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We’re in danger of succumbing to the cynical politics of advertising

We’re in danger of succumbing to the cynical politics of advertising

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 5th October 1995.

Had Greenpeace’s enemies set about to destroy it over the last few weeks, they could scarcely have done a better job than Greenpeace has done for itself. Having retracted claims about the Brent Spar’s toxic cargo and been criticized for manipulative tactics by news editors, Greenpeace has now been charged with misinforming the public by the Advertising Standards Authority. The pressure group’s most useful vehicle - its self-presentation - has been backfiring on all cylinders.

The ASA was right about Greenpeace. Beside a picture of human genitalia it had announced “Chemicals that we dump in the sea are causing willies to shrink in size.” What the group had failed to make clear is that it is whelks, not humans, who are losing their winkles.

Though the ASA’s accompanying criticism of Friends of the Earth was less deserving, there is no doubt that campaigning groups, spurred on both by declining funds and the ever-louder ticking of the environmental clock, have been cutting corners. Their failure to tell the whole truth does everybody harm. Real concerns are taken less seriously than they should be. Ordinary people no longer know who to believe.

In the sea of media distortion, however, the environmental pressure groups are still small fish. Advertising revenues mean that those on the other side of the environmental battle lines - the industries pressure groups are campaigning against - exert enormous power over newspapers and magazines. Most newspapers, for example, were far behind the public in questioning the increasing use of cars and shrinkage of public transport. The farming press - which has a strong grip on agricultural policy in Britain - repeatedly fails to discuss the damage done by pesticides. Most of its revenue comes from the agrochemical companies.

The ASA, of course, is subject to none of these pressures. But the terms of its consideration are limited. A few years ago, the London Underground was plastered with posters promoting the construction of the Cardiff Bay barrage. They carried two pictures, a bleak, black and white photo of a derelict shed surrounded by pock-marked mud (before construction) and an apparently touched-up colour photo of beautiful people drinking on a verandah overlooking a marina (after construction).

The Cardiff Bay mudflats, which were to be drowned by the development, are one of Europe’s most important sites for estuarine wildlife, attracting vast flocks of migrating birds. One of the ASA’s toughest rules is that advertisers should not unfairly discredit other businesses or their products. But it rejected a complaint about this advert, on the basis that the environment is neither a business nor a product. The ASA’s failure to stop the nuclear industry from filling the newspapers with irrelevant information about not damaging the ozone layer or causing acid rain, while omitting to mention radiation, nuclear waste or the vast quantities of fossil fuel used in mining and processing uranium is a worrying sign that it considers some forms of misinformation to be more acceptable than others.

More alarming still are the signs that those sections of the media which do not have any reason to discriminate in favour of industry are taking their cue from those that do. Daily share movements, for example, are a minority interest, of great importance to the CBI and perhaps fifty thousand managers, merchant bankers and serious investors, but of marginal and indirect concern to the rest of us. Environmental quality, on the other hand, intrudes into all our lives on a daily basis. News programmes which reflected the concerns of all of us, rather than just the powerful few, would broadcast environmental indices in preference to the FT Index. But the corporate interest and the national interest often seem to be confused - I have twice heard Radio 4 tell us “The good news is that car sales are up.”

It was for these reasons, as well as the prevailing and flawed assumption that what the three main political parties say fairly represents the range of political opinion, that two small organizations have been set up by environmental and social justice campaigners. Small World and Conscious Cinema both run an alternative news service, seeking to cover the stories the mainstream news doesn’t reach. They make no bones about their bias, but they make sure they get their facts right.

Despite tiny budgets, they have been remarkably successful. They produce alternative video newsreels, persuade existing news programmes to take their footage, and try to reset the news agenda. Both the campaigns against the Criminal Justice Act and the actions against cars in city centres first reached the news through their efforts. Their success seems to indicate a genuine public hunger for the other side of the story.

This hunger will only abate if pressure groups continue to emulate their opponents. Instead they must demonstrate, in everything they do, the higher moral values they are appealing to. The most precious, possibly the most threatened, of all environmental resources is the truth.