Dear Lady Buscombe,
Re: Extension of PCC regulation to UK Blogs/Blogging
We write in regard to your apparent proposal that the PCC should consider extending its remit to the 'blogosphere' as reported by Ian Burrell of the Independent on 16 November 2009.
While we are grateful for your interest in our activities we must regretfully decline your kind offer of future PCC regulation.
Frankly, we do not feel that the further development of blogging as an interactive medium that facilitates the free exchange of ideas and opinions will benefit from regulation by a body representing an industry with, in the main, substantially lower ethical standards and practices than those already practiced by the vast majority of established British bloggers.
Although we would not wish you believe that this criticism relates to all your members – The Guardian, in particular, has adopted a number of practices, not least the appointment of a Readers' Editor to deal with complaints, which we consider to be the current gold standard in ethical journalistic practice amongst national newspapers – it is nevertheless the case that the vast majority of national newspaper titles routinely fall well short of both those, and our own, standards and that our direct experience of dealing with the PCC shows the organisation to be, in the main, complicit in those failings.
To give but one recent example of bad practice, of the many that bloggers have documented in over the last few years, an article published by the Tabloid Watch blog in October, documented, in some considerable detail, the tortuous process that one of its readers had to go through in order to get the News of the World to retract a manifestly untrue and inflammatory statement by one of its regular columnists, Carole Malone.
In this particular column, published in July 2009, Malone made use of an all-too-common and utterly racist myth that 'immigrants' (meaning asylum seekers) receive free cars on arriving in the UK, a myth that is most closely associated with the propaganda output of the British National Party. Extract of Malone article:
"All you have to do to get everything Britain has to offer is to turn up illegally with some sob story of how your own country is too dangerous or that you're a lesbian who'll be shot if you stay there and Hey Presto, it's like you've won the lottery! And, in effect, they HAVE.
Free houses, free cars, free healthcare and free money. Hell, they don't even have to work or speak the language. Even the suggestion they should is seen as racist in Brown's Britain.
They can just live as they did before, only with a whole heap more money and zero responsibility to the country providing it."
What we find most striking about the process documented by Tabloid Watch is the extent to which the PCC actively sought to facilitate the News of the World's efforts to avoid undertaking practices that we, as bloggers, take for granted as being standard practice in our corner of the internet: i.e. the prominent publication of an honest and open correction of a factual error on the original article in which the error, itself, was made.
Instead, as we invariably find to be standard practice amongst, particularly, tabloid newspapers; the correction and cursory apologywhen it was grudgingly issued after what Tabloid Watch described as 'two months of wrangling' – appeared in a location other than that of Malone's column in the newspaper's print edition and on its website on a page utterly divorced from the article to which it relates, which was removed its entirety, and in such a way that only someone searching specifically for the retraction would ever be likely to find it.
To all intents and purposes, the retraction might as well not have been issued, for all that it would be apparent to visitors to the News of World's website that it had ever been made.
This is but one clear example of a practice that would be unacceptable amongst established bloggers and one of many that bloggers who specialise in monitoring the national press for accuracy have documented in recent years.
For a blogger to engage in such practices, which include 'stealth editing' of articles, after publication, to avoid owning up to factual errors and removing and/or refusing to publish critical comments from readers, especially those that highlight and correct factual errors.
For an established blogger to adopt such practices would do incalculable damage to their public reputation; this being, after all, all that we have to trade on.
To the vast majority of national newspapers such conduct is no more than standard operating practice.
Consequently we would suggest that before your even consider turning your attention to our activities, you should direct your energies towards putting your own house in proper order.
Should you succeed in raising the ethical standards and practices of the majority of the national press, particularly the tabloids, to our level then we may be inclined to reconsider our position.
Until that happens, any attempt by the Press Complaints Commission to regulate the activities of bloggers will be strenuously resisted at every possible turn.
Regards,
"This is very different to the trend we need to be on to limit global climate change to 2C [the level required to avoid dangerous climate change]." That would require CO2 emissions from all sources to peak between 2015 and 2020 and that the global per capita emissions be decreased to 1 tonne of CO2 by 2050. Currently the average US citizen emits 19.9 tonnes per year and UK citizens emit 9.3 tonnes.
"We went to the Times willingly, after the Mail had their reporters warned off my work premises by the police"
Women are their own worst enemies
The basics of The Five-Minute Miracle came to Tara Springett, a psychotherapist, in meditation one day.
When Lord Lovat led a massively destructive commando raid on the Lofoten Islands in 1941, he sent a telegram from the local post office to one A Hitler in Berlin: "LAST SPEECH SAID GERMAN TROOPS WOULD MEET BRITISH WHEREVER THEY LANDED STOP WHERE ARE THEY".
1. A student, who fails to complete (that is, undergo the final assessment of, or pass) any module within the year of programme of study is to be returned as a non-completion for all activity in that year. However, an exception is allowed for full-time students where the module is in addition to the standard requirements for full-time study.
Non-completions
14. Non-completion is defined in terms of modular programmes of study.These rules have been in force for 5 years, the leadership board is very highly paid and receives 'performance related pay' as a 'contractual right', they've instituted an intellectually vacuous new curriculum, are sacking 250 FTEs and being fined several million pounds. What would you suggest 'taking full responsibility' means?
The message for the British government is a simple one: don't exclude rational argument in order to exploit a visceral public response. Politicians have to win the hearts and minds of their electorate. If your policy is informed by an underlying moral imperative, be open about what that is, and don't try to disguise it with a veneer of pseudo-science. We ignore scientific evidence at our peril.
The committee has ruled that the university is funded for a student if, and only if, the student completes every aspect of the year's work in that academic year. Any postponement of a final assessment, any resit, will almost certainly result in the student being regarded as a "non-completer" and not fundable, even if the academic decision is that the student can proceed to the next year of study.
“The honourable Member for Braintree cited evidence from The Sun, so I want to refer to a recent edition of the British Medical Journal”).
“It is no good people saying that just because we cannot prove something, it does not work… I believe that the Department needs to be very open to the idea of energy transfers…
“In 2001 I raised in the House the influence of the moon, on the basis of the evidence then that at certain phases of the moon there are more accidents. Surgeons will not operate because blood clotting is not effective and the police have to put more people on the street.”
“I am talking about a long-standing discipline—an art and a science—that has been with us since ancient Egyptian, Roman, Babylonian and Assyrian times. It is part of the Chinese, Muslim and Hindu cultures… Criticism is deeply offensive to those cultures,” says Tredinnnick: “and I have a Muslim college in my constituency.”
Any attempts to challenge Tredinnick’s ideas are based, he explains, on “superstition, ignorance and prejudice” by scientists who are “deeply prejudiced, and racially prejudiced too, which is troubling.”
