How not to kill a good story
contribution by David Hencke
An extraordinary attempt was made just before Christmas to kill off a story of mine to spare the blushes of a rather hapless Liberal Democrat Parliamentary candidate caught out for living a dual life in cyberspace.
Greg Stone is now toast and has had to stand down as Liberal Democrat candidate for Newcastle-upon Tyne East and Wallsend as a result but the shennaghins surrounding the attempt to make sure this did not get into print is worth recalling.
Guido Fawkes tried to come to the rescue of Greg Stone aka Inamicus by using one of the oldest tricks of ye olde print media -a spoiler before the tale could be published by a rival.
continue reading… »
Campaign to stop Rod Liddle; we need your help
Comrades, the campaign to stop Rod Liddle from taking over as editor of the Indy is in full swing. There’s a group of us working on a few ideas but here are two to start with.
First, we’re planning to print a dummy copy of the Indy with articles written and headlined as if they were edited / written by Rod Liddle himself.
These will then be distributed outside the Independent’s offices. To help, simply email me with a short or longer article parodying Liddle by the middle of next week please!
Secondly, an email campaign directed at Alexander Lebdev himself is also planned. From my sources he is persuadable on this and if he sees enough of a backlash from readers he would seriously consider rejecting the Rod Liddle as editor. For Liddle’s greatest hits see this post.
The Facebook group against Liddle is now nearing 4,000.
Its founder yesterday sent this out:
continue reading… »
Cameron’s friends show how to destroy the BBC
Facing the outright fury of the Murdochs for daring to provide a free news website, as yet there wasn’t a set-out policy on how the BBC could be emasculated by the Tories.
Thankfully, Policy Exchange, the right-wing think-tank with notable links to the few within the Cameron set with an ideological bent has come up with a step-by-step guide on how destroy the BBC by a thousand cuts which doesn’t so much as mention Murdoch.
Not that Policy Exchange itself is completely free from Murdoch devotees or those who call him their boss. The trustees of the think-tank include Camilla Cavendish and Alice Thomson, both Times hacks, while Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph and who refused to pay the licence fee until Jonathan Ross left the corporation is the chairman of the board.
Also a trustee is Rachel Whetstone, whose partner is Steve Hilton, Cameron’s director of strategy. Whetstone was also a godparent to the late Ivan Cameron. The report itself is by Mark Oliver, who was director of strategy at the Beeb between 1989 and 1995, during John Birt’s much-loved tenure as director-general.
continue reading… »
Is it the end of racism?
In a speech today the communities secretary John Denham will say that ethnic minorities are no longer automatically disadvantaged in Britain, but that disadvantage is more linked to poverty, class and identity.
New trends are emerging linked to the way that race and class together shape people’s lives and this makes the situation much more complex. That does not mean that we should reduce our efforts to tackle racism and promote race equality but we must avoid a one dimensional debate that assumes all minority ethnic people are disadvantaged.
This should be welcomed and I’ve been arguing for a multi-dimensional approach for years, one of the reasons why I opposed ethnic minority shortlists. Class is indeed one of the primary factors affecting minorities, especially in education where middle class boys of Indian and African backgrounds do better than working class kids from white, Caribbean and Bangladeshi backgrounds.
To say that a person’s race affects their opportunities in society less than factors such as class and gender is now, I think, to state the obvious. In a way it is also a welcome development because it shows our society has become much more progressive on race issues: though it’s still a problem that how much a child’s parents earn still matters.
I can predict some comments and headlines on the right: ‘see, it shows why multiculturalism and political correctness should be ditched and Richard Littlejohn spoketh the gospel‘ etc.
continue reading… »
Daily Mail hypocrisy in slamming Swine Flu ’scare machine’
Six months ago Britain’s tabloids were tolling the bell of a looming Armageddon.
The Daily Mail headlines ranged from IS SWINE FLU ALREADY HERE?; and SWINE FLU: IT’S GETTING SERIOUS, to SWINE FLU NOW THE BATTLE TO CONTAIN IT, and KILLER FLU IS HERE.
And that’s without counting the paper’s first page warnings that “65,000 could die [and] one in three could get infected”, printed in the 7 July 2009 edition.
So you will excuse us if we laughed out loud this morning when the same paper published what is already on course as the most ridiculous article of 2010, a faux-outraged piece by Christopher Booker that states: After this awful fiasco over swine flu, we should never believe the State scare machine again!
continue reading… »
Did public opinion change after ‘climategate’?
contribution by Climate Sock
Following the UEA email hack, it’s become part of the media narrative that opinion is turning against man-made global warming.
It’s usually worth checking any such media claim about changes in public opinion that have supposedly occurred following a series of news stories, particularly ‘dramatic revelations’.
Even when people are aware of these stories, they are often not interested, or may be disinclined to believe them and change their opinion.
Testing the impact of the UEA story is tricky, because there are currently no public polling firms that have regular polls with consistently phrased questions about climate change. But data from two polls, one taken in early November, the other in early December, do suggest that the UEA story has had no measurable impact on belief in man-made global warming.
Satisfyingly, both polls were commissioned by newspapers that tried to use them as evidence of growing public doubt in man-made global warming.
continue reading… »
What exactly is Labour’s election narrative?
Possibly the worst news to come out of the failed H&H coup, for Labourites, is that Gordon Brown has been forced to expand his team of ‘election campaign chiefs’. Sure, Brown is in a weak position, but any political team should never let a range of people decide election strategy or messaging.
At this point New Labour needs one strategy and one clear message. Then it needs ministers to repeat that message endlessly in the context of their policy announcements. The political anoraks can find the policy detail if they want; for the 10-second attention span of BBC News @ 6 viewers – the message has to be coherent and repetitive (so it be internalised). That’s the way it is.
The problem with these extra chiefs is that not only will they send out mixed messages, but it gives the media an opportunity to run the narrative that senior ministers are in-fighting over the election message. They’ve been doing this for a while anyway.
I’ve said this repeatedly and I’ll say it again – there’s only one viable election strategy and that is the class war strategy. Labour should ignore the right-wing press and the Guardianistas, the polls bear me out.
The most worrying finding for the Tories is that Mr Cameron is seen to be on the side of the rich over ordinary people, by 50 to 42 per cent. By contrast, Mr Brown is seen as 64 per cent for ordinary people and 26 per cent for the rich.
How can Rod Liddle be stopped becoming Indy editor?
Since the Guardian revealed on Friday afternoon that Rod Liddle was seen as Alexander Lebedev’s main choice as editor, there has been a flurry of emails and tweets in horror.
It’s not absolutely certain Lebedev will take over the Indy, and neither is it certain Liddle will be appointed. But more than one writer/journalist at the newspaper has been in touch with me saying it is a serious prospect and they are very worried.
A Facebook group entitled ‘If Rod Liddle becomes editor of The Independent, I will not buy it again‘ has started – and accumulated over 1,400 followers in a short space of time. I tweeted the same on Friday – I’d never buy it again nor link to it if Liddle becomes editor.
The Indy is Britain’s only other progressive/liberal/left newspaper. Rod Liddle is the anti-thesis of all that (quotes by Liddle at the end).
continue reading… »
Liddle hope for the Indy
There can’t be many people with any affection for the Independent who are happy about the idea of Rod Liddle becoming editor, however premature the rumours might be.
But there probably aren’t very many people left with much affection for the Indy at all, because the brand seems to have specialised in weird and reputation-squandering reversals. Its Sunday version campaigns for the legalisation of cannabis, but then decides that skunk is actually a deadly menace.
It doesn’t support the Iraq war, but then recruits the Observer editor who put the made-up case for war on his front page.
Appropriately, Liddle was indirectly behind one of the other great journalistic screw-ups of the Iraq war – as editor of Today, he recruited Andrew Gilligan, who both found an internal source to blow the whistle on the exaggerations and bad intelligence in the “45 minutes” dossier, and then ruined the story’s credibility by mishandling his quotes and revealing his source.
continue reading… »
How Anjem Choudhary uses the media
Anjem Choudary is brilliant at professional media trolling. He knows exactly what to say, what to do and who to talk to, and also when to do it.
As strokes of genius go, nothing is more likely to wind up the nutters outside of his own clique than a half-baked supposed plan to march through Wootton Bassett, which may as well be our current Jerusalem, a holy place which cannot in any way be defiled, such is how it’s been sanctified both by the press and politicians.
As for his rather less amusing supposed plan for “sending letters” to the families of those bereaved through the current deployment to Afghanistan, urging them, according to that notoriously accurate source, the Sun, that they should embrace Islam “to save [themselves] from the hellfire”, it seems more likely that this would only be through the “open letter” which appeared on the Islam4UK website, which is currently 403ing.
Calling for a sense of perspective is of course a complete waste of time. It doesn’t matter that Islam4UK, the umpteenth successor organisation to Al-Muhjarioun.
continue reading… »
We’re giving terrorists what they want
Something doesn’t quite add up over the security panic that followed last week’s failed terror attempt to blow up a transatlantic airliner.
Britain has joined the US and other countries in toughening up checks at airports. Full body scanners, hand luggage checks and no toilet access an hour before landing are amongst some of the measures introduced to tame the new wave of psychosis that is hitting the western world.
Now. Let’s say that your house was broken into once and, hypothetically, you decided to take extra security measures to protect it. Iron bars on the bedroom window, armoured glass fitted with welded steel hinges, a special 24/7 CCTV guarding the room and a 10st stainless steel padlock to round it all off, are all concrete measures that would set your mind at rest.
However, with the initial excitement out of the way comes the realisation that all of the above may just be an expensively futile exercise. The bedroom may be safer than a fortress, but front door, living room, kitchen and all other entry points are as vulnerable as they were before.
continue reading… »
The Tories seek out wisdom of the crowds
Shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt says he’s going to “develop an online platform that enables us to tap into the wisdom of crowds to resolve difficult policy challenges”. Marina Hyde thinks the Tories may have solved the problem of their lack of policies. But with what significance?
The wisdom of crowds phenomenon observes that if you get a lot of people together and ask them to guess something – the weight of a pig at a county fair, say – then the more people you have guessing, the more likely they are to collectively get it right if you average out all the individual answers.
For every ridiculously far-out over-estimate, someone else under-estimates by the same margin. Eventually, the over- and under-valuations even each other out. The more people guessing, the closer the collective guess gets to a remarkable degree of accuracy.
The problem with applying such theorems to the realm of politics is that they only have purchase if the crowd or jury is being asked to discover something objectively certain. But politics is essentially conflict and struggle between clashing world-views. Large groups of people cannot discover the “correct” political policies, because the notion of “correct” politics is a chimera.
continue reading… »
Tory dodgy stats on Inheritance Tax laid bare
Fabian Research Director Tim Horton’s proposal that the inheritance tax thresholds should be frozen was adopted by the government in November’s pre-budget report.
He has letters in The Guardian and (why only preach to the converted) The Telegraph pointing to just one of the glaringly obvious flaws in Phillip Hammond’s rather back of the envelope claim that 4 million people will now be liable for inheritance tax, put out by the shadow Treasury Secretary during the holiday period.
Here’s The Telegraph letter.
SIR – The Conservatives’ claim that four million face inheritance tax (report, December 29) is wrong.
continue reading… »
Tory strategy: to hope for a credit downgrade
I smiled a rueful smile when I heard David Cameron call for a ‘good clean fight’ in the forthcoming general election.
Let’s set aside for the moment the fact by pouring millions of Lord Ashcroft mega-wealth into marginal constituencies, the Conservatives are effectively buying up seats, while having the gall to suggest that it is the Labour party that prey to the agenda of its key financial backers.
What is new this time around is that the result of the election may be decided on the basis of a single, methodologically obscure decision by a single credit ratings analyst.
Let’s let Stephanie Flanders take up the story, in her ‘intriguing question for 2010’:
Everyone thinks that the markets will politely wait until Britain has gone to the polls to draw its verdict on the UK. Well, maybe. But if sovereign debt is indeed the new sub-prime – at least where the markets are concerned – it’s difficult to believe that Britain will get through the months before the election without at least one major market wobble.
Perhaps one ratings agency will put the UK on negative watch. Or investors will get seized with the idea of a hung Parliament. Or Britain will simply get caught in the crosshairs of a market panic over sovereign debt in Central and Eastern Europe. Who knows what the trigger will be. But my hunch is there will be something, this side of polling day. The question will be how the major political parties react.
After Abdulmutallab: the media outcry
Odds are that the 278 passengers on board the Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day represented a reasonably random demographic.
I’m guessing entirely, of course, but it also seems reasonable to assume that there will also have been quite a few Muslims on the plane. Statistically speaking, the numbers involved even make it quite likely that those travelling on the Airbus A330 included one or two of the kind of people who habitually resort to such formulas as ‘refusal to condemn’ when discussing terrorism that they would classify as anti-imperialist.
There is an old joke that runs ‘just because you are paranoid, it doesn’t mean the bastards aren’t out to get you’. Unfortunately, the same consideration now applies to sane, rational, left of centre civil libertarians.
However morally outraged us lot get when the US blitzes an Afghan wedding party to Kingdom Come, it’s a fair bet that Osama bin Laden and his mates do not reciprocate our sincere Guardianista indignation when their team clocks up a home run.
continue reading… »
So, We Can Engineer a Mass Movement to Hack the Christmas Pop Charts, but We Can’t Agree on a Global Climate Change Treaty?
The schadenfreude becomes stale quite quickly, doesn’t it? No sooner had the whoops of glee at Simon Cowell’s failure to reach the Christmas Number 1 spot for the fifth consecutive year, and the many ironies of the Rage Against the Machine campaign were clear for all to see. First amongst these is the fact that R.A.t.M.’s angry Killing in the Name and Joe McElderry’s saccharine version of The Climb were Sony Music records: Joe is on Simco Records (i.e. Simon Cowell) “under exclusive licence to Sony Music Entertainment UK Ltd” while Rage Against The Machine’s label is Epic, a subsidiary of Sony.
The campaign put a small dent into Simon Cowell’s sales figures. Last year, Alexandra Burke’s Hallelujah sold 576,000 copies in the week before Christmas, while this year Joe McElderry only managed 450,000. But this hardly suggests that Cowell’s business model is on the wane – Leon Jackson only sold 275,000 copies of his single, When You Believe in 2007. Cowell knows that a bit of controversy is good for his bottom line. He knows that the label ‘Christmas Number One’ is an entirely relative marketing concept anyway, and modern music history is littered with classic hits which never reached that false summit.
So although the Facebook campaigners for Rage Against the Machine were successful, I can’t help thinking that there is something confused about the campaign and its aims. They say:
… it’s given many others hope that the singles chart really is for everybody in this country of all ages, shapes, and sizes…and maybe re-ignited many people’s passion for the humble old single as well as THAT excitement again in actually tuning in to the chart countdown on a Sunday.
In taking this line, the campaigners seem to be endorsing the Singles Chart as an appropriate indicator of good and popular music, when it is manifestly nothing of the sort. Yes, they reclaimed the ‘excitement’ for a single week… but they did so with a seventeen year-old song which was chosen precisely for its contrast with its competitor. That is entirely different from what the campaigners have nostalgia for – new music from good bands, battling it out. Former chart battles were essentially a positive contest, with music fans buying their favourite record. The 2009 campaign had an entirely negative “anyone by Cowell” message, which is unsustainable.
False Metrics
Modern internet campaigns often seem to fall into the trap of chasing targets based on false metrics. The campaign for Gary McKinnon (the computer hacker in danger of extradition to the US) seems to be a victim:
lets make #mckinnonmonday ‘trend’ – TWEET4GARY NOW !!! please tweet ALL #american friends and ask them to help #FREEGARY #garyMckinnon
- @cliffsul
The aim of #mckinnonmonday is to make Gary McKinnon trend #garymckinnon Pls RT
- @dandelion101
Shouldn’t the aim be to generate anger and interest in the Gary McKinnon story? How helpful is all the constant RT’ing if it doesn’t translate to bodies at the protest, letters in the politician’s in-tray.
And it is not just impoverished grassroots campaigners falling into this trap, either. Here is a recent tweet from a Cabinet Minister:
Support #welovetheNHS, add a #twibbon to your avatar now! – http://twibbon.com/join/welovetheNHS
Admittedly, sending the tweet is hardly a burden on Mr Milband’s resources, but its odd and disturbing that politicians and political campaigns have started to relate to us in this way. The idea that the NHS is something to love is presumed, and the campaign becomes about forming a huge group of people around a slogan for a fleeting moment only. Did anyone capture the e-mail addresses of those who tweeted #welovetheNHS? If not then it seems like a wasted moment.
And as for Twibbons? This innovation seems to me to be a hugely reductive exercise, shrinking political debate to a space 100 pixels wide.
Now, lest you assume I am engaging in pure snark, I should point out that I am as guilty of this hashtag chasing as the next person – perhaps more so. I helped the Burma Campaign devise their 64forSuu.org project, which was, frankly, all about the hashtag. And only today I’ve written a press release lauding the fact that PEN’s Libel Reform petition has just reached 10,000 signatures, a figure that will something only if it serves to light a fire under either Jack Straw or Dominic Grieve.
Its very easy to raise ‘awareness’ of any given issue, but that’s not the same thing as establishing a consensus that what you are proposing is right. And in turn, that is not the same thing as actually motivating people to action. It would be a great shame if “taking action” became synonymous with simply sharing links and joining endless Facebook groups, because when that “action” fails to translate into meaningful change, we will only find that another generation have been turned off politics, disillusioned. The Obama campaign has been criticised recently for its rather top-down approach to twitter, which didn’t really engage in conversation with supporters. But nevertheless, he actually inspired people out of their houses and into the campaign HQs. Did some of us think that Twitter could start a revolution in Iran? Not quite (as Jay Rosen points out). While the #IranElection tag on Twitter has been a useful tool for the protesters and for those reporting on the crisis it is clearly the people on the ground that will really put that regime under pressure (and we hope that the passing of Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri will provide inspiration to renew that pressure).
All of which is to say that George Monbiot’s sanctimonious article this morning had the ring of truth about it:
For the past few years good, liberal, compassionate people – the kind who read the Guardian – have shaken their heads and tutted and wondered why someone doesn’t do something. Yet the number taking action has been pathetic. Demonstrations which should have brought millions on to the streets have struggled to mobilise a few thousand. As a result the political cost of the failure at Copenhagen is zero. Where are you?
We’ve been tweeting #hashtags and adding #twibbons to our avatar, George. Get with the programme, yeah?
This is cross-posted on my own blog. I’ve also just added a counter-point to all this, ‘In praise of 100px Campaigns‘. It would be great to have comments on that side of the debate, too.
Understanding right-wing mentality
There’s an excellent article here by Julian Sanchez on the subject of right-wing ‘ressentiment’. He says:
The secret shame of the conservative base is that they’ve internalized the enemy’s secular cosmopolitan value set and status hierarchy—hence this obsession with the idea that somewhere, someone who went to Harvard might be snickering at them.
The pretext for converting this status grievance into a political one is the line that the real issue is the myopic policy bred by all this condescension and arrogance—but the policy problems often feel distinctly secondary.
This brings to mind several issues taken up so robustly by right-whingers, in particular climate change, because lefties champion them.
continue reading… »
What drives the global warming deniers?
Faced with the evidence, one would be tempted to say that many of our homegrown deniers are just stupid. After all the scientific facts are so overwhelmingly against them, and the improbability of AGW being either a conspiracy or an illusion so enormous, how could anybody deny that climate change is the single biggest threat facing humanity?
Someone like Lord Monckton appears to avoid the thicko label at first. After all, he publishes long-winded pseudo- explanations of why AGW is bunk (armed with his degree in, erm, classics). Then again, there comes a point when an individual’s staggering arrogance that they are right whilst (virtually) the entire scientific community is wrong shades off into stupidity, albeit of an especially hubristic kind.
But it’s hard to categorise all AGW deniers as idiots. Iain Dale, for example, can be extremely erudite and incisive when he chooses to be. I’ve seen him debate, and the man is sharp and intellectually very capable.
Similar things must be said of Tim Montgomerie: he’s one climate sceptic it’s unrealistic to categorise as stupid. Fraser Nelson – regardless of his attention-seeking flirtations with AIDs denialism – hardly comes across as thick.
continue reading… »
BS about BA
Libbie Escolme Schmidt – speaking as the author of a book documenting the too, too glamorous time she spent as a 1960s trolley dolly, you understand – thinks that striking British Airways cabin crew are ‘a disgrace to their profession’, and gets space in Britain’s biggest-circulation quality newspaper to tell them as much.
One line alone will give you a flavour of the piece: ‘For most of my career I felt guilty taking my wage, as it was such a fabulous experience.’ It presumably does not occur, either to Ms Escolme Schmidt or to the Daily Telegraph, that life probably just ain’t like that for the men and women working long-haul flights to huge numbers of mass market passengers.
Their basic wage is only £18,700 a year, and even if it is bumped up to something like twice as much as a result of allowances, many of them will be finding it difficult to make ends meet. Given that BA chief executive Willie Walsh is on £735,000, few will feel that their wedge is overly generous.
Elsewhere, the Torygraph slips into union-bashing on auto-pilot, seriously trying to maintain that the strike is really down to boosting devious leftie Len McCluskey’s chances of becoming general secretary of Unite next year.
continue reading… »
Why it makes sense for Labour to fight the ‘class war’
Oh dear, John Rentoul feels slightly stung by Don Paskini’s criticisms that his ‘please don’t hurt the rich‘ narrative doesn’t seem to be supported by polls.
He’s not alone.
The last few weeks have seen a succession of newspapers from the Daily Mail, Express, Telegraph, The Times and even The Economist play the ‘class war’ card. Surprisingly, a bunch of highly paid editors declared that increasing taxes on highly paid people was a bad idea.
But there are good strategic reasons for Labour embracing this phony ‘class war’.
1. Helps them re-frame the debate. The ‘class war’ is narrowly defined as being about bankers’ bonuses and higher taxes. Labour needs to expand this to include: Tories increasing IHT, deploring fairer taxes on the super-rich, their privileged backgrounds, the £250,000 “chicken-feed”, MPs “forced to live on rations”, Cameron not knowing how many houses he owned. In fact top Tory gaffes reek of how out of touch they are.
Re-framing the debate would allow them to talk about wider issues than just bankers’ bonuses.
continue reading… »
You can read articles through the front page, via Twitter or rss feeds.
» Why don’t MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours?
» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
» Why does Phillip Blond see civil cohesion as a security issue?
» So what if the Labour candidates went to Oxbridge?
» Last night’s Labour hustings: will it get interesting or turn to torture?
» It’s now down to Ken to win London for Labour
» The Labour people need
» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
» The Labour leadership’s token contender.. and it’s not Diane Abbott
» In defence of these fraternal nominations
» Is this the end for the socialist left?
|
25 Comments 66 Comments 20 Comments 12 Comments 10 Comments 18 Comments 4 Comments 25 Comments 49 Comments 31 Comments |
|
LATEST COMMENTS » Nick posted on Why don't MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours? » Bob B posted on Complete tits » Nick posted on Complete tits » Mike Killingworth posted on Complete tits » Mr S. Pill posted on Complete tits » Nick Cohen is a Tory posted on Complete tits » Nick Cohen is a Tory posted on Complete tits » Matt Munro posted on Why I'm defending Ed Balls over immigration » Kate Belgrave posted on Complete tits » Kate Belgrave posted on Complete tits » Nick Cohen is a Tory posted on Obama is right to slam BP - and why capitalists should too » Thomas Hobbes posted on The Daily Mail and "Bongo bongoland" » Matt Munro posted on Complete tits » Matt Munro posted on Complete tits » Lee Griffin posted on Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed? |
