The Pig Question: or How Some Clever P.R and Partisan Journalism Shifted Public Opinion

  Heated coffeetable talk for the past few weeks has been dominated by the subject of pigs. A few weeks ago, animal rights group Oikeutta Eläimille published videos filmed at Finnish pig farms, detailing the allegedly gross abuse of pigs on factory farms. The little Napoleon's were forced to live in abhorrently small pens, being unable to turn around and occasionally chewing each others tails (do pigs have tails?) off out of irritation. Pretty gruesome, we all agree. But nevertheless, quite standard stuff.

I have long ago resigned to the fact that people intentionally fool themselves to thinking their moral code holds water when exposed to completely objective and rational criticism. Maybe it's not animal cruelty because they're not the ones carrying it out. Maybe it's more justified than other forms of animal cruelty because the ultimate result of it is not wanton suffering but nourishment. I don't know and in any case am not here to debate omnivorous moral hypocrisy.

When I said the videos were all standard stuff, I mean that it's all been done before. There is plenty of footage from farms detailing animal abuse. The strike of genious from the part of Oikeutta Eläimille was to realize just that, and to understand that more than shooting a movie and putting it on Youtube needs to be done to really get a point across. They have made a damn good job of establishing a constant presence in the media and presenting themselves in a way which challenges the average persons view of animal activists.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Most people have a highly misconstrued view of the type of person who vocally campaigns for animal rights. They are seen as snotty upper middle-class kids raised in a little bubble who have nothing better to do than push their black & white world view on respectable citizens. The average persons view of an "animal activist" has pretty much ensured that their message would go unheeded, until now. The group has launched Sikatehtaat, a site with expert opinions from reporters, philosophers and doctors as well as your less credible musicians, artists and NGO hippies. Judging by the comments on the Helsingin Sanomat discussion board, (and if hs.fi isn't the true echo of the voice of the sheepish Finn, I don't know what is) public opinion has indeed shifted to a more favorable view of activism. Stunts such as interrupting a parliament session are another part of this cleverly woven web of pr, and one can only applaud the ability of a grassroots organization finally adopting t the same tactics of media manipulation that are standard practice in politics and business. But there is one more key ingredient to the success of Oikeutta Eläimille, one that which is both a blessing and a curse in mainstream Finnish media.

I hate to say this, especially since I am usually the first one to lament about the decline of journalistic objectivism, but one can't help but feel a tiny pang of glee when bias  once for leans the towards a just cause, even if inadvertently. I've come to the conclusion that Hesari most definately carries a strong anti-Keskusta agenda. Our comedically corrupt Agrarian Party does seem to be more than others on the receiving end of political exposé's, a misplaced pile of planks and the media kerfuffle that ensued coming immediately to mind. The media's witchunt may be morally questionable, but not nearly as much as the bulvanic nature of the party's fund gathering techniques or the magnetically faulty moral compass which guides the opinions of among others, minister of agriculture Sirkka-Liisa Anttila. God I hate her.

So some good has been done, and we all should be glad for that. Even meat eaters seem to be waking up the fact that while there may be some cultural, if not logical justification to their lifestyle, the conditions where their food has been brought up contradicts every possible aspect of human decency. We can only hope that some permanent change has been instigated. It's utopistic to think that meat eating is going to disappear anytime soon (it will eventually, mark my words),  but some moral soul searching seems to have taken place on a wider scale. Merry Christmas.

Someone please take out Rupert Murdoch

While I decided that the tone of this blog would be very tongue-in-cheek, I really have to get a few things off my chest. I, like many others spend a lot of my day mindlessly browsing news websites, trying to push aside, if even for a moment, the drudgery and boredom of uneventful middleclass existence. Living vicariously through the typewriters of journalists has been a hobby of mine for many years now, but only recently has the astounding level of fresh, steaming BULLSHIT which squeezes through every crevice of the global news media become apparent to me.

This is not a simple case of anti-mainstream "angry disillusioned young silver spoon-fed urban twat with too much time on his hands" rhetoric, there really is an alarming trend of even the supposedly impartial news media towards a more flashy, entertainment-based "fast food" approach.. The combination of the hectic pace of the information age and the increasingly neo-liberal approach (money first, everything else second) to business has also put a real dent in the once revered art of fact-checking. Online and print media frequently relies on news agencies (such as Reuters or STT here in Finland) for their stories, trusting them to properly check the validity of their sources. Sadly, the agencies are just as vulnerable to being forced to deliver on a seconds notice, with quality and truth sometimes taking a back seat.

The media is also alarmingly susceptible to "Flat earth stories", or stories which for some baffling reason the media shoves down our throats without a hint of solid evidence. 2 very good examples are the apocalyptic pandemonium of the Y2K scare and the weapons of mass destruction fiasco leading up to the war in Iraq. Some of us were still in our early teens when the millenium changed, but surely we all remember the headlines where a barrage of experts gave their opinion on the matter. Some were less and some were more optimistic, but NOBODY seemed to point out that there was literally no basis for this claim. Think about it for a second. Since out of every computer system that controls almost everything that happens anywhere in the world exactly ZERO malfunctioned in any sort of way, isn't it reasonable to discern that the media slightly exaggerated the reality of the peril we were all facing?

 The Y2K was an oddball incident in the sense that the media's distortion of reality can not be traced to a clear culprit pulling the strings on the marionette of public opinion. In cases such as the leadup to the war in Iraq, it was obviously the governments of Britain and the U.S who used the media as a tool. But the media should take a large share of the blame, because taking the word of government reports as fact without checking them for basis or merit hardly qualifies the kind of journalism which I expect from my daily source of whats the happyhap.

The difference between the news media and the rest of the media is that people tend to trust what the news say. Berlusconi is not popular in Italy because Italians are idiots. Well they are, but not more so than other humans. Berlusconi controls every single mainstream television station in the country, and you can bet that the picture that is painted of him there is drastically different to the one we have here. The reason for the draconian laws and stone-age attitudes towards drugs in Finland is not because someone doesnt want you to have any fun, but because the people who make the rules and run the newspapers come from an age where using scaremongering over facts was not only acceptable but favored. And because the younger generations are unable look at news with a skeptical eye, we get headlines with celebrities lamenting about the state of the world because their friend likes to do a line of coke every now and then.

What we really need is media criticism to become a compulsory subject in our schools. Kids need to be taught to look at the source where they receive their information with a healthy sense of skepticism, even if the news media has forgotten how to. Nasty shit can happen when bad people with too much money can manipulate the information received by people who have not been taught to distinguish the truth from agenda-driven lies.

The Blog

This blog however, will not be a collection inconsequential rants about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket. I will periodically look at news items from various sources, dissect them, point out obvious fallacies and offer an alternate view. Sort of like the Daily Show, but less funny and focusing on what you can read online. I'm going to start tomorrow with the whole pig-farming scandal here in Finland. Or maybe something else. We'll see.