George Monbiot: Our cult of personality is leaving real life in the shade
By reducing politics to a celebrity
obsession – from Johnson to Trump to Corbyn – the media misdirects and confuses
us hat kind of people would you expect the
newspapers to interview most?
Those with the most to say, perhaps, or maybe
those with the richest and weirdest experiences. Might it be philosophers, or
detectives, or doctors working in war zones, refugees, polar scientists, street
children, firefighters, base jumpers, activists, writers or free divers? No.
It’s actors. I haven’t conducted an empirical study, but I would guess that
between a third and a half of the major interviews in the newspapers feature
people who make their living by adopting someone else’s persona and speaking
someone else’s words.
This is such a bizarre
phenomenon that, if it hadn’t crept up on us slowly, we would surely find it
astounding. But it seems to me symbolic of the way the media works. Its problem
runs deeper than fake news. What it offers is news about a fake world. I am not proposing
that the papers should never interview actors, or that they have no wisdom of
their own to impart. But the remarkable obsession with this trade blots out
other voices. One result is that an issue is not an issue until it has been
voiced by an actor. Climate breakdown, refugees, human rights, sexual assault:
none of these issues, it seems, can surface until they go Hollywood.
This is not to
disparage the actors who have helped bring them to mainstream attention, least
of all the brave and brilliant women who exposed Harvey Weinstein and popularised the #MeToo
movement. But many other brave and brilliant women stood up to say the same
thing – and, because they were not actors, remained unheard. The #MeToo
movement is widely assumed to have begun a year ago, with Weinstein’s accusers.
But it actually started in 2006, when the motto was coined by the activist Tarana Burke. She and the millions of
others who tried to speak out were, neither literally nor metaphorically, in
the spotlight.
At least actors serve
everyone. But the next most-interviewed category, according to my unscientific
survey, could be filed as “those who serve the wealthy”: restaurateurs, haute
couturists, interior designers and the like, lionised and thrust into our faces
as if we were their prospective clients. This is a world of make-believe, in
which we are induced to imagine we are participants rather than mere gawpers…
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