OPINION
Chris Trotter
HISTORICAL PARALLELS between the impact of the printing press and the impact of the Internet are not new. Both inventions almost immediately began to undermine the command and control hierarchies of their respective societies. In the case of the printing press, the reimposition of elite control became the work of centuries. And, even then, the technology was constantly falling into the hands of rebels and revolutionaries. Judging by the amount of noise they are making, the elites of the twenty-first century are terrified that the social and cultural upheavals produced by the printing press are about to be replicated by the subversive communications made possible by the Internet.
Most of the noise is being made by those who claim that the Internet – social media in particular – is unleashing a veritable tsunami of what they call misinformation, disinformation and malinformation against societies ill-equipped to defend themselves against its pernicious influence. To amplify the elites’ unease, unholy alliances have been forged, right across the Western democracies, linking state agencies (often including the organs of national security) with the mainstream news media, in a crusade against the misinformed.
New Zealand’s own “Disinformation Project” is matched by similar joint ventures in information control in the United States, Canada, the UK, and the European Union. While it is not at all difficult to understand why the state and its agencies might have cause to fear the spread of information inimical to its ability to control the population’s general understanding of reality, the participation of the news media – working journalists in particular – in what amounts to a grand censorship project requires further explanation.
After all, the reaction of editors and journalists to even the suggestion of state censorship should be visceral. No less vociferous should be their reaction to the idea that everyone and everything – apart from the state – is capable of spreading serious misrepresentations of reality. Those journalists working in close proximity to the political and bureaucratic branches of the state cannot be ignorant of the lengths to which their servants will go to shape and control public perceptions. Attempts by these agents to set themselves up as dispassionate adjudicators of truth and falsehood ought to be laughed out of the room by any journalist worthy of the name.
So, why isn’t this happening? Why are editors and journalists closing ranks with political and bureaucratic institutions determined to bring the flow of information back under their control. Much of the explanation is to be found in the ideological shift, from right to left, that has accompanied the generational shift from the economically radical but socially conservative pre-war generations, to the economically “dry” but socially radical post-war generations.
From the late 1940s until the 1980s, the overwhelming majority of editors and journalists were eager supporters of, and participants in, the Cold War consensus that declared anything more challenging than mild social democracy to be subversive of the democratic order. Equally difficult to accommodate were those who challenged the equally conservative social consensus of the period. Patriarchal, heterosexual, racially-stratified: little, if any, space was afforded to those who rejected its monolithic institutions – and assumptions.
How things have changed. Fifty years after the West’s very own “cultural revolution” succeeded in, if not demolishing, then seriously damaging the rigid post-war social edifice, the overwhelming majority of editors and journalists have become eager participants in the suppression of whatever remains of the conservative social and political order.
Any intellectual branded as a “communist” in the 1950s and 60s would struggle to find a mainstream newspaper, or broadcaster, willing to publish their material, or allow their views on the air. To be branded a TERF in the 2020s immediately precipitates a similar struggle to make one’s views known. A regime of censorship every bit as ruthless as that which characterised the “Red Scare” of the 1950s has been erected to defend the cultural and political verities of the twenty-first century. Today’s editors and journalist have become the new McCarthyites.
Except that the seepage of forbidden ideologies into the public mind is far greater in the 2020s than was the case in the 1950s. We all know the reason why. In the 1960s, the Communist Party might set up its own, very small, printing press in a comrade’s garage, running-off maybe a thousand copies of “The People’s Voice” – of which only a few hundred might be sold. In 2024, a gender-critical blog, costing its contributors precisely zero dollars, can spread its views to millions, worldwide, at the stroke of a key.
And not just their “views”. Blogs and websites are perfectly capable of turning out journalism as well as commentary. Exposés of mainstream media perfidy are contributing to the fast-growing mistrust of mainstream news media institutions. Fewer subscribers to newspapers, shrinking television audiences: all manifestations of reader and viewer migration to content providers outside the mainstream; are rightly construed by the former masters of information as a direct assault upon their power. It is steadily transforming what were once idealistic and free-thinking journalists into brutal and unforgiving political commissars.
The situation is not helped when editors reveal themselves to be openly contemplating imposing a collective ban on reporting the Deputy Prime Minister’s criticisms of – you guessed it – the behaviour of the mainstream news media!
In the howling moral vacuum that opened up in the years immediately following the cataclysm of the First World War – a period that coincided with the beginnings of the technologically-driven mass societies we still live in today – there were profound misgivings among the elites and their ideological enablers about how the masses would respond to the new realities emerging from the collision of capitalism and democracy.
The solution they hit upon came in two parts. Firstly, it would be necessary for the emerging mass media to devote itself to “manufacturing” the consent of the governed. Secondly, the new science of public relations was charged with redirecting the desires of the masses away from dangerous participation, and towards harmless consumption.
These are still the prime objectives of elite socio-political policy. Achieving those objectives, however, has been made increasingly problematic by the manner in which the Internet has developed. Just as happened with that other great regulator of the masses, the Medieval Church, the advent of a new and hard-to-control technology is weakening the ties that bind. Then, and now, those who enjoy a monopoly on the entrenchment of lies, cannot and will not tolerate competition. The elites and their defenders in the mainstream media talk nobly of defending the truth, but what they really mean to re-establish are the key, system-protecting lies which ordinary people will then be denied the information to challenge.
Precisely what the printing press gave, and now the Internet gives, to the people. The power to manufacture the truth.