Tom McRae Interview: Media Blues

End of the World News still true for the UK indie singer songwriter

Sep 26, 2007

In part 3 of our Tom McRae interview, we discuss how the media continues to distort the news and why change can't come anytime soon with the current world leaders.

With song titles like End of the World News and Set the Story Straight, Tom McRae has always been prominent with his beliefs that the world is a screwed-up place in dire need of rescue. Yet where lies the answers?

In the third part of his interview with us, Tom shares his thoughts on the media (and the British press in particular), as well as the slow progress in changing our surroundings while we have our current leaderships worldwide.

My sincere thanks to Tom for being such a genial host, and to Jon Uren at Fruitcake Management for organising everything.

Tom McRae interview

Suite: Earlier we talked about politics and how the lines between what matters and doesn't get blurred. As an aside to that, just staying with the bigger picture for a moment, this year saw the 10th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death. Now at the time, there was a huge media circus about how she was saintly, etc, yet Mother Teresa died in the same period and she only warranted a small mention in the British media. Do you feel this is a perfect example of how screwed up the media has become?

Tom: Yeah, but then it’s one of those self-sealing little systems where I don’t care. That might sound harsh, but I didn’t know her, I don’t care what she was like as a mum or celebrity, and I certainly have Republican views when it comes to the monarchy. But at the same time, I’m not going to blame her or her kids for the fact of how the media represented all that. It’s an economic cycle - people buy those papers so the newspapers are going to print that story. It’s like music magazines; you can pretty much guarantee that they’ll have Dylan or Springsteen on the cover every 2 months, because they know that sells big. If people didn’t want to know about that kind of stuff, or have it in the news, they wouldn’t buy the papers. But they do, and my option is to either get angry about it, or step aside and let them enjoy it.

Suite: So you won’t be subscribing to the Daily Mail then (the Daily Mail is a British middle-class newspaper that is infamous for its Victorian views on censorship and moral high ground)?

Tom: (laughs) No, but I do read it now and again to see what my enemy’s up to and what polluted ideas they’re trying to sell. I think it’s an evil newspaper, and it sells to a certain type of people.

Suite: Although not too political in your music, you’re someone who isn’t afraid to speak their mind in your online posts (the Iraq war march, the BNP, the environment issues and lack of Government support). Do you think that Gordon Brown (new British Prime Minister), or whoever will be the next President of the United States, is going to offer any alternatives?

Tom: Well here’s the answer. We want change in a recognisable way in our lifetime, and we’ll get that, but we need a bigger change. I mean, if you look at the way the world has changed since the end of the Second World War in 1945, it’s changed in a huge way. Going further back, there was the time when there weren’t votes for women, or rights for black people. So those things have changed immensely in the last 50-60 years, and we want big changes like that for the issues facing us today. We want free health care for America; an equitable system where the wealth is shared everywhere in the world, things like that. They come in increments, and they will keep coming if we get lucky breaks – unfortunately everything about humanity has been set back about 50 years by the current administration. But we have to look at it as a blip, and keep putting our foot down that road in the hope that we’ll get there eventually.

Tom: Well it won’t happen overnight with democracy, but the only alternative to that is a revolutionary coup, and that doesn’t lead to too many good things either. I’m not a big fan of democracy, but if that’s what we’ve got, then that’s what we’ve got.

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