Talking Points

A lot of politics is about generating talking points to frame the narrative. There are some interesting examples of how they can be done, and it's particularly interesting to see how one isolated news event can influence the future coverage (and therefore interpretation) of news events.

One example is with the importance of rejecting divisive rhetoric in politics, and how the intervention of one MP who gave a passionate speech about it (I remember listening to it on Radio 4) sparked a future news narrative about the importance of truth in politics.

Of course, this does not imply that without the intervention of this particular MP, a healthy discourse above cynical appeals to nativism, tribalism, and so on and so on, would not be an important theme of modern politics, or a point of discussion. After all, we have seen Guardian opinion pieces about the importance of rejecting division - or creating new 'narratives' - before, and we will doubtless see them again (though they have no value).

Equally, the response of certain parts of the press to breaking news events can divert political discourse down unhealthy and pointless cul-de-sacs. For instance, the response to Extinction Rebellion from much of the mainstream press focused on whether it's right to use children in protests.

The response to this would emphatically be a 'yes'. Martin Luther King's Civil Rights Movement, with its strategist Wyatt Walker, used children in Birmingham as part of the campaign to end racial segregation. The famous photo of the dog attacking a teenager, who stands helpless, appeared on every major national newspaper and struck an emotional and political chord across the country.

However, we must examine the reasons why the press chooses to cover news stories according to constituent questions. There is firstly a question of practicality; it's easy to ask questions about specific, controversial aspects of a story rather than according to general principles. Secondly, it can help to keep the news reader engaged, distilling potentially complicated issues into simple dilemmas.

Radical thinkers such as Noam Chomsky would refer to Manufacturing Consent, which highlights the importance of ownership. In this case, the press diverts attention from the constituent questions of a news item which genuinely challenge wealth and power, and instead chooses homogenised points of interest which are covered in different ways across different parts of the media.

Importantly, the same news story could be covered in a radically different way across news outlets, and across the political spectrum. Nevertheless, Chomsky would argue that this merely forms part of an ecosystem which creates the illusion of choice through vigorous debate in order to limit the range of acceptable opinions. The appearance of political engagement preserves a certain political and economic power structure.

Similarly, Orwell would argue - along the same lines as Manufacturing Consent, that much of the press is owned by 'Atlantic millionaires'. This is not to say the news media is incapable of challenging wealth and power, or exposing wrongdoing. Rather, ownership matters, and, much like the priesthood in the Middle Ages, or indeed in any period in time where the religiously ordained wielded a monopoly on the tenets and assumptions by which people would live and behave, you don't just buy a newspaper in order to make money; you buy one to control discourse, and to tell people what to think.

Nevertheless, I don't want to push the ownership point too much. It sounds too much like a conspiracy theory and long-winded rants about 'media bias' are among the most tedious tropes of modern politics. I've been to too many Labour meetings where an old bore drones on about how the BBC or the Times covered a particular story.

I mentioned it in the first place to discuss how talking points can be used to frame the narrative, and really there is a great deal of room for manoeuvre for political movements even on the left (up to a point).