Media Madness: Film Sessions: The Myth of a Free Press: Media Bias Explained from What the Theory? by Tom Nicholas

Editor's note: with Facebook continuing to threaten anarchist content, so I've been forced to move my weekly pinko film session posts here, to Media Madness.

This post originally appeared on my Facebook Page on December 19th, 2020.

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Unfortunately I got tied up this past weekend finishing off a couple of essays and in the commotion, I forgot to leave time for our weekly film session. Now that I’ve published a few things and had a chance to catch my breath, I thought I’d post a make-up session today.

This time I want to take a look at a rather lengthy video (55 minutes) by a creator who is really quite new to me; What the Theory’s Tom Nicholas. Now according to his rather thin Wikipedia stub, Nicholas is “a British economist currently the William J. Abernathy Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School” - which is kind of funny because he looks like the kid who shags balls at a football match, and most of his videos seem to be about philosophy, or political and social theory. Whether or not this is as a result of a Wikipedia identification mistake featuring two guys with the same name (the picture looks like the same dude,) I couldn’t tell you, but based on my extremely limited sample of one video – Tom is a pretty smart guy, with at least a reasonably nuanced grasp of media theory in a capitalist environment.

More interesting to us however, is the fact that while he’s hardly Leon Trotsky, Nicholas does appear to be at least a bit of a soft socialist; perhaps a low-key Corbynite running just a bit left of the average American democratic socialist. Although a quick scan of his Youtube channel shows that as a younger creator it took Tom a while to find his stride, and the pop culture and politics videos he makes seem of very dubious quality, his left perspective on major political and social theories videos are absolute master-classes in nerdy, informative Youtube videos; including shockingly high production values.

In today’s extended-length What the Theory video, Nicholas takes an extremely granular look at the reality of media bias under private control inside a supposedly adversarial and heroic free press; which as you may well know by now is a subject near and dear to my heart. What makes Tom’s work here at least a little unique however is that he combines the ideas of media theorists Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, as well as a little bit of Marxist sociologist and foundational cultural theorist Stuart Hall, with key observations using an actual BBC story from earlier this year, about the so-called “migrant crisis,” a British version of the American “migrant caravan” scare, to demonstrate how the propaganda model works to establish bias in practice. Indeed, the overall thrashing Nicholas gives the supposedly unbiased, public broadcaster (the BBC) is frankly worth the price of admission on this video by itself, but American viewers will discover that Tom consistently finds ways to relate content about British media back to the American media environment, which prevents the piece from becoming too localized to be of use to half the people reading this.

Nicholas opens by dissecting a BBC Newsnight presentation about a raft full of Iraqi asylum-seekers crossing the English Channel, and shows how through the use of framing, suggestive language, and a careful selection bias of consulted experts, the program strongly encourages you to assume certain ideas about, and attitudes towards the migrants. As will undoubtedly be all too familiar to U.S. viewers constantly inundated with propaganda demonizing migrants, these things are all bad; ideas like migrant crossings are a national crisis, migrants might be dangerous to British citizens, and something must be done to stop, um, destitute refugees fleeing Pig Empire wars. With this analysis as background context, Tom then goes on to explain the political, cultural, and of course financial reasons why the Newsnight program adopts these positions and encourages its viewers to do the same. Finally, using both the propaganda model, and Stuart Hall's theories about representation and meaning, our presenter demonstrates that not only is the media biased on behalf of wealth and power, but also in favor of the social and cultural hierarchies necessary to maintain the current order; which in today's Pig Empire society, means an order of unrestrained corporate power.

The end result is a satisfying (albeit earnest) video that does a very good job of bringing media bias bible Manufacturing Consent out of the late Cold War period, and into a thoroughly modernized and corporatized context. A great example of this might be how despite Manufacturing Consent’s hyper-focus on the issues of American imperialism and media bias, Nicholas demonstrates how the five propaganda filters work to shape coverage of issues the viewer will directly counter in their everyday life; like coverage of policing, Astroturf campaigns, and yes, the nature of establishment reporting on the so-called “migrant crisis.” Coincidentally, the fact that Nicholas’s work builds on the Five Filters of the Modern Media video I shared with you months ago, and touches on or reinforces some of the things I’ve been writing myself about the propaganda value of distorted framing in media stories, and the corporate media origins of “fake news” and lack of trust in the media institution as a whole, is just icing on the cake. I’ll include a number of related links for you to explore more if you so desire, in the comments below.

If I had to quibble with Tom’s work here, my first complaint would probably be the failure to even mention Michael Parenti and his 1986 work Inventing Reality; a book which Herman and Chomsky clearly borrowed from liberally (pun intended) without attribution – which is sometimes called “plagiarism” when you’re not America’s most celebrated “anarchist” intellectual. Furthermore, I would have liked to have seen a little more direct attack on the capitalist distortion of the final media product consumers are presented with, ala McChesney, and maybe even some explanation of how all encompassing the media propaganda sphere is, drawing on say a theorist like Marshall McLuhan. Given that the video is already fifty-five minutes long however, perhaps that is too big of an ask at this point.

All in all, this is a wonderful video if you’ve never read Manufacturing Consent, and still a reasonably worthwhile experience if like me, you most certainly have. That’s why I picked it for this week’s extremely late film study.