EcoLogics

Updated 30 September 2009

See also the more recent Learning to love Peter—or leaving The Guardian

A newspaper editor has a number of ways in which s/he can attempt to make or break a politician. The editor’s arsenal ranges from utter silence—total censorship of someone’s views—to a Murdochian unleashing of the proverbial hounds of the hunt. In between these two extremes we find a variety of linguistic and para-linguistic instruments, not all of which are readily identified by even relatively expert readers. To mention just a few of the more obvious tools of the trade, there’s the prominence of the headline; the adjectives chosen (or not) for the linguistic account; the size, angle, lighting, framing and expression of any photographs; the framing of the article (or photograph) by other news items; appeals to ‘common sense’… the list could go on and on and on.

The word ‘attempt’ is nonetheless key because there is no guarantee that readers will buy the story: literally or figuratively. On the day that a particular politician’s campaign is to be launched (or destroyed), some other event may explode across the news-scape, redirecting readers’ attentions away from any planned making or unmaking of. Then again, a good (or inconvenient) portion of the readership may simply be on holiday. To be sure, politicians are usually made—or broken—over a much longer period of time.

Equally importantly, in the absence of the aforementioned distractions the editor may fail to persuade a significant number of readers to abandon old prejudices, or indeed, to acquire new ones. To put the matter somewhat academically, any student of mass communication knows (or should know) that bullet theories of media effects are as good as the tacit model that they silently advance: words are no more bullets than bullets are words.

Then again, a reader can be struck by a choice of words, and as Russian politicians and their Chechen henchmen have shown, a journalist can be silenced by a bullet.

This is a long way of saying that on August 10, 2009, The Guardian knew full well what it was doing when it decided to foreground a Decca Aitkenhead interview with Peter Mandelson. Many readers may not have seen the interview, let alone the editorial that accompanied it. Those who did see them were not necessarily persuaded by either. And those who were persuaded may well have been persuaded in different ways about different aspects of the first or the second representation. Few things in the world of mass communication are what they seem at first glance, or even, on second thought.

But that verity does not contradict the fact that the world of the news media is littered with efforts to determine the meanings derived from a first glance, and indeed, from a second or even a third thought. EcoLogics suggests that the editors of The Guardian were trying to determine the nature of both glance and thought where Peter Mandelson is concerned.

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Decca Aitkenhead’s Peter Mandelson interview (‘I had to be the hit man’) was very good, whatever one might say about the Guardian’s ulterior motivations. It was a Machiavellian mirror, if such a thing exists, of Peter Mandelson’s Machiavellianism. Even as it revealed the innumerable ways in which the Prince of Darkness calculates his political relations, it worked quite hard to make these seem funny. As part of this, it attempted to establish an opposition between Mandelson’s aides, who seemed to forever be warning him to keep his mouth shut or to be more careful, and Mandelson himself, who was made to appear to be throwing caution to the wind, and just ‘enjoying himself’.

The article’s stance vis-a-vis this new Mandelson line was remarkably ambiguous; it didn’t quite celebrate it, but it didn’t condemn it either. That said, there was one way in which the interview was anything but ambiguous. It constituted an example of the kind of psychology that may be generated when a journalist is embedded in a military unit pitched in battle. There may have been no incoming mortar shells, but the effect might just as well have been the same: the journalist took us into Mandelson’s unit and made a part of his political war machine. This immersion may well have generated if not a sympathy, then certainly a shared subjectivity of a kind which is least likely to be perceived or understood by readers who don’t have training in media analysis. Again, the point is not to say that this or any other ‘device’ is necessarily effective; but it was rather subtle, and so is less likely to have been noticed by a majority of readers.

Now it might be argued that this was a one-off, a sign of The Guardian’s duty to ‘balance’, that most misleading of all journalistic objectives. In fact, the interview was not only given headline status, but was silently backed up by an editorial that subtly signalled, if not a Guardian volte-face, then certainly a significant change of course. One line in the seemingly even-handed editorial said it all: ‘It is possible – with Mandelson, it sometimes seems anything is possible – that we are now about to meet a man of ideology.’ By saying this, Rusbridger et al dissimulated in principle, if not in effect, the fact that Mandelson has had ideology all along: the ideology of a self-serving neoliberal, one who now, for both tactical and strategic reasons, needs to persuade the mythical, and seemingly gullible centre of the Labour Party that he is really one of ‘us’. It would appear in this sense that the Guardian has become a part of Mandelson’s ultimate public relations campaign.

The Guardian might also try to suggest that it has published critical pieces about Mandelson—for example, the day after the interview appeared, the paper included a piece by Simon Hoggart that did say a few mean things about Mandelson, and included a telling line: ‘Now we have unveiled in the Guardian the latest, newest, shiniest Mandelson, straight from the showroom. He is, he tells us, a pussycat.’ Read in a certain way, this line suggests that the Guardian was in fact unmasking Mandelson’s latest guise; EcoLogics suggest that the combination of ambiguity and embedding analysed above suggests more of an unveiling than an unmasking.

If this analysis is a valid one, we can only guess at The Guardian’s motivations for abandoning their own hitherto admirable political crusade against the sweet stench of corruption that pervades Mandelson’s designer clothes. Perhaps the newspaper is in such dire financial straits that it dares not contradict what it senses to be a groundswell of pro-Mandelsonian opinion amongst those who still buy the paper. Then again, the editors may have persuaded themselves that for Labour itself it’s Mandelson or bust. Whatever the case, this is one Guardian reader who has lost respect for a paper that until now has been something like a lone critical media voice in New Labour’s—and Peter Mandelson’s—neoliberal jungle.

By way of a postscript, have a look at what the Guardian editors did to a CiF comment that pointed out that the Guardian was in no position to be having a go at the City of London after its own support for Mandelson (was the censorship a helpful suggestion on the part of the New Labour media intelligence unit?)  :

What the Guardian does to criticism of its own editorial policies

Here is an image of the way in which the paper headlined Mandelson’s article on 12 August 2009 (Guardian Unlimited, at 8.48am. The printed edition carried an ever bigger headline of Mandelson’s article).

The Guardian supports Peter Mandelson

Have a look also, at the little plug thrown in by the August 13 editorial about unemployment, in which the Guardian both singles out for mention, and agrees with a comment made by Mandelson that things could be ‘much much worse’. Yes indeed; but were it not for Mandelson’s and New Labour’s policies from 1997 onwards, they could be much, much better.

Update September 30:

The paper has gone from a relatively subtle pro-Mandelson stance, to one that is as crass as the videos shown at the height of New Labour’s pathetic final conference (see for example, the emetic http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/video/2009/sep/28/peter-mandelson-career-labour-conference) Here’s a suggestion to Guardian readers: vote with your feet, or rather, with your browser: stop reading the paper in any of its forms. Later this week, EcoLogics will be publishing a post that both explains the need for, and suggests some ways of engaging in, Guardian abstention.