The new PCC chair will let journalism down too
“Let me make sure you know exactly who I am and what I am going to do at the PCC” – so said Baroness Buscombe, the new chair of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), at the annual conference of the Society of Editors.
Having read her speech in full, I fear I do know what she is going to do at the PCC – and that I’m not going to like it.
It’s a curious speech in several ways. She started off by recounting in some detail her Conservative Party roots. Leading off with the fact that she’s a Conservative, added to the jibes at Labour and the silence about other parties (even though her reference to civil liberties gave an obvious opportunity to mention the Liberal Democrats, for example), leaves an obvious question about what her motives were.
I’m sure she’s a smart person and can’t have been unaware that the message many people will take from her speech is, “I’m a Conservative”. Is that really the right message for the chair of the PCC – which has to deal with complaints about political stories all in an equitable manner – to send? Is it the best way to reassure the public about how self-regulation will work on her watch?
There were also some rather astringent comments about Google and news aggregators:
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The Right’s confusion on challenging the BNP
David Blackburn writes for the Spectator’s CoffeeHouse blog that the BNP is, No longer a racist party, but a party of racists, in response to the news that BNP membership looks to vote overwhelmingly in favour of allowing non-whites to join the party.
David is highly confused. This is because he says:
The Spectator has maintained that the party’s domestic policies are inspired by racial supremacist ideology and that its economic policies are like Dagenham – that is, three stops beyond Barking.
Yes, I’ll agree with that. The party’s domestic policies are indeed inspired by a racial supremacist ideology. Which is why people should avoid following those policies right? Except, he does on to say centrist parties “must engage with (and I mean engage with, not shout down)” BNP policies. What a muddle. ‘Engage’ is a mealy-mouthed word that usually means ‘follow’.
Earlier this year Tim Montgomerie at ConHome said:
but I do think part of any anti-BNP strategy means addressing popular concerns about immigration, access to housing and championing people’s patriotic instincts… while ALWAYS attacking their racism.
They’ve banned Christmas! Sort of!
contribution by 5 chinese crackers
They didn’t actually. Last year, the Observer reported on 2 November that Oxford City Council had banned all reference to Christmas in its WinterLight Festival (which was nonsense).
This year, it wasn’t until the 13th that the Times managed ‘Christmas lights switch-on ceremony renamed ‘Winter White Night’‘. Guess what? It’s nonsense!
Okay, Dundee Council really have named the night the Christmas lights get switched on ‘Winter Light Night’ (not ‘white’, see), but according to the Times:
Christmas will not be Christmas in Dundee this year. All references to the religious holiday have been dropped from the switching-on ceremony for the city’s festive lights
Sounds familiar. In fact, it sounds almost exactly the same as last year’s nonsense about Oxford.
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The Sun does cyber-stalking too
“So how was your day?” — It’s a question which must get asked millions of times a day. Some surgeons may celebrate a successful operation; some police officers may toast the closing of a case; some bartenders may have enjoyed an evening’s banter with their regular punters.
However, if you’re John Coles, Ace Reporter for The Sun, your response to that question goes a little something like this:
Oh, my day was GREAT! I went on Facebook and stalked a 24 year old that nobody’s ever heard of. THEN, out of revenge for his Dad’s ‘zany’ statements about drugs, I publicly humilated him in a national newspaper!
Yes, the minds of tabloid journalists operate a little differently to the rest of us.
image by Beau Bo D’Or
So how did Coles’ intrepid cyber bullying increase his readers’ understanding of the world? Well, we’ve discovered that Steve Nutt either smokes weed or roll-ups (or maybe even both!); we’ve found out that he sometimes makes risque & inappropriate jokes to friends; we’ve learned that he has a sister who once drank booze at 16, and a brother who was once NAKED! In Sweden!
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Lamenting 40 years of The Sun
“We’re celebrating our 40th birthday in style”, announced the Sun yesterday.
With a series of self-congratulatory quotes (i.e. from people like Simon Cowell), Britain’s own bible belters have kickstarted a series of “sparkling birthday features”.
It’s undisputed that the Sun managed to push its way to the forefront of Britain’s contemporary culture. From shifting the nation’s attention towards mammary glands, through their contribution to harmony and cohesion, and all the way to reasoned and fact-based news reporting, the Sun has indeed become the epitome of British phlegm, “a national institution” (according to the Sun itself).
But to spare the Sun the risk of sliding into self-important back-slapping mode, which would be soooo unlike them, we’ve decided to help them celebrate the rag’s history with a short roll of honour of some of its most memorable moments.
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Which planet do Spectator writers inhabit?
Until recently I was only barely aware of a magazine called the Spectator and its accompanying website, but I’ve noticed it a lot just recently.
I’ve noticed it because everything in it seems to be such utter nonsense, and the trolls even worse than elsewhere.
Yesterday its columnist David Blackburn takes the plaudits for the new ’most woefully inaccurate journalist of the week award’, with not one but two entries – posted within a couple of hours either side of lunch? – which are simply wrong with a capital W.
First, at 12.43pm, is his suggestion that a political party, well the Labour party anyway, trying to maximise postal votes might be illegal in some way, and that Labour is bound to be up to no good. That brought the trolls out for sure.
Chris Paul’s already dealt with that one, and got the following comment published:
This seems to be speculative nonsense. People with PVs are about three times as likely to vote as those without. Weather doesn’t intervene. Holidays don’t. Illness doesn’t. Work doesn’t. Can’t be bothered less likely. Which is why all parties in close run seats try to get their known or likely supporters on PV. Conflating a perfectly logical optimisation exercise with cheating seems sloppy and ignorant. I repeat: sloppy and ignorant.
Revealed: How Tory staffers are astro-turfing leftwing blogs
Will Straw at Left Foot Forward published an astonishing story the other day. He said:
An employee of the Conservative party has used a fake name and email address to comment on a Left Foot Forward guest post about anti-semitism in Poland.
You won’t be surprised to hear that the comment was typically of the “so what?” kind that sought to play down Michal Kaminski’s background. Just the kind we’ve also been getting a lot of since the controversy erupted.
So, Unity ran a quick scan on our own comments. We’ve found four instances where someone with that IP address also posted comments here – in each case defending the party or its sympathisers.
The comments go as far back as March this year when I revealed that the think-tank Policy Exchange had been forced to apologise to a Muslim group. At the time we experienced a whole bunch of new readers coming here to rubbish my story without any substance to back it up.
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The DNA Database fudge continues
One of the motifs of the past few months has been that politicians of all colours “just don’t get it”. Ironically, when it comes to the continuing debacle over the DNA database, you rather imagine that they did get it and now they’re utterly bewildered at how things have turned out.
Here, after all, is what ought to be a standard tabloid outrage scandal: because of the “unaccountable” European Court of Human Rights, the government is having to change its policy on keeping all the DNA profiles of those arrested but not charged indefinitely, potentially raising the spectre of the guilty getting away with their crimes. The Sun, that flag-bearer of social authoritarianism, did originally raise its voice, but has since barely made a peep about the S and Marper case and its implications.
For a government that has so often treated with contempt the concerns of civil libertarians, with the full connivance of the vast majority of the tabloid press, the Daily Mail only recently deciding that it’s time to join the other side, it must be wondering where all those who believe if they’ve got nothing to hide they’ve got nothing to fear have disappeared to.
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Anti-Christmas nonsense arrives earlier every year
So apparently in the US there are circular emails and facebook applications claiming that President Obama has renamed the Christmas Tree at the White House, a ‘holiday tree’.
The facebook application amused me. Much in the way of the age old question, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” it asks “President Obama says that they will have a Holiday Tree this year instead of a Christmas Tree. Do you agree with this?”
It’s popping up in discussion forums and on news sites like myFOX. It’s going up as a question on Yahoo.
It’s being posted about on right-wing blogs. No mainstream news organisation that I can see has picked it up yet, but you just know that Bill O’Reilly is waiting in the wings to condemn someone, somewhere for not being Christian enough, as he did with a hapless group of Seattle atheists last year.
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Reforming English Libel Law
There is a growing consensus that English libel laws are not fit for purpose. The list of libel cases that seem to defy common sense grows longer every day. Bloggers are threatened by vindictive vested interests, and football fans on chat-rooms are bullied by their own clubs. Regional newspapers are intimidated into timidity, and publishers punt on commissioning the investigative journalism that is supposed to keep our democracy strong. Scientists who challenge the claims of alternative medicine are hit with writs.
And then there is the problem of forum shopping, or “Libel Tourism”:
Britain is a pariah state, shunned by its allies and exploited by the unsavoury. The state of English libel laws (Scotland’s provisions are a little better) is so embarrassing that a number of US states have enacted legislation to protect their citizens from our courts. London is the global centre of libel tourism. From Middle Eastern potentates to Russian oligarchs, the rich and powerful use our legal system to bully people who try to hold them to account.
That’s John Kampfner, former editor of the New Statesman and Chief Executive of Index on Censorship, introducing the Index/PEN report into English libel laws. The report is the result of a year long inquiry that took in the opinions of publishers, lawyers, journalists, novellists, NGOs and bloggers, and identifies ten challenges for libel reform.
First amongst these the problem of burden of proof, which in libel lies uniquely with the defendant. The report recommends reversing this, and requiring claimants to demonstrate falsehood and damage. We also recommend reducing damages in libel to £10,000 and establishing a low cost libel tribunal that would allow bloggers, and others of slender means, to defend libel actions without having to re-mortgage their children.
You can read the rest of our recommendations at www.libelreform.org, a new hub that will co-ordinate the campaign for libel reform, in collaboration with Sense About Science. We need to lobby MPs to sign an EDM calling form reform, and to pressurise both the Tories and Labour to join the Liberal Democrats and make libel reform a manifesto commitment. The campaign for libel reform has already attracted the support of writers such as Monica Ali and Andrew Motion, and makes bedfellows of newspaper editors Alan Rusbridger and Peter Wright. If you are fed up with the wealthy and big corporations using English laws to suppress free speech, then we urge you to join them, and sign-up to the campaign.
Pants off to impropriety
I’d like to shout out for an unsung hero of improper, joyful, self-actualising women everywhere: Knickers Girl.
When a Sun photographer snapped Knickers Girl – aka 20 year old teaching assistant Sarah Lyons -cavorting in Cardiff centre with a pair of pants around her ankles, she instantly became the face of female reprobation up and down the country. Never mind that she wasn’t exposing any naughty bits; never mind that dancing with a pair of knickers around your ankles is perfectly legal behaviour; never mind that the pants in question weren’t the ones she’d been wearing, but a comedy pair of David Hasselhof knickers a mate had picked up in a bar.
Never mind that poor Ms Lyons was on a course of antibiotics and hence was actually stone-cold sober at the time: the new postergirl of binge-drinking ladettes everywhere has been suspended from her job pending a disciplinary inquiry, for the dubious crime of having fun in public. And they say sexism in the workplace is dead.
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Julie Bindel does transphobia again
Julie Bindel is wrong again. She was wrong in 2004 when she said that “I don’t have a problem with men disposing of their genitals, but it does not make them women” and she’s shockingly wrong in a recent article for Standpoint mag that I can only describe as hideously transphobic.
There’s a lot in this article to take issue with. Other bloggers, such as cave of rationality have discussed it from a human rights perspective, specifically the human rights that she fails to apply to trans-gendered people.
I want to examine it through her discussion of biology as destiny, when she says:
transsexualism, by its nature, promotes the idea that it is “natural” for boys to play with guns and girls to play with Barbie dolls. The idea that gender roles are biologically determined rather than socially constructed is the antithesis of feminism.
Melanie Phillips explains Gramsci
Sometimes a particular combination of headline and author catches your eye and you just know where the article is going to go. So I must admit a certain sense of keen anticipation when I spotted the words ‘We were fools to think the fall of the Berlin Wall had killed off the far Left. They’re back – and attacking us from within’ in conjunction with the name ‘Melanie Phillips’.
At first reading, the piece appeared to be a corker, right down to the stab at summarising Gramsci for a Daily Mail audience. Sure, I know that idea sounds counterintuitive, in a ‘Richard Littlejohn outlines his debt to the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr’ or ‘Seumas Milne ponders the downsides of Serbian nationalism’ kind of way, but to my mind that just made it all the better.
So imagine my disappointment, dear reader, when a quick Google revealed that both the underlying thesis – not to mention chunks of text – are simply rehashed from a 2007 piece authored by Linda Kimball on the US far right fringe website American Thinker. It transpires that Ms Phillips may not have read Prison Notebooks after all, and really should cut Kimball in for at least 50% of the presumably not ungenerous fee she got for the feature.
Why New Labour should pick a fight with The Sun
The conventional wisdom is that a political party shouldn’t pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel, even if it attacks them relentlessly. The White House has been pushing back at Fox News and yesterday Lord Mandelson said the row over Brown’s letter to the soldier’s mother row was being “orchestrated” by a paper that was actively campaigning against Labour.
For various reasons I think this is the correct position to take.
The left has to stop becoming scared of the media and push back.
Encouragng over-reach
I suspect that most sensible Britons will look at The Sun’s hysterical attack yesterday as politically motivated. Even some of his most outspoken critics were sympathetic. The Sun newspaper is, like its sister organ in the US, actively campaigning for the opposition and both have tied their flags to the mast. This means their audience already knows there is a political agenda, which somewhat neutralises them.
And both have been getting over-excited in an attempt to attack the governing party and that means further loss in legitimacy in public opinion. Pushing back even slightly, as Obama and Mandelson have done, will invite even further hysteria from them and make them over-excitable and lose more legitimacy and so on…
Bolsters the base
Neither Obama nor Brown have much to lose in potential voters since their opponents are already campaigning hard against them. But it does bolster their left-wing base that hates the media orgs passionately. It also helps develop a victim mentality which is needed to get the activists out and push back even harder. The Sun’s political influence on its voters is already over-stated and it has lost 35% of its circulation since 1997.
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Have we no shame?
I was struck by this article, in which American journalist Penelope Trunk defends her decision, despite an unanticipated global barrage of hate mail, to post the following to her Twitter feed:
“I’m in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there’s a fucked-up three-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.”
That right there, in >140 characters, is possibly the most succinct and effective piece of feminist gonzo journalism I have ever read.
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Confessions of a leftwing Islamophobe
To describe someone as an ‘Islamophobe’ is effectively to brand them an ugly and virulent racist, which is no small accusation for one leftist to throw at another. Yet that sort of thing seems par for the course on the major British far left blogs.
Lenin’s Tomb, for example, has no problem in carrying an article under the title ‘Tatchell and pink-veiled Islamophobia’, just in case anyone was unaware that the leading green left activist is a bit of a Nancy Boy on the quiet.
Now Socialist Unity has taken up the theme, with a guest post by one Barry Kade, which we must presume to be a pseudonym. His contribution, ‘The intersections between homophobia and Islamophobia’, is pegged on the recent smears against Tatchell by a number of academics, who have accused him of ‘gay imperialism’. The mind boggles.
I could make any number of tasteless jokes at this point, but will restrict myself to the observation that Tatchell’s detractors are probably not insinuating that he has fused the state and finance capital to facilitate the export of surplus cottaging venues. Go back and read some Lenin, guys.
Let’s talk about sex
The Government has announced plans today to make sex education in schools compulsory for all pupils between the ages of 15 and 16. Under the new proposals, all schools will have to teach personal, social, health and economic education to pupils from the age of five, but until those pupils reach 15 their parents will retain the right to withdraw them from classes. Staggeringly, considering the age of consent in this country is actually 16, that right currently exists for parents right up until their children hit 19.
Predictably, a good proportion of the commenters over at the Daily Mail have got their knickers in a twist about all this, as has Norman Wells, the director of the Family Education Trust, a group which believes that “behind the plausible-sounding arguments and innocuous-sounding words there is a specific agenda at work to undermine the role of parents and to tear down traditional moral standards” and that “Sex education is an ideological battlefield on which a war is being waged for the hearts and minds of our children.”
And equally as predictably, I wholeheartedly disagree. In fact I think sex education, or PSHE (or is it PSHEE now?) should be compulsory for all pupils, including those still at primary school.
That’s not to say that I think children as young as five should be learning about sex, but I do believe that even the very youngest children have a right to know some basics, like the correct terminology for parts of the human anatomy for instance, or the fact that it’s perfectly normal for both boys and girls to feel emotions and to cry. (I also believe it’s tantamount to neglect that in this day and age a girl of 16 can find herself pregnant because she “only did it the once and everyone told me I couldn’t get pregnant the first time,” as happened to a friend’s daughter.)
The continuing madness of Melanie Phillips
At the weekend Ed Husain wrote an eminently reasonable, measured and very restrained attack on the more out-there views of Melanie Phillips. Husain clearly feels that Phillips is a potential ally in the battle against radical Islam, although quite why judging by her record it’s difficult to tell.
His main concern now seems to be that rather than being an ally, she’s becoming a prominent obstacle to any kind of progress. Especially in the way she seems determined to see conspiracies where there are none, in this instance with Inayat Bunglawala and his determined opposition to the remnants of al-Muhajiroun.
Again, this isn’t anything new with Phillips: a few years back she was convinced that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction had been buried beneath the Euphrates and that Saddam’s crack team of WMD experts had upped sticks and moved to Syria.
Nonetheless, it was also going to be interesting to see how Phillips responded.
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Why are Tories defending a “propaganda” sheet?
When Ken Livingstone lost the mayoral elections to Boris Johnson, one of the first acts under the new administration was to axe The Londonder – a freesheet distributed by the Mayor.
Even before the election the Tories attacked it as ‘blatant propaganda’. Conservatives were ecstatic – he had saved £2.9million! (Let’s ignore for a moment how much he spent on ‘transition’ and salaries).
It was dubbed ‘Pravda’ for Livingstone and the Tories were glad to see the end of it.
And why not? The Right is ideologically opposed to state-funded media right? Not exactly….
Yesterday the Media Guardian reported:
MPs today accused local councils of producing “propaganda” publications that could put local newspapers out of business. Hearing evidence from representatives of local authorities, MPs of all parties on the Commons culture, media and sport select committee expressed concerns about the effect of council freesheets on rival privately owned newspapers.
They singled out one council-run paper, the fortnightly H&F News produced by the London borough of Hammersmith and Fulham.
What will Fraser Nelson go for next?
It was the question that The Spectator’s recent foray in HIV-AIDS denialism was bound to spawn: “What next by the Spectator? ‘Questioning the evolution consensus‘ perhaps?”
Next? Not exactly….try ‘Been there, done that’
Creating an insult to intelligence
Listening to the Today programme this morning, I was irritated once again by yet another misrepresentation of Intelligent Design as a form of Creationism. In an item on the growing popularity of Intelligent Design, John Humphrys interviewed Professor Ken Miller of Brown University in the US who spoke on the subject last evening at the Faraday Institute, Cambridge. Humphrys suggested that Intelligent Design might be considered a kind of middle ground between Darwinism and Creationism. Miller agreed but went further, saying that Intelligent Design was nothing more than an attempt to repackage good old-fashioned Creationism and make it more palatable.
But this is totally untrue.
Melanie Phillips – Coffeehouse, 29th April 2009
Few could be said to have Mel’s expertise in the field of insulting people’s intelligence, she does it so regularly and with so little effort. But it’s worth putting a bit of context to her remarks if only to drive home a couple of important points.
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» 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?
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