Tribal rule

The [UK] Telegraph prints an excerpt from Antony Jay's just-published Confessions of a Reformed BBC Producer. Jay's article is an interesting examination of the media (specifically, the BBC) and its role in social change over the last half-century. It provides much insight into the mindset of the people who create "news," although much of what he has to say is obvious to anyone who has been paying attention.

Jay introduces the idea of "tribes":

That our species has evolved a genetic predisposition to form tribal groups is generally accepted as an evolutionary fact. This grouping - of not more than about five or six hundred - supplies us with our identity, status system, territorial instinct, behavioural discipline and moral code. It survived the transition from hunting to agriculture... It even survived the early days of the industrial revolution... But the evolution of cities, of commuter and dormitory suburbs, has deprived millions of people of tribal living,... [and] fewer and fewer of us are now brought up in villages, even urban villages. The enormous popularity of television soap operas is because they provide detribalised viewers with vicarious membership of a fictional, surrogate tribe.

then goes on to say "...we in the BBC were acutely detribalised; we were in a tribal institution, but we were not of it."

But in his next paragraph, Jay proceeds to contradict himself^[1]:

We saw ourselves as part of the intellectual élite, full of ideas about how the country should be run, and yet with no involvement in the process or power to do anything about it. Being naïve in the way institutions actually work, yet having good arts degrees from reputable universities, we were convinced that Britain's problems were the result of the stupidity of the people in charge. We ignored the tedious practicalities of getting institutions to adopt and implement ideas.

This ignorance of the realities of government and management enabled us to occupy the moral high ground. We saw ourselves as clever people in a stupid world, upright people in a corrupt world, compassionate people in a brutal world, libertarian people in an authoritarian world...

Surely, a "tribe," defined not by geography, race, or social standing, but by common beliefs and attitudes. And what did this tribe do?

[W]e were anti-industry, anti-capitalism, anti-advertising, anti-selling, anti-profit, anti-patriotism, anti-monarchy, anti-Empire, anti-police, anti-armed forces, anti-bomb, anti-authority. Almost anything that made the world a freer, safer and more prosperous place, you name it, we were anti it... From our point of view, the view from below, they were all potential threats to human freedom...

The topics we chose and the questions we asked were slanted against institutions and towards oppressed individuals, just as we achieved political balance by pitting the most plausible critics of government against its most bigoted supporters. And when in 1963 John Profumo was revealed as having slept with a call girl and lied to Parliament about it, the emotion that gripped us all was sheer uncontrollable glee. It was a wonderful vindication of all we believed. It proved the essential rottenness...
...
It would have been more than reasonable for us to have opposed specific abuses... But the focus of our hostility was the institutions themselves.

In the 1920s, America's alienated (at least those with "good degrees from reputable universities") traveled to Paris to sit in the cafés, where they spoke loudly and wrote extensively of the failures, foibles, and shortcomings of their homeland. In the 1950s, Britain's alienated gravitated to the BBC (and to papers like the Guardian), where they spoke loudly and wrote extensively of the shortcomings of their country's institutions and social structure. Their ignorance of "realities of government and management," their self-imposed social isolation, and hubris mirrored those of the American expatritates of the generation before.

But the 50s group had much greater effect: With hands on the controls of the press, the "good arts degrees from reputable universities" tribe could mold its product to fit their attitudes and agenda, at a time that "isolation technology" was making British society more dependant on third-party reporting for its knowledge of public events and political arguments. Much to society's detriment:

The four mitigating factors [elected government, rule of law, the right to own private property, and the right to buy and sell it] have faded into insignificance, but the media liberal ideology is stronger than ever. Today, ... our old heresy [is] the new orthodoxy, ... adopted by the leaders of all three political parties, by the police, the courts and the Churches...

Implementation [of the media liberal ideology] by governments eager for media approval has progressively damaged our institutions. Media liberal pressure has prompted a stream of laws, regulations and directives to champion the criminal against the police, the child against the school, the patient against the hospital, the employee against the company, the soldier against the army, the borrower against the bank, the convict against the prison...

...making the old instutions unworkable, leaving nothing in their place.

^[1] UPDATE 070717 00:05: The actual "next paragraph," featured by Dan Collins at Protein Wisdom:

We belonged instead to a dispersed ”metropolitan-media-arts-graduate” tribe. [bolding mine - o.g.] We met over coffee, lunch, drinks and dinner to reinforce our views on the evils of apartheid, nuclear deterrence, capital punishment, the British Empire, big business, advertising, public relations, the Royal Family, the defence budget… We so rarely encountered any coherent opposing arguments that we took our group-think as the views of all right-thinking people.

So Jay doesn't contradict himself.  (Now I'm uncertain what he means by "detribalised" in the previous quote, unless it's under the old criteria of race, region, occupation, etc.) How I missed the bolded sentence I don't know– blame Monday morning and insufficient coffee. (BTW, many good comments in the PW thread.)
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Discussion, with much BBC-bashing in the comments, at Samizdata.

Posted by: Old Grouch in The Press at 19:52:54 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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