Offence is not the Issue

Offence is not the Issue

CLIVE: Same thing happened with, er, you remember ‘Andy Pandy’?
DEREK: Yeah.
CLIVE: He used to come on. As soon as that was on I used to get in a glove. I used to jump in a glove and rush down the road and, you know, the power it has over people.
DEREK: Mmm.

(Derek and Clive on the dangerous influence of television)

When racist comments are condemned in the media too often the charge is that such views are offensive. Someone might feel insulted or threatened. This is of course a huge oversimplification. The problem isn’t people getting upset as much as bigotry being socially divisive in general. Bigotry fosters ignorance and vice versa, and that’s far more serious than momentary hurt feelings.

I’m suspicious that the reason “causing offence” has become the media’s condemnation-term of choice is that any more sophisticated analysis would be an admission of the effect the media has on us in general.

Big media players have no desire to open that can of worms. Instead such claims are dismissed as patronising, eg: Jon Snow’s recent reply to the editors of Medialens:

"people are not as ignorant as you make them out to be..dont underestimate the viewer!"

This is wilful oversimplification, and only a stone’s throw from Pete and Dud, in the above sketch. Of course, bar the occasional freak incident (playing TARDIS in an old fridge, etc) the masses don’t feel compelled to copycat dangerous behaviour. But who said the political influence of news and fiction works to such simple patterns of cause and effect? One single uncritical appraisal of the Reagan years might not fool the public on its own, but it’s not on it’s own. It’s part of a week long media blitz, in the wake of two decades of omission. The true and important stories, the ones about bombing Tripoli and terrorising Nicaragua are the ones in the wilderness, the ones that have no chance of ‘fooling’ the public.

Ideology, the stuff that succeeds in making most Britons think that the occupied territories are under Palestinian occupation, comes at us in drips. A slow but relentless saturation. The public may not feel compelled to jump in a glove, but they can be made to completely invert complex historical events if enough of the right detail is left out, day after day, year after year. This conclusion is not insulting or patronising. It’s something we should all recognise in ourselves.

An extreme but by no means improbable example: Some pensioners live quite alone. Their last twenty years in the company of a television. Say during this time a sizeable immigrant population was sucked into the country, like West Indians into Britain in the fifties, or Hong Kong Chinese into Vancouver in the nineties. Without any direct contact with members of this ethnic group, where would one of these pensioners learn about the attitudes and habits of this new racial group? You can say with virtual certainty that it has to come from the telly and the papers (and perhaps a bit from Dolly at 42, who also lives with a telly). Every opinion our recluse has about that group must have been mediated by the mass media.

In turn, the opinions and actions of that pensioner may vary greatly depending on the stories the media decides to tell: Are these people here to help with a labour shortage or to sponge off our welfare system? Are they a proud diligent people, keen to abide by our customs, or just here to plant bombs and sell our children crack? Will our pensioner be happy to ask one of these people for help at the laundry, or limp-off down a back-alley in terror? All will be dictated by the narratives the mass media has tied to the group.

Like it or not, there’s something of this pensioner in all of us. My own opinion of what Indian people are like, or rather how they might differ from me, can be no more sophisticated than the memes about Indians I’ve obtained from the mass media, plus my personal encounters and acquaintances with Indians, which as it happens are quite numerous. But when it comes to, say, Maori’s, I’m little better than a lonesome pensioner. Everything I know of them is media memes, and it’s a very sparse jigsaw: Showing posterior to British royalty, obviously commendable, and “Once Were Warriors” which is obviously very frightening. Pity the poor Maori who gets stuck on the bus next to me. Imagine the questions I’d ask.

Of course I’m exaggerating, but not much. We can’t expect our opinions of strangers or of distant conflicts to be any more sophisticated than the facts and fictions we’ve been exposed to. Such patterns of cause and effect may be difficult to chart but it’s all still just cause and effect. Just because you can’t summarise it in a sentence (without sounding absurd) doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.