These notes are available at http://www.poptel.org.uk/nuj/mike/nv-media.htm

These are notes for a talk at a gathering under the title "Gathering Visions, Gathering Strength" at Leeds University, 4-6 April 1997. Hence the "we" form. . .

Will the revolution not be televised?

The Revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The Revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The Revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner because,
The Revolution will not be televised Brother.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised Gil Scott-Heron, 1970

Do you wonder about all those apathetic people? Do you ever get angry at them?

Don't. Get creative.

How are they allowed to think? How are they able to think? There are all kinds of ways of thinking that are kind of cut off from us, not because we're incapable of them, but there are various blockages that have been developed and imposed that keep us from thinking about them. Actually, that's what indoctrination is about. I don't mean somebody giving you lectures. Sitcoms on television, sports that you watch. Every aspect of the culture involves some form of expression of what a proper life or a proper set of values are, implicitly.
The Chomsky Tapes, III "On Human Nature and all That" Z Magazine, March 1996

No wonder that there's a tradition of activists, especially perhaps nonviolent and anarchistic activists, dissociating ourselves from "the media". The media will suck us in. If we let them, they'll distort our actual campaign to suit their agenda. Always, they'll present a distorted picture.

The media serve mostly, Chomsky says, to distract people from information which would make radical change possible - if only someone were listening.

But this only works because sports and soaps tell better stories than we do. Very few people say to themselves "I need to be brain-dead for a bit, I'll turn on the TV". Many who do are activists. Most people (it seems to me) are involved by the stories that they turn to night after night.

Kanap Dixit, a journalist from Nepal, told me a couple of years ago that the answer to my worries about the tidal wave of US television and Websites soon to hit his country is to make better, Nepali television.

So how can we make better, nonviolent television and text?

Not by staging events designed for the media.

There's nothing that decent journalists hate more than the feeling of being suckered. Public relations types, creatures who lay events on for journalists, are the enemy.

Many or most parts of a good action or protest feed and nourish those taking part, and remind us of our own strength and our own love for each other. These things are worth doing even if we forget to tell our friends. If we do tell our friends, and it was good, the action gains the added effect of sowing feelings and ideas in more hearts and minds.

If our action is really good, and if it has something fresh and new about it, and if there's no Big Story that has all the news outlets throwing all their resources at it, and if we're lucky, then it may make a better story than several other things happening that day. If it does, a diluted and filtered version of it will be presented to millions of people who would probably not invite us into their homes to tell them in person. Most of them will not be able to recall any concrete fact about it five minutes after they have watched or read the news. Many will, however, retain a vague feeling.

Ten or twenty million vague feelings, though, may add up, eventually, to one hell of an emotion. . .

My job as a journalist, by the way, is not to tell people what is happening. My job is to sell stories, to editors.

Most of what happens is simply not a story: it lacks the necessary dramatic elements. As specifically nonviolent activists, we need to be aware that conflict is the strongest of those elements. Both a journalist with an agenda who wants to get the issue covered, and a lazy journalist, will seek out conflict. If the biggest and shiniest conflict on offer is between the love we show and the monster we oppose, then that is what will be filtered and diluted for the audience.

This is a good thing. How else will those people who wouldn't invite us in for tea hear about us or our cause at all?

We cannot and should not expect to have our case presented in a way that we recognise as ours. This is a deeper matter than the corrosive influence of media monopolists. It is a deeper matter than the chain of events that leads to a Sun news editor saying to a hack "get up to Leeds, gatecrash that bunch of tofu terrorists, and monster them".

We cannot and should not expect full and fair representation because we are specialists. A mathematician who walked in here and presented proofs of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems by beginning "Consider the axioms of Peano arithmetic..." would be telling a genuinely exciting story - believe me! - in a way that she recognised as her own, and achieving - mathematicians present give me dramatic license - less than nothing. We are as obscure, to those who are not us, as mathematicians are to several of us.

When did you last try explaining "the means determine the ends" to someone who had not already reached the conclusion for themselves? I tried it with an intelligent editor - you don't get to be editor of anything without quite a lot of intelligence - last week. I might as well have been talking about "Peano arithmetic" - or about "DBFO".

Journalists are translators, and no translation is the original.

To do the job, a journalist has to do two equally important things: sneak stories past editors, and sneak them into readers' and viewers' minds. Journalists have to have particular readers and viewers in mind. (This is the main way that bias is introduced - but that's a very complicated story, and I do think it's less important than what I'm trying to say here.)

On my most cynical days, I suspect that the main difference between the Sun and the Guardian is this: the Sun is written for people who are afraid of running out of conversation during a tea-break in the hell- hole where they assemble ready-chopped Marks & Spencer salads; and the Guardian is written for people who are nervous about running out of conversation during the dinner party where they eat ready-chopped Marks & Spencer salads.

If I were clever enough to write tabloid, that last stinker of a sentence might have come out as: "There's always something to talk about in the Sun. The Guardian isn't any better than us. It's just for people who talk twaddle."

Very, very few of those conversations will end up with people slamming their cups down and running out of the door to join us. Hands up everyone who is here as a result of that kind of experience.

Those conversations, however, are what the culture is made of. I could go on at much greater length about this, drawing on an analysis of culture as a complex, partially chaotic, system of signifiers... but not today.

Those conversations are an effect, a result for the cause, in themselves. Even conversations which consist entirely of condemning the activists represent an increased presence of the issue in the culture, if, that is, the activists haven't managed totally to obscure the issue.

Last month I read the full-page leader the Express ran after the four Ploughshares women were acquitted in July. I was delighted with it. It sang the praises of civil disobedience to the heavens. It talked about the glorious tradition of the Suffrage movement and Martin Luther King. Maybe five or ten thousand of the million or three Express readers will have been discussing nonviolent action and the real meaning of respect for the law over their tea-breaks and with their meals-on-wheels ladies! The piece had even said that the Express opposed what the Indonesians were doing in East Timor.

Andrea Needham, one of the four, was horrified by it. It had gone on to complain that the four weren't doing proper civil disobedience because they hadn't pleaded guilty and taken their punishment.

Give it forty years, I said. Then you'll be on the love-list. That's the definition of a conservative newspaper, I should have said - one which can praise the radicals of forty years ago. What you have achieved is to get East Timor and nonviolent action into the Express and that's bloody amazing. Of course they're monstering you a little bit. That's what you're for and that's how you got this amazing piece of good press.

Because the other really strong element that separates a story from the welter of events, aside from conflict, is good, shiny protagonists. It's very, very hard indeed to write stories about collectives.

This is where many or most nonviolent and anarchistic activists are bloody hopeless. Half the time I think that all the stuff about not letting the media make "stars" is a weak cover for a load of feeble-minded middle-class crap about not making an exhibition of yourself, and the other half I think it's all really teeth-grinding jealousy that Samantha got on TV and I didn't.

If people are going to tell stories, they're going to find characters to do it. Being on TV and giving quotes that get straight into the papers is a skill: it's being a translator between the action and the interviewer. Of course some people who have that skill are going to get carried away. Don't fret about it too much: it's mostly self-limiting. Remember, public relations people are decent journalists' enemy, and the indecent ones will just get bored with the same old faces.

If you think, after all I've said about the layers of translation involved, that the media have found the wrong person to talk to - go and practice. Get friends to play Paxman-with-toothache. See whether you can get your point across in thirty seconds or in fifty words. If you can't, think about what point you can make. If you still can't, sit down with the people who are getting the air-time and talk about how they can do it better.

Swampy will be nominated for Man of the Year. Remind me to nominate collectively Animal and Muppet Dave... and the other two whose names I forget. Someone else will nominate Swampy, and he will get a reasonable personal vote, not least for his telling the newspapers that his fame is "a load of bollocks". Is this a problem? Is it only OK because Swampy mostly keeps his mouth shut and digs?

The Big Mama Five are stars. They got across one very simple feeling, which is revolutionary and great television: "You, gentle viewer, are sat at home watching television and we are having a whale of a time." More! Encore!

This is © copyright 1997 Mike Holderness; moral rights are asserted.