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On #plebgate squared – and how we’re stitching up a whole society

Coalition, government, in a hole, mainstream media, police, police force, police service, police state, policed state 1 Response »

Dec 182012

This report from Channel 4 on the #plebgate affair throws up another video worth your time. Watch it first.

http://www.channel4.com/news/andrew-mitchell-plebgate-police-cctv-downing-street

Several immediate reactions, in no particular order of importance:

If Andrew Mitchell is telling the truth, and our government is so tardy about investigating and getting at the truth of what its own allegedly get up to (or not), what does this tell us about its ability to devise and engineer policy for a whole society? I mean if it can’t get right one piddling little report into events which supposedly took place in an area crammed full of CCTV cameras the government itself owns, what are the implications for their ability to fashion the destination of the NHS, Legal Aid, the Budget and its aftermath and a whole host of other matters of national importance?
If Andrew Mitchell is telling the truth, and both the Sun and the Telegraph duly followed their journalistic procedures, what does this say about the quality of their procedures?
If Andrew Mitchell is telling the truth, and the newspapers which reported this affair were prepared to use material leaked by a person who had a close relationship with the police, doesn’t this indicate they’ve done this on far more occasions beforehand – during #hackgate for starters and inevitably since? Doesn’t it, in fact, indicate such behaviours are par for the course?
Finally, if Andrew Mitchell is telling the truth, and now – on the basis of what he alleges happened to him at the hands of some individuals or other – wants something to be done in order to re-establish the belief he had in the police prior to these aforementioned events, aren’t we allowed to ask him why such a firm and definite trust wasn’t already severely damaged by the revelations around Milly Dowler, Hillsborough and Orgreave onwards?

Yes. I feel for Andrew Mitchell if the situation is as he describes it. Just as I feel, as any human being surely must, for the aspersions cast on the reputations of others in recent times. But I can’t help also feeling something bigger is happening here. Andrew Mitchell doesn’t want what has happened to him to happen again in Britain. I agree, of course. But I’d go much much further. Personally, I wouldn’t want the sex abuse scandals to repeat themselves; I wouldn’t want the fuel poverty scandals to repeat themselves; I wouldn’t want the Hillsborough cover-up to happen again; I wouldn’t want my unhappiness with and distrust of my government’s ability to manage a country to perpetuate itself any longer.

Yet what I believe is really taking place here is that all of us – all of us as a society – are being stitched up by forces quite beyond our ken. If Andrew Mitchell truly tells it as it has occurred, and he’s not now spinning the revelations for his own purposes, then this is really a rather unsatisfactory – even severe – matter. If someone like Mr Mitchell, at the heart of government, cannot get the truth out when a frame is being engineered around him by other institutions, what hope do any of the rest of us have when faced by analogous circumstances?

Are we really saying our society is so very corrupt/inefficient/inept that one of the most senior figures in government can be removed from his position after a cursory and inconclusive investigation by people on his own side into accusations splashed by the same old media dynamics which Tom Watson, the Guardian and others spent so much time, money and resources trying to unmask?

The stitch-up I talk about? This – that is to say, everything I describe above – is all leading us to a situation where we simply can’t trust anyone again to be telling the unvarnished truth. Instead of engaging enthusiastically and directly, immediately and sincerely, with our peers and representatives and leaders and enablers, we are slowly but surely going down the path of an encroaching and cynical disengagement.

A cynical disengagement where we will be forced to end up concluding that nothing – but nothing – can be relied on any more.

And who really benefits from such a reaction and such a dispiriting conclusion? Who really benefits from such a bankrupting of democracy?

Well, I think it’s actually time that you told me.

But what I can say for sure is that it ain’t going to be people like us.

For just once in our lives, can we focus on what we need?

in a hole, mainstream media, music video, new media, news-gathering, newspapers, politics No Responses »

Dec 072012

http://youtu.be/1vxVyaYuGYE

The news seems to be an unremitting swirl of contradictory forces at the moment. And that “at the moment” seems to have been going on for ages. Whilst newspapers can regulate themselves, Twitter users must face prison and massive fines imposed from without the community itself; whilst freedoms and privacies belong to the rich, the very innermost thoughts of our emails and electronic communications are shortly to belong – if they do not already – to those who govern us and supposedly serve us.

And then we have bankers from the financial services sector who continue to earn bonuses whilst the poor lose their jobs or their houses; whilst the poor who work can no longer afford to live where their jobs demand they must; whilst those in a job become the working-poor.

Hardly a day goes by, in fact, when some item or other of contradictory news doesn’t pull us this way and that in our wearisome fight to fix and fasten a clear agenda to our lives. It’s almost as if those who run the media – and by that, I don’t mean the journalists themselves – are looking to deliberately bemuse, bamboozle and confuse with a surfeit of data, half-truths and – more often than not – downright lies.

So here’s a suggestion. For just once in our lives, can we focus on what we need? For just once in our lives, can we decide to define ourselves in terms of what we want? Can we stop being horrified by this terrible act or that and – instead – aim to inscribe ourselves with the perspicacity of the firm?

We need that certainty, for sure. If we continue to allow ourselves to be buffeted to and fro by these terribly specific and detailed mini-storms of contention, we will be totally unable to understand any bigger picture – we will be totally unable to act.

Yes. It’s important to bear witness to each and every pain out there. Someone must do this job. But if you live your life through the emanations of every screaming angel of dark foreboding, you will become as incapacitated as any human being ever can be.

We need, above all, to focus on what we need. We need to focus on what democracy needs, what our society needs, what our wider 21st century civilisation needs:

Freedom to express one’s opinions, above all.
A collaborative space – call it our body politic, if you must – to allow such opinions thus freely expressed to encounter and engage with the opinions of others.
A legal system which allows any disputes thus caused to be judiciously decided upon to the satisfaction of all egalitarian parties.
An education system which creates an environment of society, support, innovation, creativity, imagination, technology, implementation and sustainability.
Welfare and health systems which give to those who are most vulnerable without attaching any blame.
A system of commerce which recognises achievement accurately and rewards the “hows” of good business just as much as it does its “whats”.
A wider culture of communication and relationships which encourages and engenders respect, humanity, humour and goodwill.

And how have I come about the above seven items? One for each day of the week, perhaps? Or are they, in some way, exactly what I fear our most recent three decades of political and sociocultural endeavour have aimed finally to excise from what we used to call the United Kingdom?

When put to music, my plea sounds so very easy.

When put into practice, my plea becomes so very vain.

I’d rather we thought of music and how its mathematical perfection shows us just how well human beings can work in harmony – at least, when they are driven in some way, and for whatever reason, to do so. So here, to finish, is some more music. Music which came my way via Paul on Google+ the other day. Music which settles the politically disintegrating soul.

http://youtu.be/Lt7KcHvwb2c

Leveson, Craig Murray and our concentrated media juice

Craig Murray, in a hole, Leveson inquiry, mainstream media No Responses »

Dec 012012

Craig Murray has an interesting post up this morning which argues the following:

I am with David Cameron and Rupert Murdoch in one respect on the Leveson report. British mainstream politicians are still more repulsive and self-seeking than the British mainstream media, and state regulation of the media, however modulated, is not good.

But Leveson was answering the wrong question.

The real problem is the ownership structure of UK mainstream media. Newspapers and broadcasters function as the propaganda tool of vast and intertwined corporate interests, shaping public opinion to the benefit of those corporate interests and ensuring popular support for politicians prepared to be complicit with those interests.

And I think I have already argued something similar on these pages – though perhaps less succinctly. He then goes on to suggest this solution:

The only answer to this is to break up the corporate structure of the UK mainstream media. The legislative framework to do this is not difficult. What needs to be changed are the criteria. I would propose something like this; no organisation, state or private, should be allowed effective control of more than 20% of the national or regional newspaper market or the television market, or more than 15% of those combined markets.

But here I’m inclined to believe that Craig is also answering the wrong question.

The problem of plurality across the globalised world of journalism is not only one of ownership – perhaps not even primarily one of ownership – but, rather, one of concentration of sources.

Churnalism, it’s called:

Too much of latterday journalism is actually churnalism:

The study, carried out by postgraduate students in 2010, found that between 11.6% and 21% of newspaper stories across eight major daily publications were mainly or entirely generated by public relations material, and that between 32% and 50% of all stories contained elements of public relations material. The worst offender was the Irish Times (21% of stories comprising all or mainly public relations material) with the Evening Herald scoring best (11.6% comprising all or mainly public relations material).The other newspapers examined were the Daily Mirror (12%), the Irish Examiner (16%), the Daily Mail (13%) and the Irish Sun (13.6%). All the figures for the Irish Independent are currently unavailable, but the students found that 46% of all stories in the Independent contained public relations material – a figure which is broadly in line with the other newspapers.

If we take the case of the Press Association (whose fault it can hardly be for the situation I am about to describe), we get this pretty terrifying situation:

The Press Association produces over 100 stories on weekdays.^[1] The choice of stories by the Press Association has a large impact on coverage in UK media. A study to quantify this found that 70% of UK news articles in the five most notable quality London based newspapers were largely influenced by the Press Association’s copy (or the few other much smaller agencies in the UK). 30% of stories were simple copies.^[2]

So whilst Leveson is right to focus on the content that actually gets generated, and Craig is right to point out the importance of concentrations of media ownership as a systemic block to plurality, in themselves intelligent answers to both questions posed would not sort out the apparently dismal state of the British press. For even if we could control better the unnecessary invasions of privacy that have clearly taken place over the past couple of decades, and even if we could ensure more corporate organisations were viable players in our media landscape (whether straightforwardly capitalist or more innovatively mutualist in some way), we’d still have the problem of rising costs and falling revenues driving down the desire – or ability – to generate original content.

The tendency, trend and temptation to use something which a PR department of an interested institution – or wire-service organisations like the Press Association itself – had already created, prepared and angled would continue to lead to an effective concentration of opinion. The real problem, then, isn’t Leveson’s wrong question or, indeed, Murray’s concentrations of media ownership – if either were resolved, we’d still have a serious issue. No. The real problem is that there seems, in a world of billowing data, to be little incentive – little potential bottom line, if you like – to create true and honest journalism which drives original investigation and plural communication.

And so to one final question we might care to pose: is it the industrial model which is falling apart here – or our desire as consumers to properly pay for and read the truth?

Is it, in fact, that we tend not to value the truth as much as we did?

Perhaps scandalous highs have replaced a closer approximation to reality.

Not an easy call, this one.

Not an easy call, at all.

Why the Tories really want mayoral elections (and what to do about it)

Boris Johnson, elections, electoral reform, journalism, Ken Livingstone, mainstream media, mayors, New Statesman, revolving doors, soap operas, unclassifiable No Responses »

May 052012

This story from the Telegraph early this morning really says it all:

Boris Johnson rescued the Conservatives from disastrous results in the local elections last night, bucking the national trend to win a second term as Mayor of London.

Do we really need to look more closely at why Cameron was looking for a “Boris in every city”? They are saying that London’s heavily pro-Boris Evening Standard won it for Boris – but if truth be told, the opportunity existed because London decided a long time ago it wanted to base its body politic on personality politics.

Personality politics lends itself perfectly to media influence. When yet another soap opera-like character can fill the public consciousness, can be tracked and followed on his or her own daily journey of discovery, journalists have something to narrate. We all, after all, understand the inner workings of another human being. Of such workings, we have plenty of experience – and writing a story up in time for a deadline becomes so much easier.

As I said last October:

Journalists are to our modern society what the oral narrators were to the ancients. Their main responsibility does not lie in telling the truth (though this they may do) but, rather, in making the world a place we feel we can survive. They explain events by tying together personages into what are essentially random actions – and thus, by so doing, they give us the impression there is an underlying pattern. I have long realised, ever since at uni I was taught to compare the structure behind the layout of the Sun newspaper to the leitmotifs of the Bible, how – since time immemorial – newspapers, as well as the media more generally, have served to provide us with a sense of security about our sadly accurate perceptions of the world out there.

We know it’s totally random – but we need someone to sustainably say it isn’t. Which is why content industries of all shapes and sizes always flourish – whatever the wider economic circumstances. They, like the oral narrators of old, provide shape to our shapeless voids. And that is truly no mean feat in a world where chance can afflict us at any moment.

Meanwhile, in politics, in a similarly unconvincing way, the reshuffle of overarching responsibilities allows someone at the top – generally a prime minister or party leader of some sort – to give the impression they’re flexing real muscles; even as the reality may be something quite different. I really can’t get too worked up about reshuffles of any kind, in fact – whether governmental or party political, whether of my own side’s or the opposition’s. And that others find them significant shows how important soap-opera dynamics are to our daily existences.

And so to the Tories and why they are so absolutely gung-ho on mayoral structures: not only do those who would be elected by such structures find it easier to garner and maintain the media support they need to gain the power in question but, also, as a kind of political plus of cleansing proportions, we all get the impression that real power is actually being exerted.

Why do we feel better about people like Boris at the helm? Because Boris makes us feel, through his media coverage and his own undoubted personality, that someone can do something about the manifestly random universe out there.

Boris is good because the media, like most everyone else, like to go down the line of least resistance – and so, even if revolving doors and business influence didn’t serve to flavour the dish of the day, there would be a natural human tendency to write up his colourful exploits with labourly gratitude for articles easily submitted.

Ken, meanwhile, whether you like him personally or not (his reported comments on the Jewish community were the last straw for me I have to say), would ask the journalists following his trail to talk about stuff such as policies, costings and strategies for the future – all clearly matters requiring more careful research than soap-opera journalism generally asks of us.

Is there anything we can do about it? Well. For one thing, vote against personality politics. Something I believe people in nine out of ten cities did on Thursday.

If we don’t want the media to rule the roost with their lines of understandable least resistance, nor allow the Tories to bring into the frame the media’s undeniable ability to nudge us in one direction or another, let’s keep personalities out of the frame by not voting for electoral structures which make faces more important than the teams which, working day-to-day on the ground, strive so hard to improve the quality of our democracy.

____________________

Further reading: New Statesman has a more measured take on Boris and Ken and the reasons behind their different destinies. Well worth a read.

Does secrecy ever get intruded upon?

a con, mainstream media, national security, secrecy, security, voters, WikiLeaks No Responses »

Apr 192012

The prostitution scandal currently affecting the American Secret Service, and which has already led to three dismissals, is interesting. If we were still living in a world where WikiLeaks held sway, this would surely have been a story they’d have run. But it isn’t such a world.

So why – and more importantly how – is the story being run?

It’s not being run because upstanding Americans from the Moral Majority – or indeed the liberal left – are unhappy at such acts. This is clear enough from recent political declarations, which, while mentioning ethical issues in pretty quick passing, go on to display the following narrative arc:

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Ms Collins, a Republican who represents Maine in the Senate, also said she had asked Mr Sullivan a number of questions during her phone briefing.

“Who were these women? Could they have been members of groups hostile to the United States? Could they have planted bugs, disabled weapons, or… jeopardised [the] security of the president or our country?”

The question of course, as always, is who does it benefit to run such a story at such a time? Obama, because it distracts from other matters out there? The Republicans, because it casts Obama in a bad light in the eyes of Hispanic voters? Or maybe the newspapers themselves from a pecuniary point of view, because they’re owed one for previous favours rendered?

In reality, it leads one to believe that an intruded-upon secrecy simply doesn’t exist. Whatever we see, it’s because someone who knows wants us to see it. We’re always going to be at the mercy of that manipulatory instinct to engineer our perceptions; always going to be unable to see things directly and with clarity ourselves.

If our politics is really as “crap” as some are now saying, we need look no further than the above impulse to know the reason why.

Politics does not search out the truth. Politics looks to degrade our appreciation of what’s right and what’s wrong. And pretending, occasionally, that our media serve to cast light on dark realities is just one more part of the game those in power are playing with their voters.

Does Cameron want to liberate or reinforce?

David Cameron, grassroots leadership, in a hole, leadership, liberation, mainstream media, reinforcement No Responses »

Oct 062011

David Cameron was recently asking us to discover the “can-do” spirit which on previous occasions put the Great back in Britain. Apart from the fact which Peter pointed out in a recent tweet …

British or what? Guardian: ’52% of English voters choose British first compared to 19% of Scots, and 30% of Welsh.’ 19% – and falling fast!

… we also should ask ourselves to what extent governments have a responsibility to define the patterns which determine our lives. That is to say, with what right do people like Cameron think they can decide what is good for us and what isn’t?

On the other hand, there is the possibility that the benign forces of the market which supposedly have a God-given right to operate unseen and unbound are already making things far worse than they might. As I tweeted not long ago:

Daytime TV is either Jeremy Kyle, malarial children or loan sharks. No wonder stay-at-home people get depressed.

The free-market forces which lead to such content being disseminated on such a consistent basis to carers, parents and all kinds of homeworkers really must have their impact on how people who already suffer from the downsides of potential isolation feel about their condition. And not only in this individualised context – the wider national despair this might also lead to.

I suppose, really, what I’m suggesting here is that some kind of cultural (if not social) engineering is needed to ensure the countries which currently make up the UK don’t drown in their own miserable responses to the massive crisis which awaits us. In this, I can understand what Cameron is apparently getting at – even if I find it difficult to believe he really means it.

There is every argument, then, that we do need interventionist governments which are prepared to define a line and navigate such choppy waters.

The problem is that Cameron doesn’t seem to be anything but a reinforcer of the downsides of the capitalist marketplace. And that, after Mandelson’s years of being oh so comfortable with wealth, bodes well for absolutely no one.

As a final thought, there was something in his Tory Party piece I found really thoughtful, which went down in mainstream media – as far as I could see – as a badly-scripted incongruence of untidy speechwriting. This was when he said the following (the bold is mine):

Nobody wants false optimism. And I will never pretend there are short cuts to success. But success will come: with the right ideas, the right approach, the right leadership. Leadership from government: to set out the direction we must take, and the choices we must make. But leadership also from you. Because the things that will really deliver success are not politicians or government. It’s the people of Britain, and the spirit of Britain.

And he came back to the same point a little later on when he underlined it thus:

That’s why so much of my leadership is about unleashing your leadership.

What’s really interesting about this – and even thoughtful, as I said before – is that it is a textbook example of how leadership is seen in those large corporations where leadership is truly understood to be the responsibility of everyone.

That Cameron can only see things through the perspective of his wealth and privilege is surely a given many people are inclined to suffer from.

Sometimes, however, that very same wealth and privilege can provide nuggets of perceptive ideas we really shouldn’t discard out of hand – not least because they can be rethreaded for our own purposes. This particular case, I would argue, is clearly one of these examples – even as mainstream media has chosen to interpret it as an argument without sense or sensibility.

Funny, really. When he does get it right, they criticise him for being unclear. I’m beginning to wonder if the real problem here isn’t that the media simply lives in a cocoon of its own – fixed, unchanging, unmutated for decades: surprising ideas are clearly beyond their ability to assimilate properly before that deadline – and so it is that politicians find themselves obliged, time and time again, to give up on the new, bright and potentially useful.

The press, the public and the definitive downsides of triangulation (or more on re-evaluating Ed Miliband)

Dan Hodges, Ed Miliband, Labour Uncut, mainstream media, Margaret Thatcher, Michael Dugher, on a high, Peter Oborne, Psycho, triangulation No Responses »

Oct 042011

One of the most read pieces on this blog recently was this post, framing Ed Miliband’s recent speech in terms of the reception Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” received on its first showings. I then suggested that our Red Ed might be turning himself into Ready Eddy. Meanwhile, Eoin analyses data which suggests voters are happy – where the commentariat huff and puff – for Miliband to turn his back on Blair. Then, going against the Labour grain perhaps but in line with the aforementioned commentariat, Dan Hodges, over at Labour Uncut, had this to say of Miliband’s week:

We have to understand. We need to grasp what has just happened to the Labour party.

Ed Miliband did not have a bad week. He had a grotesque, cataclysm of a week.

The conundrum gets more involved, though, with this latest research highlighted by Liberal Conspiracy, worth reading in full – and the conclusion to which runs as follows (the bold is mine):

There are two lessons here I think. First, bland centrism doesn’t necessarily mean you get elected. Second, the press is out of touch with public perception of where Ed Miliband and David Cameron politically stand.

As a tangential idea to keep up in the forefront of our erstwhile triangulating political minds, I also like this observation from the same article:

So does this all mean being centrist gets you elected? Not necessarily. The Libdems are placed broadly in the centre by voters, and yet they languish at 11-15% in the polls.
Why? Kellner says:

When we delve into the figures more closely, we see why. Conservative voters dislike him because they think he is left-of-centre – while Labour voters reject him as too far to the right for their taste. These attitudes cancel each other out in Clegg’s overall average.

And so we come to a final re-evaluation of what Ed Miliband might be up to – if, that is, he’s as intelligent and intentioned a politician as I believe he may be becoming. Again from Labour Uncut – this time, from within the most inner place of Miliband’s own inner circle:

By contrast, and by coincidence, as I made my way out of the hall in Liverpool, I bumped into two very senior business figures. One is a longstanding Labour supporter, who has made millions in private industry. The other has only recently joined the party, having retired from business after decades of running multi-million pound commercial enterprises. Both thought the speech was very good. They enthused about not only its thoughtfulness, but in particular its emphasis on the importance of business as a “wealth creator”, a line used repeatedly in Ed Miliband’s speech.

The author of this latter post – Michael Dugher, Ed Miliband’s own parliamentary private secretary – goes on to argue that:

The truth is it is not “anti-business” to criticise Fred Goodwin or to condemn what a private equity firm did to Southern Cross care homes. Neither is it “anti-business” to say a future Labour government should challenge the big vested interests like the energy companies ripping off consumers. It is the right thing to do.

There is, then, I think sufficient evidence laid out in my post this morning to suggest that:

we are, as in Thatcher’s time, seeing the definitive political downsides of the fearsomely amoral act of triangulation;
Ed Miliband perhaps realises this – and perhaps better than the rest of us right now;
Ed Miliband is getting to the point where we need to seriously re-evaluate his potential as diviner of political dynamics;
the mainstream press and their hangers-on are not necessarily best placed to catch the fluctuating public mood;

For the last point, after all, is precisely why we have politicians in the first place – to capture that public mood accurately and, in the end, democratically.

Politicians can only make their way and their reputations in that fragile conjoining of events and personal actions that is the body politic as a whole.

Which, essentially, means we can only wait and see.

Even as we do our very best to do so with what should be a generous as well as inquiring intelligence.

A licence to money print?

a con, Ivan Lewis, Labour, mainstream media, neo-New Labour, social media, symbiosis No Responses »

Sep 272011

Cory Doctorow, as usual, goes to the bottom of the matter:

For a party eager to shed its reputation as sinister, spying authoritarians, Labour’s really got its head up its arse.

Lewis will suggest that newspapers should introduce a system whereby journalists could be struck off a register for malpractice.

As Doctorow explains earlier in his piece:

Given that “journalism” presently encompasses “publishing accounts of things you’ve seen using the Internet” and “taking pictures of stuff and tweeting them” and “blogging” and “commenting on news stories,” this proposal is even more insane than the tradition “journalist licenses” practiced in totalitarian nations.

Meanwhile, Luke tweets this choice phrase:

Universal condemnation of Lewis’ plan to licence journalists. I wonder if he’s read Orwell’s 1984.

I reply by fearing that he has. And Adrian reminds us that:

@eiohel @LukeBozier As the cliche goes, 1984 was meant to be a cautionary tale not a manifesto.

Which makes me wonder if the real background to all this – to what would appear to be yet more New Labour impulses to unnecessarily add to an already overcrowded legal quiver – is actually an intention not to dismantle the structures that allowed Murdoch to wield the power he had but, rather, a desire to avoid the growth and expansion of the social media that – in tandem with the Guardian – helped apply the pressure which led to his final downfall.

That is to say, we are looking not to prevent another Murdoch but allow a Murdoch on the Labour side of the fence to gain sufficient control once more over our voting public. Part of the upsides of such a licensing system would be to “get those nasty social media flies out of our hair!”

Not a licence to print money but a licence to money print. Once in place, this legislation would allow any blogger, tweeter or random photographer out there to be prevented from making tendentious assertions. Sometimes when we do, we are wrong and the truth becomes unclear. But very often, the unclear truth reaches a clarity precisely because – between social media and its inexactitudes and mainstream media and its lawyerly-inscribed front pages – there is a symbiotic relationship where the unsaid can be first said over the virtual garden fence that is blogging, tweeting and online photography; and then reach its full veracity when sufficient investigation has been carried out by those who have the professional resources to chase up a story that begins to have legs.

All this, with government-sponsored licensing, would – at one fell swoop – go out the window. And 24-hour news would once more become the kind which would tremble at the phonecall of a feared communications chief.

I tell you what. If this is what neo-New Labour really is going to look like, you can bloody well count me out.
____________________

Update to this post: Ivan Lewis also suggested “like-for-like” corrections to inexactitudes and mistakes – more background to this idea and its ramifications can be found here. It does beg the following question though: why give a speech with such a decent and broadly acceptable idea – only to then overshadow it with such an unthought-through concept as the one I complain about in the post above?

So who writes these things? Is this just another example of the Westminster Bubble at work?

It would seem the Telegraph’s writers can’t decide if the British are scum or not

in a hole, mainstream media, plurality, social media, Telegraph No Responses »

Aug 132011

The Telegraph doesn’t seem to know this evening who – in its stable of writers – is saying or thinking what. I guess that’s par for the course – lately, none of us really seem to.

So I’ll be charitable then, and put it down to a desire for a generously post-modern plurality.

On the one hand, we have Tim Stanley, a research follow in American History, using the academic equivalent of “scum” about the British people in general (the bold is mine):

Now that the dust has settled, it’s time for the historians to bring some perspective to the August riots. David Starkey started on Friday by suggesting that mob violence was a cultural import from Jamaica. He wasn’t being racist; Dr Starkey stressed that the nihilistic attitude found among rioters was manufactured and bi-racial. But he was wrong if he meant to suggest that mob violence is historically atypical in Britain. Students of history should have seen last week coming. The British are not a very nice people and we’ve been looting, rioting and pillaging for centuries. The patterns are horribly familiar.

On the other hand, we have Damian Thompson complaining that when the current president of the NUJ calls clean-up volunteers “scum”, Twitter doesn’t fall out of its now habitual trolley:

OK, here’s a name for you: Mr Donnacha DeLong, the new president of the National Union of Journalists. On Tuesday he described the “broom army” of middle-class volunteers who cleaned up Clapham Junction as “scum”.

Yes, you read that right: scum. DeLong said so in a Facebook comment; I rang DeLong to check that it was authentic. “Yes, but I was referring to a particular exclusivist crowd,” he explained.

Now I have to say that the latter set of remarks doesn’t ennoble anyone on the left. But then neither do the far more measured and politely couched emissions of Mr Stanley describe the British in any significantly different way – except inasmuch as that nasty word “scum”, and the register it occupies, has been distanced through clever choice of substitutional vocabulary.

The underlying message and intent, however, is pretty much the same. Essentially, use the broadest brush strokes to help generate the distasteful message that the British are very much a lost cause.

I’d have thought that Britain needs neither very much of Mr Stanley nor very much of Mr DeLong. Nor, indeed, the confused sense of plurality which – in all this mad confusion – more than one news media organisation is probably sharing with our dear Telegraph.

(As a footnote to this post, both these articles came to me without irony from exactly the same Telegraph-related Twitter feed. My only recommendation for the future is that – in feral pursuit of headlines that hurt the opposition – you might want to doublecheck first of all the internal coherence of the content you’re selling. Just a thought, anyhow. Just a thought.)

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?

How civic society is driven to utter meltdown by the moneyed and powerful

a con, civil war, credit crunch, mainstream media, social media No Responses »

Jun 162011

I’ve just read this from the BBC on the civic meltdown in Greece:

There is a social crisis under way and I think it is different from the one our history books teach us to expect. It’s not like the cracking of the state, or mass unrest, but simply that the Greek state – whose reach was never far into society – is beginning to lose its grip slightly on the actual functions a state should do.

The article goes on to point out:

It cannot decide its economic policy; it can’t convince its own people of any good intent; the rule of law is imposed hard here – with the impounding of yachts bought through tax evasion – only to break down somewhere else, as people begin to pledge non-payment of bills for the privatised utilities.

It is not anarchy here, but – to use another Hellenic word – neither is there catharsis. As the conservative daily Kathimerini put it in an editorial last night: “Prime Minister George Papandreou does not seem to be on top of things anymore.”

In a sense, there are parallels here in Britain. Perhaps we won’t reach such levels of distress for a while yet, although the public sector strikes planned for June 30th could quite easily serve to radicalise people even more. There is a small difference, however, between Greece and ourselves: the truth of the matter is that over here in Britain we are in the grip of a government which deliberately goes out of its way to make us feel we are not on top of things any more.

The famous shock-and-awe effect, in fact.

Meanwhile, what’s happening in Greece is the rapid seeping-away of all sovereign legitimacy as the international financial institutions ensure – as happened in Asia a decade and a half ago – that their friends in high places are able to duly retrieve their booty before a country and its people are allowed finally to collapse. As Adam Curtis pointed out in his recent documentary series and Wikipedia summarises thus:

The 1997 Asian financial crisis began as the property bubble in the Far East began to burst in Thailand, causing large financial losses in those countries that greatly affected foreign investors. While Bill Clinton was preoccupied with the Monica Lewinski scandal, Robert Rubin took control of foreign policy and forced loans onto the affected countries. However, after each country agreed to IMF bailout loans, foreign investors immediately withdrew their money, leaving the tax payers with enormous debts and triggering massive economic disasters.

Perhaps Greece is not so much a foretaste of things to come as a reminder of things that have gone.

Daylight robbery is what this is really all about. A daylight robbery which channels the livelihoods of ordinary folk into the pockets of the rich and undeserving. Greece may not be a case of a property boom gone bad – but it is most definitely an example of a wealthy world which doesn’t know how to function on behalf of the opportunities and welfare of the majority. And there the parallels are absolutely in sync.

This capitalism we talk so proudly of is so demonstrably inefficient at what it claims to be best at. It uses and abuses government intervention when it pleases – and completely ignores the intellectual incoherence this generates. It preaches the natural cycles of rise and fall – and then creates institutions, organisations, companies and corporations which serve to outlast any and all discrete human life on this blessed planet we sadly inhabit.

And meltdown in our civic societies happens precisely when the poor know not just that the rich are always going to be on top but that, also, they don’t care to hide it any more.

As the journalist of the BBC article I linked to above concludes:

And I will repeat the point about hostility to the media: it’s not a problem for me and my colleagues to be hounded off demos as “representatives of big capital”, “Zionists”, “scum and police informers” etc. But to get this reaction from almost every demographic – from balaclava kids to pensioners – should be a warning sign to the policymaking elite. The “mainstream” – whether it’s the media, politicians or business people – is beginning to seem illegitimate to large numbers of people.

The mainstream is no longer main. It’s not even that it ever was – but until today there was never anything else to publicly demonstrate the lie it represented: the disjunctions it fashioned. For it is social media which has served to show us all a far truer reflection of the reality of our poverty-stricken and hollow lives.

Those lies at the very centre of that binding nexus of marketing- and advertising-tied feature journalism – a nexus which claims to provide us with tough and brave truths when in reality it’s never been anything more than a bunch of clever angles.
____________________

Update to this post: the Guardian publishes the following report tonight on powerplays galore. Just makes me want to heave.

Mainstream media is facile shorthand written for the weary masses

a con, BBC, mainstream media, March for an Alternative, on a high, social media No Responses »

Mar 272011

The Nation concludes its report on yesterday’s march against the cuts with the following sadness (the bold is mine):

But that is where we are: a government carrying out a determined, ideological assault on the welfare state; shell-shocked public sector workers demoralized after a decade of “New Labour” reforms; a Labour Party determined not to repeat the mistakes of the 1980s, which resulted in a long winter of unelectability, but whose alternative to austerity so far lacks either conviction or inspiration. Although he’s already been taunted for it in the press, Ed Miliband was right about one thing. Looking out over the throngs in Hyde Park he said: “This is what the Big Society looks like.” At the risk of sounding antediluvian, he might have said it’s what the working class looks like. It’s also what class war looks like—when your side is losing.

Meanwhile, a couple of years ago the Fabians coined a happy alternative to both the Coalition’s Big Society we now just must learn how to warm to and Labour’s Good Society which, at least to my mind, has always seemed little more than a hand-wringers’ soundbite. The Solidarity Society is something different though (more from the Independent here) – and chimes quite happily with the expectations I acquired of body politics in general whilst I was living for sixteen years in Spain.

I can believe and become enthusiastic about the Solidarity Society where the Good Society makes me just want to get out my sandals.

So then. Where are we? Millions marched against Iraq and Tony Blair refused to bat a batty eyelid. Yesterday’s march, from all accounts, was nothing like as substantial. But yesterday’s march was something different – and had a vicarious weight that Iraq never could’ve acquired. We didn’t then have social media to mediate the slants and angles that mainstream media always chooses to impose on these big events. A conservative estimate (ie the BBC‘s) put the crowds at a quarter of million. Others have spoken of 400,000. The difference is academic really, though. What’s important is how at least 250,000 people can spend a peaceful day full of true solidarity and societal goodwill – and yet find their activities headlined by the violence of a thousandth of that number. I would argue – and I’m sure you would agree – that no sector of activity if reported thus, and here I include politicians, the police and journalists too, could possibly generate and sustain a favourable and positive image of itself were we to take our lead from the worst thousandth of its members.

Mainstream media is facile shorthand written for the weary masses.

And social media is now here to show us exactly how facile it has become.

Hyper-injunctions, a psychosis of relativism and that narcissism of the powerful

a con, hyper-injunctions, mainstream media 1 Response »

Mar 222011

Here’s the dreadful background to the hyper-injunction cases that have apparently been riddling our body politic, social and cultural for longer than any of us might ever care to guess. Although Anna would beg to differ:

Every single MP knows what has been going on; the Speaker of the House knows what has been going on; David Cameron knows what has been going on; to my personal knowledge, every single media outlet has known what has been going on; none of them were prepared to risk the wrath of the establishment by letting you know what has been going on. Do please Google and see if you can find one single reference in the media yesterday or today to the astounding events detailed in Westminster Hall on Thursday afternoon.

Mr John Hemming, MP for Yardley in Birmingham, rose to his feet and used parliamentary privilege to list some of the secret prisoners, the people who have lost their liberty in the UK behind closed doors; the court orders which detail the secret injunctions – not for the benefit of footballers or bankers, (although it was the issue of Fred Goodwin’s secret injunction that allowed the debate to be heard), but the injunctions, not mere ‘super-injunctions’ that the media could not mention, but ‘hyper-injunctions’ which even prevented the aggrieved citizen from appealing to their MP for help.

Because we are allowed to speak of that which has been in Hansard, we can today speak of the misery of those whose lives have been turned upside down, in secret, with the added bonus of a special injunction from the judge which prevented them even turning to their MP.

This is far far worse than any of us outside the circles of power could ever have imagined. If truth be told, it would appear that the truth itself is only to be possessed by those who – out of fear for their jobs or respect to their employers (or maybe a combination of the two) – choose not to share their knowledge with ordinary folk. Truth – in our latterday civilisation – is only for those who must swear not to tell. Anyone else can kiss goodbye to a common reality. And anyone else who believes in a common access to such a reality is surely bound to have that reality denied.

Just look at what happened to Julian Assange.

What really upsets me about all these kinds of circumstances is not that there are powerful people out there who are taking advantage of ordinary voters like myself but that, like Nixon most famously before them, their main objective seems to be not to get caught – or not, at least, to get caught being talked about in public. And this could not happen if we had a mainstream media which truly believed it should “publish and be damned”.

With very few exceptions, our media prefers to package the world in predigested globules which require no effort on our part to effect consumption. Thus we have a mainstream media of political superficiality and cultural tittle-tattle – brazen in its pursuit of the well-turned headline and the dramatic angle. And because it refuses point-blank to describe reality as it is, because money can mould that reality to its own purposes, because being here tomorrow is more important than telling it as it is today, we are gradually but ever so surely sliding into a relativistic world: a relativistic world populated not by human beings with a desire to hold onto a real universe out there but, rather, by pecuniary interests far deeper than anything the good society can ever summon up – interests that lose contact with any reality outside their own narcissism. This is, I would argue, a psychosis of relativism, where these interests simply refuse to engage in honest debate (even amongst themselves) and only care to perpetuate – as far as is inhumanly possible – their tawdry and tiresome existences.

This is bad stuff – very bad stuff.

I really didn’t realise how awful it was getting.

How we juxtapose information is everything in communication

9/11, a con, Alastair Campbell, AlJazeera, blogging, China Daily, Facebook, in a hole, mainstream media, on a high, online publishing, Twitter No Responses »

Dec 142010

We learn as children to bide our time. If our parents are ragged at the edges, weary or worried, we learn to shy away from serious debate, request or proposal. Newspapers and online media are no different – except inasmuch as they tend to do the opposite. I remember Alastair Campbell talking recently at the Chester Literature Festival about how the ratio of good to bad news had changed over the past forty years. And from his 2008 Cudlipp Lecture, I have found the following reference:

Before his death, Robin Cook used to cite a study showing a shift in the positive to negative ratio in our national press of 3 positive stories for every one negative in the mid 70s, to 1 positive for every 18 negative in the early 21st century. Even if that overstates, and in some media it certainly doesn’t, it certainly reflects the trend.

So when we grow up and become media editors and authors and bloggers, and professional communicators of any and every kind, we do just as we did with our parents when we were young – only exactly the opposite. We assess very carefully the right moment to release a bombshell on the rest of our peers, just as we used to do in our youth – only that right moment becomes one of maximum impact rather than the minimum pain we generally learn to generate in family.

A classic example below from AlJazeera’s English website the other day (click on the image for the larger version), and which I captured this evening.

What do you think then? Examine the evidence. Remember, this is AlJazeera – a communications channel which, for many of my American, and perhaps also British, readers, is a website and media hub they would never choose to access voluntarily. It is associated with first publication of many unhappy videos and propaganda statements – and whether fairly or unfairly, this is an undeniable fact.

So what do we have? A story on the subject of how the American Federal Aviation Authority is unaware of the true ownership of over 100,000 planes currently flying in the US. In the body of the text, AlJazeera reports that the FAA are worried that drug-traffickers and terrorists may make use of these planes – but the iconic American Airlines jumbo used to illustrate the piece tells a much clearer and more directly terrifying story.

It clearly, and most deliberately, alludes to the 9/11 attacks – without taking any kind of ownership for such an allusion.

For how we juxtapose information is absolutely everything in this modern, and slightly sly, style of communication.

(Note, also, and by the by, the clickable piece of real estate in the top right-hand corner asking us: “Are classified leaks in the public interest?” Yet another way of saying something without having to admit that’s what you meant.)

Now I can imagine how easy it is for paperwork to get misplaced. A third of all US planes does seem rather a lot, mind – but, even so, I can understand how this could happen. I assume, however (unless any of you know any better), that the vast majority of these planes will be rather small – and certainly not passenger planes of the type the photo leads us to conclude might be the case.

I’m not a brain surgeon, of course. I’m not even a trained journalist. But if I can reach such conclusions on the basis of the facts laid out in front of us, then why cannot the journalists working for AlJazeera locate the same caveats in the story they have chosen to tell? After all, their story is strong enough without it needing any pumping up or additional priming. This is sensational enough not to require sensationalism to sell page impressions, powerful enough not to require the journalistic equivalent of the literary adjectival phrase to define and situate.

Really, my question is therefore the following: is this an example of tendentious journalism or lazy journalism? If the latter, please do better next time round. If the former, then perhaps I should skirt around the output of the channel in question with rather more care, just as some of my more reluctant readers might advise me to – and just as I have now become accustomed to so doing with our own mainstream British media.

Especially in the light of their sloppy reporting on an untold number of political and socio-economic issues over the past unhappy nine months.

China Daily anyone?

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking more on the subject of Twitter, Facebook and the decay of blogging. And I’ve come to a reasonably cheerful conclusion: blogging lives on.

Blogging was always a two-handed affair – on the one hand, the traditional logging of the web, that manual filtering of and linking to interesting material; on the other, the impulse to open oneself up to the web and declare oneself in diary format. So, in reality, all that’s happened to our dearly beloved blogosphere is that Facebook has spent the last few years building a community around the latter and Twitter has spent a slightly shorter time building a community around the former.

Which is why any serious attempt to recover and restate the importance of old-style blogging for the future of the Internet may need to negotiate with both companies if it wishes to ride any future waves of communication effectively and convincingly.

Whether we like it or not.

Blogging isn’t dead, you see. It’s just been carved up in two pieces – and monetised before our eyes.

Why we will become strangers in our own country

atomised society, blogging, Facebook, in a hole, mainstream media, social media, Twitter No Responses »

Oct 272010

Whilst I watch the television news this evening, and see valuable minutes spent on showing us people going through security checks at airports and top-flight politicians disagreeing via soundbites on the issue of housing benefit caps, Twitter has the following video tweeting round the ether.

Almost to the very penny, it would appear that Vodafone has extracted concessions from HMRC which – had they not been extracted – would have meant the Coalition government might have needed to look for some other convincing excuse to implement its savage cuts programme.

Meanwhile, I just wonder what the long-term implications of such a disjunction between mainstream and social media will be.

I suspect they will be serious: as the cuts bite, we will see a firm compact of non-social media users – newspaper readers, radio listeners, Sky+ consumers – continuing in blithe ignorance of such memes. On the other hand, evermore savvy and knowledgeable Twitter, Facebook and blogging aficionados will build up a fund of assumptions and ways of seeing that will bind them together in absolute identification.

Thus it will come to pass that these two groups of citizens will become strangers to each other in their own country.

This is the how.

And this manifest lack of public coincidence leads me to contemplate what is likely to become a perplexing and possibly terrifying future. Modern Western civilisations have to date prided themselves on their ability to sustain a cohesive sense of what society means. This would now appear to be something we must doubt and can no longer rely or depend on.

Our perception of reality – as mediated via the media we most comprehensively trust – determines how we see each other.

Those of us who follow, employ and participate in the production of social media see each other differently – more democratically perhaps, less hierarchically certainly – than those who use what I have seen John Naughton call steam media. This affects how we understand and deposit in others the confidence and trust that makes civilisations function.

Inevitably, a gap will open up between us to such an extent that even those with the best of intentions will find it impossible to comprehend the other. If I am right, it would be fair to say that this process has already started – in the media we use, through the cuts this awfully top-down government imposes and via the Internet and its immensely liberating freedoms.

All contradictory forces.

All leading us in different directions.

So it is that the growing inability we have to put ourselves in another’s shoes means there will come the day when it will not be your words I find resistible but simply the sound of your voice.

And that is not only how but also why we will all be strangers in our own country.

"Andrew Marr lives up to surname as he sullies mainstream journalism’s reputation"

Andrew Marr, blogging, in a hole, mainstream media 4 Responses »

Oct 102010

This is clearly deliberate:

“A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed, young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting. They are very angry people.

“OK – the country is full of very angry people. Many of us are angry people at times. Some of us are angry and drunk. But the so-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night.

“It is fantastic at times but it is not going to replace journalism.”

It’s not only deliberate, it’s also inaccurate.

It’s not only inaccurate, it’s also revealing.

It’s not only revealing, it’s also insulting.

It’s precisely the kind of language and behaviours he would have us believe that blogging is generally guilty of. Meanwhile, rantings there are many in this world – not a few of them in mainstream media.

Maybe you need to get yourself a blog, Andrew – and get rid of some of that repressed married angst. You do sound very much like the sort of sober mainstream journalist who gets paid the minimum wage to suffer the depraved impositions of duty editors everywhere whilst trying to pay off the sort of mortgage that led us all to economic despair.

I suppose Andy Coulson was a blogger, was he Andrew?

Oh, and I’ll sort my cauliflower nose out whenever you want – but only if you promise to sort out your ears.

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