A Touch of Pontius Pilate
In an interesting Guardian piece about how rightwing newspapers like the Daily Mail and Telegraph had helped Liz Truss to become PM and then started attacking her once things began to go wrong, Jim Waterson asks whether they will acknowledge any role in creating the disastrous situation. I am pretty confident that the answer will be no, they are now in full Pontius Pilate mode and very busy with large basins of hot water and all kinds of interesting antiseptic soap. And I can already offer at least one piece of evidence from the Daily Mail from yesterday, in which the paper shamelessly lists off screeds of international outlets trashing Truss and the Tories, as if they, the Mail, had had nothing to do with the whole humiliating and destructive debacle.
Interestingly, the piece was first published before Truss announced her resignation, though later updated at 8 o’clock in the evening. Perhaps the Daily Mail knew that she was going before she announced it in front of the black door? Given the appalling power of newspapers like the Mail and the existence of the telephone, it is quite possible that Truss phoned the Mail right after she got off the blower with the king. Or maybe she did it before – checking in with her handler before she pulled the emergency brake cord.
Though one might smile at such absurdity and hypocrisy, it is more tragic than comic, because the rightwing press make it almost impossible for a decent government to get elected. By decent, I mean one which is concerned with both ordinary people and the ever worsening state of the planet. The Guardian’s Waterson wonders about the influence of the press, but it is clearly immensely powerful and seems to be vastly more effective at opinion forming than the mainstream broadcast media, who are held to much higher standards both of truth telling and having to be careful to pretend to be neutral (what sensible and sentient human is truly neutral about something as important as who controls their lives and livelihood?), lest the rightwing governments we have been subject to on and off for over forty years attack them with legislation which will gag them almost completely.
Until and unless this situation changes – that of having perhaps the most extraordinarily biased press in the so-called free world, it is hard to see how any UK government will be able to get into power and then actually do something useful and sensible as long as such ideologically driven papers like the Daily Mail, Telegraph, Express, Sun and to some considerable extent the Times, are allowed to print the lies and demagoguery that keeps British people believing that they must vote Conservative or they will lose their houses, all their money and perhaps be turned into frogs.
The irony is that it is precisely the Conservatives who deliver misery to so many, including many of those who vote for them – I am thinking particularly of the old, who vote Tory so reliably in droves only to be let down by the NHS crumbling under the weight of under-valued and over-worked staff fleeing (to work at other low-paid but perhaps less stressful jobs) and the greed of stealth privatisation.
The reality is clear: it is only the few at the top who are rich enough to ride out just about any calamity, or so they think; but they are smart enough to know that they must keep the populace plunged in ignorance and lies in order to maintain their levitating place of greed, and luckily since all the rightwing press is owned by just a few billionaires who understand this too, the situation will carry on.
The take-home message is incredibly important: newspapers with a large circulation and clearly able to influence national politics should not be owned by one person, but should be subject to a kind of ownership that can receive democratic oversight. Otherwise, they will be able to go on playing not only Pontius Pilate when anything goes so obviously wrong, but also their favourite role of Rasputin crossed with the Eminence Grise.