Anger can be whipped up, when you have the power and privilege of doing so, and the news media can be a useful tool for reframing such anger in support of national objectives. Beyond that, there is no room for anger.
It’s a saddening reflection on the state of public discussion (I am trying to avoid the word “discourse”) that anger is considered to be a bad thing; something that is unnecessary and gets in the way of “rational thought”, “reason” and “scientism” — which is a world away from “scientific”.
Aristotle left some room for anger, but places heavy conditionalities on anger and passion… It is easy to be passionate, he said, “anybody can do that”; the key is “to be angry with the right person, to the right extent and at the right time, and with the right object and in the right way — that is not easy, and it is not everyone who can do it.”
Samuel Johnson wrote about the wastefulness of “useless resentment” and the futility of holding on to “stubborn malignity”. It is best, he said, “not to be angry; and best, in the next place, to be quickly reconciled”.
The point here is precisely the caveats or conditions, and who determines them. As journalists working in the mainstream, for news outlets published by corporations, hedge funds or families, like the Murdochs, there has always been an expectation to keep a healthy distance from the people you interview, or the events you report on. This “distance” is what we were taught at the start of our careers as junior reporters. We may be allowed to ask: who, exactly, determines when anger is justified, whom or what may be the target of our anger and when is anger appropriate?
Anger is uncool, triumphalism is medium cool
Among most journalists and news media around the world, there will probably never be consensus on the issue of objectivity. In the US, where journalistic “objectivity” is considered to be sacred, it remains an illusion, William Rivers of Stanford University explained in 1988, in the years immediately before triumphalism entered the craft as normal or at least permissible after the end of the Cold War. (See his book Ethics for the Media.) This triumphalism was especially pronounced in the elite newspapers of the US and Britain, where the media were, and continue to be, part of the historical bloc that shapes news and decides what is newsworthy.
Although there are important ideological differences between individual newspapers in both countries, in the US reportage hinges more on notions of individual freedom and markets, while the British press (The Telegraph and Daily Mail are notable exceptions) tends to be more thematic, nuanced and focused on social issues. On both sides of the Atlantic there was, at the time when the Cold War ended, and still very much in place, a heavy reliance on government sources and information. In this sense, “international news making remains inherently ethnocentric, nationalistic and even state-centred,” Chin-Chuan Lee and colleagues wrote in Global Media Spectacle..
In his review of the book, Douglas Kellner of the University of California, Los Angeles added that the mainstream/elite media in the US and Britain, reproduced “the assumptions and interests dominant in their country, and in international global events take the position of constructing discursive contestations of other countries, while promoting their own country’s interests and agendas”.
The US media, from print media to film-making, was angry. Recall the way Life magazine called for “strangling” Japan after the attacks on Pearl Harbor. Almost immediately, wrote Tom Engelhardt, “Hollywood, film studios began producing war movies in which, from Wake Island to the Philippines, a savage non‐white enemy ambushed and overwhelmed small groups of outnumbered American soldiers”. What followed was the media exploiting despair, and “a propaganda ploy to mobilise a shocked nation”.
And when, in 1965, the US produced a film that justified its war against the Vietnamese people, the historian Henry Steele Commager denounced it for its fabrications, adding, “When communists sponsor such propaganda we call it brainwashing” (See The Vietnam War and American Culture, p 113.)
It seems clear, then, that anger can be whipped up, when you have the power and privilege of doing so, and the media can be a useful tool for reframing such anger in support of national objectives. That’s the patriotic journalism that I referred to in a previous column.
Blindness, wilful ignorance and selective anger
I have tried to make the argument that journalists (and media outlets) tend to consider anger as irrational, unnecessary or even out of place, because it stands in the way of analyses, commentary and reportage that is objective, impartial and in search of the truth.
There is no room for anger, and anything that provokes passion, you decide it best to ignore, or as one Stoic aphorism has it, you turn to silence. Journalists, on our part, turn to blindness or wilful ignorance. What I am about to say is not about whataboutism, nor is it about lesser evils or notions of manifest destiny or any of that rubbish, it’s about consistency, intellectual integrity and honesty and contextualising that is not beholden to any state or power.
I have tried, in most of my work as a columnist, to remain loyal to a set of beliefs. One is that good people can be bad, and bad people can be good. I also believe that nobody rules without guilt. And (this is key), two things can be true at the same time; whoever pays your salary calls the tune. The difficult part (not difficult for me, actually) is the recognition that when you have built a career on waiting for an email, a press release or a statement from the state or a power (any state or power) — and you derive great standing among your peers from a type of “institutionalised dependency between journalists and their sources” (I referred to the Lobby in Westminster) — and you want to secure your income, you’d best remain docile and conform.
Let’s take two (or more) issues that were true (at the same time), and which deserve to be highlighted and discussed. In the 1960s, the US reaped the benefits of capitalism’s golden age and worked towards placing a person on the moon — both great things, right? During that same decade, the US dropped napalm on Vietnamese villagers (people) and carpet bombed Laos. (US planes dropped more than two million tonnes of bombs on Laos. An estimated 50,000 people have been killed by unexploded ordnance, 20,000 since the war ended in 1975. Almost half of those killed were children.) The US had Jim Crow laws in place for the first half of the decade, and was complicit in the Indonesian genocide, in which at least 400,000 people were killed by the US-backed regime of Suharto, which the CIA described, in 1968, as one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century.
Having looked, in great detail, at the media (British, US, Canadian, Australian and South African) coverage of the era, the focus was almost entirely on the moon landings as the cynosure of human achievement. Scant references were made about everything else — it was, at best, considered to be a sideshow of “American greatness”.
There was no place for anger. Anger would have drawn attention to the brutality of the era, with the same intensity that was awarded to the achievements of capitalism’s golden era and the moon landings. The public intellectuals who did speak out about the Indonesian genocide (like Benedict Anderson) were cancelled, drawing on today’s lexicon, and banned from visiting Indonesia. Some genocides are permissible, it would appear, and there is no room for anger, only rational thought, reason and sober reflection. This is what you get when there is a single-story narrative, and when anyone who disagrees is gaslighted, doxed or something much worse.
All of the above rests on the belief that some lives, or some bodies, are worth more than others, and that anger is reserved for those who have the power to have their grief broadcast and taken seriously. It occurs when mass murder is framed as something else, something necessary and unavoidable, and the lives of the dead are not worthy of grief — or anger.
Another issue that is dismissed, and malleable, as it goes, is intellectual honesty and integrity. Somewhere amid these issues, and there are very many others, power is at work that shapes what it means to be “honest,” or to have “integrity”. Power and privileged access to the bearers of power, the people who make news, help us determine what readers should be told. DM