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The Disintegrating ‘Centre Ground’
Over the next six weeks, we are all going to hear an awful lot of nonsense about the ‘centre ground’. Most of this nonsense will come out of the mouths of journalists who typically imbue the centre ground with a significance bordering on the sacred. There is an entirely unmysterious explanation for the news media’s worship of centrism – it allows journalists to avoid having to consider all the facts.
Though more honoured now in the breach than in the observance, the news media’s traditional obligation to its consumers is to keep opinion out of its news stories. As the detective hero in the 1950s television series Dragnet used to say: “All we want are the facts, ma’am.”
The problem with facts, however, is that there are just so damned many of them. If every fact were included in a news story it would never be printed or broadcast – for the very simple reason that it would never be finished. That’s why journalism consists primarily of determining what facts can and should be omitted from the finished story. Such determinations inevitably require journalists to make censorious political judgements, which most of them would be loath to admit.
The idea of the centre ground grew out of the journalists’ need to create an ideological space in which their decisions about what to include in their stories, and what to leave out, could be presented as both rational and reasonable. For the most part, it is a space inhabited by the sort of people their employers respect and trust: senior politicians and public servants; military and police chiefs; business leaders and successful entrepreneurs; respectable scientists and academics, prosperous professionals; high-school principals. It is the opinions of these people that the media distils into ‘conventional wisdom’: information which it then proceeds to inject, unceasingly, into the minds of their readers, listeners and viewers.
Not much cogitation is required to arrive at the disturbing conclusion that the conventional wisdom of those inhabiting this media-constructed centre ground: the view of the world dinned into the population daily as “the facts, ma’am”, is actually the distilled opinions, born of the personal interests, of the tiny minority that perches at the very top of our society. Not so much the centrists, as apex-dwellers.
Similarly, not much thought is required to work out that the arrival of the internet and the creation of social media was bound to disrupt – to the point of destruction – the media architecture that permitted the centre ground to endure as a believable mental construct. Suddenly all those voices, from all those other parts of society, classified by the journalists and the media corporations they served, as ‘extreme’, were in a position to contribute their wisdom to the rapidly expanding public discourse. Suddenly, people became aware of just how many ‘facts’ were missing from the ‘mainstream’ media’s stories.
Nowhere was this absence more palpable than in the coverage of the Covid-19 global pandemic. From the very first moments of the pandemic, the apex-dwellers were required to exert all their powers to ensure that a number of very important facts were excluded from the official narrative of the coronavirus’s origins. Their intervention was required because the scientific team assembled to investigate the circumstances surrounding the Covid-19 outbreak soon arrived at a consensus that the virus was most likely to have escaped from a disease research laboratory in Wuhan, China, where all of the initial cases of Covid-19 were located.
This was not an acceptable origin story – not least because the Wuhan research laboratory was allegedly creating variants of the SARS coronavirus on behalf of the United States. Better all round if the origin story of Covid-19 offered the world a ‘natural’ cause of the outbreak. Bats into pangolins into humans, via the Wuhan “wet” market – was considerably less alarming than the idea of the entire planet being thrown into the most serious crisis since World War II because the Chinese couldn’t keep their US-commissioned killer virus safely contained in what was, supposedly, an ultra-secure research facility.
Inevitably, the story about the scientists being forced to endorse the ‘natural’ explanation of the Covid-19 pandemic got out and began circulating on social media. All over the world, governments and the mainstream media were thrown into a panic. If people could be persuaded that, from day one of the pandemic, the ‘powers that be’ had been lying to them about the origins of Covid-19, then the chances were very high that, before too long, a significant portion of the global population would convince themselves that their leaders were lying to them about every other aspect of the Covid crisis. Somehow, this scepticism had to be shut down.
Hence the brutal castigation of anyone and everyone who raised doubts about the official reaction to Covid-19. Overnight, those who expressed even the slightest reservations about the state’s response to the virus were dismissed contemptuously as ‘conspiracy theorists’. Concerns about the safety and efficacy of the fast-tracked Covid-19 vaccines were represented as the reckless endangerment of millions by means of misinformation and disinformation. Those responsible were portrayed as the enemies of humanity. Having ‘gone down the rabbit-hole’ of loopy conspiracism, they were now emerging from their phantasmagorical fantasy-worlds as serious threats to national security.
Which is not to suggest that many people weren’t persuaded that the most bizarre stories about Covid-19 were factual – they were. Merely, that when the so-called “centre ground” is exposed as a media-created myth: when politicians, public officials, scientists, and academics are willing to misrepresent the facts in the name of preserving public health and (in a disturbingly short period of time) public order; then frightened people will cling to whatever narrative brings them solace – no matter how bizarre.
With the election bearing down on us, the mainstream news media are desperate to avoid a Covid-style shattering of people’s faith in the centre-ground myth. They need the public to accept that, as far as their journalists are concerned, all we have are “the facts, ma’am”. It is not that they intend to sell us identical news stories, or that they will all be supporting one party or bloc. What they are determined to have us accept is that our political parties are not extreme, and that in their political imaginations, at least, most New Zealanders should inhabit the same centre ground as the journalists by whom they are (mis)informed.
The only conclusion to be drawn from this exercise in mass deception is that our journalists, and the apex-dwellers they work for, are terrified of the facts. Were they not, they would publish and broadcast more of them, and millions of New Zealanders would see the truth of their lives reflected in them.
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