Martin Hirst started his career in journalism at the University of Sydney student newspaper Honi Soit during the heady years of student radicalism in the mid-1970s. From 1984 to 1990 he worked at the ABC, before joining the SBS press gallery team.
One of the most impressive achievements of his career was leading one of the longest journalists’ strike in Australian history, in which journalists downed pens for more than a week in 1990. He spent much of his career fighting against cuts, bad pay deals and sellouts by union officials.
After leaving the industry in 1993, Hirst taught journalism at universities until his retirement in 2016. Over that time, he has written numerous books, mostly Marxist analyses of the media and journalism. His latest is There is No Good News: Journalism, Crisis and Philosophy of Praxis, an urgent and necessary exposé of contemporary journalism that not only condemns the mainstream media but argues for an alternative to it. Red Flag’s Nick Reich spoke to him recently in Melbourne, where he now lives.
The title you chose for the book has a double meaning—it both highlights the nature of the modern news cycle as a seemingly endless stream of horrible stories about genocide, inequality, natural disasters, war and the rise of the far right, and it says something about the nature of journalism and the production of news under capitalism. You use the mainstream media’s coverage of the Gaza genocide to demonstrate this. Can you talk a bit about how mainstream journalism in the West has responded to the Gaza genocide?
I think that the mainstream media has totally discredited itself. There’s a number of aspects to that.
One of the most glaring ones is the almost total silence of mainstream journalists, particularly in Western countries, about the deaths of probably close to 400 journalists in Gaza, the West Bank, southern Lebanon and Iran. The silence of Western mainstream media damns it to hell, as far as I’m concerned. They have this belief that they are the fourth estate, speaking truth to power and all that liberal ideology. Yet, in the face of the deliberate murder of hundreds of their colleagues by a powerful state actor, most have nothing to say.
The second thing is that the framing of the genocide has been through the use of terms like “war” or “conflict”. Language has been used that seems to indicate that there’s equal or comparable responsibility on both sides for what’s happened. With a small handful of honourable exceptions, the conflict is reported from the perspective of Israel and the West. So it’s a pro-imperialist viewpoint.
One of the ways this manifests is through what I call in the book “atrocity propaganda”. The supposed mass rapes, beheaded babies and other lies that were told about what the Hamas fighters did on 7 October are an example of atrocity propaganda. I’m not ruling out that there may have been sexual assault by some Hamas fighters on 7 October. But if it did happen it was not on anywhere near the scale that Israel claims. As I document in my book, they’ve provided no forensic evidence, they’ve provided very few eyewitnesses, they’ve provided no documentary evidence, autopsies, or anything like that, to support their allegations. But the evidence against the allegations is significant. There have been serious investigations, piecing together the eyewitness accounts, and they don’t add up. Most of them are based on one or two people who weren’t even there, and who are known to have lied in testimony in other situations. But the atrocity propaganda is still being reported in the media today, nearly three years later, as if it were fact.
It has been said that journalism is the first draft of history. Well, this is how history gets made by journalists; when lies don’t get any pushback.
You say in the book that everything is propaganda. Explain what you mean by that.
People come at the word propaganda with a value judgement. Propaganda is bad, right? Propaganda is what they do. We don’t do propaganda. But if you take that value judgement out of it, the basic definition of propaganda is information put into the world to convince people to act in a certain way. Anti-smoking campaigns. Slip, slop, slap. Seat belts. Those are all examples of propaganda campaigns that I can get behind. Red Flag, where you’re reading this article, that’s our form of socialist propaganda. So, when I say that all journalism and all news is propaganda, I can justify that argument quite simply. Whether you’re reading stock market reports or crime stories, or anything from the mundane, everyday journalism, it all has a particular political point of view attached to it. It is propaganda.
For example, when a teachers’ strike is reported, a certain tone is adopted: “teachers shouldn’t go on strike, they should be thinking of the poor children!” They don’t make the argument that giving teachers higher wages and better working conditions actually improves the education your child is going to get. They choose what perspectives to foreground, which frames their reporting of events and how they encourage you to react.
You critique many of the normative and liberal assumptions that underpin bourgeois journalistic practices. But you also use the concept of “common sense”, as deployed by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, to go beyond a critique of journalistic propaganda as crude lies. What do you mean by common sense? And what did Gramsci have to say about it?
Gramsci points out that common sense ideas stick in people’s minds, because elements of them help you make your way in the world. So, for example, things like navigating by the stars or by the direction of the sun. Things like herbal medicines and other pre-scientific treatments for wounds were all based on common sense.
But by the time we got to the formation of capitalist relations of production, common sense started to develop a more scientific basis, and that resulted in the bifurcation of knowledge. Knowledge was something that the ruling class could control, whilst common sense was just left to wither. Ultimately, it became a basis of ideology.
Take the example of a strike again. There is truth to the fact that a strike will inconvenience people. Of course—services are disrupted and ordinary people have to adjust. This seemingly simple and obvious truth is what ruling class intellectuals seize upon to argue their propaganda, avoiding a thorough investigation of the facts.
Journalists act as these ruling class intellectuals. Journalism, as we know it today, did not exist before the Industrial Revolution. It wasn’t until you could connect a printing press to a steam engine that you could churn out mass-produced daily newspapers. And so the rise of capitalism produced mass media, meaning the capitalists could consistently shape what message is churned out by this means. That’s why journalists are hopelessly beholden to the system. Because their class position is such that they adhere to and popularise ruling class ideas. They are disseminators, if not generators, of ruling class ideology.
But Gramsci also argued that common sense is not all-encompassing. Yes, it helps to produce consent from the oppressed classes to be ruled by the capitalist class. But class consciousness also grows out of common sense, because common sense ideas must actually help people to navigate the world and tend to bind people together. Very contradictory ideas can therefore exist in people’s minds. This can get to a point that Gramsci calls good sense, which is probably where people are at when they come into the orbit of a socialist organisation.
Our role as socialists is to develop the size and spread of our organisation to the point that we can lead others and realise our goal of a society without class division and everything else that goes with capitalism. We’re nowhere near that yet—we’re a handful of people in the scale of things, but we’re moving in the right direction.
