Contesting the Power of Newscorp: Of Parliaments and Pies
The controversy enveloping the Murdoch’s Newscorp empire is a contest over the nature of power itself
In this era of post modern late capitalism global elites are characterised by their elusiveness. Power, though still concentrated, is measured and exercised through the evasion of accountability. More than a decade ago Zygmunt Bauman dubbed the present condition ‘liquid modernity’, in contrast to the ‘solid modernity’ of the twentieth century.
If power in the age of solid modernity was characterised by heavy, stable, lasting, territorially oriented forms of domination and control, liquid modernity represents a new era in which the powerful exercise their supremacy through their ability to evade, reshape and re-form.
Although Rupert Murdoch is not an unambiguously liquidly modern figure (his genuine attachment to the ‘old technology’ of the geographically grounded newspaper is well established) he is, as Anthony Lane wrote in the New Yorker this week, ‘one of those figures so wealthy, and granted such frictionless mobility by their wealth, that they never seem to be in the part of the world that you expect them to be’.
However, vestiges of solid modernity persist. In a sense nothing could be more characteristic of solid modernity than a Parliamentary Committee of elected representatives from geographic constituencies attempting to establish the truth of a matter in the name of accountability.
The contrast finds expression in the life story of Tom Watson, the Labour MP whose bravery and forensic rigor mark him out as the star of the UK’s Parliamentary Culture, Media and Sport Committee. As John Harris noted after a long interview with Watson, ‘[h]anging over just about everything we talk about is a slightly awkward implied presence: the politician Watson used to be, a man happy enough to play his part in New Labour's often moronic dances with the Murdoch press, and issue shrill messages either aimed at, or inspired by, the red-tops’. The reinvented Watson is frank, and his revealing comments say much about the impact of liquid modernity on democracy:
‘I have changed. This has been a profoundly life-changing event for me, in many ways. It's certainly changed my politics. When I was first elected, I was a completely naive and gauche politician. You look at the pillars of the state: politics, the media, police, lawyers – they've all got their formal role, and then nestling above that is that power elite who are networked in through soft, social links, that are actually running the show.’
Somewhat ironically, the motives and the analysis of Watson are not dissimilar to those professed by Jonnie Marbles, the activist who disrupted the Parliamentary Committee’s session with the Murdochs, although the two men reached very different conclusions. The actions of Watson and Marbles represent long standing alternative responses of the left to abuse of power: the first seeking proper recourse through the system, the latter despairing of institutions as they are currently constituted and pursuing more radical alternatives. Marbles has said:
‘If you're of sound mind, you might quite reasonably ask what possessed me to smuggle a shaving-foam pie into Portcullis House and throw it at (though, alas, not into) the face of one of the world's richest and most powerful men. I didn't do it because I wanted more Twitter followers. Simply put, I did it for all the people who couldn't.’
Marbles’ actions were objectionable for any number of reasons, but the heavy criminal penalty of six weeks’ jail now promptly imposed on the twenty-six year old could not provide a starker contrast to the Murdochs’ physical flight from Britain in the wake of their absurd poetry of denial before the Parliamentary Committee.
The fundamental question of the imbroglio now surrounding the Murdochcracy is whether in a liquidly modern globalised age, ‘the power elite who are networked in through soft, social links’ who are ‘actually running the show’ can indeed be brought to heel by the rest of us, through the good agency of our political representatives. Let us hope so.
David was on annual leave last week so no blog. You can follow David on twitter here.
