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Politics Theory Other

Teaser - PTO Extra! The Fox Newsification of UK media w/ Will Davies

Politics Theory Other

Politics Theory Other

News

4.8553 Ratings

🗓️ 26 September 2020

⏱️ 2 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Will Davies joins PTO to talk about the possible emergence of a UK equivalent of Fox News, what that might do to UK politics, and why breaking into broadcasting is so important for right wing media owners such as Rupert Murdoch. We also talked about whether in the years preceding the Brexit vote the left should have paid more attention to the ideology and attitudes being fostered by people such as Paul Dacre, former editor for the Daily Mail - rather than the more obvious faces of the neoliberal economic revolution of the 1980s and 90s.

Transcript

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0:00.0

I think that the way in which the cultural dimensions might have been underestimated is that

0:06.7

if we say that the home of those views between Thatcher and Boris Johnson was the Daily

0:14.7

Mail, really.

0:16.1

It was the Daily Mail that was the one that, and Paul Dacre, that was the kind of voice of traditional family

0:23.8

values. It was the one that was most hostile to immigration. It was the one that was most

0:29.9

concerned about sort of, you know, welfare dependency. I mean, Dacre himself sort of saw himself

0:35.8

as a great moralist, by all accounts. And Daker was concerned by culture first and economic second.

0:41.3

But I think that a lot of people were always much more focused on Murdoch.

0:46.6

And Murdoch, if you look at the – I think it's on the front cover of David Harvey's brief history of neoliberalism.

0:51.7

I may be wrong about that.

0:52.7

But, you know, often the faces of neoliberalism. I may be wrong about that, but, you know, often the sort of the faces of neoliberalism are

0:57.0

Reagan, Thatcher, Murdoch and the sort of, you know, this, what happened in the 80s with Murdoch and the Sun and the Times

1:06.0

is seen as being a great kind of moment of economic reform of deregulation, low taxes and so on.

1:13.6

And I think that a lot of people, I mean the left is obviously, particularly the Marxist left, obviously,

1:18.6

it has a materialist view of politics to ultimately, maybe not a crude one, but ultimately is more comfortable talking about material issues than

1:28.8

discursive and superstructural and cultural issues.

1:34.1

And therefore, believe that the right ascendancy was fundamentally about the reform of

1:37.8

capitalism.

1:38.8

And that may indeed be true.

1:40.9

But I think that there was perhaps a, not a disregard, but perhaps the DECA worldview may have

1:46.5

been under, underweighted in recognising what was going on in the country and what was going on in

1:53.2

the media. If you'd like to hear the rest of this episode of PTO Extra, please consider becoming

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