Friday 30 March 2012

Challenging Chomsky: Galloway's win

While I broadly agree with the Chomskian propaganda model, it has been been attacked by many academics, often for being too simplistic (and underestimating the active power of the audience).
Here's an interesting example which you can use if you wish to add a counterview on Chomsky (its always a sign of a good academic - including an A/A* grade A-level student! - to show an ability to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of any theory or academic source)...
George Galloway won an astonishing by-election victory in Bradford last night - despite typically fierce, extremely negative press. An avowed left-winger, he proved too left-wing for Labour, now a centrist party at best (many would argue actually right-wing), and is even generally criticised in the two centre-left papers (Mirror and Guardian) which might be expected to be supportive (his ties to reactionary Islamist clerics may explain this).
In short, here's a radical voice which the media generally filter out, not least through 'flak' ... yet he still won this election, and by a long way. Read the section from this article below, and you'll see that there's an interesting argument here for the growing power and influence of YouTube over more traditional news media ... should it be regulated by OfCom to the same level TV is? (If you look ahead to one of your homework essays you'll see this is a useful case study...)
The majority of those pledging their support had a number of things in common. They were either a first time voter or a disaffected Labourite, and all wanted to congratulate him on his robust stance against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many said they used to watch him on Press TV, the English-language Iranian controlled channel – until it was taken off air by the government earlier this year.
More still had watched YouTube clips of Galloway ripping into his detractors, whether in front of the US senate in 2005 or in a classically adversarial interview with Sky News about Gaza. These, Galloway proudly refers to as his "greatest hits". Only a handful recognised him primarily from his appearance on Celebrity Big Brother in 2006, when he dressed in a red unitard and pretended to be Rula Lenska's pussycat.
...

2 comments:

  1. Well, yes but he won despite the press doing more or less everything they could to vilify and marginalise him. This shows that when people are generally more engaged with politics, as the electorate were in this area, it is possible to unite public opinion in a way that the media are powerless to do anything about.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well, yes but he won despite the press doing more or less everything they could to vilify and marginalise him. This shows that when people are generally more engaged with politics, as the electorate were in this area, it is possible to unite public opinion in a way that the media are powerless to do anything about.

    ReplyDelete

Comments and suggestions are very welcome ... but please ensure all comments are appropriate! All comments are moderated before publication. Spam will be reported