, were instruments of darkness. A footnote which underwrites
the point is the difficulty Orwell had in obtaining a publisher for his Homage to
Catalonia for it was, initially, rejected by both capitalist and left-wing publishing
houses for politicalideological reasons which should require no further comment.
It would be wrong, of course, to suggest that Orwell’s study of the press
coverage of the Civil War could be viewed as a model of sociological analysis. It
was too impressionistic for that, lacking both methodological rigour or any sense
of theoretical distance. It was, moreover, clearly partisan in the respect that
Orwell does not conceal his sympathy for the Trotskyist prognosis of the
political logic of the War. However, I would count this in its favour. To speak of
the political role of the media is not an abstract undertaking. It can be done only
through a study of the role played by the media in concrete, historically
determined political conjunctures; and to study these, it is necessary to deal not
only with the media but also with the political issues at stake in those
conjunctures. One does so at a price, of course. For it is not possible to offer an
analysis of a given political conjuncture without being drawn—as Orwell was—
into the maelstrom of political debate and, thereby, of politics itself. It is,
however, misplaced to imagine that one might stand aloof from this arena.
Perhaps the greatest value of Orwell’s study, however, consists in the fact that
it deals with events that were of a momentous, world-historical significance in
relation to which—although their impact may not be quantifiable—the part
played by the media was politically consequential in ways that may not seriously
be doubted. In ‘Looking back on the Spanish War’, Orwell argues that, no matter
what might have happened on the ideological front, the disposition of military
and international forces was such that the Republic would probably have been
lost anyway. But he also records that there are different ways in which a defeat
may be suffered. As he wrote in Homage to Catalonia: