The Daily White Male Reaches for the Stars

You may remember from some months ago, outrage about the way the Daily Mail covered the appearance of two eminent scientists on Newsnight:

Newsnight's Guardian-trained editor, Ian Katz, is keen on diversity.
So, two women were invited to comment on the report about (white, male) American scientists who’ve detected the origins of the universe – giggling Sky at Night pre-senter Maggie Aderin-Pocock and Sri Lanka-born astronomer Hiranya Peiris.

Obviously only people indoctrinated by those Commie Feminists at the Guardian care about diversity. Thus he deliberately searched the astronomy and astrophysics worlds until he found 'two women' – we'll just have to live with the 'giggling', just as the Mail's (white, male) editor has to cope with constantly being referred to as 'simpering' whenever he flaunts his luscious curves on the comment pages. And what women he found: a giggling TV presenter and a foreigner.

Or as we know them, Dr Maggie Aderin Pocock, research fellow at UCL's Department of Science and Technology Studies, inventor, managing director of Science Innovation Ltd and James Webb Telescope instrument designer, and Dr Hiranya Peiris,  

Reader in Astronomy in the Astrophysics Group in the Dept. of Physics and Astronomy at UCL. I am also the coordinator of the CosmicDawn project, funded by theEuropean Research Council under the FP7 Ideas programme.

Prior to becoming a Lecturer in Cosmology at UCL in 2009, I was an STFC Advanced Fellow at the Institute of Astronomy,University of Cambridge and a Junior Research Fellow at King's College Cambridge. Previously, I was a Hubble Fellowin the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at theUniversity of Chicago. I did my postgraduate research at theDepartment of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University.

Clearly these two were just plucked from a list for their looks, and not at all for their incredible knowledge of the subject.

And talking of incredible knowledge, what about this 'white, male' bit? I looked up the authors of the research they talked about. It took literally seconds. Turns out that this international BICEP2 partnership consisted of men and women of almost every ethnic grouping. The Mail journalist simply assumed that clever science can only have been the product of 'white, male' minds.

So I complained to the Press Complaints Commission, and on Friday, 2 days before it was replaced by IPSO, I got a reply. Guess how apologetic the Mail is feeling!

The newspaper explained that its columnist’s focus on gender and ethnicity was designed to be nothing more than a “cheeky reference” to the BBC’s alleged political correctness. In the columnist’s view, the selection of Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock and Dr Hiranya Peiris to comment on the BICEP2 (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarisation) study was another such example of this institutional approach.

I see. So you can print untruths as long as they're 'cheeky'. And obviously a professional journalist lacks both the skills and the motivation to quickly Google the scientists' names to see if they are actually fully qualified to comment on a subject, in pursuit of his job.

The resulting outrage did push the Mail to publish a partial retraction of the factual errors it hadn't bothered to check before publication

The newspaper took a number of measures to address the situation: the managing editor wrote to both Dr Aderin-Pocock and Dr Peiris; a letter criticising the columnist’s argument was published the following day; its columnist later explicitly noted both scientists expertise, and competence to comment on the study; and, a correction was published promptly in the newspaper Corrections & clarifications column which acknowledged that the BICEP2 study was “conducted by a diverse team of astronomers from around the world”, and which “apologis[ed] for any suggestion to the contrary”. The latter measure was sufficient to meet the newspaper’s obligation under Clause 1 (ii) of the Code, to correct significantly misleading information.

but isn't really sorry:

The columnist’s suggestion that Dr Aderin-Pocock and Dr Peiris were specifically selected for the Newsnight programme because of “political correctness” was clearly presented as his own comment and conjecture which, under Clause 1 (iii) and the principle of freedom of expression, he was entitled to share with readers. There was, therefore, no breach of the Code in publishing that suggestion. However, the subsequent correction of the factual inaccuracy regarding the BICEP2 team and the acknowledgment of both experts’ expertise will have allowed readers to assess the suggestion in a new light.

Who needs evidence when conjecture will do? On the main point of my complaint, they've got away scot-free:

Under Clause 12 (Discrimination) (ii) of the Code, “details of an individual’s race, colour, religion, sexual orientation, physical or mental illness or disability must be avoided unless genuinely relevant to the story”.  

I suggested that coverage of a scientific discovery did not require discussion of the scientists' (or scientific commentators') sexes or ethnicities. The Press Complaints Commission said:

While the terms of Clause 12 (ii) do not cover irrelevant references to gender, the Commission would need to have received a complaint from a member, or members of the BICEP2 team, or Dr Aderin-Pocock or Dr Peiris in order to consider the complaint about [word omitted: race or colour?] under this Clause. In the absence of any such complaints, the Commission could not comment further. 

So according to the PCC, you can lie and fantasise to your heart's content as long as the specific individuals are too depressed, worn-out or distant to personally complain about your disgusting behaviour. The rest of us just have to let them get on with it. In essence, the Daily Mail's defence is that their reportage is just 'banter'.

Can IPSO be any worse?

Keystone Kommissioners

Morning everybody. It's voting day! No, really!

I usually vote at 7 a.m. partly because democracy is still a bit exciting even in its British form, and partly to ensure that just for a second, there's a 100% majority for Truth and Justice.

Not today. I lazed around and didn't get to the polling station - in the Civic Offices at the heart of The Dark Place - until 9.48 this morning. It didn't bode well when the election officials actually cheered when I walked in and shouted 'An actual voter!'. I know more people will vote at lunchtime and in the evening, but it's not a good sign, and some of my friends were the first to vote at their stations too.

To be honest, I only voted because I feel strongly that you should vote at every opportunity or shut up when everything goes wrong. I utterly oppose the idea of elected police commissioners. I suspect it was dreamed up by some boomer Tory who remembers Commissioner  Gordon and Chief O'Hara from the 1960s Batman TV show.

They think these guys will shine a symbol into the sky and Eric Pickles will land on the roof and shoot skateboarders.

This is really why I voted. I know damn well that the only turnout will be from the Daily Mail-reading, Neighbourhood Watching, curtain-twitching reactionaries who vote Tory and mutter darkly about 'coloureds' and property prices. The kind of people elected will pander to the paranoia of the aging white suburbanites who will never be persuaded that crime is falling, that the police can't be trusted without supervision (Hillsborough, the Birmingham Six, various paedophile cover-ups, Jean Charles de Menezes and multiple other things were 'isolated incidents') and that policing shouldn't be an extension of Conservative Party policy. They want youths and dogshit off the streets and that's what they'll get in their areas if the motley crew of ex-coppers and ex-politicians who've stood get through. The non-white kids are in for a hard time if they stray from their slums and upset the commissioner's voters. My appalling MP Paul Uppal explicitly envisions a city swept clean of anyone who isn't a 'shopper': these police commissioners will turn the police service into private security guards looking after businesses and rich Tory voters' areas, because that's what will attract votes.

The argument for election is that the old policing boards were unaccountable and distant. They were appointed from the ranks of councillors elected in police areas. I have no idea who my commissioners were, but I did know that if I threw out my local councillors, the police board would change. I also knew that with a certain distance from the electorate, they couldn't canvass for the Rambo vote or play dog-whistle politics. Justice and policing shouldn't be politicised in this way: it's political enough already. Elected commissioners will become the bursting zits of a foul body politic.

Finally, it enrages me when Tory MPs call union strikes illegitimate if the turnout is less than 50%. By those standards, most MPs shouldn't have seats. Perhaps they'll pipe down when the policing commissioners are elected with less than 10% of the eligible vote.

I voted for Bob Jones, a Labour councillor and longstanding member of the policing board. One reason made me bother: he, like all the Labour candidates, promises to stop moves to privatise police activities. I fear and distrust the police as it is. A for-profit police force will be the stuff of dystopian novels. I've seen Robocop and it's not that far-fetched.

What of the other candidates? The Tory is one of John Cheever's 'quick civil servants of extinction': one of those hard-faced technocrats with no regard for civic virtues and too much for the iniquities which can be committed under the name of 'efficiency'. There's Derek Webley, an 'independent' who calls himself a Bishop, and says he as 'acted as media spokesman for the West Midlands police', so we need say no more about the Evangelical shill for repression. There's a UKIP candidate, so let's hope nothing blows up on nights when there's a full moon. Bill's an interesting guy. He used to be a Conservative until even they objected to him and his wife posting Facebook photos of them with golliwog dolls. Bill runs the Campaign Against Political Correctness, so I think we can assume that under his leadership, black chaps will find themselves falling down police station stairs like in the old days. Predictably, Mike opposes 'red tape', 'anti-social behaviour', 'elf-and-safety', 'chalkboards' and 'abroad' (I may have made this last one up). He hopes Jimmy Savile will burn in hell with a spike up his bottom. He is also the local head of The Freedom Association. That sounds nice, but they spent the 80s campaigning for apartheid and took money from the South African government, so you can just imagine the kind of policing he's keen on and who deserves freedom. He'll probably do quite well.

Cath Hannon (Independent) is an ex-copper, so she's out on the basis of quis custodiet ipsos custodes and anyway the daughter of Irish immigrants should have known better than to have joined the force which fitted up the Birmingham Six. The Lib Dem, Ayoub Khan, is a barrister who seems far too friendly with a force notorious for its treatment of ethnic minorities. And finally, there's Mike Rumble, a frightening-looking ex-officer with business fingers in some unsavoury pies and who can't spell 'independent' (and as an ex-rozzer during the darkest days of the WMP, probably couldn't be independent either).

Separating news from comment

I've blogged about this before, so I'll keep it brief. Various media luminaries are telling Leveson that it's hard to keep news and comment separate, and that newspapers haven't being doing so very well.

This reminded me of this story in the Daily Mail:

Which as you can see is in the 'News' section, and was written by no fewer than five reporters. It went on to claim that:

Which despite the use of emotive language ('police fled', 'rampage') and the total absence of evidence (many other newspapers said that the police van was unattended), is clearly written as fact, rather than comment. I complained about numerous aspects of this to the PCC. The response (read the link above), was written by… the editor of the Mail on Sunday and is a delightful example of Newspeak. Apparently leaving a van unattended and then it being subsequently vandalised is 'fleeing attackers'. 


Worse was this article, again filed under 'News':

Apart from the drooling neo-paedophilia of which the Mail is frequently guilty, I complained to the PCC that there was no evidence that these women were there because they 'just wanted a photo for Facebook', breaching the article on accuracy. 


No joy. Apparently even though it's under 'news', the reporter's unfounded claims and emotive language mean that 

 the Commission was satisfied that readers would be aware that the article was an account of this particular journalist’s experience of the protest and the views he had formed on it, rather than necessarily statements of fact. As such, the Commission could not establish a breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Code of Practice.

So accuracy no longer matters at all under PCC rules. I'm eager to see how Leveson deals with this. 

Farewell, the Press Complaints Commission

It only lasted 21 years.
It has never had a Chair who wasn't a Conservative peer.
It's being replaced by a 'transitional body' headed by three people, two of whom are prominent Conservative activists.
It totally failed to stop phone hacking: Baroness Buscombe asked the News of the World if it was hacking phones. The paper denied the claim, and she duly told the Guardian that it was telling lies.

I've personal experience of the Press Complaints Commission. I complained about the local paper's abuse of Travellers and Gypsies: it kept using animal metaphors about them and linking their ethnicity to criminal activity.

The PCC told me that claiming that being a member of an ethnic group automatically leads to criminal behaviour is not a breach of the Code. Apparently you can't say 'X is a criminal because he is a Gypsy/Jew/Afro-Caribbean', but you can say 'All Gypsies/Jews/Afro-Caribbeans are criminals'. Only individuals can be discriminated against under the PCC Code. No wonder Adrian Sanders MP described the PCC as 'as useful as a fishnet condom'.

So I won't be mourning its passing - but I do suspect that its eventual replacement will be another Establishment stitch-up, staffed by Tory donors, placemen and preference-seekers.

So much for Lord Hunt…

Lord Hunt is the Tory peer of the realm who - in a bold and radical move designed to really shake things up - is replacing Baroness Buscombe, the Tory peer of the realm who used to be Chair of the Press Complaints Commission, after an exhaustive search by the recruitment panel chaired by Tory peer of the realm Lord Black (Buscombe succeeded - yes, you guessed it - Tory peer of the realm Lord Wakeham).  


She attacked the Guardian and others for suggesting that News International might be hacking into people's phones and behaving rather naughtily. No evidence at all, she said. How did she know? Well, she'd asked News International and they said they hadn't done it. Case closed. 


This new political time-server hasn't got off to a great start. What's the major problem in media regulation, according to him?

surely the major problems occur because of the tabloids? "No," he replies, "I think the greater challenge is with the bloggers

Right. Because it's people like me who spend our days illegally tapping the phones and computers of our political enemies, conducting surveillance on anyone we don't like, printing 'up-skirt' shots (often of famous but underage females), dealing in insinuation and innuendo to an audience of millions, encouraging mass fear of (declining - though we don't mention that) crime, of immigrants, gays and pretty much anybody who doesn't share our particularly narrow-minded and prurient beliefs. For every Guido Fawkes, there's a racist knee jerker like Richard Littlejohn (that links to a magnificent encounter between Will Self and Littlejohn), climate liar Christopher Booker, climate liar Richard North and sperm-stealer, murder victim's taste-disapproving and top famine reporter (apparently Somalian hotels are awful) Liz Jones prepared to lie, distort, and shriek until our public sphere is a vicious, hysterical dystopia in which science, accuracy and altruism are left by the wayside. 


I'm not saying the blogosphere is lacking in trolls, but perhaps Hunt should read a few newspapers before he gets his secretary to show him how the Internet works.

Is he open-minded about where we go next, given that self-regulation has been a complete failure?

"I have a complete hostility to any form of statutory regulation… I come at the job with a fervent belief in self-regulation," he says, "having seen the downsides of statutory regulation."

Oh dear. Not the sign of a reflective mind. 


On the problems of newspaper editors sitting in judgement on their own practices:

He chooses to praise the code – "there is nothing wrong with it," he says firmly.

…admitting that he knows nothing about the internal workings of newspapers

But that's OK because:

he lived next door to the Daily Mail's late editor, Sir David English, for 16 years in Westminster, calling him "somebody who was the epitome of integrity"

Ah, right. He looks up to the long-term editor of the most vicious, hypocritical, racist, reactionary, misogynistic newspaper in the history of the printed word. Everything's going to be fine.

Daily Mail 1, Vole 0

You may remember that I complained to the Press Complaints Commission about the Daily Mail's coverage of the student demonstrations. In particular, I objected to the claim that police 'fled' the van which got trashed, because this didn't happen: the police left the van prior to the demonstration, and no policemen had to 'flee' at all. I also objected to the repeated claims that many of the students (especially the young females who were the focus of the articles) were dilettanted, there simply to pose for Facebook photos.

The PCC (board member: Peter Wright, Mail on Sunday) has responded.

it noted that the article included the account given by the police that the van had been following protesters to gather intelligence about where they were heading, but the vehicle was “quickly overwhelmed”. It subsequently stated that the van had been “left” to be stripped by masked protesters and quoted a member of the Metropolitan Police saying that it would have been disproportionate to “use force to recover the van”. The Commission considered that readers would understand from the article as a whole that the van had been left by the police and that subsequently protesters had vandalised it.  It did not consider that the claim that police had “fled” it would significantly mislead readers as to the situation and, as such, the Commission could not establish a breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code of Practice.

To me, that's total bollocks. My point was that the police weren't in the van when it was attacked, and therefore, no police 'fled'. The PCC seems to be saying that the police have been misleading at best. The claim that 'fled' isn't misleading is just laughable.

On to my second objection: that the report degraded and distorted the coverage:

The complainant had raised further concerns over the article “Young, bright and pretty: The day girl students went to war over tuition fees… and the pupils who just wanted a photo for Facebook”. The Commission noted that this was a first person account of the protest, and was presented as the reporter’s own experience and interpretation of the event. With this in mind, the Commission considered the claim that individuals wanted to have their photographs taken for social networking sites reflected his own experience of the protesters. Indeed, the article included a quote from a girl who proclaimed “that one’s going straight on YouTube”. Similarly, the Commission considered that the terms “carnage”, “chaos”, “war” and “herd” were terms used by the journalist to describe his own views of the protest and those taking part in it. With these points in mind, the Commission was satisfied that readers would be aware that the article was an account of this particular journalist’s experience of the protest and the views he had formed on it, rather than necessarily statements of fact. As such, the Commission could not establish a breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Code of Practice.

Apparently, a journalist can say whatever he or she wants if they believe it to be true (or claim they believe it to be true). Let's leave aside the PCC's inability to distinguish Youtube from Facebook. My point is that the Mail produced the article it wanted: one dripping with misogyny and reactionary politics. That a supposedly serious newspaper is happy to write off a generation (many of the children of Mail readers) as a 'herd' is horrifying. The claim that the piece - complete with photos tagged with misleading and unsubstantiated claims - is merely an 'opinion' piece is pathetic.

But that's what you get from an industry-run puppet body. You know me: I don't give up, and I'll be sticking my oar in with renewed vigour.