Bitter Northern Scum ©All Newspapers

Well, perhaps not all newspapers. The liberal ones will send their Toynbeebots up to the dreadful slums once every five years to wring their hands about why the proles are bitter fat racists. The rightwing ones will pay some toff to churn out 800 words from a golf course bar about why the  proles are Speaking For Britain while still being Unwashed, fat, racist and northern.

What they won't do is spend any time there or ask whether the inhabitants of places like Stoke are reacting to a polity and economy that has absolutely no interest – whoever is in government – in managing the transfer from full, mass, employment (Stoke had potteries, coal and steel) to a post-industrial economy. The liberal ones send in the Tristrams now and then like ineffectual missionaries to explain why globalisation is brilliant and they have to get with the programme, and then wonder why the oiks fall for the constant stream of racist bile delivered in simple words by the right. And poor old Labour has to run an election campaign with the lotto voce slogan 'We know Tristram was a selfish prick who ran away at the first sniff of a canapé, but this time it'll be different'.

There's a distinct air of David Attenborough about the media and state's attitude towards places like Stoke, except that he loves his subjects while they are embarrassed by or cynical about those left-behinds. Poor old Stoke - hard to find a babycino or a hedge-fund trader there. What hope do they have? For the people of Stoke, politics is like the weather: it happens to them and there's nothing they can do about whatever is thrown their way.

Democracy, but only for your enemies

I'm watching the British media coverage of the Hong Kong democracy protests with some fascination. I'm supportive of the protesters: China is in no way a socialist or communist state, merely an autocracy or kleptocracy which has retained the branding of communism. Any decent communist should be fervently wishing for a complete collapse of the now satirically-titled 'People's Republic'.

So that's the cause dealt with: three cheers for Occupy Central and its allies. But cursed with a little historical knowledge, I view the UK's political and media support for Occupy with a jaundiced eye. The British took Hong Kong by force in 1841 in reprisal for the Chinese forcing British drug dealers to destroy their stock (opium, in this case). They then negotiated additions to the territory at various points, with a lease that expired in 1997.

So that's 156 years without a single election for the premier, and elections to vague and useless 'advisory councils' only started in 1984, after the return of HK to Chinese rule was negotiated. It's hard not to see this late and tokenistic democratic gesture as little more than a satirical gesture designed to establish some tiny distinction between the 'free' West and 'tyrannical' China. For 156 years, decisions about Hong Kong were made 6000 miles away in London and executed by a man dressed like this:

I think this extends to the UK media coverage of Hong Kong's protests. I haven't seen a single word about the colony's political history: the silent implication is that denying HK democracy is typical Chinese or Communist behaviour. The British like to pose as democrats to the fingertips, but they've always preferred to drop it on their enemies rather than extend it to their subjects or (in postcolonial times) business partners. Yes, Saudi Arabia, I'm looking at you. When Tony Blair announced that Britain had to invade Iraq for 'democracy', I congratulated my New Labour MP and asked when the invasion of Saudi Arabia would begin. His reply was a rather huffy 'that's different'. Of course it is: Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a vile dictatorship of terror, while Saudia Arabia is a vile terroristic dictatorship which buys a lot more weapons, beheads a lot more people and makes women's lives a living hell.

I guess I'm still a political adolescent, caring about principle over realpolitik. But back to Hong Kong: let's all support the protestors not because we enjoy annoying China but because democracy is a good thing per se, while examining our own national consciences a little more closely. I can't help thinking that if the democracy protests had occurred under British rule, we'd have had a lot of furrowed-brow commentators interviewing bank CEOs worried about 'stability' and the economy, just as we have with the Scottish independence referendum.



Here, for example, is a staged ambush performed for the Pathé cameras by the British Army in Ireland, 1920 (sorry I can't embed it) and here's another in which those debonair Black and Tans keep proper British order in a devastated Ireland wrecked by rebels. Meanwhile the same arguments against Scottish Independence were being raised against Irish Home Rule in the Irish Times:

…today’s Irish Times… claimed that the cold reality of the mistake that was Home Rome was now beginning to dawn on nationalists as they looked at the detail of what was proposed.
The paper said that ‘fantastic assurances can no longer deceive intelligent nationalists. They are beginning to realize the hideous barrenness of the Promised Land.’ The paper concluded: ‘They begin to perceive that the Bill for which they have sacrificed so much spells national bankruptcy for Ireland - increased taxation, the starvation of all schemes of material improvement and social reform.'
'The Irish Parliament must find the money for all these things, and will be powerless to find it.’

There's always a framework within which the media operate - you just have to look for it. So don't expect support for the HK democracy movement to last beyond what's politically expedient. States and parties don't work like that - but we can.

This is the news!

Wow. Four days since I last blogged. Back then I was young, naive and optimistic. The world was an exciting place and possibilities were endless. I was leaner and lighter, the lines etched on my face weren't so deep. Now, older and not necessarily wiser, the horizons have narrowed and death is that bit closer.

Still, at least the teaching keeps me in touch with the world of 'the youth', though the first-years fresh from school were born while I was studying(ish) for my first degree and the cultural gap widens rapidly. It's fascinating seeing what they know of the 90s: they recognise but don't watch The Simpsons, whereas Friends is widely watched still, though to me it looks impossibly dated (and I hated it back in the day too). I guess I watched some 70s comedy in the 90s: To The Manor Born, Yes, Minister, The Good Life and several others, though not always by choice. With one TV in the house, we watched whatever my parents or grandparents wanted. Though I still adore Yes Minister.

My students watch remarkably little TV, and rarely on an actual television: they have access to so much programming without the constraints of technology or time. In some ways it's liberating: the past is as immediate as the present, though without the context it means something different. In other ways, the dislocation is disorienting. For instance, most of my students have never heard of BBC Radio stations 2, 3, 4 or 6, and tend not to listen to 1 or 5 unless they're football fans. BBC TV 2 and 4 may as well not exist, and channels themselves mean relatively little: it's programmes that matter. They never read newspapers other than Metro on the bus, and have never watched a news broadcast. I discovered this when lecturing about genre the other day. In the course of explaining the characteristics of a news programme, I played this opening clip, expecting laughter:



Laughter came there none: not having ever seen a real news broadcast, with its portentous music, pompous graphics and demanding editing, they didn't realise that this was a parody, and assumed it was news.

This isn't their fault, of course: contemporary news broadcasts make The Day Today ('bagpiping fact into news') seem less parodic than prophetic. Plus, most of them are young and I'm acutely aware that being a teenage news junkie made me less than normal. It's tempting to dismiss them as ignorant and incurious about the outside world, but wrong: they do have concerns, but aren't well-served by news media (especially outlets aimed at young people) and don't have the social and cultural capital to make news relevant. News happens elsewhere and features the activities of other people. My students are on the receiving end of political activity, but their disenfranchisement is so complete that knowledge, in their case, isn't power. Or so it seems, anyway. The media economy isn't really set up to engage the young masses anyway: in a world of corporate power, reducing citizens to passive consumers is pretty much the game plan. Why give them the means to hold power to account when you can distract them with the opium of the people, whether that's religion or Angry Birds?

It is frustrating: I'm always trying to encourage them to read newspapers, watch the news or engage with the world outside home and the university, but the immediate rewards are pretty low, frankly. It's partly a regional and class thing: while the children of privilege in élite universities are being trained to rule, it's hard to persuade my students that they too are equal citizens with a valid voice: because however much I'd like it to be true, it definitely isn't: they don't have the social capital to succeed en masse in a competitive society. That's why I see education as an act of civil resistance. We could do the empowering thing like an intellectual Oprah, or we can flag the inequalities inherent in the system to rile them up. I try both at different times, but it's hard to beat generations of internalised acquiescence.

Keyboard warrior offers truce

It seems like every time I use this blog to think aloud, to consider the wider contexts of events in the news, or to discuss the highs and lows of my job, some weasel makes hostile hay with it, either about me, or about my job, colleagues and students. Which is a shame, because we need to be honest about these things. For instance, yesterday's lecture and seminar was really difficult because only a small number of students engaged with the material. The rest reminded me very much of this:



But going by recent experience, this will appear somewhere as either 'Students Are Morons Compared, Not Like In Our Day' or 'Subversive Lecturer Slags Off Students', whereas I'd like to exchange ideas with readers about why some classes work, and others don't, about what I might be doing wrongly and what I might do instead, about whether lectures still have a place, for instance. This rather saddens me. My experience of the internet is that despite the occasional troll, it's a place in which intelligent people can discuss ideas and situations in an informal but informed fashion. People comment on my pieces critically; they bring opposing or divergent views and I enjoy the debate. Very few people are simply abusive. This is great: I've learned from opponents and gained pleasure from the exchange of views even when I haven't been converted or converted them. It's the same on Twitter: I follow and am followed by people like @KateMaltby who describes herself as a 'Tory feminist' because she's interesting and thoughtful. I don't follow @ToryEducation (apparently run by Michael Gove's advisors) because it eschews discussion in favour of abuse.

It's just a shame that some in the media have failed to keep up with the times. The joy of new media is that we can all exchange ideas with a wider network than ever before. As you probably know, I'm a newspaper addict. I deliberately spend money on print media because they're essential to a functioning democracy, which is why David Cameron's threat to punish the Guardian is such a frightening thing. I get frustrated with my chosen papers (The Guardian, The Observer, Private Eye, the London Review of Books, New Statesman, The Sword, New Welsh Review, The Irish Times) at times, but no other organisations have the scope or the resources to conduct serious news gathering and commentary. The internet resembles Metro: cheap, simplistic, often 'human-interest' stories in bite-size chunks, derived from the wire services and PR releases. There are exceptions, of course, such as Politico (which has interestingly launched a print version) and Glenn Greenwald's new venture, but on the whole print media are still the go-to outlets for long-form investigative journalism and commentary. Andrew Rawnsley and Nick Cohen, for example, are the highlights of my week. They make me grind my teeth regularly, but their work reflects decades of expensive research, hard work and careful thought.

Yet where some outlets have failed is the reciprocal nature of new media. Rawnsley and Cohen are to varying extents responsible in the technical sense: they engage with their readers and see no contradiction between justified pride in their own expertise and the need to draw on the skills, knowledge and experience of their readers: we learn from each other. This is the utopian side of the social media revolution: billions of people in mutually enriching conversation. There are dissenters, of course. Plenty of old media figures jealously protect their occupation of the bully pulpit: like fundamentalist preachers, they see us as a barely-restrained mob of barbarians requiring their professional enlightenment and discipline, and they get very shirty when their work is critiqued or dissected in public. What could they possibly learn from us? Actually, quite a lot: while professional journalists have the funding, time and training for serious in-depth work (stop sniggering, it does happen), we keyboard warriors have the obsession to stick with particular stories, the weak social capital that comes with particular interest groups, and skills derived from our offline lives. As a trained literary critic/scholar, I bring wide reading, background knowledge, an eye for the wider context and significance of local or limited events, theoretical knowledge and critical skills to bear when I write about literature, politics, popular culture and whatever else catches my eye.

My audience is different too: a journalist has to write for a section of an idealised general public; I write for a group of people drawn to my blog voluntarily. The journalist has a captive audience of readers who may or may not care about that particular writer's views or interests (they may just want the racing tips); I have to compete with and connect to millions of other amateurs, but I don't depend on blogging to make a living. This means I'm free to some extent. I don't have to whip up outrage or air extremist views simply to sell copies (Stewart Lee describes Jeremy Clarkson as cynically 'having outrageous opinions for money'), or pretend that the world is simple and comprehensible. The worst that could happen to me is that my few readers dwindles to no readers – matching my peer-reviewed publications! I'll still have a job.

I couldn't write anything without the resources of the professional media to draw on: through them I learn new things, hear about new outrages or recent books to read: from people like me they occasionally pick up new stories and new ways of thinking outside the Westminster bubble. I think of us as complementary rather than oppositional.

In my own field, social media has widened my intellectual horizons. Before its advent, new developments in literary criticism depended on the slow process of journal and book publication, and the inherent costs thereof: some academic books now cost hundreds of pounds. There are queues to get published and impossible quantities of material to get through in the quest for useful work. Now, I can go to Academia.edu or Twitter and find an expert. And unlike the old days, I know that anyone I approach is happy to talk about their work: otherwise they wouldn't be on there. The same goes for authors, most of whom are really eager to talk rather than behave like gods passing down tablets of stone and not to be questioned: Iain Banks (as @amendlocke) was particularly enthusiastic. It's a democratic space: except for some mega-celebrities such as Fry or Gaga, you're only as good as your feed: any unknown Tweeter can be as witty or informed as a professional pundit or comic.

The professional boundaries are now porous in a good way: expertise is strengthened and disseminated more widely, at least amongst those privileged enough to have social media access. I publish work in peer-reviewed journals for one professionally-accredited audience and to further what might laughably call my career: I write Vole to air ideas I'm not ready to publish, and to apply things I've learned professionally to different contexts. I'm also on here to engage with people I wouldn't ever meet: fellow professionals in my field, but also anyone with an interest in the same sort of thing: I don't see the point of doing all that research and cogitation simply to talk to the three people who'll read my journal articles.

My attitude in lectures is that I'm no brighter than my students (sometimes much less bright) but that I've had a head start in years and resources on which I can draw to help them: it's a way of recognising and countering the inherent power imbalances encountered in education. My online existence is hopefully an extension of this – a way to engage and be engaged by the outside world, to demonstrate the relevance of my niche to the wider culture, to learn new stuff and to have some fun along the way. There's also a therapeutic aspect to it: I find academic writing difficult intellectually and psychologically, and thinking aloud in this way is helpful. I also passionately feel that academics, particularly in the humanities, get a raw deal in public discourse: there's always some blowhard politician or commentator slagging off medieval history or media studies, and the more of us who engage in public debate, the better. In fact, looking at Inger and Thomson's recent paper 'Why Do Academics Blog?', my motives are pretty much exactly those of my peers. Plus, it's a way to show off, not something I do 'IRL'.

Having been through the mill a bit recently, what with the Sun on Sunday trying to get me sacked, I'm conscious of having internalised a little of the hegemonic structures' disciplinary power. Should I talk about difficult teaching sessions? Am I allowed to have political opinions, or make tasteless jokes? How far off-piste can I go without my writing sounding like a drunk know-all with the in-depth knowledge of a pub-quiz champion? It's hard to honestly and openly discuss things - which for me is the essence of social media culture - if I'm aware that anything I say is likely to be used to attack me, my peers, my institution (which has been unfailingly kind to me) and my profession.

Answers in the comments box please!

They come over here, taking our front pages…

I wonder what people would have said ten years ago when asked to describe a Romanian or Bulgarian. Perhaps some highly-informed people would have muttered darkly about Ceaucescu (Romania) or poisoned umbrellas (Bulgaria), mentioned Romania's origins as a Roman military veterans' resettlement colony (which is why Romanian is so close to Latin) or noted that even by the standards of the USSR, these countries were extremely repressive.

Now of course, thanks to the viciousness of the tabloid press and the briefings of the government, we all know that millions of Bulgarians and Romanians are riding donkeys to Dover ready to rob the UK blind both individually and via the benefits system. Don't we? That's certainly the impression given by the media which is happy to lie, distort and mislead in pursuit of a readership apparently consisting of paranoid, reactionary, gullible fools. Apparently it's perfectly OK for millions of British people to fan out across Europe in search of sun and cheap housing, but not for anyone else.

People of Britain: get over yourselves. Yes, life here can be great, but (and I hate to have to say this to you), your international reputation is rather poor. Having spent 400 years invading and ransacking other people's countries, and the last 50 bombing and subverting them whenever the US clicks its fingers, Abroad has formed the impression that life in the UK is just Not All That.

I've worked with, socialised with and lived with Romanians and Bulgarians for many years. Emigrants are usually a society's pioneers: hard-working, committed and determined. No doubt we see the best of a country's population when we associate with their exiles. Sure, they aren't perfect: at least one Romanian I know objects to the Daily Mail's coverage because it depicts 'Gypsies, not Romanians', which suggests – to put it mildly – that Romania has its own racial divisions too. It's weird, too. The Daily Express, Daily Mail and Telegraph are all huge supporters of the 'hard-working families' doing their best… as long as they aren't foreign. They're also big fans of the British Empire too, which was little more than heavily-armed illegal immigration on a global scale.

But why is the British press so racist (and stupid and opportunist, of course)? Does it really think so little of its readers that it can just airily ascribe this country's problems to 'them'? Are British people totally uninterested in the messy, complex, interesting realities of life in other countries? Sadly, they probably are: at least one of my local students had never heard of Wales, which can be glimpsed from the top floor of my office block. Even more shamefully, the tabloids are owned by the kind of people they disapprove of: Murdoch is an American citizen of Australian origin, the Telegraph's owners live like Bond baddies on a (tax-free) Channel Island. The Daily Mail's owner is French (but only for tax purposes) while Richard Desmond of the Express is a leading member of the Jewish community and should know better about how migrants and religious minorities have been treated. In particular, the above headline ('Now Muslims Get Their Own Laws In Britain) could just as easily be applied to Jews: Jewish courts are recognised by the British legal system, which I generally think is a good thing. Shame Mr Desmond can't extend this to Islamic citizens.

This is probably why there's not a single report in the UK press about the so-called 'Bulgarian Spring', going on right now after Plamen Goranov set himself alight in protest at the government's corruption and incompetence. But that doesn't suit the narrative. Let's just perpetuate vicious, mean stereotypes, egged on by politicians who know that the way to retain power is to appeal to the electorate's lowest impulse. What a way to run a country.

Good article on Bulgaria, immigration discourse and media filters here, by one of our graduates. With thanks to BC for the tip.

The weekly Wednesday wobble

Morning all. And what a grey, dreary morning it is here. Perhaps it seems even greyer because I looked through my sister's wedding photos last night. She got married on an escarpment overlooking Wellington, New Zealand - mountains, the sea etc. And the tables at the reception were named for various typefaces, which is exactly the kind of thing I appreciate. I'd like to think that the more annoying guests were placed on the Comic Sans table, out of earshot.

Today's plan is both simple and exhausting: 3 hours on King Lear with the second year students, then straight into 2 hours on deontological ethics and subjective/objective phenomena (utter Kant) with a different set of second years, then I'll haul what remains of my sorry carcass off to fencing. I know that 5 hours of continuous teaching sounds like a doddle to anyone who has a physically demanding job, but it's mentally draining - out in front of the class there's no opportunity for mentally recharging. Switching between two subjects (I teach in two departments) without a break even for a cup of tea is a challenge too.

You have to constantly review how things are going, be alive to every nuance of what the students are saying, feeling and thinking, and never stop paying attention to them. When it goes well, it's the best feeling in the world - but it's still exhausting. I wouldn't want to do anything else. When it's not going well, it's utterly demoralising - such as when they haven't bothered reading a text, or don't feel like talking about it. I've occasionally walked out of a class in exasperation, but it's not a solution.

Anyway, the Lear class should go well - they've had lectures on it already and they should be prepared. As with last week's class, we'll talk about the Nahum Tate 'happy ending' version of the play, the history of performance, the plays' differing moral universes and see how it goes. Attendance has so far been high and they've all been talkative.

The ethics class is trickier: the students are from a wide range of subjects, the concepts are both new and difficult, and most of them appear not to have any interest in the core applications. While they engage quite well with the philosophical concepts, the application of ethical thinking to media production and consumption still seems beyond their mental landscape. News media are at the core of today's session, but I'm hampered by the fact that they literally do not watch TV news, read newspapers or listen to news radio. Last week they hadn't heard of Jimmy Savile, for instance. I know this makes me sound like a whinging old duffer, but it really does bother me: they're mostly media students and they all have the vote.

And finally…

Afternoon all, how are you on this beautiful sunny day? I woke this morning (at 5.15, thanks to the adrenalin gland) ready for a day 'on set'. In my head, it was Sunset Boulevard. I was ready for my close-up, Mr de Mille. As I climbed into my fencing gear, the phrase 'I didn't get fat - the equipment got small' ran through my head. Sadly I didn't leave anyone floating face down in the pool.

Then it was off to Weston Park, a rather beautiful stately home set amongst rolling green acres. The purpose was to introduce a bus-load of international journalists to fencing: VisitEngland.com were taking them on a month-long road trip across the country as part of the Olympics build-up. We were there to show them what goes on at the Olympics and more locally, the Much Wenlock Olympian Games, a more honourable event which is on this weekend: do go.

None of these people are me. I was too busy fencing to take any when we got going. 

So there we were: me, a couple of more senior fencers and a couple of taller, thinner, younger models who seemed quite pleased to be awake at 8.00 a.m. Eventually the journalists - mostly Chinese TV with some European press - appeared. We gave them a high speed demonstration (me on sabre and foil) while trying to avoid smashing the chandelier. Then we got them into kit, gave them the briefest of lessons and set them up in a mini-competition. Competitive isn't the word: they must have been cooped up in that bus for a long time, given the pent-up aggression that manifested itself.

We did some interviews and it turns out that far from starring in some romantic epic, Vole is to be the 'and finally…' story on tonight's news in China ('And finally… crazy things fat Western gaijin do'). Plashing Vole on Chinese TV: well, a billion people can't be wrong. Double chins will be trending in China this year, I tell you.

He reads the news! He's gay! OMFG!

You've probably never heard of Anderson Cooper. He's an American journalist and news anchor. Chiselled. Silver hair. Doesn't rant much.

Yesterday, he was 'outed' by Brian Moylan, who seems to have been fixated by Cooper's sexuality for years, as his account described.

The odd thing is that Anderson Cooper appears to have been 'out' for years, perhaps decades. As Moylan's article makes clear, Cooper appeared as a couple with his male partner at all sorts of social events, frequented gay gyms and generally got on with his life. Additionally, Moylan has written numerous articles telling the world (well, his readers), that ANDERSON COOPER IS GAY. As though it was anybody's business. In fact, the only people to whom Anderson Cooper wasn't 'out', are those viewers who don't spend their lives wondering what particular stimuli excite Mr. Cooper's gentleman's area.

Which is exactly as it should be. Anderson Cooper isn't the news. His sexuality doesn't determine what's news and how he reports it. I don't preface my lectures with 'Here's a fat boring (they assume this bit anyway) heterosexual's perspective on trochees and spondees', Kirsty Wark doesn't have to warn viewers that they should take her genes into account ('And now the news… in a kilt'). While there are plenty of intellectual arguments about identity and the ways in which our orientations influence us, reading out the news doesn't seem to be a prime example of the way in which sexuality does or doesn't define us. Cooper shouldn't have to overtly or covertly tell the viewers that his understanding of the LIBOR scandal or an earthquake is informed by the fact that he's a big old gay: 'Here's the Gay News… and over to Chuck for a straight's perspective on the famine. Chuck?'.

I distrust most major news media because the system is compromised by capitalism and conservative hegemony. Because they're under assault by PR and marketing executives. Because they're underresourced. Because they keep hacking into people's phones. Because they distort science and valorise speed over accuracy and evaluation. Because they prefer power to accountability. Not because the author or presenter is a friend of Dorothy.

I'm glad there are prominent gay people out there proving - and it's sad this is still necessary - that homosexuality, holding down a job and being happy are compatible, but I don't see why anybody should be forced to become a role model, particularly for one facet of their identity. It's reductive: Cooper's journalism qualifies him as a role model. I don't really believe in role models anyway. It's just pompous Daily Mail-style bullying. Anderson Cooper doesn't seem to have been a self-hating hypocritical McCarthy or advocating self-repression.

That is all.

Cynical, Moi?

I spend a lot of time abusing politicians, I'll admit. In particular, one Mr. Paul Uppal, the Mediocre Millionaire.

To add a bit of class to my disgraceful behaviour, here's a short piece by Adam Curtis on how the politicians and media managed to poison their own wells.

How media works, pt. 94

I'm still reeling from Richard Desmond's appearance yesterday at the Leveson Inquiry. Together with the editors of his newspapers, the Star and the Express, he painted a picture of the tabloid media as a sinkhole of greed, cynicism and incompetence. Only this last element truly surprised me: I've always assumed that the purveyors of this vicious, racist, cynical, misleading propaganda and filth knew exactly what they were doing. This is of course, even worse than being enthusiastic. I assume that Mail and Sun writers don't in fact vote for the BNP, leer over young women's breasts and endorse pogroms in their personal lives: they just advocate it for money to sell newspapers. Perhaps I'm wrong though.

Down at the level of the Express and Star though, things are very different. Richard Desmond's appearance was in a sense refreshing. The Mail claims to have some sort of reactionary mission: it's pompous, self-serving and hypocritical. This last charge can't be applied to Desmond and his henchmen. Their testimony was revoltingly honest: they say whatever sells newspapers (and take a cavalier approach to truth), whether that's accusing the royal family of murdering Diana (my two cents: drunk chauffeur, passengers too stupid to wear seat belts) or repeatedly accusing the McCanns of murdering their daughter without any evidence at all (and hearing Desmond add 'etc. etc. etc.' to his apology to the McCanns only added credibility to his opening statement: 'Ethics - I don't know what the word means'.

One of the most unpleasant elements of the Express's hypocrisy is its censorious approach to sexuality. Let's have a look at what was on its owners TV stations while he was giving evidence, shall we? Unfortunately, Portland TV's website is remarkably coy about what its '17 channels', but a little further digging finds Television X, the Fantasy Channel, and various Red Hot stations (showing such treats as 'Bathroom Bitches' during daytime hours) including Red Hot Only 18 and Red Hot Rears. Yesterday's treats included 'Indian Amateur 1', 'Lesbo Chicks Do Boy Girl 4' and 'Hot and Heavy 1'. Over on Television X, you could have watched the frankly baffling 'Cathy Barry Extreme Interracial 2', 'Jim Slip's [geddit?] Euro Matures 2', 'Ready Steady Chav 2' or 'Freddy's British Granny Hunt''.

Other highlights of Mr. Desmond's career include his ownership of a range of pornographic magazines such as Megaboobs, Asian Babes and Skinny and Wriggly, getting an executive tasered in the testicles during a violent confrontation with the Gambino mafia family and - my personal favourite - goose-stepping round a board room while singing 'Deutschland Über Alles' to Telegraph executives during a business dispute. Mr. Desmond is Jewish.

Now the salient point is this: Desmond explicitly sees newspapers as vehicles for selling advertising. He has no truck with high-flown notions of the public sphere. Newspaper content has no responsibility to the wider community: a position even the Mail, which has delusions of running the country, would find distasteful. To honest Dick, this is pompous nonsense put about by the Establishment which wants to freeze him out. In a sense, I agree with him: I wouldn't want to go back to a situation in which newspapers are solely owned by plutocratic peers of the realm who use their organs as vehicles for hegemonic continuity. Nor would I want a world in which only broadsheets are permitted. But is the media sphere - especially on the right - particularly independent now? They all hate the EU, foreigners, black people, women, socialists, the poor. To read the tabloids is to enter a world of fear, paranoia, hatred and easy bigotry. At least the Mail genuinely believes all these things: Desmond appears to promote them solely to sell advertising space.

Should we end violence in the media?

Media effects is the topic of this afternoon's class with the first-years. Thankfully, I have a fine exposition of the case for violent entertainment, from one of my favourite films. Go from about 28 seconds in:

Violence in the Media



Clueless

— MOVIECLIPS.com

Are the media hypocrites? The definitive answer

On the left (this is the Daily Star, but it could have been any of them), a picture of an underage girl complete with references to her breasts. On the right, an article lambasting the 'perv' TV bosses who allowed Chris Morris to broadcast a satirical programme attacking hysterical and hypocritical media pedophile scaremongering (click to enlarge):

Watch this space

Morning all. The media news of the week is that I'm doing a Guardian Higher Education live chat on Surviving Your First Academic Job. I'll post the link when I know it, and you can all submit your burning questions.

I'm still in my first academic job, I suppose. Not for want of trying to get a second one, I hasten to add. I started teaching as soon as I began my PhD, and did something in every semester: English, Media, Sociology, Politics, History, American Studies, Theoretical Mathematics). When there wasn't much around, I did a tour of duty as a supply teacher in The Dark Place's fine secondary schools. Apart from a day spent umpiring cricket, it was a tale of unrelieved misery and shame. But that's for another day.

Now I'm in the 5th year of a series of 'temporary' contracts, 0.5 in each of two departments. How did I start teaching Media and Cultural Studies despite being a Welsh literature expert I hear you ask? Well, the former head of Media noticed me reading a newspaper. He asked me if I read one every day and when I replied in the affirmative, he offered me a job.

Yes, it's that easy. So that's something else I have to thank the Guardian for! No Guardian, no hourly-paid lecturing, no 0.5 contract, no MA lecture on blogging, no Vole! So you can thank/blame the Guardian too.

A-levels: just for girls?

As you can see from this site, only fruity teenage girls pass A-levels. Or is it just that the entire news media only print pictures of fruity teenage girls opening their results because the implied reader is a lecherous heterosexual male encouraged to view all human beings - but especially teenage girls - as sexual commodities.

If the Daily Telegraph and the Mail could get away with naked teenage girls on the front page (white and upper-class, naturally), they would, but until then, results day is a fixed highlight of their year.

But sadly, it does contribute to ideas of attractiveness and to excluding non-fruity-teenage-girls from the Platonic Academy. Even worse, Badminton College (very expensive exclusive girls' school) even sends newspapers speculative shots of their fruitiest girls to tempt the photographers down on results day. I believe the word for that is 'pimping'.

One simple rule for public servants

One of the reasons the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police had to resign was that he'd accepted a free stay at a health spa. A day before I went on strike, the Chancellor of the Exchequer - fresh from attacking us for not working - turned up at Wimbledon. The head of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs has frequently had slap-up feeds in posh restaurants with the companies who he subsequently let off their taxes. A lot of golf is played by businessmen trying to butter up councillors and planning officers - often excluding women of course.

There's a culture amongst politicians, civil servants and other public servants of socialising with their class, regardless of propriety. There is - in Anthony Sampson's terms - a political class which is educated in the same schools and universities, lives in the same areas (of London), goes to the same events and dines in the same restaurants.

So let's end these cosy deals with a simple rule.

If you're paid by the taxpayer, your meetings are held in the office, with a minute-taker.

Is that clear? So Murdoch doesn't sneak into the back door of Downing Street. Party donors don't murmur sweet nothings into the ears of Cabinet Ministers at Glyndebourne. Policemen don't go to dinner with News International hacks and councillors don't shake hands with developers down at the Masonic Lodge. Weapons manufacturers don't - as now - second their staff to the Ministry of Defence. I won't accept lobster from academic textbook publishers.

Instead, if people want to talk to public servants, they come to our cramped, bleak offices and drink bitter coffee, while every word both parties say is recorded. Every citizen is under surveillance all the time, so this seems a small price to pay.

It will take some adjustment, but it's a small requirement for anyone who wants to live off our taxes.

A wave of sympathy

Listening to the news about the Japanese/Pacific tsumani reminded me of a question we posed to our Media Ethics class this year. We asked them to consider whether watching suffering entailed responsibility, and how a viewer could possibly respond.

The mediated aspect of disaster is the tricky bit. I listened to Radio 4's Today programme this morning, and it was obvious that something big was unfolding. Sometimes the presenters' voices would wobble as they contemplated the mass destruction and death to come. I was comforted by this: I don't think cold objectivity is possible or desirable.

At other points though, at least one of the presenters sounded excited by the drama: disasters make great broadcasting. People phone in with reports, Twitter feeds can be quoted. In the editorial room, computer graphics are being deployed to give us a sense of mastery through knowledge. Getting there first, or getting the most dramatic accounts become part of the excitement. The event becomes a commodity. BBC competes with ITV, rolling news channels are relieved that Accrington Stanley's reserve goalkeeper's wobbly knee is no longer the lead item, and the multiple moments of horror become a kind of pornographic entertainment.

Distanced by screen and footage and graphics and newsreaders and journalists, we no longer imagine the final terrifying seconds of an individual's life because empathy is blunted by mediation. Instead we wonder at the 'power of nature' or the heroic efforts of the rescue teams. We're disconnected from the people in the eye of the storm, which is terribly sad, but having pictures of their suffering won't reconnect us - it just gives us the illusion of immediacy and witness. If you need pictures to make you care, you're a damaged human being.

I was rather annoyed by the coverage of the New Zealand quake recently: much more heartfelt than coverage of the disasters befalling non-English speakers and non-white people, but it was flawed too in that the concentration on sheer scale failed to convey the true horror: those scared individuals facing a terrifying end.

What am I saying? Not sure. That we need empathy in journalism without sentimentality, but also that the media's obsession with speed and technology haven't brought us closer to events but distanced us from them. Baudrillard's concept of hyper-reality is right: TV gives us the illusion of involvement and reality while actually creating a whole new set of events with very little relationship to facts (if there are any) on the ground. What we need is more silence, more admissions of inadequacy and ignorance from our media, rather than the loud insistence on omniscience.

How newspapers do science

This is a lovely satirical piece on how science is reported in newspapers - I'm impressed the Guardian, which is only slightly better than the others, published it. Here's a taste. Do follow the links at the bottom of the article. 

This is a news website article about a scientific paper

In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding?

In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of "scare quotes" to ensure that it's clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever.

In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research "challenges".

If the research is about a potential cure, or a solution to a problem, this paragraph will describe how it will raise hopes for a group of sufferers or victims.

This paragraph elaborates on the claim, adding weasel-words like "the scientists say" to shift responsibility for establishing the likely truth or accuracy of the research findings on to absolutely anybody else but me, the journalist.

Dara spells it out

I've gone on long enough about pseudo-science and the media's obsession with 'balance' and distorting stories for sensationalist effect.

Ignore me. Listen to Dara. He used to be a physicist. Now he's a comedian who knows how science works. This occurs to me because I listened to a Conservative member of parliament (David Tredinnick) telling the Radio 4 audience that 'homeopathy works' on the basis of 3 very dubious papers - without addressing the many hundreds of scientifically rigorous papers which prove that it doesn't.

See you next week

That's it for me, this week. I'm off to Newcastle on Tyne for a UK School Games team managers' orientation meeting, which promises to be enormously debauched. I don't think.

Meanwhile: half my job is in Media/Cultural Studies, and so I'm used to people making snobbish remarks about the subject. I'm bored with pointing out that in an overwhelmingly mediatized culture (could we be anything else?), knowing how the media works on a cultural, political, economic and theoretical level is mighty useful.

So I'll merely point you in the direction of Mr. George Orwell, who points out in the essays 'Good Bad Books' and 'Boys' Weeklies' that popular media can tell you far more about a society than the minutely-selling highbrow literature. They're short and punchily written - enjoy.

Representation and power

One of the things I did in my introductory lecture on representation yesterday was to discuss a range of images of homosexuals across four decades of TV and film.

Today's interweb (specifically Sociological Images, an excellent resource) provides a brilliant example. Some bigoted Christian group wants to stop a lesbian couple adopting a relative's child. They sent a circular out to their members with a photograph of said couple.

Except that it wasn't. They used the photo on the right (stereotypical militant aggressive 1980s working-class lesbians)  - an image which seems to suggest that their members are more frightened of the proletariat than they are of lesbians per se - rather than the smiley chic bourgeois actual couple in question. It's a fascinating example of how representations reinforces and reproduces power.

Now anyone who chooses a mullet clearly shouldn't be permitted children - but this group clearly recognise the power of representation to construct reality.