The Rise of Politically Powerful Global Media Organizations & Planned Surveillance

Desmond Lowden's script is prophetic in several respects. Although its predicted date of the moon landing significantly overshoots the reality, it strikingly pre-empts subsequent conspiracy theories which suggested the event was faked in a film studio. It also prophesies the rise of politically powerful global media organizations and the surveillance culture that inspired many later conspiracy dramas.

With its themes of extreme surveillance and television as tools to control the masses, Lowden's drama also echoes Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, a television version of which Cartier had previously produced, extending its themes into the world of 1968. This is made explicit when JG refers to a 'Ministry of Morality', whose name recalls Orwell's ministries of Truth, Love and Plenty. Whereas Orwell's novel depicts an overtly oppressed Britain, Lowden suggests that in 1968 similar control could be effected invisibly via manipulation of the media.

And just as J.G. is no ordinary producer, this is no ordinary job offer. Larkin’s new role will be t help J.G. and CWNS literally manufacture the news – during the interview J.G. reveals that they’ve already started to “plan the news for 1973… news is the most highly developed form of fiction, the most difficult.”

At the time the play was written, Vietnam had emerged as the first 'television war', and the extent of the medium's influence on the public, particularly in political and commercial arenas, was just beginning to be recognized. In this context, Lowden's extrapolation is as astute as it is grimly playful. With media manipulation now a routine feature of regimes such as China, North Korea and Iran, and increasing concern at the agenda-setting political power of certain partisan news services in Europe and the US, 'The News-Benders' is perhaps even more pertinent now than it was in 1968.

[The BBC’s philistine practice of wiping their tapes to re-use them hit Thirty Minute Theatre particularly badly. Of the 286 episodes originally broadcast, most were wiped – 239 remain completely lost, one is in the archive but incomplete and three exist on non-broadcast standard formats. One of the survivors was Desmond Lowden’s The News-benders, first broadcast on 10 January 1968, a prescient vignette about the power of the media and those who run it to not only dictate what makes the news cycle but to manipulate reality itself.]

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