Electronic whores
There is a dangerous pleasure in reading a book that fuels an existing prejudice. It's delicious. Yet the peril is that you'll cheer so loudly as you read that you'll not notice the flaws in the argument, the gaps in logic, and the assertions that are not properly supported.
It is for this reason that CHN readers should take my enthusiastic recommendation of Paul Sheehan's The Electronic Whorehouse with a grain or two of salt. The book may have holes you could drive the Queen Mary through; there may be egregious lapses in taste and judgement—I wouldn't know. I applauded so often that the book kept folding shut on my lap.
The Electronic Whorehouse is an indictment of the mass media, an expose of the lies, distortions, hidden agenda, hypocrisy and double-standards of the gatekeepers of public opinion. In a series of twelve linked essays, touching on subjects as diverse as the ‘stolen generation’, asylum seekers and the personal feud between Phillip Adams and Mike Carleton, Sheehan shows in detail how media practitioners do their work, how they hide relevant facts from the public, unfairly smear reputations, push their own agenda, distort and selectively quote for their own ends, engage in petty feuds with one another, and always refuse to be called to account for their behaviour.
Along the way, his targets include the ABC's Media Watch, and its presenter David Marr, columnists Robert Manne and Gerard Henderson, the ABC program 4-Corners, the PR industry, and others too numerous to mention.
What is so attractive about Sheehan's critique is that his outrage is not a political outrage at being marginalised, or at being prevented from scoring his own ideological points. His anger is that which we all feel when we are lied to, when the facts are deliberately hidden from us. He seems to have no particular political axe to grind: he is as scathing about Robert Manne (a left-leaning opponent of the Howard government) as he is about Gerard Henderson (a right-leaning Liberal party member and Howard supporter). He clearly disapproves of aspects of right-wing America (such as the death penalty), and yet asks quite trenchantly: Why is it in the mainstream media that this group is always referred to as the ‘religious right’ while its ideological opponents are never described as the ‘atheist left’? In fact, why is it that commentators routinely refer to conservative views as ‘right wing’ but never to their own directly opposite views as ‘left wing’?
Interestingly, although Sheehan shows no particular sympathy for biblical Christianity, especially in its American evangelical form, he points out how unfairly evangelical Christianity is portrayed and treated in the mainstream media. He commends the Sydney University newspaper Honi Soit for its moment of editorial honesty:
The biggest taboo in our society isn't to publish an article that proposes that Jesus is gay. It's not to accuse Islam of deluding millions into subservient worship, or slander the EU [Evangelical Union] as a homophobic cult, or print a picture of a Catholic priest having sex with an altar boy. The biggest taboo for Honi Soit today is to publish an article written by a group of Bible-believing Christians.
However, most significant of all in my view is Sheehan's description of the spin campaigns regularly conducted by the media and their bedfellows in the PR industry. He quotes veteran thriller-writer, John le Carre, whose most recent novel is about the corporate world and public relations:
I think we are dealing with an octopus. We have become creatures of these people. Advertising as news. It's very skilfully done. The methods of seducing the media are far sophisticated and the money that's going into it, and the ingenuity of the spin has reached a point where we, as a general public, have never been lied to by such sophisticated means as now. And, of course, this completely confounds the modern notion of transparency and instant communications. It's instant brainwashing.
The Electronic Whorehouse has a simple message. The world of the modern mass media is one where “lies, fabrications, character assassinations, reputational rapes, point scoring, axe grinding, sneering, smearing and generalised weaselling have become standard fare”.
It's something most of us either realise or suspect to be the case. Read this book if you need any further convincing. And if you're already convinced, read it anyway. You'll enjoy it enormously.