Talking-up Scotland

bob-crow-brigade

Bob Crow, the RMT, the YPG Kurdish Resistance Fighters and Media Bias (Daily Mail.co.uk) (Kelvin Williams) (Independent.co.uk) The late Bob Crow, General Secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) from 2002 until his death, was probably well-used to a ‘bad press’. The Daily Mail never tired of exposing some aspect of his life. Here’s a typical Daily Mail headline from June 2011: ‘Champagne, £650 lunches and sickening hypocrisy: The truth about Union baron Bob Crow who wants to bring Britain to a halt.’ His union, the RMT, likewise rarely got a sympathetic hearing as they were regularly blamed for disrupting the daily routines of the nation’s commuters and holidaymakers. Here’s the allegedly left-of-centre Guardian, taking sides instantly against the RMT and by implication, absolving the management and the government in September 2016: ‘Members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union have begun a 48-hour walkout as part of their dispute over proposed changes to the role of conductors on trains. The company plans to make drivers responsible for closing doors – something that already happens on many services across the country.’ Bob Crow’s name has surfaced today (17th September 2016) in an Independent report on a group of around 40 British ‘lefties’ who have signed up to fight for the Kurdish militia in Syria, the YPG, against ISIS and any other threats. They’ve named themselves the Bob Crow Brigade ‘praising the late union leader as a “beacon of home for the Labour Movement” and hero of socialism.’ The Independent report is the only one I can find of what is clearly a newsworthy story. It hasn’t made it to any of the TV News broadcasts as far as I can see. Reporting positively on a trades union ‘firebrand’ and a powerful trades union is clearly still not something writers for the corporate media think is in the interest of their careers. There’s no need to worry of course as the public will want what the public gets. I don’t know anyone outside of the RMT who admired Crow. I guess his threatening visage and the success of the RMT made both difficult to love. Most of all, the media coverage was uniformly and utterly negative so he had little hope of wider popularity for his courage or his dry sense of humour. Not surprisingly, Crow was a boxer but readers who have seen me or remember me will be surprised to know that I too took up the gloves at one point. Sent to the Grangemouth Boxing Club in the early 1960s because my mum’s uncle ran it, I did learn a bit of footwork and developed a good dodging neck. My Dad, perhaps, came to see and commented that I was a bit like that Cassius Clay (later to be Mohammed Ali). I moved like a butterfly. Regrettably I stung like a butterfly too! Reading again of Crow and the RMT, I remembered a piece I wrote, last year, revealing that the uniform negativity of the media elites was, despite its dominance, not always reflected in public opinion as my survey of comments posted under the article shows. It’s titled ‘Media Propaganda in the UK Fails to Fool All of the People: Evidence from online responses to news reports criticizing the RMT in May 2015’ and it’s at: https://thoughtcontrolscotland.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/uk-media-fails-to-fool.pdf For those not keen to read the whole thing, it concludes: ‘These results suggest quite a strong (c50%) tendency in this quite large sample of UK citizens to be resistant to hegemonic influence in a fairly emotive context – industrial action by the widely demonized RMT union. Rail workers generally and by contrast with many other groups such as teachers or nurses, are portrayed by media and by politicians as selfish, disruptive and ideologicallydriven (from the extreme left). It is true that the RMT is highly organized, disciplined and educates its membership in wider political concerns and this contributes to their negative representation by media and political elites even where the latter characterize themselves as ‘moderate’ or ‘centreleft’. Commentary from the centre-right or right is often venomous. Despite the almost complete hegemony in mainstream media output and based on these results, hegemony is clearly only partially successful in terms of the wider effect. Consequently, these results confirm Chomsky and Davis’ identification of resilience to mass media effects amongst non-elite groups. Further, these results suggest strong support for Gramsci’s optimism that hegemony is never complete and thus open to challenge at all times.’ Nobody would publish it at the time so it has languished in my own blog here, read only by a few hundred. I feel it has something important to say about the democratising potential of social media. Please share it. Professor John Robertson, September 17th 2016.