NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS

It’s almost impossible these days to completely escape Newzak 24, if only because it is regularly provided to irritate and intrude upon those who have obediently taken a break at motorway services. Its achievement in reducing world affairs to wallpaper is best observed in these circumstances, where all else is as timeless and meaningless and it doesn’t matter when you come in or when you get back on the road.

There’s no great difficulty in these days of pausing, plus channels  and on-demand in missing packaged TV news programmes however.

Even before the BBC's Newsroom moved to that shopping centre in Salford that looks like Cité Europe during a ferry strike, it had become formulaic and gung-ho to a degree that made it unwatchable. But the loss and betrayal neither started nor ended with them.

Back in the mid-fifties, ITN pioneered the idea of genuine news gathering, and of asking politicians actual questions, rather than feeding the official line via newsreels. I watched the ITV news recently and was saddened to discover it is now not much better than the Beeb’s.

I thought never to see the spectacle of a journalist and newscaster of Alastair Stewart’s experience acting as a dialogue coach for an earnest young reporter delivering a pre-scripted ‘report’ in the phony US TV manner which enables news presenters to appear to interview each other (and often to appear to like each other) without the dangers of unpredictablity that make the news the news.

If this process is ludicrous and only slightly nauseating, it also has much more serious liabilities, as also demonstrated on the newscast I saw.

The next person to come in for a cosy chat was ITN’s ‘medical correspondent’, Lawrence McGinty. To encouraging nods from Alastair, he announced a pharmaceutical ‘breakthrough’ with allegedly wonderful predicted results, without ever once even using qualifying terms, such as ‘hoped’ or ‘claimed’. In fact, what he did was deliver straight to camera (or to the nodding Alistair) an outright advert for the medico-pharmaceutical monopoly.

The prepared script did not permit the seasoned ITN newscaster to ask any questions: “What is the evidence for this?”, “What is the breakthrough that has caused the change in treatment?” “What independent studies have been done?”, or even, “Do you believe what they tell you?”

In fact, it looks like the wonder cure is another sordid attempt for the pharmaceuticals to flog an existing drug ‘off-label’; a product for which the patent for its original claimed purpose has expired, and for which the producers would dearly love to create a new profit stream.

I appreciate that ‘reporters’ benefit in all senses from ‘relationships’ with politicians and interest groups, and that they are very reluctant to overstep the mark and have their loyalty cards revoked, but TV news is not (or should not be) about acting, pre-scripting or propaganda, and it’s not about state service either. It’s supposed to be a public service.

With the completion of the move of what is left of once vital, diverse and wide-ranging television networks into sheltered accommodation, I guess the need for contact with the outside world will cease altogether.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

Forged in another time and place, the two major political parties have become outmoded and irrelevant. In the new millennium, both have become rudderless anachronisms, reduced to bickering and posturing and lost to the people to whom they owe their existence.

Government is a sacred trust; a duty to manage and lead the nation forward on behalf of its citizens. It’s about doing things. Past governments created such things as the Health Service and the Welfare State. They were people of vision, building something for the future. They thought in terms of later generations; of goals and purposes. They had energy and experience and were able to take a long term view, aiming for results rather than short-term popularity.

Politics has all but replaced intelligent government. It is about saying things. There is no plan, no goal, no agreement as to ideals. Instead mediocrities tinker and meddle with the achievements of the past. Born politicians, they have no real world experience, are completely out of touch with the public they are supposed to represent and have so lost the plot that the average citizen no longer bothers to vote for any of them. This is why they are reduced to childish insults and attempts to propitiate simple-minded sound-bite media.

While weak and hopeless administrations are a liability in themselves, the frustration they instil in the franchised voters has a much worse potential knock-on effect. If both main parties are almost indistinguishable and neither confronts real concerns, cynical extremists have an easy ride of it to get attention out of all proportion to their real significance.

As President Sarkozy recognised in France, anodyne, uninspired political twaddling would never get sensible people to the polling booth, while the rabid, racist supporters of Le Pen would make it through fire and flood. All he had to do was to victimise gypsies and he was sure of some support from the kind of people who thought fomenting discord and putting community relations back a hundred years would solve everything.

It is inevitable that new ‘parties’ will spring up from time to time. Maybe one day one will come along that will overcome the years of fumbling inertia. More likely, as we have seen, is that groups with an eye on the gravy train cobble together barroom platitudes into an apparent crusade based on blame and recrimination and the old, old trick of ‘divide and rule’. They will always find support, because they speak for the angry rather than the apathetic, but ultimately they won’t achieve much because their whole raison d’être is based on stopping people and things, not building or improving anything.

A further liability is that those who normally don’t bother to vote are driven to the end of their tether by Westminster’s cowardice and stupidity and decide to vote for anyone that might get the present incumbents out.

And why not?

The problem is that there is little connection, the way our ‘democracy’ is rigged, between the voter and who gets to parliament. An entirely justified metaphorical slap in the face for the psychopathic May or the shape-shifting-alien Blair is more likely to be an actual kick in the teeth for one of the only really valuable people in the whole shambles – those who toil at local level directly for their constituents and communities.

Political affiliations are largely irrelevant down here in the real world. It’s about individuals and what they do, whether they listen and respond, and to what degree they employ their energies for the good of the local community.

SUPERFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Putting a lower case ‘i’ in front of something or labelling it as ‘smart’ doesn’t really denote the presence of actual intelligence.

That commodity isn’t limited to the shuffling of figures and data of which the contraption might be capable. It involves perception, consciousness, evaluation and understanding.

No machine is capable of any of these human attributes. If it ever seems to be, it is because we are endowing it with our own characteristics.

It is generally easier to recognise this in the written word than in voice synthesisers, satnavs, automated telephone messages and the frightful Alexa, in which we anthropomorphise anything that speaks our language.

I was on a car launch on which the route had been fed into satnavs. Although ours was triggered by the various road going stimuli which would normally cause it to say useful satnavvy things such as ‘turn half left,’ ‘follow the road,’ or ‘leave by the exit’, it said total non-sequiturs such as ‘The Quartermaster’s sergeant will accept delivery.’

Our own satnav has been updated a number of times since a new estate was built, but still doesn’t ‘know’ it’s there. A self driving, so called autonomous, car would have to be overridden by anyone living there who wanted to go home.

Such cars are not autonomous of course. The proprietor has merely abandoned his own autonomy to a programmer who has never driven in that place at that specific time.

The nearest analogy would be a headless cockroach, which continues to obey the last command given before it lost its head until it finally runs out of fuel.

In the course of a day’s real world driving, a person can spot when a child, a dog or a deer might run into the road. He or she can make allowances for foreign registered left hand drive lorries and cars, can make way for ambulances and other emergency vehicles, negotiate cyclists and motorcyclists, funeral cortèges, tractors, buggies, hedge-cutters and roadworks. His or her modern car might be bristling with sensors and processors, but the only awareness or intelligence present resides with the person.

He or she is able to perceive a problem right then in the present and conceive a solution to it. The machine can only respond to exigencies already programmed into it.

The same goes for ‘diagnostic’ machines, which electronically ‘pick a card’ from an available menu, where once a skilled doctor would use his or her experience.

Computers are great at a lot of things. Their main advantage is their variability. Where once Henry Ford had lines of identical black Model Ts coming off the production line, now different models can be programmed to come off the same line, one after the other, left or right hand drive, petrol or diesel, with just-in-time supply chains and stock control all communicating with each other. Robots can be trained by technicians to repeat certain tasks ad infinitum, until the last skilled trainers are gone.

But a lot of the impetus to do away with intelligence and humanity has to do with self-appointed people playing god. All around us are comic books, movies and TV shows showing weakly humans being terrorised by idiot machines, yet we seem to bow down before them and consent to being dumbed further down and made increasingly irrelevant in our own scheme of things.

The size of a brain is not a measure of intelligence. The brain is a router that passes stuff one way or the other, but it doesn’t need to know what any of it is.

People say things like ‘my brain is telling me’ this, that or the other. What they mean is they are telling themselves what they already know but going around the houses to do it.

So called ‘artificial intelligence’ is nothing more than sleight of hand. There is no intelligence in the true sense of the word. Just a superficial illusion of some other ‘entity’ that can be blamed.

DIMINISHING RETURNS

The BBC and the Licence Fee

The licence fee is a unique broadcasting arrangement. It started out as a permit to receive broadcasts, and originally cost about the same as a dog licence.  You had the choice to have a dog or not to have a dog and, back then, the choice to have or not have a wireless set.

The only licensed broadcasters were the British Broadcasting Company (later Corporation), so the few shillings you paid for your licence from the Post Office mainly went to them.

Right and proper, in principle, because the BBC was a ‘public service broadcaster’, at least in name.

By 1936 these paltry sums from radio listeners were sufficient, it seems, to finance the world’s first public television service, though. there being no imaginable propaganda value in television in those innocent times, the whole thing was mothballed at the outbreak of World War II.

When it resumed, it was no longer the staggering, amateurish thing it had been pre-war. There had been a big influx of talent; entertainers, musicians, writers, directors and boffins - mainly people brought to both the arts and emerging technology while in the armed services and their entertainment division, ENSA.

Within a short time, television moved from novelty to drama and comedy production and, with the decision (and gracious royal permission) to televise the Coronation of Her Majesty, the present Queen, from a rich man’s toy to a must have.

A mere two years into the new queen’s reign, Britain acquired a second public service television broadcaster, the similarly unique ITV. So-called Independent TeleVision raised money through advertising and various commercial connections, so it could put on much more extravagant things than could be paid for by the pocket money the Beeb had to make do with.

Thus began the rise in cost of the Television Licence and increasing pressure on TV set owners to pay it, the BBC eventually employing broadcast detector vans and actual (though questionable) legal enforcement on the viewing public - even if they chose to watch only ITV, which received none of the proceeds.

Of course, there has always been debate about whether the BBC was in the service of the public or the powers that be. It had a theoretical charter of strict impartiality which tended to make it more toothless than inclusive, and it probably wouldn’t have realised there were ordinary folk in existence if it hadn’t been for ITV exposing them on Coronation Street. Likewise, it had such a deference for authority that it had never questioned a political leader or member of the upper crust until ITN (Independent Television News) crashed onto the scene in 1955.

The more licence collection became enforced and belligerent, the more people came to resent it.

But BBC types were envious of the bigger budgets at ITV, whom they felt the need to imitate. 

Furthermore, the more commercially oriented people at ITV, under the direction of rare geniuses such as Lew Grade - ‘We spread our bread upon the water and hope that it comes back as smoked salmon sandwiches’ - , began to sell their products abroad for even bigger money, which in turn sponsored still glossier programmes with still bigger budgets.

During the Falklands debacle, Mother Thatcher had finally got the idea about Television and propaganda. The BBC and the ITV might be nominally there for the public but, to her mind, it was their patriotic duty to place themselves at the service of her government.

The BBC rolled over, carrying nightly po-faced official briefings that looked like something out of Duck Soup. ‘Hail Freedonia!’ Only ex-ITN newsman Robin Day provided a dissenting voice, causing then Defence Secretary John Nott to have a hissy fit and flounce out of the studio.

That was enough for Thatcher who set out to neuter both organisations for their respective treasons in not glorifying her war. ITV was dismantled by her rewriting of the franchise set up to exclude small local companies and impoverish the majors. The job of taking the wind out of the BBC was later completed by Thatcher’s homunculus, Blair, when it let the cat out of the bag on his weapons of mass destruction, and Greg Dyke, the corporation’s most capable Director General, was forced to resign.

Despite public marketing slogans claiming ‘it’s your BBC’, it’s been so compromised and become so propitiative to dark forces that it seems to be anybody’s and nobody’s these days, helping to explain its abandonment of the iconic Television Centre in London, the very symbol of its glory days, for sanctuary in the new media fortress in Salford, Lancashire, where its news personnel are reduced to interviewing each other.

Its claims to balance and impartiality are mostly fictional. It has always taken one side - materialism, Darwinism, global warming, the medical monopoly - against all comers; has unapologetically put out faked ‘crisis actor’ sequences as news and prostituted its once-respected Panorama strand to the screaming personal vendettas of the visibly unbalanced John Sweeney.

During the 60s and 70s, despite the competition from ITV, much of the corporation’s output was garnering well in excess of 20 million viewers. Since then, whatever the excuses about fragmentation, for which the BBC was one of the prime movers, viewing figures and quality have sagged, while budgets have soared. From the kind of quality TV drama once done with fine actors and writers as a kind of people’s theatre, most drama is now shot as if it is a feature film, with plenty of visuals but little use for writers or actors. All fur coat and no drawers.

We’re currently witnessing a drama series on Troy that cost two million quid an episode. Spot the public service element in this if you can, and figure out how many licence fees will self-destruct per screen minute.

But the current DG will point out that the thing will be sold all over the world and more than make back its investment.

To which we are forced to ask, ‘Whose investment?’

The licence fee was extracted with menaces, it enabled the corporation to do whatever whimsical thing it thought fit to do with it, and it gets to keep the profits.

Some deal. Our BBC, huh?

Those of us who grew up with it all miss the old Beeb. But it’s already dead and gone. Dumbed down, commercialised and, in every other sense than the public funding that removes the necessity (or excuse) for commercial breaks, it’s just another broadcaster. It thinks it is providing a public service by putting on something fatuous against something else fatuous on the other channel and getting 15m viewers.

Most of its best classic comedies and dramas are flogged second-hand to other stations where people put up with watching them with ad breaks.

If it is to be stripped of the public fee, let’s hope it can come to an arrangement by which sponsorship and ads on the two main TV channels can generate enough spare cash to support the real jewels in its crown - its radio channels - and the last bastion of culture, BBC4.

This article previously appeared in Counter Punch.

Dave Randle is a British author and journalist who has written more than a dozen books and has worked in print and online media for nearly 30 years. His latest book is Blinded withScience