Over at his blog “Kelvin Grove”, journalism scholar (and one of my old lecturers) Brian McNair has started a series of posts arguing for the preservation of the union. I welcome contributions such as this, the more debate on the issues the better of we all are as far as I’m concerned, although naturally, I strongly disagree with him.
Brian’s latest post celebrates the “dynamism, irreverence [and] breadth of coverage” of the Scottish media and argues it would be diminished by partition – one of many reasons why the union should remain. I disagree profoundly with his description of the Scottish media, its bad and its only getting worse, and rather than see it as a reason for maintaining the status quo, I think it is one of the problems we really need to be thinking about post-independence. How are we going to rejuvenate the Scottish public sphere to provide both a vital forum for debates about our future, and the critical beady eye over those who hold the power in forming our new political and economic inheritance?
Brian’s post is entitled “the print union we value”, presumably as opposed to the unions who fought for the rights of working class people and tried to tell us that Murdoch was an exploitative and poisonous bastard, the valueless luddites! This sets the tone of the post which largely coheres with McNair’s later academic work which is, and I hope I’m not being unfair here, starry-eyed neoliberal fantasy narrated by an ‘end of history’ true believer.
We can’t afford, according to his argument, to lose our “rich media culture”, in which our local press is nested within a national press which is in turn enriched by its position within the UK-wide newspaper milieu. Our boring, local concerns are enlivened by “being part of a larger, more cosmopolitan whole”. I can’t disagree with this, a country in which I was consigned to choose between only the Scottish papers for my news would indeed be a boring one – but in no sense does independence entail a journalistic iron curtain: if a Scottish edition of the big UK papers is viable now, who is to say it would not be viable post-Independence? Furthermore, anyone with an interest in news surely gets it from all over the place – the New York Times paywall has diminished my news experience far more than that of the London Times, news is borderless and independence would no more remove Scotland from the world of news than it would from the world of nations.
Neither do I recognise McNair’s description of the UK press as “exceptionally well endowed”, nor do I share his friend’s love of the red tops, which make Norway’s press look “rather insular [and] narrowly focused on the business of a small country”. I hardly need to list the vile, vindictive, reactionary and downright anti-social behaviour of these beloved red tops – who have diminished the level of political debate in this country to the standard of the scrawlings on a public toilet wall. Nor do I need to go into the distain the “UK” press has sporadically shown for the people of Scotland – from A.A. Gill’s description of “shellsuited angry men with faces like melted funeral candles”, to the scandalous harassment and groundless abuse of the Dunblane survivors by the Sunday Express.
I have seen the office in Holyrood, perfectly designed to allow the press to perform their watchdog role in the belly of our flourishing institutions, lying empty. The Sun and The Guardian share an office, ideological differences put aside over a tacit agreement that nobody cares what happens at Holyrood anyway. Meanwhile our national press is on the rocks, The Herald group is haemorrhaging staff and can’t afford to pay freelancers peanuts for perfectly good public interest investigative research. And the only local paper that seems to be flourishing is The Digger. The well endowed Scottish public sphere is a myth.
Of course, this is not an argument for independence, rather it’s a worry for those thinking beyond it. The public sphere of a small country needs newspapers focussed on the business of running it to perform an essential watchdog role, to keep an eye on the wielding of power, the formation of new institutions. To watch where the money goes, where deals are made, where a new nation is negotiated. The Scottish press at the moment, it seems to me, is simply not up to the task. The national papers are treading water, and the local papers which can stay in business are, bud for a few notable exceptions, are producing nothing but advertising copy and rehashed press releases. This is rarely a question of ethics, I must stress, and almost always a question of money (I’ll leave the ethics of money for another time!). This is a vary real concern that those thinking beyond independence are going to have to engage with.
So, I don’t agree with Brian that the media in Scotland is so good we must stay in the union to preserve it. Especially not that independence would lead to media stagnation as we would “no longer need to worry too much about anything other than ourselves and our local concerns north of the border” – it strikes me that as a new, small country our concerns would be more diverse than ever, that now our relations with the rest of the world were actually within our control it might be more important to think and talk about them. I think I am for independence, but worry that as things stand we would not have the media required to negotiate the transition to a democratic, participatory and vibrant political life – we need to think about how we can sort this out.
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