Tapping Into The Media Psyche

The phone hacking denials seem disingenuous to me, having been a media insider for more than twenty years.

Let us look at what might really be going on here.
We have to remember that our Prime Minister was Director of Corporate Affairs, which would include marketing departments, at a large TV company.

Now I know that lots of perfectly decent people in Marketing ply their trade within the law, but as a psychotherapist for the last twenty years I’ve also looked very deeply into the issue of ethics.
Ethics concerns what’s actually ok to do to another person. It’s a big complicated subject because what’s right and wrong simply doesn’t suit us a lot of the time.

The reason is that many of our conscious, societal ethics are frequently sabotaged by the strength of the survival instinct itself, part of what Freud called our ‘Id’ or our basic, primitive brain.

Therapists are required to make a rigorous examination of every subtle temptation to warp our societal ethics in order to defend ourselves, in order to get what we want, and to manipulate others.

If we practise those things unaware upon our clients, therapy won’t work, because the client’s unconscious monitoring will render the relationship with the therapist unsafe, trust will not develop, therefore honesty will not be assured and therapy won’t work.

Now, back to marketing. Marketing any product that satisfies a desire rather than a need is difficult.
Entire industries are devoted to the art of persuasion. This inherently means a certain level of control and manipulation, not necessarily directly, but by participating in setting up a culture where desire is seen as acceptable. As a marketer, often all we need to do is to ensure that the aspirant purchaser takes our product and not someone else’s.

Politics is also about marketing because the idea that you can effectively run a country from the benefit of others is also inherently bogus. All you can do is build a career as a legislator, and these two things are paradoxical, because in order to maintain your career in politics your decisions can never all be altruistic. People know this so they have to be ‘sold’ politicians today.

So, Mr Cameron, a media professional, looks around prior to being elected and he and his team ask themselves: who is going to be ruthless, clever and manipulative enough to ensure that our spin is effective?

I will not libel Andy Coulson because I have no idea whether or not he or allowed about phone tapping in reality, but I can say that if it happened he would definitely have known about it. So let us surmise a little here about the general system or how news is gathered, based on my own experience of how news media put their product together.

News comes from many sources but since news is mostly negative, i.e. about problems and tragic events, those who are required to provide the information are generally reluctant to do so.

This reluctance is overcome by journalists in three major ways: in-depth, pressurised questioning in interviews, designed to trip people up,  unnamed ‘sources’, and sometimes payment.

A source is a person who usually has negative agendas, so is willing to secretly provide information. I always found brilliant moles when I was a reporter, and they were usually disaffected or held grudges.
News literally arrives from sources, from coverage in other media, from official sources and then enhanced by getting behind sophisticated and powerful Public Relations shields used by organisations like the Government, Police, military and corporate worlds.

It is treated like a product, sold, off the ‘wire’ to other organisations by agencies like Reuters and the Press Association, who take information 24/7 from various sources around the World, process it, usually pre-packaging it in six or seven different ways to suit the editorial policy of the different publications to whom it will be sold.

So before it even arrives at the newspaper offices the ‘angle’, order of factual content and content itself, including the main point of the story intended to catch the eye of the reader, may be quite different for different publications.

So immediately, all news is being filtered.
It will also be filtered through the unconscious lens or belief system of the source and writer, for we all have biases and beliefs which, however hard we try, will leak out into our approach to a news story. A word here, a turn of phrase there, a prioritising of facts, the way we interview people all carry unconscious bias. Then it will be edited by maybe three or four other human filters. No wonder it’s hard to get the facts about anything!

Another complication is that much news isn’t usually factual anyway. Comment and surmise make up a great deal of coverage. There are only ever six real facts out there: What When Where How Who and Why. This is fine in an air crash, until the aftermath of course, when the ‘why’ suddenly gets cloudy, or the birth of a Royal baby which doesn’t of course have a why but will lead to endless speculation based on nothing merely to feed the fascination with celebrity that bedevils our culture. But a great deal of political coverage is about journalists making assumptions about some conflict or dispute, questioning anyone involved, and coming up with some sort of assessment of what is actually happening. The order it is served up in the publications’ page numbers or running order is in itself a hint of importance to the consumer. In the tabloids, a celebrity divorce might be used to take the attention from an unpopular law going through Parliament if the paper is partisan to that government.

News is ‘tasted’, an old Fleet St word which means ‘is this for us?’ and slotted into the paper or broadcast according to the ‘editorial policy’ and therefore worldview of the publisher and everyone down the chain of command who has editorial input.

So all this makes creating the news ‘product’ plainly and honestly extremely difficult.
In the national media, most news journalists and editors will have a daily editorial conference in which they run through the stories which need covering in more depth, stuff off the wire, or follow ups with developing stories. Files on past stories complete with ‘background’ are carefully kept.

Once recorded, ‘facts’ are carved in stone and often trotted out without being updated. This incidentally is why I don’t take session notes as a therapist, I always want to see where the client is right now, today.
Sometimes a story has gone cold and will be re-explored to see where things are developing.

Remember, news has to be found, holes have to be filled, life is humdrum, in fact we often used to ‘drum up’ a story during fallow times. The editor and news reporters will, as a team, decide on the approach to take, and who will cover what.

No journalist is some sort of stand-alone maverick, out there in trench coat with notebook, ranging round the World and returning to the office to write it up unmonitored, because news gathering is a team effort.

Your contacts book might have been developed by you but your editor will know who is in it and how you get your stories. This is because the editor needs to be sure that your story ‘stands up’ and will go to great lengths to make sure you haven’t just made it up, although I’ve noticed over the years that many no longer let the facts get in the way of a good story, as is evidenced by the WMD scandal, in which the media were willing accomplices to the Government of the day.

Then there is the ever present legal department. For probably more than 40 years, all contentious news stories, especially if they concern something potentially libellous, or concern a public figure or holder of an official post, or worse, a big spending advertiser, will need to be checked by what reporters call ‘legal’ before they can be published.

News production is in fact such a team effort that even a front page headline can be the subject of a debate among six or seven people for a couple of hours.

Now make up your mind whether the News of the World, a complete rag by anyone intelligent’s standards, its editor, whose by-line you will have seen for many years on some of the dirtiest most judgmental stories on the front page of the Sun, and Rupert Murdoch, for whom he worked and who has made billions by Marketing ruthlessly on every front in the media worldwide, would be likely to try phone tapping.

Who is it alleged that they tapped? A Royal, who they loathe? A Labour politician who they loathe? A a gay MP who large numbers of their homophobic readers loathe?

How easy is tapping? Effective equipment can be bought easily on the Internet.
Having, hypothetically, tapped the victim, the editor, the editor in chief, and all layers of management, including ‘legal’ would be likely to have been fully aware of how the reporter got the story.

We live in a culture rampant with every kind of dishonesty.
The media pander to the prejudices of the lowest common denominator in society, who remain back in the Victorian era where the ‘Id’ ran everything. They judge with blanket assumptions, there is no compassion, they pander to the unexamined, anachronistic assumptions of the ignorant, suspect everyone, hate authority and can’t wait to bring it down, and are totally unaware of the fact that they are not special, they themselves are ordinary people, often ruthless people with sketchy ethics by and large, who have self elected to take advantage of a platform which has an enormous impact on the culture. For many of us, the ego alone operates, that is: I won’t do something wrong in case I get caught. Freud’s third level, the Superego: I won’t do something simply because it’s wrong, does not kick in very often.

Being good at getting news and writing up a good story does not give anyone the right to attempt to distort the worldview of an entire culture, yet it happens every day. Journalists are unelected guardians of the national psyche in many ways, a small coterie of mostly London based people who live in their own group ‘trance’ and definitely unelected.

The spectacle of the BBC, which considers itself unbiased and ethical, but demonstrates subtle biases every day for those who care to look in depth going after Coulson and his ilk is mildly enjoyable to me having been there, but it’s not good for the country.

Our newspapers are the trashiest in the World. Americans are shocked that national press purporting to produce serious coverage are so bad. Their trashy newspapers are seen as just that, no one really takes them seriously. People still trust their quality media. But here the lines are very blurred.

As I said, make up your own mind. But one last thing. Career survival is at stake here.
How much honesty are we to expect in all of this? Very little I would guess.Remember too, this very blog is unedited, contains some facts but much surmise, is just my opinion, and contains my conscious and unconscious biases!

Rhiannon Hill

About RhiannonHill
I have been a professional, holistic psychotherapist seeing couples and individuals for 20 year but am now semi retired, maintaining a small private practice. E-books: Ten Stupid Things That Can Mess Up Your Life and Ten Stupid Things That Can Mess Up Your Working Life available direct from me £5.99 or through my website: www.brightonhovecounselling.co.uk I also have an all women original, eclectic rock band called WYND, I have two children and three grandchildren and I live with my partner Al.
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