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What does Leveson really think about blogging?

blogging, blogosphere, Facebook, Fifth Estate, Fourth Estate, James Firth, Leveson inquiry, libel law, news-gathering, newspapers, Twitter, unclassifiable No Responses »

Dec 122012

James summarised it thus (more than fully) on November 30th, in a piece clearly titled “#Leveson is excellent on internet free speech. He didn’t brush over it, he robustly defended it”:

Leveson [...] draws a clear distinction between a news outlet which claims to provide trusted reporting and the internet in general, where there is no implied trust (although Leveson uses the term ethical rather than trusted, which in this particular case I believe are interchangeable as trust in news output flows from ethical journalism).

Chapter 7, section 3.2:

“… the internet does not claim to operate by any particular ethical standards, still less high ones. Some have called it a ‘wild west’ but I would prefer to use the term ‘ethical vacuum’. This is not to say for one moment that everything on the internet is therefore unethical. That would be a gross mischaracterisation of the work of very many bloggers and websites which should rightly and fairly be characterised as valuable and professional. The point I am making is a more modest one, namely that the internet does not claim to operate by express ethical standards, so that bloggers and others may, if they choose, act with impunity.”

Leveson doesn’t say this but there is also a jurisdiction issue online. It’s not strictly true that bloggers may act with impunity if based in the UK, as there’s always the possibility they will be traced using existing legal instruments and prosecuted or face civil proceedings for libel or privacy breach.

7.3.3:

“The press, on the other hand, does claim to operate by and adhere to an ethical code of conduct. Publishers of newspapers will be (or, at least, are far more likely to be) far more heavily resourced than most, if not all, bloggers and websites that report news (as opposed to search engines that direct those on line to different sites). Newspapers, through whichever medium they are delivered, purport to offer a quality product in all senses of that term.”

James also goes on to point out the difference between social media making content available and the very same content being “emblazoned” on the front page of a highly visible online newspaper.

So. We have an ethically-driven industry versus an ethical vacuum such as the Internet. And we have the industry of extreme visibility versus the amateur placing of content at a much lower level. As I pointed out a couple of posts ago (the bold is mine today):

Some further thoughts, then, on where this might all be leading us:

We need to look beyond the tools and their physical manifestations – it’s always easy to notice the technology and think that content must inevitably follow suit. What’s clearly missing in all kinds of media at the moment is the instinct to reflect and think behind the headlines before putting virtual pen to paper – the impulse to leave, for a few days as a draft, a piece of work usefully unpublished. Blogging is as guilty of this as any newspaper columnist out there. I am as guilty of this as anyone else.

I would also ask us to keep in mind that whilst the free press belongs to limited liability industry, free speech should belong to unlimited liability people. And the rights and responsibilities, as well as the punishments for transgression and so forth, should be quite different in each case. If we believe that international corporations are better guarantors of our free press than the laws of representative democracy, then the real problem doesn’t lie in statutory underpinning or not – it lies in a democracy which isn’t representative enough. No amount of any social media under the evermore fierce gaze of Western governments is going to fix a system as broken as that.

A people’s press, then, perhaps? A kind of Fifth or Sixth Estate? We need statutory protection for free speech here in the UK at the very least if we are to propose such a model.

The ideal? Maybe an osmotic world of information exchange where industry and people interface to their mutual benefit. But not under the current weight of English and Welsh libel laws.

Leveson, then, as per the slant James places on him at the end of last month, seems clear that there is a substantial difference between, on the one hand, the Internet as it has grown up and is manifesting itself through blogging, tweeting and Facebooking and, on the other, the industry of highly visible newspapermen and women.

But today the Guardian publishes a report on a conference Leveson has just given. An immediate observation: I thought at the time of the report’s launch, Leveson had assured us he would take no questions and make no further comments. The second “public outing” in as many weeks would seem to give lie to such assurances.

Or maybe I misunderstood.

Or maybe I simply invented the moment.

Talk about picking and choosing your stage …

Anyhow. At least according to the Guardian, Leveson is now in two minds about the Internet. Whilst he still accepts that social media is the “electronic version of pub gossip”, and does seem to accept that this might actual inscribe a virtue for human thought (that is to say, the thinking of the unthinkable – the freedom to go anywhere with a train of thought), he doesn’t seem quite convinced any more that the implications in relation to law, and what and how we should apply it, should be followed through.

What’s more, he seems to recognise the ethical side of the newspaper industry isn’t quite as ethical or convincing as it might be, especially when he says:

[...] if journalists saw the law going unenforced against bloggers, it might “undermine media standards through encouraging them to adopt a casual approach to the law”.

“If we are to ensure that appropriate standards are maintained, we must meet these challenges, and ensure that the media … is not placed at a disadvantage where the enforcement of the law is concerned,” Leveson said.

I think, to be honest, and I’m happy to be corrected if you feel I’m being too cynical, that those who’d really be placed at a disadvantage would not be the media but, rather, the rich, powerful and/or well-connected who strive to manage the news which journalists are allowed to print. If such things as described by Greenslade are happening already – and they have happened for a long time I am sure – just think what they could get away with under a regime where lawyerless and amateur communicators could be silenced and punished to the same degree as an industry.

Leveson is right to say:

[...] that it was a “pernicious and false belief” that bloggers were not subject to the same laws as print and broadcast journalists.

But he is wrong to argue that, in exactly the same way, both individual free speech and the industrial free press should be marshalled, controlled and punished by our justice system.

It’s just not fair, proportional or democratic. If my yearly income is a minuscule percentage of what a media behemoth turns over globally, I can hardly be held equally responsible for errors of judgement.

Now can I?

So I come to my last question: what does Leveson really think about blogging? Is it a force for good which often takes us to the wilder parts of human thought in a productive and constructive manner? Or is it something which for the good of the status quo must now be progressively chilled into holding back its occurrences?

A sensibly policed state – or the anteroom of a police state?

Where is Leveson now?

Why HuffPost’s Pulitzer is deserved but not necessarily welcome

digital literacy, Fifth Estate, Fourth Estate, FreeTheInternet, Huffington Post, in a hole, journalism, new media, on a high, print media, Pulitzer Prize No Responses »

Apr 172012

They’re saying this story shows how online media has come of age. I can see that Huffington Post clearly deserves this Pulitzer – and not just for the series it was commended for. But, whilst deserved, I wonder if the recognition itself is welcome.

HuffPost now belongs to AOL – it changed hands last year for millions of dollars. Other media organisations such as the New York Times or the British Guardian, adapting reasonably fleet-of-footedly to the new journalistic frames, now produce similarly effective online presences with just as much interactivity and just as much social media impact.

Since they also have real printing-presses and other offline overheads, they probably lose much more money than HuffPost – but even so, the final impact on readers cannot be all that different.

So what does online media’s garnering of prizes like the Pulitzer mean for the rest of us? I think it means we are probably going to lose something important, as the traditional model of legally defensible communication reasserts itself by taking over from the over-the-garden-fence discourse which we as users have, to date, thought we were all engaging in.

We lose, in effect, as does our democracy too, the deniable-outrider advantages of bringing up through that bubbling virtual cauldron of rumour and speculation realities which traditional media may refuse to contemplate airing. In the absence of other written guarantees around freedom of speech in the UK, social networks’ recent grey areas of rights and responsibilities were perhaps our only saving graces: take these away as all our online media strive to become respectably recognised and we might find we are left with very little true freedom of speech.

It may not be fashionable for people to suggest that what makes online media so fascinating is precisely its inability to get things absolutely right – but, for me anyhow, its biggest strength lies precisely in that: in stumbling across far bigger truths by getting some of them dramatically wrong.

If we lose the liberties which over-the-garden-fence discourses have, of late, afforded so many of us, we will gradually revert to a mode of communication so dependent on platoons of legal bodies, advice and dark corridors of injunctions that the “newness” online media initially brought with it will eventually become nothing more than a historical blip on the horizon.

The Pulitzer path will lead us back to traditional business models, mark my words. And the Rupert Murdochs of this world will eventually have their way.

Unashamed ambiguity and deniable outridership – now these should be our true cause and standard.

As well as our markers in the sand.

Agenda-setting and social media – an example of where it’s not working

agenda-setting, blogging, editing, editing reality, Fifth Estate, Fourth Estate, in a hole, Peter Levine, social media No Responses »

Sep 142011

Peter Levine provides some worrying data about social media’s inability to set agendas. The data would seem to confirm the assumption that, at least in one city in the United States, social media is perfect as an echo chamber – but not as a leader of editing reality:

[...] In [Baltimore, MD], the number of news outlets has proliferated to 53 “radio talk shows, … blogs, specialized new outlets, new media sites, TV stations, radio news programs, newspapers and their various legacy media websites.” But the number of reporters has fallen–fast. That means that there is more written and spoken text about the news, but it is highly repetitive. A search of six major news topics found that 83% of the articles and blog posts repeated the same material–perhaps sometimes with commentary–and more than half of the original text came from paid print media such as the Baltimore Sun.

He goes on to underline the unhappy conclusion that:

[...] This trend has the somewhat surprising result that city governments and other official institutions now have more, rather than less, control over the news.

Which kind of fits in with some of the thoughts in my own post the other day on police involvement in online media – and the implications this has for both traditional local-media business models as well as future freedom of expression.

I was hopeful a while ago here on the subject of the Fifth Estate. But if Levine’s observations above are anything to go by, it’s looking pretty clear that we need more data not less before we can fairly conclude that the brave new world of intelligent interconnectedness is going to provide is with a greater democracy than we have been used to.

Institutional vigilantes (or "watchdog by wiki")

blogging, democracy, Fifth Estate, Fourth Estate, mainstream media, on a high, sorted, watchdog by wiki No Responses »

Aug 062011

A lovely idea which has come my way via Emily Bell’s Twitter feed today - institutional vigilantes, if you like; or, alternatively, “watchdog by wiki”:

Imagine, then, a how-to guide setting forth the basic steps that any interested watchdog should take to scrutinize a municipality, a school district, or a redevelopment agency. It could be posted on a website that included pages for every government entity in a state. Did someone just upload the campaign-finance disclosure forms for every member of the Santa Barbara City Council? Check that box. Is there a city in South Los Angeles where public officials’ salaries have gone uninvestigated for three years? Send a roving volunteer there. Whenever nonprofit investigators or auditors uncovered corruption, eager journalists would still be just a phone call away. Call it watchdog by wiki.

On the back of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal and the part the Guardian newspaper played in pursuing it, I’d more or less committed an about-face with respect to the relationship between mainstream and social media, arguing that social media could never be more than a powerful echo chamber of properly funded journalism. But the piece linked to above – in relation to examples from the US and well worth reading in its entirety – seems to provide us with other examples which show that the situation is not so clear-cut. In the cases described, it was bloggers who pointed to the corruption taking place, whilst mainstream media took its corporate time (years on occasions) to pick up on the stories in question and deliver the appropriate coup de grace. This may in part be that in the US individual freedom of speech is much more sacredly understood. British libel laws, meanwhile, are so fierce that bloggers in the UK have to be brave souls indeed to go beyond what a well-funded newspaper with a roomful of lawyers is prepared to do on its lonesome.

If watchdog by wiki of British institutions and corporations is to work at all in the future, we are going to need some far-reaching changes to our legislation and institutional and corporate cultures. My own experience of the latter would seem to indicate that the immediate and current instinct when presented with misdemeanour and wrongdoing is to bury institutional heads in institutional sands. Whistleblowing, whilst clearly within the remit of HR policies worldwide, isn’t the first impulse of those who run pyramidal organisations.

Watchdog by wiki is an excellent idea – for democratic oversight of both government and private industry alike. But transplanting it from a country with freedom of speech in its constitutional DNA to a country ruled by precedent, old-boy networks, media barons and corrupt makers and shakers is not going to be an easy task.

On the other hand, whoever said true democracy would be easy?

The price of information should be zero precisely because its value is priceless

civic journalism, Fifth Estate, Fourth Estate, Guardian, Heather Brooke, on a high, WikiLeaks No Responses »

Jul 152011

Open-data initiatives have been bubbling away for a while now. The recent News International scandals show us we need such initiatives more than ever:

Open data is the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control. While not identical, open data has a similar ethos to those of other “Open” movements such as open source, open content, and open access. The philosophy behind open data has been long established (for example in the Mertonian tradition of science), but the term “open data” itself is recent, gaining popularity with the rise of the Internet and World Wide Web and, especially, with the launch of open-data government initiatives such Data.gov.

The connection may not be immediately obvious, but a piece by Heather Brooke writing in the Guardian yesterday describes how the former may avoid the latter in the future:

[...] The fact is, all information is vulnerable to release – it is simply a matter of the resources someone wants to devote to obtaining it. In Britain information is not equally accessible to all, rather its release depends on one’s wealth, power or privilege. Only the richest and most powerful media organisations have a shot at access and they, in turn, only want to expend their resources on investigations they believe will guarantee a story and a big audience – thus the focus is on sex, scandal and celebrity.

Brooke goes on to point out that:

When journalism is treated as just another widget in a commercial enterprise, the focus isn’t on truth, verification or public good, but productivity and output. [...]

To finally conclude that (the bold is mine):

Freedom of information laws bust open the cartel. They give everyone an equal right to access information. You don’t have to take anyone out to lunch. You don’t have to pay anyone or suppress a damaging story to maintain a flow of information. You simply ask, with the full power of the law behind you. The way to stop this black-market trade in official information isn’t to further criminalise valuable civic data, but to legitimise those records necessary for good reporting. By doing so we remove the patronage power of the elite and open the door to a new form of civic journalism.

And it is precisely this need for a more civic journalism which could release and allow both the Fourth and Fifth Estates to engender a useful partnership in the future - a partnership where paid journalism and its unpaid equivalent could ensure that government and business behaved both morally and efficiently.

For if the price of information becomes as close to zero as makes no difference … well, instead of those privileged eyes running corrupt news-gathering regimes for their own private interests, we’ll have those millions of crowdsourced intelligences accessing the truth on a daily basis.

A true civic journalism where the professional and amateur are bound together productively in one.

The WikiLeaks’ dream, in fact – without the histrionics and melodrama thrown in.

Resetting Britain to a kind of "year zero" (or "Why would entrepreneurs set up new media outlets?")

Britain, broken politics, broken society, Ed Miliband, entrepreneurs, Fifth Estate, Fourth Estate, new media, News Corp, on a high, Rupert Murdoch, social media, Spectator, www.politicalinnovation.org No Responses »

Jul 132011

Osbert Lancaster has asked a good friend of mine the following series of questions on Twitter this evening:

@Paul0Evans1 Hmm. Why would entrepreneurs set up new media outlets? Why might I invest in them? Is my blog a media outlet? NGO newsltr?

I’m fascinated in particular by the first two questions. One, for linguistic reasons. Two, for quite practical ones.

The first can be interpreted in two slightly different – but important – ways. “Why would entrepreneurs set up new media outlets?” doesn’t mean quite the same as “Why would entrepreneurs set up new media outlets?” And knowing the difference between the two and understanding the implications of such a difference might, in turn, very well help to answer the second of the four questions in this lovely 140-character summary of what may now excitingly face us in the aftermath of Rupert Murdoch’s humiliating – though possibly tactical – climbdown over BSkyB. As another tweet not a few minutes ago pointed out with cautious wisdom:

Nice to see Murdoch humiliated, but too early to gloat. This is a guy whose childhood sled was called ‘Crush All Enemies Without Hesitation’

Anyhow – back to the subject of this post. Real entrepreneurs – those who challenge existing ways of thinking – absolutely thrive in markets which tend more towards freedom than monopoly. Indeed, one of the basic functions of entrepreneurs in what we might term a wider society is to ensure that monopolistic competition – towards which all modern capitalism seems to wish to tend – is given a salutary jolt every so often.

If Mr Lancaster wants a good reason to invest in either new media outlets or new media outlets, post-Rupert Murdoch as has been, then the above reason could one of the first he might wish to consider: for only in a society where communication is free and considered can business be conducted in the kind of radical and constructive ways that these true entrepreneurs I talk about seem to prefer to avail themselves of. It is in all businesses’ interests then – all businesses, that is, which care to conduct their business ethically (or would prefer to) – for the media to operate with transparency; for the media in our country to reflect, to argue with and to challenge our shakers and makers in such a way that true dialogue – and not a simply sterile set of occasional consultations – becomes par for the course in our society.

“Why might I invest in them?” Why, indeed … Because, essentially, for particularly businesslike reasons, it would lay the foundations for a better business culture. When the Fourth and Fifth Estates communicate adult-like and with genuine interest in the issues at hand, so the businesspeople who will generate our wealth will know far more clearly that the ground rules are going to be grown-up and sincere.

And they will know that when they go into business, they can expect to be treated with coherence and understanding.

If the pact between our politicians and the media can convert itself in something rather more transparent and outgoing, it won’t only be the voters who’ll be able to heave a sigh of relief:

Do we now need to re-evaluate the House of Commons? Has it finally redeemed itself after MPs’ expenses? #hackgate #bskyb

It’ll also be our businesspeople who’ll know there’ll be one less thing to worry about – that is to say, the ever-present and bedevilled choice between a moral exchange on the one hand and underhandedness on the other will become far less problematic when we are able to create a society which visibly rejects the antics of the spivs and fly-by-nights.

What is really facing us, as we contemplate the rack and ruin which Rupert Murdoch’s methods will surely end up bringing to the investors in News Corp, is an opportunity to refashion a society. After the dictatorship of cultural life which News International has effected on British society – that “spell which is now broken” as I think Ed Miliband was reported as having said in a Spectator interview today – there is now a clear opportunity to decide how we can proceed: an illuminating and liberating opportunity, in fact, to start constructively at some kind of “year zero”.

What we really want from our media is that ability to engage at a peer-to-peer level – a dialogue between equals; a conversation where politics is no longer an evil game but, rather, an enabling device to improve the lot of everyone. And if we are to achieve this, then starting from scratch – realising in time that we actually do have that opportunity to wipe the slate clean and redo our media landscape – is about the most important thing we may yet be able to understand in the next six months to a year.

In Blair’s time, it was Saddam who fell; in Cameron’s, it could well be Murdoch

a con, British people, British Spring, Chris Bryant, Coalition capitalism, David Cameron, Fifth Estate, Guardian, in a hole, News Corp, on a high, Rupert Murdoch, Saddam Hussein, Tom Watson, Tony Blair No Responses »

Jul 112011

The latest revelations on the News International nightmare simply indicate that at the top of this media pyramid is a dictator in grave need of being toppled. Either he actively institutionalised criminality – or, through neglect and under his watch, he allowed it to become institutionalised.

During Blair’s reign, it was Saddam who fell. In Cameron’s, it could well be Murdoch. But not because of the authorities, not because of the police, not because of the checks and balances of the state.

Rather, because of MPs like Tom Watson and Chris Bryant, of newspapers like the Guardian with the financial resources and morality to pursue the story – and the Fifth Estaters amongst us who use Twitter, Facebook and blogging tools, all of which have allowed us to provide the good traditional journalism that can still be found out there with the people’s wings it required to flourish.

As Anthony Painter recently tweeted:

The fatal misjudgment that News Corp has made is that it’s always had a parliamentary majority behind it. This time it hasn’t. #phonehacking

The corollary is complete. News International was a de facto dictatorship, operating within the British body politic. And no politician of real import in recent times has cared to even attempt to defeat this dictatorship.

Each generation needs its villains. Blair had his opportunity to choose – and chose Iraq instead of Murdoch. Cameron had his opportunity to choose – and chose the British people instead of Murdoch. As I pointed out in August last year:

In a democracy, there are two ways to proceed before your true aims are rumbled. The first is to attempt to continually butter the population up – this was Blair and New Labour’s approach for many years. The second is to demoralise and divide all probable opposition prior to the event with acts such as Cameron’s Coalition are carrying out. Better than demoralise and divide, however, is the strategy of cutting supply lines and taking apart little by little regions of common association.

This is also something that the Coalition will find it hard not to do.

The cuts that are being effected may have an ideological bent designed to socially engineer us back into the Darwinian dark ages of 19th century capitalism, and they may also perpetuate and deepen a recession we were on the point of emerging from, but, principally, their main purpose – if we are to accept my tentative thesis – is to lay the ground for a far more profound set of changes further down the line: changes which will end up being imposed on a thoroughly frightened and unhappy set of atomised and splintered individuals, looking to the support that democratic socialism promised them even as the tactics I have described serve to slowly but permanently disintegrate them from their fellow men and women – as well as lead them, once more, as so many sad times in the past, to believe that dog-eat-dog philosophies are humankind’s inevitable fate.

And yet now the British people have chosen Murdoch – above all – as their target of choice. Now the British people have settled on the dictatorship they truly wish to desert.

So where does that leave Cameron and his blessedly fashioned neo-conservative project – made, as it is, to the measure of Murdoch’s ideologies; and as foreign to our shores as anything of such evil intent could ever be? Who will be left untarnished enough to be able to provide the moral and political support to such a futile and suddenly hollow device?

For this is the question that surely occurs to us all: if Rupert Murdoch’s empire is no longer fit and proper to run the British press and media, what does that say of David Cameron himself?

A free press versus what we’ve got right now

David Cameron, Fifth Estate, free press, free speech, in a hole, Jeremy Hunt, journalism, PCC, regulation, Rupert Murdoch, Sky, unclassifiable No Responses »

Jul 082011

I can’t imagine how anyone doesn’t want a free press. OK. With the exception of some people who live in places like North Korea – or, alternatively, the occasional British politician. So we all agree on that. But there does seem to exist an awfully deliberate misunderstanding of the choices we have to make if we want to achieve such a beast.

Whenever British politicians have spoken in the past about their relationship with the press, they’ve always gingerly couched their public pronouncements with the sort of mealy-mouthed statements which remind one of barge-poles and devil’s spoons. Today’s speech by David Cameron on the subject of quite a number of things – mainly, it has to be said, Andy Coulson’s “second chance” (for which Cameron may soon find crucifixion the easier option) – also happened to touch on the matter of press freedom. And for once, it clearly led us to understand how dreadfully the Press Complaints Commission had failed in its remit. (If, that is, it actually has a remit to fail. Like many hallowed British institutions, so much of what goes on here seems to have more to do with precedent and who you know than objective checklists and criteria …)

He did mention regulation too – or, at least, I think he did. Now whenever the printed press and its representatives hear that dreaded word, they immediately clamber up onto their barricades and declaim the importance of holding shakers and makers to account. They hardly ever include their own CEOs, it has to be said – but a morality of sorts, even so, can be detected by the more charitable amongst us.

And then what we have got from our mealy-mouthed politicians, looking to cultivate their cosy relationships with powerful print moguls in order that they may “explain their democracy better to the people”, is a lukewarm adherence to the principles of self-regulation.

I have to say that I do actually agree with the latter. And my adherence isn’t lukewarm at all. I’d much prefer a systemic solution to as many important government decisions as possible – than the terrible alternative, which is what we often have now: idiosyncratic, untransparent and – potentially – politically biased decisions made by self-serving politicians looking to winning masses of votes via top-down communication strategies. The conflict of interests couldn’t be greater.

So this is essentially what I feel. If we want a free press, self-regulated and autonomous, we need a far more plural ownership than we currently have. We need the invisible hand of the market-place to ensure that politicians will never fear again the future patronage of a Murdoch or Daily Mail. These units of production need to have a certain size to ensure the kind of investigative journalism carried out by the Guardian recently continues to be carried out for the benefit of all of us – whether professional politicians, amateur voters or self-proclaimed members of the Fifth Estate. But there must also exist automatic measures of breakage which trip into action when a newspaper or media organisation gets bigger than a certain size. As I have suggested a couple of posts ago, this trip switch could be an algorithm or simply a checklist in the hands of specialist personnel, which would ensure no politician would ever find themselves again in the kind of position Jeremy Hunt currently occupies.

A bit like making the Bank of England independent – but in this case in relation to our treasure trove of culture.

The alternative to all the above is, of course, quite simple. If we wish to continue with monopolistic media, we need a much heavier – and, what’s more, external – regime of regulation than we have been used to.

So the choice is clear:

a free, autonomous, self-regulated press, possibly more digital than anything else; structured in small but sustainable chunks of ownership which allow for useful value-adding content to be created; essentially, a press which no longer has to churn out PR releases under the banner of original journalism but is able to truly inform, explain and investigate democracy on behalf of the rest of us – even as it manages to maintain a competitive plurality able to support and give space to all viewpoints in British society
a monopolistic press, still mainly based around the printed press, where 20th century publishing models are sustained – and where influence and favours are curried persistently by self-interested parties on both sides; a press, that is, where regulation must inevitably be as heavy as it currently is in TV and radio broadcasting

If you want an autonomous press, then, there is no alternative to the plurality of the true market-place. If you want a monopolistic press, where the invisible hand of multiple offers is slowly but always amputated, there is no alternative to heavy regulation.

It’s as simple as that.

Why the News of the World’s closure isn’t primarily a victory for people power

Fifth Estate, Guardian, journalism, News of the World, on a high, Sky, social media, sorted, Twitter No Responses »

Jul 072011

It’s just been announced – in a desperate attempt by Rupert Murdoch to deal with a situation that is clearly spiralling out of control – that the News of the World is to be closed after a final edition this Sunday. There has been much understandable joy expressed on Twitter – but if truth be told, we should bear carefully in mind John Naughton’s wise words this morning on the subject of properly financed media outlets. As I tweeted not long ago:

This wasn’t question of people power vs corruption – rather, good old-fashioned well-financed journalism providing trigger for people power.

And as Naughton pointed out:

Here’s a cautionary question for those of us who are gung-ho about the possibilities of the online world: where would the UK phone-hacking story be without the Guardian?

Answer: nowhere. The Murdoch political and news-management machine would have been able to get away with it. It was the Guardian that kept the phone-hacking story alive, long after most other journalistic institutions, Parliament, the police and the Press Complaints Commission had given up on it. One of the many reasons Peter Oborne’s Telegraph essay on the affair was so remarkable is that he paid tribute to the Guardian for performing “such a wonderful service to public decency by bringing to light the shattering depravity of Mr Murdoch’s newspaper empire”. For one British newspaper to pay tribute to another in this way is almost unprecedented, but in this case Oborne is right.

The really important point is that there are some things that can only be done by a properly organised and funded news organisation. Investigating a scandal like this requires great skill (of the kind displayed by Nick Davies and his colleagues), plus determination, courage and resources — legal and logistical. These don’t come cheap and have to be funded, somehow. I yield to nobody in my enthusiasm for what Charlie Beckett calls networked journalism, and I’m a great believer in harnessing collective IQ by crowdsourcing and so on, but a scandal like the illegal behaviour of the Digger’s satraps and their accomplices in the Metropolitan Police is unlikely to be exposed just by the Net. Much of the posturing by print media about how important newspapers are for democracy is just cant, because it confuses a format (the printed paper) with function (journalism). What matters — what democracy needs — is great journalism of the kind practised by Nick Davies and his colleagues. And that needs organisations — and business models — that can support it.

(Full disclosure: I write for the Guardian’s sister paper, the Observer, but am not — and never have been — an employee, and these views are very much my own.)

So, in reality, this hasn’t been the start of a new age of people power but, rather, the uncertain fashioning of a new compact between old established ways of funding and running investigative journalism and the intelligent and symbiotic intertextuality of a new social media. Without the Internet, we bloggers and tweeters are nothing. Without the real world digging about, all we can do is go on what is put before is. We still need you all, you honourable journalistic souls – of whom there must be so many. But you too, with your acts and your toil, should remind us why we should pay you for what you do.

Don’t spend your time churning out Press Association remashes. Add real value – as the Guardian has most clearly done here – and there will come a time when we will decide yet again to pay you for everything you communicate. And what’s more, as the online campaigns click evermore effectively with offline investigation, between us and together we may yet manage to create a truly democratic connection with what may still become a truly useful Fifth Estate.
____________________

Postscript: it is of course a victory of sorts – but Murdoch is a chess player, not a hundred metre sprinter. Whilst the News of the World will be closed down now, it’s already been announced the Sun will become a seven-day operation – essentially to substitute its sister paper in the autumn, when presumably the BSkyB deal will also be done and dusted. Be careful, as I have already said more than once over the past few days, despite short-term victories, that Murdoch doesn’t achieve his ultimate goals – and not only achieve them but also, in the end, if the shares of BSkyB start to tumble, at a knockdown price at that.

Boycotting the News of the World is playing silly sanctimonious buggers

"Citizen Kane", 20th Century Fox, a con, David Cameron, Fifth Estate, Fourth Estate, Fox News, News of the World, Paul Evans, Peter Oborne, Rupert Murdoch, unclassifiable No Responses »

Jul 062011

I’m still puzzled by the joy with which people are proclaiming successful the campaign to boycott the News of the World. Rupert Murdoch has been a brilliant editor over the years; but more importantly, a very clever businessman – using his very many companies to lever new business in new countries and sectors. On the other hand, his is – well, was – a soulless empire where what works often got priority over what was politically coherent. More recently, with Fox News in the US and other foolishnesses in the UK, there definitely seems to exist a clear-cut political agenda more akin to that displayed by Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane in the film of the same name. But there were, once upon a time, jewels of wisdom in Rupert’s empire which would grace any editorial bookshelf. So we could argue that when he got it right, he went with his instincts to contract clever teams and let them do their stuff – and when he got it wrong, he was giving in to the hubris of power; doing, in fact, precisely what we have criticised him and his ilk for not doing often enough: that is to say, actually getting involved in the “dirty dirty” of daily process.

Anyhow, whilst I’ve been trying to work out a useful way of trying to say exactly what I think about this whole affair, only rude words seem to have come to mind (thus, I suppose, for me at least, the unusually forceful title to this post). In truth, I see no great victory with honour in declaring to all and sundry that companies like Ford have:

[...] suspended advertising in News of the World newspaper after allegations that the tabloid hacked the voicemail of a missing schoolgirl who was later found murdered.

“We are awaiting an outcome from the News of the World investigation and expect a speedy and decisive response,” Ford said in a statement.

Only to add (the bold is mine):

“Pending this response we will be using alternative media within and outside News International Group instead of placing Ford advertising in the News of the World,” it added.

This isn’t a boycott but simply a sham – and an unabashed recognition that the bad practices it would appear people working for News International are guilty of are more widespread in the industry of journalism than people are caring to recognise.

And if you don’t believe me then read Peter Oborne in the Spectator a few minutes ago. Some choice excerpts from a lovely piece which deserves your time – taking us, as it does, directly back into Citizen Kane-land:

[...] There are those who maintain that David Cameron is little more than a high-grade public relations man. Cameron’s long association with the Murdoch empire, dating from his dreadful decision to hire Andy Coulson — a former editor of the News of the World who resigned after a phone-hacking scandal, and now looks to be in even deeper trouble — unfortunately suggests that the prime minister’s detractors are on to something.

And then there’s this:

The truth is that very few newspapers can declare themselves entirely innocent of buying illegal information from private detectives. A 2006 report by the Information Commissioner gave a snapshot into the affairs of one such ‘detective’, caught in so-called ‘Operation Motorman’. The commissioner’s report found that 305 journalists had been identified ‘as customers driving the illegal trade in confidential personal information’. It named each newspaper group, the number of offences and the number of guilty journalists (see above). But, as the commission observed, coverage of this scandal ‘even in the broadsheets, at the time of publication, was limited’. The same reticence has been seen, until now, over the voicemail-hacking scandal.

The truth, then, as Oborne sees it, is much broader and much more depressing. The current scandal, initially dating from 2002, is rooted deep in the epicentre of New Labour territory – and it will be very difficult for anyone to convince anyone that Labour didn’t turn a blind eye to behaviours and activities any decent government should have had the guts to face up to.

That Cameron isn’t that kind of government goes without saying.

The progressives amongst us would have hoped, however, for something different from our own leaders.

Everything I could usefully say on this matter, I said yesterday. The only way up is down. Everything has to come to light – no one should be allowed to re-establish the establishment without a proper process of truth and reconciliation first taking place.

And if this is not going to happen – and the establishment manages instead to brazenly re-establish itself, as Paul from Never Trust a Hippy suggests may still happen – then we really will need to create a Fifth Estate of common interconnected interest: a Fifth Estate like we have never seen before.
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Update to this post, 07/07/2011: this piece, again from Peter Oborne, this time writing in the Telegraph, is full of the kind of clarity and moral compass we can only hope the rest of the British establishment is looking to re-acquire. And again, a couple of choice paragraphs from yet another piece which totally deserves your full attention:

The Prime Minister cannot claim in defence that he was naively drawn in to this lethal circle. He was warned – many times. Shortly before the last election he was explicitly told about the company he was keeping. Alan Rusbridger – editor of The Guardian newspaper, which has performed such a wonderful service to public decency by bringing to light the shattering depravity of Mr Murdoch’s newspaper empire – went to meet one of Mr Cameron’s closest advisers shortly before the last election. He briefed this adviser very carefully about Mr Coulson, telling him many troubling pieces of information that could not then be put into the public domain.

Mr Rusbridger then went to see Nick Clegg, now the deputy prime minister. So Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg – the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister – knew all about Mr Coulson before last May’s coalition negotiations. And yet they both paid no attention and went on to make him the Downing Street director of communications, an indiscretion that beggars belief.

The implosion of British journalism, the deconstruction of the British establishment and the need for a Fifth Estate

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Jul 052011

And I say the implosion of British journalism, because a helluva lot of what goes under the guise of journalism here is in the hands of editors like Rebekah Brooks who work for companies like News International.

Anyhow. According to the Guardian, Rebekah Brooks (who used to be Rebekah Wade – therein her possible confusion about exactly what happened during her tenure at the News of the World) is apparently “sickened at news of the Milly Dowler phone hacking”. Meanwhile, over at Stumbling and Mumbling, Chris explains how remote-control management – where leaders spend their time in strategic meetings but never get down amongst the “dirty dirty” of daily process and activity – can lead to such awful things happening.

And quite unbeknownst to the upper echelons in corporate structures.

He concludes thus:

[...] Could it be that remote control managers function much as the gods did in ancient times. They get blame when things go wrong and praise when they go right, but in fact have no power at all, except that which ignorant people impute to them? They are, technically, redundant and are sustained in their lucrative positions only by superstition and ideology.

He also points out that there could well be an alternative motive for not wishing to get too involved in the unseemly realities of ordinary work:

[...] Like Mafia bosses, senior managers leaves the dirty work to their underlings.

To be honest, I think what’s really happening here is a massive deconstruction of the British establishment. There we were, in our tolerantly racist ways, criticising the PIGS for their corruption and instability – when really the puff-pastry approach to governance is just as widely practised here as anywhere else. The first chapter was MPs’ expenses; the second chapter is the absolute absence of journalistic and media integrity; and the third chapter will – if Paul has anything to do with it – mean the total implementation of the “Mediterranean” method of running nation states, an implementation which will surely outdo anything Italy or Greece have ever achieved to date.

For after MPs were outed by the Fourth Estate, who is left to out the journalists but other journalists? And when was self-observance ever a guarantee of conceptual hygiene?

I tell you what we do need. We need to harness the power of the ordinary man and woman. And we need to give it a name.

How about the Fifth Estate? As Wikipedia notes (the bold is mine):

Nimmo and Combs assert that political pundits constitute a Fifth Estate. Media researcher Stephen D. Cooper argues that bloggers are the Fifth Estate. William Dutton has argued that the Fifth Estate is not simply the blogging community, nor an extension of the media, but ‘networked individuals’ enabled by the Internet in ways that can hold the other estates accountable.

Yep. That’s what we need. And perhaps that’s what we’ve now got. Mr Cameron may believe that all he needs to do is to rework Blair ten years on. But ten years on, things are different out here – and the Internet is an element whose behaviours cannot be easily predicted.

Paul may be right when he says:

Once the fuss has blown over, Hunt will give the whole thing the go-ahead. And any hopes Labour had of not being savaged relentlessly by the Murdoch press over the next four years are now gone.

But the relentless savaging, from a 20th century editorial empire, anchored in a world where MySpace was once worth hundreds of millions, was then seen as a channel for corporate content and now is a backwater of the Internet, may not – in an innovative social media world where much of our time is spent creating our own content – be half as effective as it was held to be in New Labour times.

My money’s on the ordinary man and woman.

What do you think?