[A NEW home for a not so new…]
Socialist Organiser1981 1981-07-30Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 3 →
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A NEW home for a not so new column. Press Gang welcomes the rest of Socialist Organiser to its company.
The point of this column is supposed to be to berate mock or otherwise denigrate that last and worst graveyard for dead treesnewspapers.
The press is capitalist society's distorting mirror. It admires the ridiculous, fawns on the bully; elevates the worthless and trivialises and debases everything that is noble in humanity.
Despite its arrogant swagger however it is also frightened; frightened of the workers movement; frightened of socialism; frightened of the power of the working class.
The Tory press plays the role of the geese which grazed on the hillsides of ancient Romesetting up a hysterical cacophany every time danger threatens (which these days is a fine excuse for a daily paper).
The object of Press Gang is to hold S own mirror up to Fleet Street in the hope of comic results.
Sometimes however, despair seems a more appropriate emotion. The Royal Wedding juggernaut thunders on. No self respecting publication whether 'quality' or 'gutter' was complete without its 72-page pullout-and-vomit-into supplement which detailed everything from the names of the horses to the order of precedence amongst the footmen's children.
The Sunday Times says:
'The vulgarity of the media coverage and of the commercial cashing in, has often been hard to stomach," which would have sounded a great deal better if it had not bee in the introduction to a fourpage special On the wedding.
Partly those supplements were so long because they had to give space to the numerous and complex restrictions that the police were bring to bear. They warn for example that the population of London must