It was supposed to be in the name of truth and justice.It was a dog and pony show like those found in the small circuses wandering over the English countryside at the end of the nineteenth century. It keeps coming back to Guy Debord when thinking of this hacking scandal, with bald-faced lying becoming popular entertainment. After Rebekah Brooks’s appearance one would think Murdoch’s dross were churning out journalism of the highest standards. As Ms. Brooks remarked she is “sad and baffled” by this decline in quality.
Guy Debord: Ideology is the basis of the thought of a class society in the conflict-laden course of history. Ideological facts were never a simple chimaera, but rather a deformed consciousness of realities, and in this form they have been real factors which set in motion real deforming acts; all the more so when the materialization, in the form of spectacle, of the ideology brought about by the concrete success of autonomized economic production in practice confounds social reality with an ideology which has tailored all reality in terms of its model.
After a short-break in the proceedings, a composed and now jacket-less Murdoch resumed his testimony. Conservative MP Louise Mensch praised Murdoch for having a “lot of guts” to come back. Why not a purple heart. She played t-ball with him that even an eighty year old could muscle into the bleachers. Mensch asked if the News Corp. CEO considered resigning. Murdoch replied that he’s the “best man to clean up the mess.” Earlier , the table-tapping Murdoch appeared unsteady during what he termed the “most humble day of my life.” His son, James, attempted to rescue hesitant papa a couple of times, but was rebuffed by members of the committee. James, who chairs the British newspaper group, also told his dad to stop pounding on the table.
The pie enabled Murdoch, who told the panel that he is “absolutely shocked, appalled and ashamed” over the activity, previously condoned of the now closed- temporarily? like a salubrious restaurant that needs to dispose of the lice and rat feces- News of the World, to wrap up the hearings on a high note. Labour MP Chris Bryant, a known critic of Murdoch, blasted the shaving cream attack as “despicable.” He believes not even arch-foe Murdoch deserves to “be treated in such a manner.” It was a great day for shareholders: News Corp. stock rose six percent to $15.94 after the hearings.
Guy Debord:The spectacle is ideology par excellence, because it exposes and manifests in its fullness the essence of all ideological systems: the impoverishment, servitude and negation of real life. The spectacle is materially “the expression of the separation and estrangement between man and man.” Through the “new power of fraud,” concentrated at the base of the spectacle in this production, “the new domain of alien beings to whom man is subservient… grows coextensively with the mass of objects.” It is the highest stage of an expansion which has turned need against life. “The need for money is thus the real need produced by political economy, and the only need it produces” (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts). The spectacle extends to all social life the principle which Hegel (in the Realphilosophie of Jena) conceives as the principle of money: it is “the life of what is dead, moving within itself.” Read More:http://libcom.org/library/society-of-the-spectacle-debord-nine a
ADDENDUM:
Thorstein Veblen:The current periodical press, whether ephemeral or other, is a vehicle for advertisements. This is its raison d’etre as a business proposition and this decides the lines of its management without material qualification. Exceptions to the rule are official and minor propagandist periodicals, and in an uncertain measure, scientific journals. The profits of publication come from the sale of advertising space. The direct returns from sales and subscriptions are now a matter of wholly secondary consequence. Publishers of periodicals, of all grades of transiency, aim to make their product as salable as may be, in order to pass their advertising pages under the eyes of as many readers as may be. The larger the circulation the greater, other things equal, the market value of the advertising space. The highest product of this development is the class of American newspapers called “independent.” These in particular — and they are followed at no great interval by the rest — edit all items of news comment or gossip with a view to what the news ought to be and what opinions ought to be expressed on passing events.
The first duty of an editor is to gauge the sentiments of his readers and then tell them what they like to believe. By this means he maintains or increases the circulation. Read More:http://boingboing.net/2009/03/14/thorstein-veblen-pre.html a