A comprehensive demolition of the Daily Heil’s grubby attack on a man who’s been dead 17 years, who cannot therefore hit back or defend himself through the courts, who served his country at the age of 22 fighting in Normandy whilst Mail editor Paul Dacre’s 19-year-old father avoided military service to bravely report on show business in London, who fled the Nazis (who had gained the support of another of Dacre’s forebears who supported the British version of these thugs under Oswald Moseley) before World War II and remained grateful to Britain ever afterwards, despite harbouring grave doubts about its version of Capitalism and who, most offensive of all for Daily Heil was the father of Labour leader and next Prime Minister Ed Milliband.
Kitty’s blog has dealt very thoroughly with an extremely unpleasant example of the excesses the right wing gutter press are capable of. Congratulations to her, and to Ed Milliband for his dignified and immaculately-reasoned response in the first instance. This blog is WELL worth reading – highly illuminating and unanswerably right.
In the 1930s, Theodor Adorno offered cogent criticism of the mass media, stating that it gave rise to ideology by standardising and stereotyping cultural “goods”, and it weakened people’s capacity to think in an autonomous and critical manner. Everyday life becomes the ideology of “its own [notable] absence”. Put another way, the “news” constitutes a reification of an extremely narrow range of our human experience.
Adorno and the Frankfurt Institute of [Critical] Social Studies generally proposed that this had rendered the public more susceptible to the ideology of Nazism and fascism. The media is simply a way of transmitting ideology, and is a mechanism by which dominant and powerful social groups are able to diffuse ideas which promote their own interests. Louis Althusser regarded the media as an integral part of the ideological state apparatus.
So I had wondered when the right-wing media bullying, character assassinations and lie campaigns against Ed Miliband would…
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