I'll keep this one brief. A lot of people active on social media think that BBC political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg is biased, specifically against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. I don't know if she is or isn't because I haven't seen much of her work (and therefore my general view can't and shouldn't be applied to her): interviews between politicians and reporters, and political reporting, are now so sterile that I can't face watching any more of them. The politicians are so well-trained that they can effortlessly flannel through any really pressing question, while the savvy ones simply avoid appearing at press conferences or tough interviews: Cameron would only appear on sofas, while the Today show is reduced to sarcastically pronunciation of the words 'no minister was available'.* One particular report she filed on Corbyn's attitude to British shoot-to-kill policies was reported to the BBC trust and investigated for misrepresenting the Labour leader's views by misrepresenting the question put to him (unseen on the particular show complained about), which altered how his response was framed. The findings were mixed: she was found to have been inaccurate:
…the report had not been duly accurate in how it framed the extract it used from Mr Corbyn’s interview
and that
Trustees considered that the effect of the inaccuracy was compounded when the report went on to state that, consequent from Mr Corbyn’s answer:
“[the Prime Minister’s] message and the Labour leader’s couldn’t be more different.”
Finding: Upheld as breaches of accuracy and therefore as a breach of
impartiality
but not biased:
Trustees agreed that there was no evidence of bias or any intent by the BBC or any individual to misrepresent Mr Corbyn’s position
People may agree or disagree with this finding: that's their right. But what caught my eye was the subsequent behaviour of BBC executives. The Head of News, James Harding, was quoted saying this:
While we respect the Trust and the people who work there, we disagree with this finding…BBC News reported on the leader of the opposition in the same way it would any other politician…It is striking that the Trust itself said there was ‘no evidence of bias’. Indeed, it also said the news report was ‘compiled in good faith'.
The Trust is being abolished shortly, so no doubt Mr Harding felt that he could ignore it with impunity, but I worry that this attitude mimics the behaviour of governments and politicians. In the space of two sentences, Harding rejects the substantial findings of the report while cherry-picking it for the positives – like a film poster which bearing the quotation 'STUNNING' when the original review read 'the cash spent on this film is a stunning waste of time'. You can't say 'this was all rubbish except the bits I like': that way lies @realdonaldtrump. Harding's a public servant, not a PR operative or political hack: either he rejects the whole thing and explains why, or he accepts it, but to pick and choose like this is spin and we should expect better of the BBC. As a journalist or an executive responsible for journalists at one of the world's most respected broadcasters, he has an ethical duty not to editorialise or himself misrepresent despite the understandable pressure to defend one of his own. Doing so adds to the perception that all uncomfortable or inconvenient decisions and judgements should be dismembered and rebuilt in a different way for the convenience of one side. *I also groan whenever a political story is reported 'live from' Downing Street/the White House/wherever even if it's 3 a.m. and the story relates to Syria because they think the viewer is so stupid s/he needs to see some synecdochic or metonymic architecture.
Let's start way back at the beginning. My academic career started well and tailed off quite badly. By 'well', I mean that I began school at 5 and had burned through the school's entire stock of books by the age of 7. Come secondary school I bounced from institution to institution, memorably scoring a fine 4% in a maths exam and being on the receiving end of violence and scorn from the Sisters of Mercy, the Christian Brothers and the Benedictines. Achieving largely undistinguished A-levels, the Clearing system came to my rescue and I took a degree in English with large chunks of Philosophy and various other subjects mixed in. I'd picked up a couple of languages and acquired a few more, mostly in the pub and through sharing houses. Next came an MA in Welsh Writing in English, and finally a PhD in Masculinity and Politics in 1930s Welsh Literature. Since then I've published occasionally on Welsh literature, Welsh literature in English, Foucault, jazz in contemporary fiction, Star Trek and Doctor Who, and I'm working on politicians' creative writing and Welsh Appalachia. The trend, as you can see, is specialisation. It's taken 11 GCSE's, three A-levels, three degrees and a teaching certificate to qualify me to mark the pile of first-year English essays currently on my desk, and I was 34 before I had a regular income and a full-time job. I'm just like any other academic, except less productive and more sarcastic. Amongst the academics I admire most are the AHRC/BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinkers, an incubator scheme that nurtures some of the best new academics and gets their work in the public domain. It's a brilliant scheme that doesn't take into account institutional prestige, and believes strongly in the value of communicating good research to the people who ultimately pay for it. Which brings me to the point of today's post: Affiliate Professor Jeremy Baker, the Today programme and News Values. Affiliate Professor Baker was interviewed on Today this morning about workers' rights, which he described as 'rewards' due to the 'middle-class' and awarded to everyone as a right only by those who are, or want to be, 'French'. In a world largely without workers' rights, he said, Britain can only stay competitive by withdrawing them. He notably declined to deny that he was advocating 'exploitation'. So far, so terrible. Awful views, but it's a free country. However, it got me thinking about the process of inviting this man onto the nation's most prestigious news broadcast. A few years back, Mitchell and Webb teased the media for its sudden and rather desperate attempt to catch up with social media.
Very funny, I thought. And I'm regularly to be found tweeting on the #bbcqt and #bbcr4today hashtags: howling into the void without any hope of a response from those in charge. Little did I think, however, that being a Man In Possession of a Reckon now qualifies you not simply to Send In Your Views but to be interviewed as an expert on the nation's most prestigious, agenda-setting news magazine. Appalled by the Affiliate Professor's views, I wondered where the BBC had found him. Being an researcher of sorts I decided to look him up. This wasn't easy, but eventually I found his institution: the private ESCP Europe Business School, which has campuses in London, Berlin, Paris and several other places. It has not, to my knowledge, troubled the league tables nor the Nobel Prize committees. Given the British Establishment's obsession with Oxford and Cambridge, I'm at the least surprised that they went so far off the beaten path for this guy. So ESCP Europe Business School isn't much cop. It's so removed from UK academic standards that it isn't even allowed the 'ac.uk' URL or email addresses (that's a tip, kids). But what of the distinguished Affiliate Professor? Well, I looked him up on ESCP Europe Business School's website. You can't do the same because within minutes of the interview, the relevant pages were removed as if by magic! Thankfully, I took a screenshot and also resorted to the Wayback Machine. Here are Affiliate Professor Jeremy Baker's publications and current research profile:
So the Today programme's expert in the field is a man with no publications and no current research. But he does have an MBA and a teaching qualification! To be fair to Affiliate Professor (not a standard title by the way) he does have one publication: a self-help book about the pre-fame careers of various well-known people. It's called Tolstoy's Bicycle and it came out in 1983. Here's what it covers:
Copies are available from 1p to £1751. But let's delve a little deeper into the good Affiliate Professor's career. Has he, like the BBC New Generation Thinkers, or even me, devoted his life to deepening his understanding of his chosen field, employment law and the philosophy and economy of human rights? Um, no. According to the Wayback Machine's archived page, this is his life.
He has Credentials and membership such as:
AA Dip: Architectural Association Diploma, RIBA part 2
Cert Ed: Greenwich University PG Certificate in teaching Higher Education
CIPR: Member, Chartered Institute of Public Relations
CIPR: On Awards judging panel, 2006, 2007, 2009
F.CAM: appointed Fellow of the CAM Foundation – Comms Advertising Marketing
Society of Authors: Member
Press Club of London: Member
University of Tennessee: Award for help with their PR programme
Journal of Comm Mngmt: Member, editorial board
Southampton Solent Uni: External Examiner: BA New Media
He is, in fact, qualified in architecture, teaches Marketing and is very, very available for media work. Has he though had a distinguished career in academia, drawing on his wide range of experience? Again, no:
In the course of his career, he was a visiting lecturer in Marketing and international business analysis at London Metropolitan University and at Cambridge Marketing College. Jeremy Baker is also a commentator for TV and radio on marketing and consumer issues. He worked as a freelance PR on communication for Avon Cosmetics, New West End Co, Rain, Communications, Selfridges, and Oxford Street retailers NWEC.
Now London has many fine courses, but Cambridge Marketing College is not, as far as I'm aware, another bastion of critical enquiry, and being a visiting lecturer there (read: hourly-paid) is probably not the career profile of a nationally-important commentator. The major question isn't why Affiliate Professor Jeremy Baker thinks he's an expert in workers' rights: the question is why the BBC deems him sufficiently qualified to speak on the subject to the nation. The New Generation thinkers have struggled intellectually, economically and personally to become experts and their reward is to reach the tiny (but lovely) Radio 3 audience. Jeremy hasn't struggled in any way and yet gets to go on the Today problem. This is (finally) about news values. Rather than get someone from industry or academia to present their experience and research, the editors decided that their priority was controversy and extreme views: entertainment rather than information. In the process, an obscure and frankly less-than-credible source is given national credibility for himself and his Reckons without having to substantiate any of his claims via peer-reviewed research. How did they choose him? What are the criteria? Why should hard-working academics put effort into testing and refining ideas if snake-oil salesmen are considered more radio-friendly simply because their views are more pungent? We'll never know, because they don't respond to queries or complaints. It cheapens the Today programme and it cheapens the value of academia. Worse than that: it creates amongst the listeners an impression that these unsourced and unjustified views are somehow prevalent, backed-up by research (why else would you find even an 'Affiliate' Professor?) and institutional credibility, thus shifting the parameters of the debate well away from the mainstream without in any indicating this. This is highly misleading, not to say irresponsible.
Too many depressing things are happening at the moment, though there are bright spots (I refereed 57 straight fights at the Much Wenlock Olympian Games fencing the other day and only made one result-changing cock-up; I turned 40 on Tuesday too) and I can't keep up. Attacks on organised labour, on healthcare, on public service broadcasting, on education… It's like the Tories, with a majority of 12, bought a copy of The Shock Doctrine and are using it as a guidebook. If you haven't read it, it traces how the CIA-supported 1973 fascist coup in Chile gave American monetarist economists (known as the Chicago Boys) the opportunity to try out all their ideas in one go, untrammelled by democracy, debate, human rights, concern for the people or any of those outdated ideas. Capital loved the Cold War: it enabled them to link freedom, democracy and capitalism, when they have no natural connection at all. China's the most successful capitalist nation on earth – because its people are neither free nor democratic.
So that's what's happening in the UK (and Greece, obviously). A government is using a tiny mandate to rush through the privatisation of public services and the abolition of the very concept of the public good (here's the excellent open letter on the marketisation of Higher Education). Here's a short piece I've written for a university magazine, with a few additions and subtractions for this different kind of outlet.
Some, perhaps all of these shows might be your idea of hell,
and no doubt readers also
tend to shudder at the thought of a night in front of Snog, Marry, Avoid or Dog Borstalthough I would point out that all the shouty smugness can often be a diversionary tactic: those sneaky TV-types are smuggling educational stuff in under the cover of crass rubbish. I used to be quite good at spotting weaselly indoctrination in kids' TV and boycotting shows when I was young: give me Ren and Stimpy over Grange Hill any day. You don't have to like everything on TV: you just don't have the right to demand that anything you don't like should be shut down.
Anyway, fair enough. Being a white middle-class 40 year-old, Radio 1's current disposition makes me want to cut off my ears rather than endure a second’s more ‘banter’ and self-promotion by one of their interchangeable smug DJs playing bland rubbish. I once listened to nothing but Radio 1. John Peel,
Steve Lamacq’s Evening Session, Mark and Lard in the afternoon. The commercial
stations didn’t play the kind of thing I liked, and I’m allergic to
advertising. As I aged, Radio 1 fulfilled its requirement to cater for a
younger demographic, but I still had Radio 3. Well, at least Late Junction: the rest of it has been ruined by market forces. Classic FM has destroyed classical music by its strict policy of only every playing snippets of music that has featured on adverts. Nothing unfamiliar, unhappy or untuneful can be tolerated. If it happened in visual art, our galleries would be full of nothing but dogs playing cards and selfies. Classic FM attracts listeners by giving them soothing background muzak and R3 has largely followed suit, at least in the daytime.
I still have Radio 4 (except for the damned Archers) and sometimes 6Music. My tastes in TV changed too: where
once I watched little but science fiction, Westerns and smart-arse American
cartoons, I’m became addicted to The Wire
(BBC2), Newsnight (BBC2) and New
Tricks (BBC1). I shout at the TV and radio quite a lot, because I think
that the BBC has a markedly conservative tendency at the moment, but as long as
the other half of the population is shouting at it because it’s full of
lefties, it’s probably getting things about right.
And now theCulture Secretary wants to strip the BBC back to making programmes that ‘the
market’ won’t make. The BBC, he declares, should stop making popular and
populist shows that ITV or Channel 5 or (and I suspect this is the major point)
Sky could do. The Voice has been
mentioned, amongst that plethora of talent shows. What it should do, he thinks,
is produce the unprofitable shows that are good for us. No doubt he means
wall-to-wall Question Time, Antiques Roadshow, Songs of Praise gardening programmes, golf, golf, more golf and property speculation shows
designed to make us view the panoply of human life solely in monetary terms. He and his friends want coverage of the stuff they like on the BBC, and want everyone else to shut up or pay Sky. They hate the BBC because they think it's run by communists: as far as I can see, it's run by Daily Mail readers. They also hate it because they resent the popular will being embodied in collective non-commercial provision of public goods. It's an example of a largely successful popular institution which reproaches the market by simply existing. Like the NHS it's got to go, because it implies that there is an alternative to the market.
Essentially, the
new government wants a BBC which panders solely to the tastes of rich, white,
conservative, southern people, especially men. Women, ethnic minorities,
Welsh-speakers, homosexuals and liberals should try their luck in the fabled
‘market’. Children too can get lost. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but
children’s TV has largely disappeared from the commercial airwaves: hampered by
pesky regulations (soon to be abolished, I presume) about not advertising sugary drinks and foods means that
there’s no money in it. What little kids’ TV there is tends to be cheap rubbish
designed to sell toys. Only the BBC – thanks to its public service broadcasting
requirement – provides high-quality children's programming, often with an
educational bent. News, too, is under threat: imagine running a report on
aircraft safety, for instance, if you depend on Ryanair adverts, or on hidden
sugars when you know that Coca-Cola is one of your major clients?
The attack on the
BBC is an attack on the idea of universality. You and I might hate every
programme on BBC3, but that’s OK: it’s audience might hate everything we watch.
We all pay the licence fee (in theory) and part of the public service ethos is
that all our needs are served equally. I pay for Dog Borstal and Dog Borstal
fans pay for my University Challenge.
Viewers of Dog Borstal and University keep paying, and might even
watch the other’s types of show. In the brave new world of subscription-funded
broadcasting, those with cash will get the programming they want; the rest may
as well go for a walk.
John Whittingdale
objects to The Voice because he
thinks the BBC shouldn’t make shows replicating what the commercial channels
are doing. While the rash of talent shows may be annoying, he perhaps forgets
that most TV formats are trialled on
licence-funded channels, where ratings are slightly less important than
quality. What seems tediously familiar now was once innovative. Take Mad Men, for instance. Made by an
American commercial station, only BBC2 took a chance on it in the UK. Once it
was a critical hit, Sky swooped in to outbid the BBC for later series: the BBC
built the audience up, and Sky took the credit (though not the viewers, interestingly).
Whittingdale also forgets that popular hits pay for expensive unpopular but
important shows. No Top Gear, Sherlock and Doctor Who, selling round the world, no Newsnight or Desert Island
Discs. Nor, I would add, any highly trained directors, producers,
engineers, actors, editors and sound recordists: the commercial sector is
subsidised by the BBC’s world-class training programme.
Infuriating
though it often is, the BBC represents the very best of British culture (despite it being Establishment, Unionist, a capitalist shill and all the other things about it I hate). It
believes in equality of representation, universality, and that very
old-fashioned concept, ‘public service’. Without a broadcaster committed to
serving us all uninfluenced by the profit motive or chasing ratings, we are all
poorer.
The same model is
being applied to education, by the way.
So, Lord Patten and the BBC management have searched the world for the right person to lead the BBC into a new post-Savile, post-paternal age. They've picked Tony Hall, poaching the former Newsnight journalist and editor (oh dear) from the leadership of the Royal Opera House. I've just sent this letter to the Guardian:
Sir, Lord Patten and the BBC are to be congratulated on their brave choice of Director-General. It's about time that male, white, privately-educated Oxford PPE graduates with seats in the House of Lords got a chance to show the rest of the world what they can do, freed from the institutional discrimination which has kept them down over the generations.
Baron Hall may well be a fine Director-General. He may well be more than the sum of his massively privileged parts, and cope just as well overseeing My Big Breasts and Me as La Traviata (and no doubt he'll be singing 'Your Tiny Budget Is Frozen' within a week)But I can't help thinking that the recruitment procedure consisted of two stages.
Act the First. The scene is the Athenaeum Club, or it might be the Groucho, or a post opera drinks reception. 'I say, Lord Patten. Who's that chap in the Keble tie?' 'I rather think it's Baron Hall of Birkenhead. I wonder if he'd like to be the next DG. He'll keep the riff-raff out'. 'Steady on, Chris old chap. We need to make damn sure we've got the right chap'.
Act the Second. The scene is Lord Patten's office at the BBC. Gathered round an iPad are Lord Patten, some lawyers and a balding man in combat trousers and a Half Man Half Biscuit t-shirt. He is he IT specialist, and he's here to work the iPad for his Lordship. 'So you're sure then?' 'Absolutely, Lord Patten. There isn't a single picture of Tony Hall posing with Jimmy Savile anywhere on Google Images'. 'Then he's our man! Trebles all round!'
Amidst all the Savile and McAlpine furore, you may have missed this little exchange on Radio 4's Today programme:
The BBC has apologised to the chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, after Radio 4's Today presenter Evan Davis asked him a question about the violence in Gaza without telling him he was live on air. When Sacks finished his Thought for the Day on Friday morning, Davis asked him to comment on the Gaza situation before he left the studio.
Sacks, seemingly unaware that he was live, said "I think it's got to do with Iran, actually", before Davis' co-presenter Sarah Montague whispered: "We, we're live."
This seems to be a reasonable thing to happen. Jonathan Sacks appears on Today regularly and clearly listens to the show. He knows how it works. As the leading Jewish cleric in the country, he frequently gives his view - as perhaps he should - on Israeli affairs.
So what's the problem?
The problem was that Mr Sacks, being unprepared, was honest.
His tone then changed markedly and he called for "a continued prayer for peace, not only in Gaza but for the whole region, no one gains from violence".
Apparently this is infra dig at the moment.
According to a number of BBC sources, Sacks was said to be "angry" about the incident and made his feelings known to Today's production team.
The Chief Rabbi appeared to think that there are things it's OK to think and other things it's OK to say in public. Which is not my idea of spiritual leadership.
What is going on at the BBC? This is the response:
However, according to one senior BBC executive, the incident reflects the chaos at BBC News. "This is another cock up for BBC News – they are a law unto themselves on this one," said the source. "It is a cardinal law that you don't do that to a Thought for the Day presenter – that's a separate thing and you don't ask them questions like that. Lord Sacks is the chief rabbi. You show him some respect. This may also fuel the idea in some people's minds that the BBC is anti-Israel."
So apparently asking the country's most prominent Jewish cleric his opinion of events in Israel is 'a cock-up' rather than a decent bit of impromptu journalism. Sacks has never been afraid to mix politics with religion. He has a view on the Gaza bombardment that doesn't fit the Israeli government's line. So what? It's only an issue if - like Rupert Murdoch - you think every Jew has to be slavishly loyal to current Israeli policy, which I don't. Clearly Sacks thinks that it's dirty linen to be kept indoors. To me, it's news. The BBC's grovelling shows that it doesn't understand what that is any more.
Anyone else watch Newsnight last night? I certainly did. It's like visiting the deathbed of an ageing relative to whom you're theoretically attached but actually rather fed-up with. The viewing experience becomes like an episode of Miss Marple. Will there be a deathbed confession? Will we find out whodunnit? Or will there be another executive's body on the carpet by the time the show ends and I've turned over to something less morally troubling like South Park?
In the event, the show became less Poirot and more Witchfinder-General. After Eddie Mair's raging hints at suspension or cancellation last week, this week's editors (dead men walking, presumably) decided to take the Opus Dei route and self-flagellate before the mob of Tories and Murdoch employees turned up with pitchforks. Nowhere did I hear many facts: such as the inconvenient truth that Newsnight didn't name McAlpine, and the victim of the sexual abuse was misinformed by North Wales Police.
Instead, we got a decent amount of considered self-criticism followed by a shell-shocked public confession to all crimes barring murder on the Marie Celeste. Sure, Newsnight massively screwed up by not running the Savile film and making basic journalistic errors in the Bryn Estyn story, for which it should be severely reorganised, but let's not lose sight of the way the public narrative is trending. Conservative MPs and Murdoch papers have always hated the BBC. They think it's one of the last state-corporate institutions left and they want it dismembered to make way for fully-privatised media. And they think (wrongly) that the BBC is full of lefties. Excuse me if I just say Homes under the Hammer, Flog It, Escape to the Country, the Today programme as merely a few examples of cultural and political conservatism in action.
As it happens, I was discussing public service broadcasting with the students yesterday. After initially not seeing a problem with privatised media, they then began to understand what happens when licence-funded media and investigative journalism and abolished. Imagine the Sun being left to cover phone-hacking. Imagine any newspaper or TV station conducting consumer investigations into its own advertisers (this show about climate science is brought to you by Shell and British Airways). Imagine TV news being Fox vs MSNBC. Imagine children's TV without the Beeb: bought in dubbed toy adverts and nothing else. Who would make shows for the groups with little purchasing power: Welsh-speakers, the old, the very young, ethnic minorities? How would boring but important shows get made if they didn't attract advertisers, such as local news or discussion programmes?
Newsnight and the BBC need urgent surgery - but just look at the contorted faces of its enemies and ask yourself: who stands to gain from a shrunken, cowed BBC? The very same rich and powerful forces (politicians, police, corporations) who have made the UK a rotten, corrupt and bankrupt oligarchy. The £145 licence fee is quite a bargain when it keeps these forces at bay, however imperfectly.
Poor old Newsnight. They got hammered by everyone for not broadcasting a true story about Jimmy Savile. Then they got hammered for broadcasting an untrue story about Lord McAlpine.
Or rather, the Conservative Party and their Murdoch allies (the newspapers that didn't get the Savile story despite hacking every celebrity mobile in London) are trying to get Newsnight shut down when in fact it didn't name McAlpine. If anyone's guilty, it's the Heddlu Gogledd Cymru/North Wales Police, who apparently told Steve Messham that the man in the photo was Lord McAlpine when in fact it wasn't.
However, Newsnight is in deep trouble, and rightly so. I've crossed swords with it recently too: they interviewed an MP who'd written 'a report' on climate science, allowing him to rant and rave without ever mentioning that he's a director of an oil exploration company. There's been no reply to my formal complaint and I don't expect one now, given everything else that's gone on. But it is symptomatic of an editorial team which has lost sight of basic journalistic safeguards. They should have checked on the MP. They should have got a comment from McAlpine. They should have shown Messham a photo. They should have run the Savile film without regard for what the rest of the BBC is doing.
The show has been in trouble for ages. The leading presenters are trapped in a failed paradigm: talking heads and sarcasm may have worked once, but the politicians, PR spinners and assorted other publicity-hounds are well-versed in this kind of thing. Quizzical looks and sharp one-liners are no substitute for sustained, critical journalism. Paxman has long since stopped being the attack dog of the Third Estate and become a fully paid-up member of the establishment. The editorial side has been looking desperate for a while too: as an example watching the hugely impressive Paul Mason (perhaps the best journalist on TV at the moment) being forced (by his editor, he told me) to use teen hacker-speak to sex up a piece was nauseating. Then there's Allegra Stratton's monstrous and dishonest presentation of a hard-working teenage mother as some kind of parasite.
This is a programme that's lost its way: it doesn't know what's news, what's comment, and what's serious. It also, I suspect, doesn't know what its audience is or where a new generation will come from. It knows that the Westminster bubble is a turn-off but can't wean itself off the access and familiar formats. Mason is doing superb work with the Global South and the struggles of the bottom dogs, but the rest of the show is addicted to shots of Downing Street, head-to-head shouting matches and painful attempts at occasional levity.
However, we need Newsnight. Without it, BBC news becomes Huw Edwards putting on his furrowed brown for earthquakes and his grovelling face whenever a politician hoves into view. Sofa news, feel-good fluff and no more investigative journalism than you'd find on BBC3's celeb-driven drivel. It's news as wallpaper, as safety, as tame pussycat. The BBC is constantly under suspicion as the 'state' broadcaster, and it's true that plenty of its output may as well be government-approved: check out its use of 'efficiencies' when it means cuts and job losses - vocabulary from Tory HQ. But check out also the Daily Mail and the Sun, the BBC's biggest enemies. Did they get Savile? Did the Sun report the hacking story, or Leveson? Did the Mail cover its editor's appearance at Leveson? Only briefly and in the most fawning terms. The Hillsborough cover-up wasn't revealed by the tabloids: the Sun participated in the demonisation of Liverpool fans.
The primary responsibility of the media is to enable the people to hold power to account. Newsnight has failed to do that, but nowhere near as completely as the popular press. This is why we need to defend Newsnight now. Look at the people circling round it: Tory MPs and the rightwing press. They hate the BBC and they hate being held to account. What they want is a cosy, neutered BBC which welcomes the powerful onto the sofa and asks them if they have anything they'd like to share with the nation. Yes, Newsnight and the BBC need a clear-out, and a cold hard re-appraisal of its standards and practices. But we'd be a poorer, weaker nation without a bold, independent hard news programme. Call it Newsnight or anything you like, but without it we're left with ducks on skateboards and Tory MPs demonising the poor/young/foreign without question, while Fox and Co fill the airwaves with poison.
Thanks to a combination of electronic media and time on my hands, I've become a serial letter-writer and complainer. It's a terrible stereotype, and I'm always watchful in case I start reaching for the green ink. On the other hand - it's what active citizens should do, holding authority to account.
A few weeks ago, Newsnight featured Peter Lilley MP. He was presented as an expert who'd written 'a report' on climate science. The report itself wasn't scrutinised at all, and nor were his credentials. Instead, he launched into a bizarre diatribe, a torrent of abuse which basically said all climate change science was lies (at the start and from 5.50):
Fair enough - some people believe this stuff. But what really annoyed me was Newsnight's failure to mention that Mr Lilley is the director of Teuthys Petroleum: an oil exploration company, and might be thought to have a vested interest in promoting fossil fuels and damning climate change science. So I fired off an email to Newsnight asking whether they knew this, whether they should routinely check for conflicts of interest, and if they did know, why they didn't mention it. No reply. So I went through the BBC Complaints procedure, which turns out to be run by Capita.
A few weeks later, I get a reply:
In order for us to look into your concerns, we would need a transmission date. If possible, please write back using the complaints webform.
Thanks again for contacting us.
Kind Regards
Gemma McAleer
BBC Complaints www.bbc.co.uk/complaintsNB This is sent from an outgoing account only which is not monitored. You cannot reply to this email address but if necessary please contact us via our webform quoting any case number we provided.
Which is bollocks. The complaints website consists of a series of drop-down boxes to be filled in. If you don't fill it in, you can't move to the next page and the next question. So they do have the date. Furthermore, I cannot believe that the combined forces of Capita and the BBC lack the resources to find out when a particular guest was on a particular edition. I'd assume they have a list. Failing that, how about checking Newsnight's website, or good old Google? But no: they mail me. And not, I notice, via an e-mail to which I can reply: that would be too simple. Instead, I have to go through the whole complaint again - 20+ questions (including the original one asking for the broadcast date) simply to provide them with information they a) already have and b) can easily find.
It feels, frankly, like a delaying tactic. Not just for me, but a way of fending off most people's complaints by making it as difficult as possible.
OK, the budget is as depressing as we imagined - massive cuts to public services and attacks on the old, the young and the poor to fund tax cuts for corporations and the rich. Ed Miliband managed a good line - inviting those members of the Cabinet lined up in front of him to raise their hands if they were getting a tax cut. Personally, although my pay has gone down by 10% in real terms over the past two years (thanks to inflation), I'll be paying more tax after this budget, while George Osborne - who is an inherited multimillionaire - will be paying less. Every little helps, eh George?
The most interesting element was Harker's discussion of individual socialists' grasp of form being ideological. People like Archie Harding felt that the established use of a radio as a lecture was backward looking and overly dependent on the conventions of other media. So he used mobile recording studios and the like to go out and record ordinary people talking about their lives. He held studio debates and experimented with form to generate radio-only conventions - much to the horror of his superiors.
Sadly, the Party and the BBC shared some cultural fears. Echoing the Frankfurt School's suspicion of popular culture, they both insisted on the primacy of 'high' culture: the CP later led the battle against American comics and pop music, preferring 'serious' books, classical music and folk, which the presented as 'authentic', despite very little of it actually originating in the fields and factories.
All this and much more in 45 short minutes. Anyway, back to the marking…
(No, not my former opinion of Twitter). So said the Manchester Guardian when faced with a new medium. 'No good will come of it', he said - he must be spinning in his grave every time a Guardian journalist types yet another breathless paean of praise to The Wire and The Killing. It would destroy the social fabric, said others - people would retreat to their individual homes rather than congregate gregariously.
Here's the song commissioned for the first UK public demonstration of television in 1936. 10,000 homes got TV before service was suspended for the duration of the war.
OK, I'm in considerable pain - I've actually pulled chest muscles from coughing so much. It may be the infection I've got, or it may be the sheer spleen-busting disbelief occasioned by watching U2 and Primal Scream performing at Glastonbury. It wasn't the musicians so much: U2 were reliably pompous, while Primal Scream yet again pulled off the trick of persuading the public that they're somehow interesting or relevant.
No: they do what they do and some people - unfathomably - like it. What made my intestines make a bid for freedom was the jaw-dropping idiocy of the BBC's presenters. U2 were discussed by Jo Whiley and someone called Zane Lowe. The pearls of wisdom spilling from their mouths would have shamed a toddler. Mostly, of course, just unconnected adjectives ('amazing', 'awesome' etc.). But then Mr. Lowe started claiming that U2's power was due to their set being 'raw', 'stripped down' and 'all about the music'. Really? Doing a live video link from the stage to the International Space Station so that an astronaut (the one whose Congresswoman wife was recently shot in the head) can mumble some platitudes to a drug-addled bunch of hipsters is somehow 'raw', rather than 'incredibly pretentious', 'arrogant' and 'pompous'? They then 'interviewed' U2 afterwards with the kind of journalistic incisiveness that inevitably leads to the interviewee having to wipe drool from the soles of their shoes.
This idiot - or it may have been some other idiot, all BBC yoof presenters are pretty much interchangeable - then proceeded to claim that Primal Scream's set proved that they'd 'always looked forward' in their music. For feck's sake: they're touring their Screamadelica album in some kind of retro cash-in. You know, the one that was released 20 years ago. The one that was a deliberate retro homage to the Rolling Stones' 60s work. The band which released and album with a bloody Confederate flag on it. How, in the name of all that's holy, is that 'always looking forward'?
Bloody charlatans, the lot of them. Time for a salad to calm me down.
I watched the BBC News last night. They had the story about a US Congressman who resigned after texting women pictures of his penis. His name, by the way, is Anthony Weiner.
Now I'm not sure that a story like this is at all relevant to a UK audience other than to demonstrate where the global centre of power is, but its introduction made me choke on my chips:
This report contains flash photography.
You can watch the report here, where the warning is emblazoned across the video
I'm hooked on the Guardian's and BBC's coverage of the nationwide student protests. All over the country, university, college and school students are protesting in their thousands - a magnificent spectacle and a little heated in a few places.
What's striking about the BBC coverage is how reactionary and judgemental it is - comments like 'a complete rabble' 'a bit crazy', and surprise that Cambridge students (imagine) are protesting and are angry. There's a concerted effort to focus on the incredibly isolated bits of violence and to praise the 'peaceful' students: the discourse clearly separates 'nice' from 'nasty' with virtually no discussion of the rights and wrongs of the situation. There's no historical context - of education or of student protest - and more than a hint that all these Oxbridge-educated commentators (particularly on the BBC) are revolted by their successors. Certainly the interviewers are parrotting Clegg's and Cameron's lines as though there's no debate to be had.
I like this dispersed protest. The massive London demo was excellent, and certainly caught the media's attention, but concerted efforts in virtually every town in the country from Bolton to Bristol to York means that a much larger proportion of the population have a chance of meeting and listening to them. It's like a mini-general strike. Shame there's nothing happening in The Dark Place, unlike all these towns (rolling updates here).
Manchester, Bristol and Leeds students seem to be doing a magnificent job - as is Simon, the very articulate student talking at length to the BBC, despite their little attempts to bully him ("you condemn the occupation at the previous demo, don't you?", "we only report what we see" - he points out very calmly that news organisations frame all stories, and they choose what that frame is).
There's a BBC news journalists strike on today and tomorrow, over pensions (despite the senir management being paid telephone numbers, most BBC staff aren't on top whack).
Because radio and TV news are so public, it's going to be really easy to see who's a dirty, class-traitor scab. Take down their names and remember them - when they need help next time, they're on their own.
Conversely, respect to the famous and rich presenters who've manned the picket lines in solidarity with their lower-paid colleagues, such as Paul Mason, Newsnight's economics editor and all-round good egg. Wearing a suit to a picket is a particularly nice touch. Joining him in solidarity if not in physical form were John Humphrys and Sarah Montague from the flagship Today programme.
Mark Thompson, the director-general of the BBC told them that:
"The public – many of whom are facing difficult employment and economic pressures – will find it very hard to understand why the BBC's service to them should be impaired in this way,"
Mark Thompson earns £834,000 per year, with commensurate pension.
Ewar stuck this on his blog, so I'll do the same. Even if you have little taste for Mitch Benn's comedy rock, it's a public service message. The BBC has had some dark moments (going back to Lord Reith's decision to put the BBC at the government's service [p. 14] during the General Strike of 1926, its connivance with censorship and blacklisting via the 'Christmas Tree' system at times) but its cultural impact is huge, and massively in its favour.
90 years of quality radio and TV across a multitude of formats, serving virtually the whole community for £140 per year, guaranteed no adverts? Bargain. Don't let the Tories spoil it.
PS. This track, 'John and Marsha' was banned in the 1950s, after being played for weeks. Can you guess why?
You may recall that I recently applied for the post of Head of BBC North, on the assumption that as Peter Salmon, the current postholder, refused to actually move to the North, there was a vacancy.
Unfortunately (for me), Mr. Salmon has had a partial rethink, according to the letter I received from the head of the BBC, Mark Thompson (and full marks to him for replying to my teasing and for standing up for the BBC recently):
Dear Dr [Vole]
Thank you for your email.
BBC North's objective is to serve and represent audiences across the whole of the UK. It will deliver locally made, high quality content for every platform using the latest innovations in technology. BBC North will also lead the way in training and developing local talent, building on the rich mix of skills and experience already available in the North of England. It will also renew and forge new partnerships with organisations across the North of England to bring the BBC closer to the public.
Peter Salmon is leading the BBC's move to the North and already spends a considerable amount of time in Salford. In the short term he will be renting a flat in Salford Quays, due to existing family commitments. This means he will not take up any other relocation assistance from the BBC when he moves at a later date.
When Peter does travel to and from Salford, he travels by train in standard class.
Until recently, the Irish government tried to rebalance the economy away from Dublin (which has dragged half the entire country's population into its environs) by posting government departments to different towns and cities. I thought this was a brilliant idea - Ireland's a small place, and the e-revolution means that we're never far away from each other in practical terms - but it failed because snobby civil servants and their political masters missed the bright lights, the cosy bars and easy access to bribes meetings with 'opinion formers'. Now there's no economy anywhere in Ireland of course, so the decentralisation push has run into the sand.
On the subject of Ireland's politicians, decide for yourself whether - on the basis of this clip - the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) is drunk in charge during this 8 a.m. interview last week.
I seem to have had a lot of hits recently from the BBC, and from Associated Newspapers, publishers of the evil Daily Mail. Associated with what, you may ask? Well, with racism, a long history of fascism and antisemitism, a deep seam of misogyny not disguised by hiring self-hating women as columnists.
However, I view their presence on Plashing Vole as a sign of contrition, perhaps even conscience. So now's my chance to encourage them to return to the straight and narrow path towards redemption.
So, BBC employees. This is easy. More Spiral and Dr. Who please. More like The Wire. Fewer programmes badly aping bad ITV shows. No more celebrities, just competent professionals. No more shows promoting kindergarten capitalism, e.g. your entire daytime schedule, packed with Homes Under the Hammer, Escape to the Country, Bargain Hunt, Flog It (basic premise: your family's heritage should be turned into a few quid), To Buy Or Not To Buy etc. etc. They're shallow, boring, greedy and the formats are exhausted. Yes please to more satirical humour, but I think Armstrong and Miller's brand of comedy is mined out now - as their greed for advert money suggests they know. And it's time to put Bruce Forsyth and Jeremy Paxman out to pasture - they're wounded lions. Ben Fogle, it's time to admit, isn't qualified for anything. He's blond and has a polite accent. That's not the same as having something to say. He's the slightly creepy and over-familiar care assistant in a rural old folks' home. Under the well-scrubbed face is pure evil and one day you'll all realise this.
Oh, and what happened to the idea that soaps were a mildly heightened version of real lives? Yours seem to be packed with murderous crackheads and other assorted monsters. Get a grip.
BBC3 is pretty repulsive, but it's not for people like me so I can't really preach about it though I will say that shows based on putting 'celebrities' in 'real world' situations are patronising and lazy. The ads for whatshisname Nelson's Well Good Show made me really angry, so they must be working quite well for his demographic.
BBC4 - stunning.
Before I leave TV behind, could I make one plea? Cancel Top Gear. I know it makes you an awful lot of money, but Clarkson's personal friends are in government now, so you don't need him to put the reactionary view any more. He's a boor and a bore. You can do better. Say thank you and goodbye to him and his friends. It was fun, but now it isn't.
Radio 1 - boring mainstream playlisted junk.
Radio 2 - no idea. Friends say it's good but I'm just not ready for that.
Radio 3 - just plain brilliant. Make the daytime shows more like the evening ones, e.g. more new music. It could be a tad more like FIP, but it's already one of the world's greatest shows.
Radio 4 - again, ace at night, dull during the day. Pedestrian is the word I'm looking for, perhaps. Especially the comedy. Once, all the comedy on TV was remakes of Radio 4 shows, but recently there's nothing worth repeating. Old Harry's Game, for example, was funny for at least two episodes, but once you've got used to the idea of a sitcom based in hell, you're left with some very laboured puns. Obviously The News Quiz and The Now Show are still good, but they're a little too conscious of themselves as 'heritage radio'. Now if you put Marcus Brigstocke, Frankie Boyle and some unknown kids together, you might get something interesting. The dramas are very hit and miss, the book readings are getting a little predictable, but the news shows are varied and brilliant. I wish John Humphries was a) better informed b) brighter and c) prepared to leave gaps between his questions for the interviewee to answer though. Evan Davis doesn't seem to know about much outside economics either. Leave The Archers and Woman's Hour alone. They're ace.
Basically: more new shows. Adaptations of recent books and plays. Comedy by people who didn't meet at Oxbridge. Something people would complain about.
6Music - good, sometimes brilliant. I don't know anything about the other channels, but saving 6Music while sacrificing the Asian Network did feel a little bit racist.
Institutionally, you really need to grow a pair. I mean really, the Tories and Murdochs and Daily Mails of this world spend apparently all of their waking hours screaming about how evil, socialist (don't see it myself) and dangerous you are, and you never fight back. Your overpaid governing-class executives roll over on their backs and accept every intellectually vapid attack while seemingly happy to be reduced to a stump of a once proud body.
Repeat this to yourselves: 'Just because they're rich and loud doesn't mean they're right'.
Now, moving on to the Daily Mail:
Die. Just give up. Kill yourselves. You have nothing to contribute except lies and misery.
The world would be a better place without your shrill distortion. You can't divide the world into things which cause cancer and things which cure it.
Women aren't evil if they want to have jobs/sex/opinions/a range of body shapes.
Being black doesn't make you an illegal immigrant/rapist/terrorist/ threat to property prices.
The working classes do hate you, but you started it (as far back as the Zinoviev letter).
Celebrities aren't classifiable either as deities or devils, depending on what your star columnist thinks of their weight that week.
Real scientists don't tend to use the word 'miracle' and they know that climate change is a bad thing. Bad scientists seem to have a hotline to your front page.
Seriously, the world's actually quite a nice place with potential to be even better. You could contribute to this process by quietly turning off the presses and dedicating yourselves to a better life.
I mentioned yesterday that Mr Salmon (hence the dreadful pun in the title), head of BBC North, intends to direct operations from that Northern bastion, London.
So I've dropped the Director-General of the BBC a line, applying for Mr. Salmon's job. I like the North, I live here (cue the arguments about whether the Dark Place is North) and I could do with a salary of about half a million pounds. Think of all the whippets and flat caps I could buy with that!
Dear Mr. Thompson,
I've read in numerous papers that the Head of BBC North, Mr Salmon, does not intend to move to Salford with his section of the BBC.
In any normal institution, this would constitute a resignation, given that one would expect the generals to lead from the front, so I'd like to apply for his job.
It's time that the BBC stopped seeing the North through tourists' eyes. The move to Salford is a hugely positive step, but it need to be done convincingly and honestly: treating it as some kind of Siberian gulag or outpost to be visited by Southern executives via internal flights or first-class train for half a day won't impress anyone. Northern licence-payers demand authenticity, not the occasional pat on the head. BBC Wales has done an amazing job over recent years - time BBC North got the chance to become a cultural powerhouse.
So how about it? Fresh insights, new accents. No more whippets and flat caps, just commitment, depth and knowledge.
Thousands of BBC employees are relocating to Salford to decentralise the overly-metropolitan organisation. A thoroughly good thing, I think. It should save money too.
Peter was appointed Director, BBC North, at the end of 2008 and is a member of the BBC's Executive Board.
He leads key departments including Children's, Sport and BBC Radio 5 Live moving to one of the world's most advanced broadcasting centres at MediaCityUK in Salford Quays.
The BBC's second largest production centre, BBC North aims to build stronger relationships with audiences across the UK.
Today's one of those occasions on which the new media/old media divide is up for examination. I'm watching BBC News 24, which is leading on two stories which originated on the web, one of them weeks ago. The first is the Wikileaks release of 90,000 US military documents relating to the war in Afghanistan; the other is a story about a bear which got trapped in a car.
The Wikileaks story has been floating around for a long time. It's the kind of event an anonymous, locationless organisation can do: the BBC or another established, regulated media organisation would have avoided the legal ramifications, would have spent too long considering the national or security implications, and would probably have been penetrated by the security services in any case (there's a long history of news media aiding the secret services).
On the other hand, it's interesting that Julian Assange is now giving a press conference for the offline media, and three chosen newspapers have been given full and early access to the material- clearly the 'old' sources are still important, for informing the wider public, and because they have greater journalistic resources when it comes to investigating stories. Strikingly, however, Assange's conference displays his awareness of the limitations and responsibilities of classic journalism: research, fact-checking, skepticism. He's also engaged in some weeding of material which would, he says, cost lives or damage security, which is a major assumption of authority. His nomadic, independent approach gives him the freedom to subvert the cultural and legal boundaries which hamper established media, but it makes him immune to the checks and balances too (though Fox News behaves in exactly the same way, as its disgusting behaviour over the Shirley Sherrod story shows (rightwing bloggeredits a black Department of Agriculture official's speech to make her look racist - she gets the sack by a cowardly employer but is reinstated when the true story emerges, Fox refuses to apologise or alter its position - as does the blogger: original, unqualified and uncorrected story here).
Either way, we're into a new era when the power of major news organisations fail to uncover major scoops - they're sclerotic, timid and too dependent on their relationships with authority.
The bear-trapped-in-a-car story is the other side of the new/old media coin. Ten years ago, it's the kind of thing which would take up page 3 of a local newspaper. Now it's a light-hearted bit of fluff which fits in with 90% of what's on the internet. What's shameful is that it's now a story for the global news media: rolling news has very obviously led to dumbing down, simply to fill space. IT'S NOT NEWS, PEOPLE!
What's still unclear is the implication for Wikileaks and similar sites. No doubt the security services are chasing it through legal and illegal means - cyberwar resources will engage in DOS attacks and more, but it'll be like nailing down a jelly. I'm hugely positive about this. Wikileaks claim they're politically neutral, but a commitment to the free exchange of information is clearly a libertarian/anarchist position which will hopefully challenge authorities which act with impunity by keeping us in the dark.
