The new wave of NOTMWTS - by Mic Wright - 0 views
brokenbottleboy.substack.com/...the-new-wave-of-notmwts
media analysis opinion journalists journalism bias UK Britain BBC press
shared by Ed Webb on 30 Aug 22
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“No one tells me what to write.” “No one tells me what to say.” And, of course, their mirror twins: “No one tells me what not to write.” “No one tells me what not to say.” These are incantations of the British media, phrases that readers, listeners and viewers are expected to receive as articles of faith. Those assurances are trotted out so often that Noam Chomsky’s retort to Andrew Marr in an interview from 1996 has become a cliche, shared on Twitter as an almost autonomic response to the performative ignorance. Asked by Marr how he knew the interviewer was “self-censoring”, Chomsky replied: I’m not saying you’re self-censoring; I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.
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the idea that not being explicitly told what you can and can’t say is any kind of defence or even a description of how media organisations work needs revisiting often
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There are layers that contribute to knowing what can and cannot be said without the need for anyone to tell a reporter explicitly where the red lines are
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Culture is in the air like cigarette smoke in pubs before the ban, but it’s also pinned down in editorial rules and style guides. It’s there in tropes and cliches, precedent and the dread line “just how we’ve always done it”.
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if Laura Kuenssberg had needed to be “told what to say — or what not to say” she would never have been appointed Political Editor
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NOTMWTS is a shield intended to bat away further questions, to avoid closer scrutiny of how stories are chosen, framed, and reported. “All you’re doing is trying to find the truth,” is a line that comes from the same place as claims of journalistic impartiality and objectivity
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the notion that there are no clues to Kuenssberg’s politics or worldview in the thousands of hours of broadcasting she undertook in that role is downright insulting to viewers and listeners
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Kuenssberg is far from alone in having provided a megaphone for anonymous sources, “not told what to say” but happily parroting lines to a huge audience; it’s an epidemic in British political journalism, where WhatsApp messages whip onto Twitter with undue weight and ceremony.
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Their beloved Orwell — writer of two of the handful of books that every columnist leans on at some point (1984 and Animal Farm) — wrote in an unused preface5 to the latter that: Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.