Dylan on the media

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I've been listening to and watching a lot of Dylan recently. In particular, there's a documentary on the man from 1967, Don't Look Back, which follows him around during his '65 tour of the UK. One scene stands out, in which Dylan is taped utterly eviscerating a journalist from Time Magazine. The conversation goes something like:

JOURNALIST: so are you a folk singer?

 DYLAN: what do you mean am I folk singer? who are you? you don't even know what a folk singer is

 JOURNALIST: ...yes I do

 DYLAN: no you don't. why are you here? why are you talking to me? who are you?

 JOURNALIST: i'm here so i can tell people about you

 DYLAN: what do you mean tell them about me? tell them a little tale you dreamed up about me in your little magazine? 

 JOURNALIST: no, so i can tell them the truth

 DYLAN: the truth? you know nothing about the truth. who do you work for...Time Magazine? that right? what an earth do you know about truth? is that what you think you do...report truth?

 JOURNALIST: ...erm...yeah

 DYLAN: come off it man, you don't know anything about the truth! what do you do? like Time Magazine - i'll tell you what you do. you report stories that you create as entertaining, that you create as something for people to eat up...like for a certain class of people, people who spend all their time working and just need to be fed information in small digestible chunks - chunks which keep them comforted and tell them everything's okay, instead of throwing their world into chaos. that's what you do. what you do has nothing to do with the truth

 JOURNALIST: ...erm...so what do you call truth then?

 DYLAN: like anything else! like, a collage of images that shows a beggar puking his guts up right round the corner at the same time you walk into work at 8am in the morning. that's the truth, and believe me, what you do has nothing to do with that. you would never show that! if Time Magazine showed the truth, it would just disappear, shrivel up, people wouldn't buy it. that's the real truth of this. you see, i know more about what you do than you do! and i have no wish at all to tell you why i'm not a folk singer, because you wouldn't understand the difference!

Now, that is a creatively edited transcript, simply because I couldn't be bothered to treck through the doc again to find the scene, and because I enjoy even the smallest opportunity to rip into the media establishment. But the main points and phrases Dylan uses are all in there, and I think those last two paragraphs apply incredibly to any of Britain's most popular news outlets: in particular, the BBC and the Economist, two publications whose entire popular stand rests on a concrete wall of fact manipulation and corporate fandom.

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