Proxies in the news media are people acting as a disguised channel of information in the interests of another party. As internet usage warns us they are intimately connected with subterfuge because the sole intention behind them is to protect the original source from accountability for the claims.
Proxies have sprouted crazily over the last forty years or so in the rich, well manured undergrowth which surrounds that proud and lofty trunk, the modern newspaper – and newspaper it is, for the broadcast media are not vulnerable to the pest in quite the same way as the press.
A government source was quoted as saying...
In politics, where it all began, correspondents now deal primarily with the press offices instead of the politicians themselves. An elaborate dance is played out in which both partners know and perform the appropriate steps: the spokesman signals that he is speaking with the authority of the appropriate minister on a specific matter but will not name him; the journalist accepts the stuff offered to him knowing that if public reaction is bad then another spokesman will claim that “it was an unfounded rumour”. If he doesn’t accept the rules then the dance stops and he won’t get any more information.
Alongside this process of agreed deception, the only way so far that media and democratic politics have found to co-exist, we have the grotesque, fungus-like growth of the PR and lobbying industries, whose job is to use the same techniques as the politicians but with much, much murkier objectives.
A company spokesperson said...
Every significant newspaper story, without exception, is the arena for a struggle to control the words on the page, a struggle of which the average reader is astonishingly unaware, for any news incident has potential consequences. Take an apparently trivial, uncomplicated and “factual” one, a road accident, say, a petrol tanker rolling over without exploding perhaps, with property damage and some injuries but no fatalities.
The reader may have an image of a newsman rushing to the site to ask witnesses what happened. Perhaps. But by the time the story hits the page the PR department of oil company Greaseball PLC will have been alerted and will discuss with a director what “stance” they should take. And if the possibility arises that the driver might be at fault in some way – that he might have exceeded his legal hours, for example, or had perhaps taken drugs – then a struggle begins, carried out by proxies for the management.
They will soon be on the blower to try and “balance” the reporting. If the going gets tough a PR person will soon be rubbishing the credentials of difficult witnesses such as a witness claiming to have seen the driver smoking skunk, for much is then at stake: the company’s image most of all but also its employment and training methods, the financial implications of insurance claims and associated court cases. For every formal statement that the company puts out about the incident there will have been numerous phone calls and off-the-record briefings attempting to skew the story. That’s how the game works.
A company source insisted...
Now every company has the right to defend itself against unfair claims. But where decades ago a formal press statement giving Greaseball PLC’s side of the story would have been sufficient, the game has now changed: a company’s reputation, its “brand”, is capitalised via its share price and has to be protected in exactly the same way that its computers, oil tankers and other assets are protected. As a result a court judgement of liability in an incident such as our road crash is financially dwarfed by the potential effect of public loss of confidence: the arena for defending the brand now is the media not the court and the target is the mind of the public, not a jury. Any civil court proceedings and judgements are an unimportant footnote.
But how can a media “judgement” be “won” by a company? The same way a politician wins it, silly! Get your version out via proxies and hidden news management so it looks neutral and objective and keep it there by repetition and spin, financed by what the politicians haven’t got, loadsa money to throw around. Unfortunately for that same public others, less constrained than public companies, have learned that the game works for them too – entrepreneurs and scam artists, thieves like the Natwest Three, brand-value celebrities like footballers, golfers like Tiger Woods. And, of course, fugitives from justice facing potential extradition.
A source close to the family said...
So now when stuff gets really serious Greaseball PLC PR department hands the job over to outside agencies, the so-called Crisis Management PR gangs who first came to public attention in the Pinochet case, and who have since grown not just like fungi but giant and revolting teratomas. These offer the priceless asset of complete separation from the original principals, in this case the oil company directors, who can, like politicians, disavow their activities at any time – that’s part of the deal.
The result is a thoroughly disreputable industry of deception and influence-purchase employing or contracting litigation and libel lawyers, journalists, private investigators with their associated pond-scum of dodgy policemen and villains, and finally the smooth marketing types who present their public face. A “result” is one in which the original event is smothered in a thick overlay of planted and disguised press stories which by constant repetition gain unjustified credibility – backed up with legal threats to deter attempts at unravelling the scheme.
This industry exists in ill-defined legal territory, like a growth in an unlit crack. The use of the system diffuses responsibility too widely to hold individuals to account; it constantly pushes at the boundaries of contempt of court laws; and the distinction between influence purchase and actual corruption by threat or bribery is vague indeed. In fact the whole process described above is in essence one large, distributed bribe to purchase an edge.
Remind you of anybody?
But the witness, Mr Menezes, stated...
The greatest enemy of the PR/lobby industry, like daylight falling on Dracula, is the court room: there, under the light of evidence, oath and cross examination, all their apparent strengths become weaknesses. So they don’t appear. Instead the lawyers take over and if it is a civil case either the facts are established or the principals withdraw the action, as in the Trafigura dispute and numberless others. But the proxy industry has still served its purpose – Trafigura, for instance, won’t have to answer to the courts for their manipulation because they didn’t do it: their proxies did and the proxies, existing in their ill-defined legal territory, are not in court for they were only “professional agents of the principals” . So, the costs and damages are paid but nobody is held accountable because the public itself, as yet, has no defender. And the industry is out the next day spinning the verdict. Isn’t it cute?
So where exactly do the McCanns fit in to this charming business?
