Healthy discord

I must say it's been a little strange this past month to find myself writing again after all these years for a publication in which "right-wing" is used without irony as a term of abuse. (Although I suspect I myself have been described as such in these columns from time to time, I don't feel any more comfortable answering to the description "right-wing' than I would anymore to "left-wing".) By "The Chorus" I mean, broadly, the media, but not simply that. There is already more than enough analysis of how various media organisations or their commercial and journalistic operations are performing or behaving. I'm hoping to write more about what might be called the health of the public conversation, the collective discourse from which flows the shape of our society, its attitudes and beliefs. Hence the title, which derives from the idea of the Greek Chorus, the lyrical running commentary which carried through the great Greek dramas as a way of filling in the gaps and counter-pointing the flow of events. The Chorus had its roots in religious ritual, though this is not immediately obvious in many of the surviving works. It was in effect the moral voice of the polis, a kind of refracted conventional wisdom which drew its inspiration from the play and fed back into it, extending approval or disapproval to the various characters as the action unfolded. The Chorus was both creator and enforcer of reality, while usually, as for example in Euripides' play Medea, being able to wash its hands of responsibility for all such influence.

In "modern" societies, the texture and scope not merely of our collective conversation but of the very nature of what might be called collective thought is dictated by what the media decide is important or true. Those speaking on behalf of media vested interests usually claim for themselves a bogus objectivity based on the insistence that "we only report the facts", which then proceeds to the assertions that the essence of free speech can be delivered only through "choice" of media, and that the best achievable conditions will be those arising from media pampered with every "freedom" they demand. We observed again only last week the utter disingenuousness of this, with media going well beyond the established facts to create a terrifying chorus of poisonous unanimity to convict a young man for a crime that he had no opportunity of meeting in open court. Wayne O'Donoghue's father described as "unbearable" this unparalleled capacity of modern media to focus the entire emotional energies of a society on to one individual or family. We hear much about the democratic function of the media, but very little about its shadow-side: the terrifying brunt of media focus on those unable to answer back.

The theory that media freedom equals societal freedom sounds plausible until you remember that a modern media market is subject to immensely distorting forces, including competitive pressures, ideology, the commercial interests and political allegiances of media controllers, the petty prejudices and docility of most journalists, and so on. If a form of policing were possible in relation to the media, to correspond with the kind of policing the media purport to carry out in relation to other institutions in society, the public mind would very quickly see through the persistent assertion of journalists that the public's right to free expression is coterminous with media freedoms.

Much is made in the media about the importance of diversity, which is implicitly asserted as being achieved through the open-mindedness of journalists and media controllers. But such diversity as we have is a paltry phenomenon, with dissenting voices frequently utilised to give a gracing aspect to an unhealthy consensus. A river can have all kinds of cross-currents and undertows and still sweep everything along in the one direction.

In the raging torrent of last week, it was very easy for those queuing up to deliver another kick to Wayne O'Donoghue to justify themselves on the basis that they were avenging the death of a little boy or extending support and comfort to his family. In reality, they were behaving as molecules of the mob, taking no risks and employing a spurious moral justification to immobile what consciences they might have. There is nothing free about saying what everyone thinks they know. This indeed, may be the very antithesis of freedom, since the more people who believe something the less opportunity this belief has to be tested in public, rendering it far more suspect than a belief held by only a minority of citizens.

Despite (because of?) our latter-day media saturation, we are a long way from John Stuart Mill's vision of healthy diversity of opinion. In, 'On Liberty', his celebrated treatise on free speech, Mill made the case for the indispensability of dissent, error and ignorant opinion. "If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind," he wrote.

Sometimes Mill seemed to be arguing that those who speak in error have a higher value in the protection of liberty than those who speak truly.

What he called "the peculiar evil" of silencing the expression of an opinion was for him not simply a matter of enabling "minorities" or underclasses: he insisted that it was "robbing the human race, posterity as well as the existing generation – those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it" of the potential understanding of even the most peripheral and eccentric view of an issue. "If the opinion is right," he argued, "they are deprived of the opportunity for exchanging error for truth; if it is wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error." A healthy Chorus, in other words, is to be judged more on its discordances than its harmonies.