Media Control – 20th Century

Some quotes from a book I’ve read on your behalf that relate to the A2 Media unit, power and control of the media – how the media influences the government and vice versa.

Rex Leeper, head  of the Foreign Office News Department, Feb 1935, ‘We really must find some way of guiding the BBC’s foreign comment more than we do’

Rupert Murdoch was altogether different from most of the newspaper magnates who dominated British journalism during the twentieth century.  Most of them had big political ideas they were determined to propagate, using their newspapers and the influence they had over public opinion and the political elite...Murdoch’s commercial position, by contrast, dictated the political position his editors were obliged to follow...it was always clear that his papers would support whatever line Murdoch thought would help his group’s profits.

Howlin' Mad Murdoch

After the Falklands, The Sun was Margaret Thatcher’s heavy artillery...The Daily Mail provided her with support which...addressed middle-class voters...But The Sun could bring new people to her cause in large numbers...

Thatcher's other heavy artillery!  Ha ha!  Do you see what I did there?  Brilliant!
 I'm wasted here, I really am.  Pearls among swine, darling, pearls among swine.

In the wake of the Falklands War Mrs Thatcher was unbeatable, yet Neil Kinnock (Labour Leader) represented a genuine long-term threat; and The Sun went to work on him...(later front pages included) ‘If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights’

Rupert Murdoch changed the character of every single newspaper he bought; even the News of the World.  When he met senior staff he told them ‘I didn’t come all this way not to interfere’.  One of the paper’s editors is quoted...as saying ‘He would come into the office and literally rewrite leaders which were not supporting the hard Thatcherite line’...’Murdoch, the paper spread out before him, would jab his finger at some article...and snarl ‘What do you want to print rubbish like that for?’ or, pointing to the byline of a correspondent, assert that ‘That man’s a Commie’

Kelvin MacKenzie, (Editor of The Sun in 1980’s), describes the typical Sun reader ‘He’s the bloke you see in the pub, a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house, he’s afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers  and the weirdos and the drug dealers’.

Bucket of S***

When John Major (Prime Minister after Margaret Thatcher) called MacKenzie to ask about the Sun’s coverage of him, MacKenzie replied ‘Well, John, let me put it this way. I’ve got a large bucket of shit lying on my desk and tomorrow morning I’m going to pour it all over your head’

Alistair Campbell...wrote a book about his time in Downing Street, ‘The Spin Doctor’s Diary’...’Nobody ever said ‘We have to do this because Murdoch supports it’. But his views were always heard.  And they were heard ahead of many Cabinet ministers’.



Moody



Peter Mandelson, (spin doctor for Tony Blair) ‘Of course we want to use the media, but the media will be our tools, our servants; we are no longer content to let them be our persecutors’.

Sinister

All (except my notes in brackets) from John Simpson ‘Unreliable Sources – How the 20^th Century was reported’