Media spin about the economic crisis based on a division between 'victims' and 'the guilty' is a convenient fiction, writes JOHN WATERS
THE DRAMA of a society divided between those who have created our economic difficulties and those who innocently suffer the consequences is staged daily by a media presenting itself as on the side of the “victims”.
This storyline can be heard most clearly in the listener texts read out ad nauseam by radio presenters. These texts are an important revenue stream for radio stations, which may partly explain why these terse and ill-tempered communications are treated as a profound expression of the will of the people. For 30 cent “Tommy from Tullamore” and “Ciara from Clara” can bask in the tacit approval of a media tribunal represented by a presenter who seems never to reflect on the contentlessness of what he or she is reading. As predictable as they are banal, these texts simply affirm some populist intuition concerning the outrage we are all supposed to feel about “them”. If a guest on a programme is one of “them”, or seeks to make a point that does not add to the general excoriation of “them”, he is subjected to a barrage of accusations of being “part of the cosy consensus”.
The texter is “outraged”, “appalled” or “gobsmacked”. The texter wants to throw up. If, on the other hand, the guest has harmonised with “pubic outrage”, the texts will be approving. “Fair play to so ’n’ so”, they will applaud, “for speaking up for us”. The worst crime is to be “out of touch with the man in the street”.
On several radio programmes recently, I’ve been intrigued to observe that presenters think these communications are a reliable weathervane of public opinion. Of course, they represent merely the regurgitation of a repetitive sense of grievance emanating from people with time on their hands and nothing interesting to say for themselves.
This trend has at least four worrying elements. One, it reduces the public narrative to opposition between the “guilty” and the “innocent”. Two, it grounds the common discourse in blame and punishment. Three, it allows the media to hide behind a bogus notion of “public opinion” to pursue agendas which may be to the long-term detriment of Irish society. Four, it avoids the idea that the Celtic Tiger was the consequence of a collective psychology, of which the media was the principal driving element.
For more than a decade from the mid-1990s, the media actively whipped up aspirations, whether by uncritically talking up the property market or suppressing critical appraisals of what was happening in the economy. There is now, therefore, a certain convenience in simply relaying the telegrammatic, selective and repetitive rage of the “man in the street”. The idea of media people being the champions of the disgruntled taxpayer provides an impenetrable protection against any broader analysis.
I heard a tabloid editor recently condemning the idea that culpability for our present woes should be spread beyond the shoulders of bankers, developers and politicians. He wasn’t a believer, he said, in “this ‘we’ business”. Such insinuations of solidarity with the average Joe should be a transparent tactic, but there is no “fifth estate” to make that case.
The current media strategy depends on implying that “The People” are entirely innocent of all charges. But how many of us are as innocent as the media would have us believe? There are many categories under which we might allocate responsibility for our collective misfortunes, and such a process would leave very few citizens unfingered.
Take, for example, Special Savings Investment Accounts (SSIAs), one of the most extraordinary bonanzas of the Tiger period. In 2001, the Government announced that it would top up by 25 per cent savings under this scheme, to the tune of about €4 billion. There were approximately 1.2 million SSIA accounts, which means that roughly half the working population benefited. The top-ups were provided with borrowed money, which the taxpayer is now paying back. SSIAs were intended to encourage saving and curb consumer spending, but ultimately provided a classic instance of private virtue becoming public vice.
Maturing in 2006 and 2007, these accounts contributed enormously to the overheating of the economy. Without the expectation they generated, the property market might have peaked before it did, with far less serious consequences. In advance of maturation, motor dealers, mortgage lenders, technology stores and furniture outlets were extending credit on the back of SSIAs, although the rules specifically forbade this. As the economist David McWilliams pointed out, the SSIAs were really a tax that penalised all taxpayers for the benefit of approximately 50 per cent.
Five or six years ago, there was almost continuous celebratory media coverage of the SSIA phenomenon. Anyone who did not have an account was made to feel inadequate and imprudent. Thus, the SSIA episode should enable us to observe in microcosm the psychology that governed the boom years, and implicated “us” as much as “them”.
Such exploration, however, might render journalists and radio presenters liable to the charge of being “out of touch” with “popular opinion”, and make Tommy from Tullamore want to throw up.