Massaging the Media

 

Image - © Owlcation

 

Something I read in yesterday's Guardian - as so often, in the Journal;  Andy Beckett, writing on the ongoing Tory assault on UK culture and the arts says that the government exhibits a somewhat confused state in simultaneously promoting racial inclusivity whilst engaging in "the war on woke." To quote Beckett direct: 'Johnson has spent his political career sounding both liberal and reactionary, often in the same sentence, and generally getting away with it.'

The truth in this observation is self-evident and obviously also holds for President Trump, another leader who doesn't let truth or logic get in the way of a good bluster or self-promotion. In both cases, for their target audiences they can do or say little wrong, despite their lying, dissembling and self-contradiction being out there in neon lights for anyone awake and of a mind to see. Has this always been the case with politicians? Didn't the truth actually used to feature in politics, at the very least twisted, skewed or slanted, but a kernel of reality, nonetheless?  This led me to thinking that maybe revisiting Marshall McLuhan again might be in order, half a century on from his time in the spotlight.

Johnson's appeal to his congregation is neatly encapsulated in McLuhan's aphorism 'The Medium is the Message'; an exemplar of surface gloss over content, the mainstay of the advertising industry since it first came into being and the essential core of the Instagram generation. Boris 'nice but dim' to paraphrase Harry Enfield's character, is a carapace that Johnson has worn all his life, hiding that slender, Classically honed intellect from too close scrutiny; the fluff and the bluster, the harrumphing and the floppy hair all part of his own personal meme; self-aggrandisement cloaked in self-effacement, disguised as self-parody.

McLuhan got so many things right on the nail, even foreseeing the web almost thirty years in advance, but the thing he was derided most for, pre-internet, was exactly his analysis of what has, in the intervening decades become today's accepted media-ted, filtered 'reality'. The Medium is the Message should be everyone's first consideration when consuming media content, comment, news or opinion; McLuhan stands now as the true bellwether of the twenty-first century. It would have been better for us all had he been completely off-target. What the world needs at this criticality of circumstances is certainty built on a foundation of truths. As a classicist might have it:

Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas - Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.

Aristotle, trans. from the original Greek