Recent Media Articles

Heavily invested in sacred cows

by Chris Naden     February 27, 2013 at 11:30 am

This neat piece from Steve Benen reminded me of this longer, but wonderful piece from Jonathan Chait in 2005 on epistemic closure and the remarkable lack of interest, from the right, in evidence-based government.

The New Republic piece is full of quoteable moments, and well worth reading in full, including this on the non-equivalence of the parties;

Part of this difference reflects the cultural predilections of the last two presidents–Bush is the instinctive anti-intellectual who likes to go with his gut, and Clinton is the former Rhodes scholar who relished academic debates. But it also reflects the natural tendencies of conservatism and liberalism.

Clearly, after the 112th Congress and the theatrics of the 2012 Republican primary, Chait’s theme has been much explored since. The rise of the Murdoch-influenced ‘conservative’ press, and its influence on creating an extraordinarily lucrative rage market for Limbaugh, Beck and company; the disturbing elevation of Paul Ryan and his numberless economics; Sarah Palin; and the radicalising effect of two cycles of TEA-Party politics in the House and in State Houses across the country have all washed the GOP further from their old moorings on the shores of reality. Here’s J. Bernstein in 2011:

No, the difference between the parties is how well party dogma is aligned with reality. [..] Republicans are required to be sceptical of evolution, to deny climate change, pretend missile defense works, and otherwise ignore real-world evidence. [...] a lot of GOP policy positions [are] “conservative” in the sense of being aligned with what Rush or Beck says, but not in the sense of being aligned with ideological conservatism.

Which got me thinking about the UK. There are certainly ideological factions in parliament. British government has clearly been divorced from any great emphasis on evidential policy for some time. But in the same way that the GOP has become an echo-chamber of dog-whistles and plutocratic catechisms, rather than becoming an ideologically conservative policy actor, the UK scene is ignoring evidence not so much for reasons of ideology as for reasons of faith and habit.

One cannot overestimate the power of habit in British politics; which is mostly a Sir. Humphrey-ish artefact of the professional civil service. It is amplified in the echo chambers of the tabloid press. The Sun, the Mail and their ilk exist, like Limbaugh and the departed Breitbart, to serve a market in fear and rage. Several, in fact; for example, the under-educated working class rage is mostly in the Sun, the educated middle-class rage is mostly in the Mail. Humans are habit-forming and change resistant, older humans are more so, and thus change can be easily presented in a manner which will induce fear and rage in a lucrative and electorally effective demographic.

Then we come to faith. Both major parties have significant and strident minority membership from the wing-nut end of socially conservative Christianity, but that’s not really one of the core articles of faith which have been so damaging. Both major parties also have a religious faith in the free market fundamentalism of the Great Moderation. Both have been captured by financial vested interests. Both have nailed their trousers to the mast on Austerian fantasies and will find it very difficult to climb down.

Both major parties are instinctively authoritarian, and with the triumph of the Orange Book faction of the Liberal Democrats, they’re not much better. Both major parties (since the New Labour course change) are reflexively, rather than in any real sense ideologically, right of centre. Once again, the Liberal Democrats aren’t much better. It should be noted that this matters relatively little as the Coalition may prove to have done more damage to the LibDems than 1983 did.

That British government is no longer moored to evidentiary standards of reality is visible in a number of very high profile incidents. The Dodgy Dossier, for one. The Nutt Sack affair. Public-Private Partnerships. ATOS. Faith schools. The entire Broken Britain narrative, which I have ranted about before. Ridiculous rhetoric on immigration. And in probably the most egregious example currently going, George Osborne’s economic policies.

Both major parties, and to a lesser extent the LibDems front bench, are heavily invested in sacred cows. That’s not a good way to run a country.

openDemocracy: Paying the price of principles

by Guest     February 22, 2013 at 8:45 am

by Julian Sayarer

openDemocracy is set to close. openDemocracy is set to close unless they can raise the last £30,000 of a £250,000 needed to clear the foundation’s debts.

Frankly, this is important, and whilst hijacked oil tankers and horse meat and bankers’ bonuses are also important, openDemocracy is more important because it is a media by which we can discuss problems in a way that seeks to address them, rather than merely to create real life cinema or high-brow gossip.

I’ve contributed around a half dozen articles to openDemocracy in the last two years… I’ve received £0 in return for my work. Over the years I’ve been paid to write for magazines and journals, and of all the work I’ve produced, it’s that which appears on openDemocracy that means most to me.

oD does not abandon an issue after the 48 hour window in which newspapers seek to profit from it, oD is committed to ideas that mean something to how we live, rather than only the quick titillation of a headline scandal.

oD does not play to the lowest common denominator, and it believes humans are on this world to do more than just buy stuff… it is for these reasons that writers contribute their work for free, and it is for these reasons that oD does not make profit.

If you care about the world you live in, and are not a regular reader of openDemocracy, then start reading. If you want to go on reading openDemocracy, if you have enjoyed the articles I’ve written for them, then pay a little money for it. Our mainstream media resides in the gutter, it assumes the worst in people, tells them the worst about one another, and operates more as a bullshit carousel than as an integral component in a functioning democracy.

You cannot have a high standard of democracy without a high standard of media, and if the mainstream media is to be removed from the gutter, or held to account for its promotion of organised ignorance, we need sources like openDemocracy. As much as anything else, that’s the issue here… there is no other source like openDemocracy.

Ten years after its foundation, with readership rising internationally, oD restructured with new sections, campaigns, and editors to manage the new interest and adapt to a changing world. The organisation’s finances have since been returned to a sustainable footing, with expenses balanced against revenues, but the debts of restructuring must be cleared in order for oD to continue.

You will be paying for media that is not worn-down by cynicism or distracted by hysterics, openDemocracy is written and edited by people who care deeply about the world, and who still have the courage to believe that world can be made better. You cannot put a price on these ideals, but they have to survive.

Does the press simply reflect the continuing sexism in our society?

by Robert Sharp     February 20, 2013 at 4:05 pm

Many of the people who attacked the author Hilary Mantel on Twitter yesterday made derogatory remarks about her appearance. This was unwittingly ironic, given that Mantel’s speech to the London Review of Books concerned the objectification of women, and our media’s obsession with looks.

@itvwestcountry @itvnews Mantel should have CBE revoked, ugly botoxed fat witch, who is she to comment?

— anne selley (@cheltenhamlady) February 19, 2013

If we believe in free speech, then insult becomes unavoidable. But that does not mean that objectification and misogyny should go unchallenged.

I felt it was particularly important to challenge people’s language in this case, because Mantel’s speech dealt directly with the problem of sexism in the media.

I spent some time yesterday evening collecting examples, which I made into a Storify.

My conclusions? The recent phone hacking scandal and the subsequent Leveson Inquiry has given us an opportunity to scrutinise the press. The conclusion is usually that the media is shallow and nasty.

However, I think these tweets, from ordinary members of the public, suggest that society can also be spiteful and sexist. Why blame the press, when they reflect the public?

One message for those up in arms about @hilarymantel ‘s lecture. READ THE DAMN THING (it’s more about us than Kate). bit.ly/YUv6Hx

— mary beard (@wmarybeard) February 20, 2013

How the Mail misrepresented cancer survivor as ‘scrounger’

by Guest     February 20, 2013 at 10:15 am

by Steve Rose

Heather Frost is the latest victim of the Daily Mail’s agenda against benefit claimants with large families.

But many of the key claims don’t stand up and I have unpicked them here.

This new house is taxpayer funded
“We’d probably be even happier – and perhaps a little humbled – if it was being specifically built for us and paid for by the taxpayer.”

Not true. The council are not responsible for any new building work. Tewkesbury council sold a plot of land in Northway Lane to Severn Vale Housing at an estimated price of £210,000. This information is only revealed in the 20th paragraph.

Severn Vale Housing offer social housing in the area and will most likely foot the bill for the cost of the build. In their contract, they will build up to 12 more properties for those on low incomes. As stated in their proposal the project is not for the benefit of the Frost family exclusively.

The proposals also include a 6 bedroom family home and a four-bedroom bungalow at the request of Tewkesbury Borough Housing Officers as these will help meet the identified housing needs of large families and families with disabled members respectively.

Quoting the Tax Payers’ Alliance weakens your argument

Their campaign manager, Robert Oxley, stated: “It’s scandalous that so much time and money is being spent on one custom built mansion. Many people can’t afford to buy their own home, but have to opt for what their budget allows.”

Are they aware this is a social housing project? There is no evidence to suggest the Frost’s will have ownership of the property. Any housing benefit they receive will go into the pockets of Severn Vale. It is a stretch to call this proposed property a mansion.

She has been let down by private and council renting

Ms Frost’s story is a symptom of chronic housing problems we face in many parts of the country. Shortages originally forced her into the private sector where she had seven children inside a two-bedroom property. Their current accommodation involves a three-bedroom house with a knocked in front door that joins with another house.

A temporary solution became permanent as Ms Frost states: “It was meant to be for four months but we’ve been here for five years now.” You could argue it would be hard for the council to re-house large families but the conditions dictated its unsuitability from the outset. They must pay for two sets of electricity and gas bills. All of the new properties are built to be energy efficient to save money for low-income tenants.

She must be a scrounger

Ms Frost is presently unemployed. However, the media make no effort to explain her individual circumstances but play up the scrounger characture by quoting anonymous neighbours and the dilapidation of her property.

What we do know is she is a cancer survivor who is presently in remission. Her cervical cancer prevents her having any more children. Having a year of cancer treatment might explain why she has been unable to work. The use of ‘jobless’ in the headline already confirms the intended bias of the article that aims to divide the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor.

—
Steve Rose tweets from here and blogs here.

More ‘outrageous’ quotes by Mantel on Kate Middleton

by Sunny Hundal     February 19, 2013 at 3:04 pm

This morning the Daily Mail is outraged over a speech / article by the writer Hilary Mantel – describing it as an attack on the Duchess of Cambridge.

That in turn prompted an intervention from David Cameron (while he was in India!) even though it was clear he hadn’t read Mantel’s piece.

But since so many people are taking Hilary Mantel’s piece out of context, I thought why not do the same? Here are ten other quotes from that piece that other media organisations could get outraged over.

1) “It’s rather that I saw Kate becoming a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung.”

2) “In those days [Kate Middleton] was a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore.”

3) “this young woman’s life until now was nothing, her only point and purpose being to give birth.”

4) “But Kate Middleton… appeared to have been designed by a committee and built by craftsmen”

5) “…her eyes are dead and she wears the strained smile of a woman who really wants to tell the painter to bugger off”

6) “What does Kate read? It’s a question.”

7) “Kate seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character.”

8) “I used to think that the interesting issue was whether we should have a monarchy or not. But now I think that question is rather like, should we have pandas or not?”

9) “Our current royal family doesn’t have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment.”

10) “Kate seems capable of going from perfect bride to perfect mother, with no messy deviation.”

[In case the point is not understood, this is meant to be tongue-in-cheek]

Guido Fawkes: Westminster’s biggest Bullshit Artist

by Sunny Hundal     February 17, 2013 at 2:27 pm

Yesterday the Guardian ran quite a fawning profile of right-wing blogger Guido Fawkes (more affectionately referred to by his real name P. Staines).

The piece states:

This week, at prime minister’s questions, Ed Miliband used the column as ammunition: “Doesn’t it speak of how out of touch [the prime minister] is, Mr Speaker,” he hooted, “that last week he attended the Conservative ball and auctioned a painting of himself for £100,000 and then declared without a hint of irony the Tories are no longer the party of privilege!” The hall jeered and howled. Cameron’s reply, it quickly became clear, contained a leak obtained by the Guido Fawkes website: “He [ie Ed Miliband] is making a major speech on the economy on Thursday. It won’t have any policies in it!”

Staines regularly does this – take credit for stories that aren’t his. The 100k story that Staines took credit for was actually brokenby the Daily Mail a week earlier. It was also in the Daily Mirror before he ran it. (several different lobby journalists privately sent me that link, presumably because they’re also annoyed by his practice).

The story was, of course, also wrong on there being no major announcement at Ed’s speech on Thursday, but the journalist omits this fact.

I find it genuinely perplexing to see journalists at a newspaper I love allow Staines to once again get away with his anti-establishment schtick, given he’s always been so desperate to accepted as part of the crowd (he’s known for begging for invites to Downing Street receptions; he writes political gossip for the Sun FFS).

In fact the Guardian ran a similar profile / interview on Staines with the same anti-establishment angle two years ago. At least that time the Damian McBride scalp merited a profile. Why now, and why not ask some vaguely difficult questions?

He wasn’t asked about this love for murderer and dictator General Pinochet. Nor his disablist tweets.

He wasn’t asked about the several times he’s called for pizza to be sent to IDF soldiers when they’re raining bombs on Palestinians.

He’s not asked why he caims to be to be a libertarian given how frequently he sends out libel letters or calls for hanging to be reinstated.

—
[No doubt some people will accuse me of being jealous for writing this, but that misses the point. I'm questioning why both were so uncritical. I've not done enough to merit a profile; the Guardian hasn't even interviewed Owen Jones yet despite his achievements over the past year.]

The climate change denial industry’s dirty money-trail gets exposed

by Tim Fenton     February 17, 2013 at 9:15 am

James ‘saviour of Western civilisation’ Delingpole eagerly recycled an article from a senior advisor to the Heartland Institute back in November 2011, because it gave him the answer he wanted to hear. The subject was “Green charities”, and the article rubbishing them had appeared in the American Thinker.

Had Del Boy plucked these organisations out of thin air? Well, no he hadn’t. Heartland has recently moved on from pretending that passive smoking can’t harm people to becoming a pillar of the climate change denial movement. The American Thinker is described as a “Conservative online magazine”. The two had been cited by Del because they are as reliable to his mind as Fox News Channel.

So what was Delingpole’s verdict on “Green charities”? These were held to be “way more evil and dangerous than Exxon or the Koch Brothers”. But the climate change denial lobby does plenty of its own charity fundraising.

That has been thrown into sharp focus by the Guardian, with an article about donor trusts and the sharply increasing amount of money estimated to be passing through them en route to funding climate change denial groups.

Under US law, donations made this way can be kept secret, but it appears that one recipient is the so-called Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).

CFACT, in turn, runs a website called Climate Depot, a repository of robustly expressed climate change denial, and here – for instance – there was a point-by-point rebuttal yesterday of anything climate related in Barack Obama’s latest State Of The Union address. This was enthusiastically trailed by Delingpole, who with customary subtlety called it a “fisking” of the President’s “eco-bollocks”.

Thus the climate change denial circle jerk in microcosm. The donor trusts also have the advantage that people like the Koch Brothers can slip the conservative and libertarian fringe a few million greenbacks this way too, and thus make it look as if they’re not really involved any more (the estimated amount of direct Koch donation more than halved between 2006 and 2010).

And this parallels the kind of non-transparent funding structure of UK organisations like the so-called Global Warming Policy Foundation, the premier British repository of climate change denialism.

This is something to think about the next time you see a conservative or libertarian lobby organisation popping up in the media claiming to be “non partisan”. He who pays the piper, and all that.

Will getting rid of the Sun’s Page 3 change anything?

by Septicisle     February 12, 2013 at 10:55 am

It really doesn’t take much these days to get a news story running. Rupert Murdoch responds positively to a tweet saying “page 3 is so last century“, and almost instantly there’s about half a dozen reports up on the Guardian website debating exactly what it means.

I’ll believe the end of page 3 when I see it.

Those against it really can’t have it both ways. Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, editor of the Vagenda blog, writes that her problem with page 3 is not the nudity but the commodification and objectification of the female body. That’s fine and is also my secondary objection, yet if the issue isn’t the nudity then why are there not such long running campaigns against the Daily Mail’s Femail pages, and the “sidebar of shame“?

Page 3 exists because of the cooperation of women, not all of whom are either brainless or in it purely for the money. By comparison, the tabloids as a whole rely on the paparazzi effectively stalking celebrities and the almost famous to fill their pages where there is no such permission or exchange of money, except between the paper and the photo agency.

If anything these stories are often far more leery than page 3 now is, or indeed, if the celeb is not deemed to be looking their best, far more likely to have an effect on those who worry about their own body image. True, page 3 is unique in that it has such a cachet in the public imagination, and can be used by giggling adolescents to particularly revolting effect, but let’s not go into such ridiculous exaggeration as “lascivious drool”, as though some men go into Pavlovian reveries at the mere sight of a printed boob, at least in public at any rate.

If anything, as Karen Mason’s original tweet can also be read, page 3 is last century in that really the whole debate about objectification and the pornification of culture has moved on.

A few years back we were worrying about the rise of Nuts and Zoo, and the often disgustingly sexist content of lads’ mags, whereas now even that seems old hat when “revenge porn” sites have entered the news.

Where once it was hip-hop videos that had an abundance of flesh on display, now the utterly mainstream likes of Rihanna and Nicki Minaj perform in costumes which can’t really be described in any real sense as clothing. At the same time, porn might be going through a transition period where it’s unclear what its end business model will be, yet the material itself has never been so easily available, with all that entails, the possible effects unknown.

Cosslett is right in saying it’s fundamentally “about a demeaning and disrespectful attitude to women”, yet the fact is as, she admits, both “men and women … cynically manipulate young women’s bodies for commercial profit”.

If page 3 were to disappear tomorrow then its effect would barely be measurable. The problem modern feminism has to face is that it’s women as much as men who are behind the shift in culture, and at the moment it doesn’t have a proper answer as to what this means and how it can be fought against.

Telegraph columnist blames Europe for Equal Marriage

by Tim Fenton     February 10, 2013 at 7:24 pm

You have to hand it to the Telegraph’s Christopher Booker. He is so obsessed with the EU that there are no ends he will not go to to pretend that something that happens in one or two member states is part of a vast conspiracy that causes all laws to be handed down from that well-known marauding spaceship otherwise known as Brussels.

Booker’s latest attempt to see the hand of the EU behind every conceivable piece of legislation concerns same-sex marriage (SSM). He tells that there has not just been argument about SSM legislation in the UK, but also in France: “why, just as it was provoking the biggest Tory rebellion in decades, was it also prompting a similar row in the French National Assembly?” he queries.

The straightforward answer is that it wasn’t: the French had voted on it, approving the measure by 249 to 97, the previous week.

But this does not deter Booker, who asserts that all EU member states are going to have to fall into line by the middle of 2013, which would be interesting to see, because there is no way that this is going to happen: there won’t even be a majority by that time.

Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden have passed SSM law previously. The UK and France are passing it. Finland and Luxembourg may also do so in the near future. That makes just ten member states out of 27, and as eagle-eyed Euro watchers may have already noticed, the ten do not include Germany (or Italy, or any of the former Warsaw Pact countries).

Moreover, Booker keeps on citing the Council of Europe (CoE), but this body is totally separate from the EU, and is unable to make law. But he includes a CoE measure to “combat discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity” as part of his chain of supposed proof. Then the ECHR is asserted to be ready to make SSM a “human right”. If everyone passes legislation, that is.

But not every member state of either the CoE, or the EU, has done so. So Booker’s talk of “shadowy bodies” allegedly “ruling our lives” is more of his obsessional drivel speak.

Goodness only knows why the Telegraph bungs him good money to churn it out. Best get it while you can, Chris.

Why did libertarians like @DouglasCarswell vote against equal marriage?

by Sunny Hundal     February 6, 2013 at 8:55 am

Sometimes I feel sorry for libertarians in the UK – all their idols keep betraying them one by one. First it was UKIP, the self-proclaimed libertarian party against the free movement of people, that decided their current policy was to deny homosexuals the right to marry… for some libertarian reason.

Last night it was the poster boy’s turn: Douglas Carswell MP.

@sunny_hundal Libertarians also favour religious liberty.I do struggle to take you seriously when you’re quite so trite and tribal

— Douglas Carswell MP (@DouglasCarswell) February 5, 2013

When I asked him in response how exactly religious liberty was going to be impinged by the vote, he didn’t reply.

Then he implied he was against the vote because some religious institutions were banned from performing gay marriages. So I asked him – was that his reason? No reply, again.

Here is an MP who waxed lyrically about how the digital revolution brought MPs closer to people and allowed them to explain their decisions. But when it came to the crunch – Carswell didn’t even want to explain why he voted that way.

And neither did he stick to libertarian principles, as the bill went out of its way to please the religious lobby. Of course I have no sympathy for the Labour MPs who voted against, but Carswell goes out of his way to preach about his independent mindedness and his libertarianism. But when it came to the big crunch he folded.

* * *

As an aside, it did amaze me that Cameron didn’t come into the Commons to make a major speech on this, at least for the cameras. It once against illustrated his weakness as he knew it would attract more ire from his own side. But if you’re going to take a hit, why not do it in style?

* * *

As another side point, I owe an apology to George Potter and Andrew Emmerson on this issue. I criticised the Libdems earlier when I said they had let the issue get kicked into the long grass, but both pointed out it was entirely procedural. They were right, I was wrong. Apart from the four who voted no, the Lib dems deserve credit for yesterday’s vote for constantly pushing this issue.