These New Puritans.

And how many sources confirmed your story?

Last week I read this piece in the New Statesman, by professional journalist Andrew Gimson, who also wrote a biography of Boris Johnson.

Long ago, when he went to Brussels as a correspondent, his rivals accused him of embroidering his news stories for the Daily Telegraph in a way that was not strictly true. This was intensely annoying for them, especially when they were hauled out of bed to follow up reports that turned out to be inaccurate. They were not prepared to accept the defence that Johnson had made these imaginative embellishments in order to dramatise a deeper truth – namely, that Jacques Delors, the then president of the European Commission, was grabbing power at the expense of the nation states.

Gimson's wider thesis is that the Conservative party and wider society are now riven not on left-right lines, but between fun-loving types like Boris Johnson and Puritans, amongst whom he counts Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May.

The quotation above is designed to make the point that while the Puritans insist on mere facts, there is a deeper level of truth which can be accessed by buccaneering free-wheelers like Mr Johnson.

I agree with Mr Gimson. There is certainly a place for those who generate imaginative narratives about the way the world works in order to dramatise their philosophical, cultural and political perspectives. It's called fiction, and it's what I make my living teaching and researching.

Mr Johnson wasn't publishing fiction at this point (though I have read his comic novel about suicide bombers, Seventy-Two Virgins and his book of cautionary verse). He was writing for the news pages about specific events and decision made by actual people in a real organisation for credible newspapers whose readers had an expectation of accuracy. And yet he cheerfully concocted stories from soup to nuts, or as Gimson has it, 'imaginative embellishments'.

This marks me out as a Puritan, clearly. But the story isn't really about Boris Johnson. Yes, his blatant lies contributed to the public's trust in the EU decaying to the point of Brexit. The wider story however is that Andrew Gimson and the New Statesman have succumbed to the disease of 'truthiness'. An early example was the exchange between journalist Ron Suskind and George W. Bush's spokesman back in 2004.

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Sadly we expect our politicians to lie to us these days. What's really poisoned the public sphere is the total collapse of the dividing wall between 'news' and 'opinion': if Boris's tall tales were on the opinion pages we'd all have giggled at his exaggerations. Instead they were on the supposedly factual news pages and therefore gained illegitimate credibility.

The New Statesman knows that Johnson's claims about straight bananas, standardised condom sizes and banned sausages were lies, because it recently printed a piece dedicated to linking these lies with the referendum result. Now, however, they're happy to print without comment a defence of such behaviour which entirely rejects the notion of basic factual truth, on the grounds that it's boring or short-sighted.

Why should I ever believe anything Mr Gimson or the New Statesman (I'm a subscriber) prints in future? I have to assume that any claims they make are informed by a desire to access a 'deeper truth' which – crucially for this discussion of media ethics – must remain untestable and even invisible to the reader. We all know that journalism is necessarily incomplete and can never be impartial, but this is a new low: a journalist and a news magazine proclaiming that it's OK to lie, and uncool to object.

(I sent the NS a short letter on this subject: it went unprinted).

Bought and sold?

A while back, I sat in the audience while a friend gave his professorial inaugural address (the closest I'll ever get to one). A business studies scholar, his final assertion was that Business Schools should be 'about', rather than 'for' business. Critical distance is essential: without dispassionate critique, neither businesses, the systems that generate them nor the public good are served. The evidence to the contrary is clear for all to see in the great recession: a global finance system populated by MBA-holding elites, advised by academic consultants from the most prestigious universities, and yet not one of them saw the contradictions inherent in the system. Here's a striking discussion from the documentary Inside Job:



A couple of things reminded me of this today. One was seeing that Warwick University's Business School has a satellite unit in the Shard. No doubt to their management and neoliberal staff this looks like a prestigious address close to those with money to burn consulting them. To me it looks like a public declaration of love and fealty to the money rather than a critical and independent perspective. It also looks like willy-waving competitiveness of the kind only the silliest institutions engage in.

The other conflict of interest that caught my eye today was the Chartered Institute of Public Relations Education Journalism Awards. This afternoon, I taught a Media Ethics class about PR: its origins, its methods, its motives and the ethical context of public relations. It boils down to one thing: money. Public Relations operatives are answerable to their employers and the law. Anything not illegal is therefore permitted in pursuit of profit, with the caveat that one should not get caught.

As Nick Davies' Flat Earth News demonstrated several years ago, PR success is measured in news column inches. If you can get your promotional activity reported as news, you've won. It's relatively easy now: journalists are time-poor, resource-poor and under pressure. They are hosed down daily by a shower of easy 'stories' which are actually adverts. One of the jobs of journalism is to filter out the PR guff. And yet: I watched Twitter tonight as reputable journalists from the Times Higher Education Supplement – people whose work I respect – celebrated winning awards from an organisation whose job it is to fool them. The EJA Awards themselves are a PR stunt to make the industry look more reputable, and it's working. They also attempt to close the distance between journalism and PR copy, which is disingenuous to say the very least.

As far as I can see, a journalist waving a CIPR award is a journalist who doesn't mind being tamed: the trophy may as well be a collar with a bell on it, plus a tag with 'If found, please return to CIPR'. They're being used to dignify a dubious organisation and they've lost critical distance in the same way that Warwick has sold out to finance capitalism and that economist sold himself to the corporations. How can we trust an article by a journalist who has accepted such an award? How confident can we be that they'll apply their critical judgement to material that crosses their desks?

In the interests of full disclosure, I'm in the process of writing a commissioned article for the THES. I wonder if this blog post will magically lead to its withdrawal…

Getting Stuffed With Paxo

Tonight is Jeremy Paxman's last appearance as lead anchor for Newsnight, the BBC's premier long-form news broadcast. To many, Paxman is a hero of hard-hitting journalism, famous for encounters such as this, with the egregious Home Secretary, Michael Howard:



Or this more recent one with the hapless Chloe Smith of the Treasury



There are many other examples of him at the top of his game: the interview with Blair in which he tried to pin down the PM's rather shifty conflation of Christianity and neoliberalism, then listed (from 8.50) one Labour donor's publishing stable ('Horny Housewives, Mega Boobs, Skinny and Wriggly') to which Blair could only reply 'I've said what I've said…Look…'.

I used to love Newsnight. The other news broadcasts seemed lazy, lightweight, incurious and uninformed. They were also, to my younger self, thrilling. A rude, loud and openly sceptical interviewer demanding answers to awkward questions from people I hated - Tories and rightwing Labour ministers and MPs. It was, frankly, a macho thing, a gladiatorial battle. I felt exactly the same way about the Today programme, Radio 4's flagship 3-hour morning news show.

I no longer feel that way. Firstly, probably because I'm getting old, I find myself frustrated by the sheer lack of knowledge displayed by all sides. I keep thinking that if I can educate myself in basic economics, climate science, philosophy, the arts, sociology etc. etc., the least the politicians and journalists paid to be experts can do is be ahead of me. I'm also sick of the closed circle of Establishment voices represented on Newsnight and its equivalents. Despite the devolution of power to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the importance of the EU, the dissemination of expertise to charities, universities and local organisations, the political and media classes are still resolutely metropolitan and Westminster-centric. I'm tired, too, of the relentless parade of privately-educated, Oxbridge-finished faces and voices reflecting a world-view and an interrogative style derived from the tired rituals of the Oxford Union debating society. The perspectives of tens of millions of other people just never get a look-in: and that's before we even touch the exclusion of female, minority-ethnic and northern people. Civil society is now invisible in political and hard news journalism, which I find deeply saddening. The obsession with the remnants of democracy seems rather archaic when executive and corporate power retreats further out of the reach of electoral politics.

Presentationally, I'm now utterly drained by the moribund, sterile set-up of Newsnight and Today. Paxman's aggressive approach was once essential: the interview with Michael Howard may well have changed the course of British politics by revealing him to be not just authoritarian but also profoundly dishonest. But it's a tactic that stopped working long ago. Any politician – with the exception of Chloe Smith – has had so much media training that an appearance opposite Paxo holds no more terror. They're trained in the art of 'bridging': filling the available 3/8/15 minutes with so much bland pap that neither the interviewer nor the audience is given anything to grasp beyond a sense of whether the interviewee is 'good on telly'. Paxman's brute force frontal attack can't do anything against an interviewee whose only concern is to 'fill'. They're trained to look human (I know, what a world, in which our representatives need training to sound like the rest of us, but it is, of course, our fault: we and our chosen newspapers and TV channels demand robotic perfection then mock them for giving us what we think we want), not to answer reasonable questions.

I am tired of the two-heads format in which people with extreme views are presented as equally knowledgeable while a presenter mediates ('Well he says you're a liar, what have you got to say to that?'). Yes, we all like a good argument but we often end up none the wiser, or even misled. Climate science is one particular victim here: presenting the views of corporate whores like Lawson (who has zero scientific background) as co-equal with 99% of active researchers in the field has literally done enormous damage to the planet. Last year I fruitlessly pursued a complaint against Newsnight, which presented Peter Lilley MP as an expert who'd written 'a report' about climate change, which he thinks is a hoax. The programme didn't mention that he has no credentials, nor did they mention that he is a director of an oil exploration company. In short, they presented him as a qualified and neutral observer. When I complained, they refused to accept that his interests should have been flagged up. When pressed, their defence was that Lilley's financial interests are listed in his Parliamentary Declaration of Interests, and were therefore common knowledge. Really? I strongly suspect that more people watched that interview than even know that there is a Declaration of Interests, let alone where to find it. TV is powerful, much more powerful than the notion that viewers are out there Googling the background of guests afforded the privilege of airtime on a flagship show. Newsnight's actions, and their response to my complaint, seemed little short of dishonest to me, an abuse of power.

Paxman famously cited Louis Heren's approach, 'Why is this lying bastard lying to me?' as the source of his style, but it's become unproductive, and contributes to a general cynicism which is infectious. I have no doubt that politicians did – and do – lie to Paxman and the rest of us, but Newsnight seems to have applied this method to absolutely everybody. The result is the grotesque sight, last Monday, of Paxman telling Professor Alice Roberts what the scientific method was, of functionaries, charity workers and ordinary people being treated as objects of suspicion, of climate scientists being accused of misleading the public for some kind of obscure conspiracist purpose, of good people being assumed to be up to something. This is corrosive, but it's also counter-productive. It's noticeable over recent years that Jeremy Paxman's editorialising and sneering is more frequently applied to people you might call liberal or leftwing. He has become openly reactionary, about climate science, non-neoliberal economics, youth culture, the arts, non-Establishment approaches to history and a host of other subjects, often, I suspect, those about which he knows least. This week's series of farewell interviews has been instructive. He seemed most at ease with Hillary Clinton, a rightwing machine politician well-versed in the art of giving nothing away. He is drawn to power and nowadays rarely interested in principle and motivation: like him, Clinton is about the exercise of authority rather than any kind of idealism. Paxman then talked to Lord Saatchi, who presented him with a copy of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and proceeded to explain that corporation tax should be abolished in the name of 'freedom'. To this, Paxman had no response to the redefinition of freedom as merely economic and available to rich capitalists, despite there being no shortage of very mainstream alternatives. The gift, it seemed to me, represented the thanks of a grateful class of neoliberal governors.

Is Jeremy Paxman a Conservative? I doubt it: he seems like a patrician radical to me. But away from the individual personality issues, I think he represents a deeply radical-conservative perspective which is socially damaging. The assumption that nobody has any higher motives reinforces the status quo. It militates against social, economic and political change. It maintains the dominance of a ruling class which may occasionally incorporate some dissent and alternatives (such as the general acceptance of homosexuality) as long as the deep structures of the state and the economy remain unchanged. Once this is understood, Newsnight, the Today show and its ilk become simply ritualistic performances little different to the excruciating arse-kissing seen when politicians turn up on breakfast TV sofas to talk about what they feed their kids or whether their partners have to do all the ironing: it's just a way of reaching a different demographic.

We end up with the tired rehearsal of familiar scripts, as Chris Morris pointed out a very long time ago in a satire that now doesn't look particularly extreme.





Do we gain anything from these shows? It's noticeable that neither the flagship programmes nor the investigative newspapers foresaw the financial crash, LIBOR, Snowden, the Savile affair or any of the major scandals of our time.

I think we've reached an impasse. The Fourth Estate is now too entirely bound up with corporate interests (the private sector), paralysed by fear or simply too enmeshed in the ritualistic, performative practices of the establishment. Effective scrutiny of power is now out of reach. There are journalists I admire: Paul Mason for one, but it's too easy for those with authority to evade their grasp. Citizen journalists, big data analysts, leakers and websites do their best, but they're largely excluded from the public forum and lack the resources for serious investigation, or they're also wrapped up in corporate webs.

I'm sorry to say that I won't miss Paxman. There's a place for attack-dog journalism, but the media landscape has moved on. Power is dispersed, discursive and often invisible. Unfortunately, being a mere blogger and so-so academic, I now run into the sand. We need a searching, effective media environment more than ever, one capable of reflecting on, exposing and investigating our governments, cultures and societies. Newsnight, battered by the Savile affair, has attempted a new direction (perhaps occasioning Paxman's departure) but it's a sad and pathetic show, seemingly desperate to keep up with the kids on Twitter by running LOLcats, excruciatingly 'funny' or 'quirky' pieces and trying badly to be arty, which communicates little more than creative and journalistic exhaustion and insecurity. I have no idea where we go from there. Your thoughts?

Free speech v a free press

What a depressing title to a blog. Normally there shouldn't be any dissonance between the notion of free speech and a free press.

Sadly though, I'm finding that my local paper (the one that employed racist Enoch Powell as a columnist then got more rightwing) is making it very difficult for me to say anything other than the blandest remarks about insubstantial issues.

Over the last couple of years, so-called journalists have used what I've written here on Plashing Vole to do two things: destroy my professional reputation and to find material to use against the university. Lacking any sense of irony, they see no contradiction between naming and shaming me as an exemplar of all that's wrong with academia, while diligently mining my writing to manufacture outrage against the university by distorting and selectively editing anything I write.

The latest effort hasn't yet appeared in its pages but I've been tipped off that the piece I wrote on plagiarism the other day has 'inspired' them to generate some faux-news. There are several layers of irony here. My definition of plagiarism is to pass off as your own work material written by other people. I'm sorry to say that while this newspaper is outraged at the possibility of students behaving in this way, its own staff do so with astonishing regularity. 99.6% of our students do not plagiarise. I do not believe that 99.6% of the rag's articles are free of re-processed press releases, PR material or the work of people like me. I got so used to my work reappearing under certain people's bylines that I wrote to the editor suggesting that he either stopped it, sent me a cheque, or simply hired me directly. Sadly he didn't find time to reply.

This particular instance has annoyed me more than usual because it's a subject on which the university and I are in total agreement – unlike pretty much any other one. Plagiarism is an intellectual and moral problem, though not a huge one in terms of numbers. We try to eradicate it through education, good task design and ultimately by applying sanctions. That I feel every instance deeply is not an indication that plagiarism is rife. But thanks to the local hacks, the press office has to fire off another defensive statement and someone in a suit adds another page to my bulging personnel file

In the wider context, I'm absolutely sick of the lazy, cynical replacement of actual journalism with this brand of manufactured outrage. Local newspapers are the lifeblood of democracy and the community. They used to employ staff to get out into the streets, the courts, to public meetings and council events. Now, they'd rather pay someone to surf the web in the hope that they can turn the kind of thing I write into a cheap headline.

It's got to the stage where I'm wondering if I can every express an opinion about my job, teaching, literature, politics or public events ever again. The local (and sometimes national) press are so proficient at stripping out context and nuance that there's no chance ever of getting a fair representation or hearing.You know me: I like a rumbustious punch-up, with you, with my bosses and even with the local press. What I am heartily sick of is being used as cannon fodder or cheap filler by a paper with no respect for different perspectives or other people. There's nothing progressive or in the public interest about trying to stir up controversy for controversy's sake.

My local paper has no interest in the public sphere, in give-and-take or the exchange of ideas, hence its readiness to steal my ideas and refusal to engage in any sort of conversation. Frankly, it hasn't adapted to a world in which it is now one voice amongst many. In the days when it employed journalists and pursued stories, it performed an essential function. But now it's one of us. Like me, it monitors the internet, Twitter and other outlets for subjects on which it can generate an instant opinion. It's abandoned what made it special for a weak version of what the rest of us can do just a well now. Just as well? Better. I'm too old to be a digital native, but I understand the etiquette of digital media. Attribute sources. Link. Give credit. Don't distort: nothing can't be checked. Expect and welcome conversation, disagreement and debate, and join in.

So from now on, it's lovely kittens.

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!

What a piece of work is a man

Firstly, a word with Mr Peter Rhodes about 'news values'.

I made a passing comment recently about my university restructuring its departments, resulting in a Faculty of Arts. People have been referring to it as FArts, which isn't very funny but is fairly predictable. My preference would be for the more accurate Faculty of Arts and Humanities, but I'm just not that bothered.

Although I can't link you to his column in the Express and Star as it isn't considered worthy of webspace, Mr Peter Rhodes thought that my comment was a) worth repeating (without payment) and b) 'whistleblowing'. Then again, he does think that the term 'school lunch' is bourgeois political correctness. Unless he's joking. I can no longer tell these days.

Whistleblowing is when you reveal dangerous, illegal or unethical activity in the workplace. It's worth column inches. I'm very pleased that Mr Peter Rhodes is a regular reader of Plashing Vole, because he might learn something. Not because I'm particularly well-informed, but because he's even less well-informed. It's just a shame that he feels it's important to recycle lame fart gags rather than reconsider whether, for instance, supporters of equal marriage are 'fascist', as he claims (clue: fascists put gay people into concentration camps and make them wear pink triangles, rather than legalising marriage between same-sex couples).

Anyway, that's as much space as Mr Peter Rhodes deserves. But I'm afraid I'm going to upset him again by telling you all what I did in class today.

The first class of the day was a two-hour lecture on Shakespeare, with me as the boss's minion. Or lovely assistant, depending on how myopic you are. An introductory session, we spent a lot of time talking about the cultural blocks around having a rich and dynamic relationship with Shakespeare. We talked about the way Shakespeare has been appropriated by the state and cultural authority as in some way emblematic of Englishness and Britishness. For instance, this 1944 Olivier version of Henry V was clearly part of the patriotic propaganda drive:



But it needs some editing to make it Glorious Brits versus Evil German Scum. Principally, the lines in the next scene in which Henry orders 'every soldier kill his prisoners' are cut - we can't have a king of England, or English people, committing war crimes (even though they did, and do, quite a lot).

We talked about Shakespeare as a businessman, as perhaps being Catholic, perhaps being homosexual, of definitely being a creation of each age. There is no Shakespeare, we said: there are Shakespeares. There's the man churning out bums-on-seats material and negotiating the political vicissitudes of a dangerous period. There's the uncouth dullard who slipped into obscurity for 150+ years after his death,  to be revived in cut-down versions and tragedies with happy endings (really: in one popular staging, Romeo and Juliet wake up and live happily ever after). There's the prophet of Empire (the Victorians saw The Tempest as justifying Empire as a means of civilising the brutes and the anti-Imperial Shakespeare, such as the Irish seashore version I saw this summer which played The Tempest as an examination of the evils of invasion and colonisation. There's Straight Shakespeare and Gay Shakespeare, all working off the sonnets, and there are Conservative and Lefty Shakespeares. Most of these send the guardians of conservative culture off the deep end, but they're all there in the texts, waiting to be uncovered. That's why Shakespeare (and his contemporaries) are so fascinating. Yes, you end up less certain at the end of the course than at that start, but I consider that an intellectual victory.

Our point was that you could easily do a degree in Shakespeare Studies without even opening a copy of the plays because in the absence of authorial intent, all texts and especially plays, can be read (or not read) in a variety of ways. Shakespeare didn't leave manuscripts, didn't do interviews in the Sunday papers, didn't arrange publication of the plays (the cash came from performances, and he co-owned a production company). There's no Authorised Version, only varying texts cribbed from actors' notes and friends' memories. Hence the Shakespeare Industry, which puts him up on a pedestal. World's Greatest Playwright. Timeless. Immortal. Always Relevant. Englishman of the Ages.

All crap. This stuff gets in the way of close, informed readings of the texts. Resistance to Shakespeare is often a result of this patronising guff, most often found in education ministers' speeches and little-Englander editorials in the Daily Mail. Once you've cleared all this cultural undergrowth, you can start reading the texts: asking how (and whether) they work on stage and on screen, what the cultural context was, what perspectives are being privileged and which are being silenced. I'm with Derrida: the author's dead. His opinion no longer matters, but the words he (probably) wrote do, and so does the relationship the reader and audience have with those words.

What we want to do is strip away the unthinking hierarchisation of Shakespeare v other authors, English Literature versus Others (such as MacAulay's assertion that a single shelf of European literature was worth 'the whole native literature of India and Arabia') and get back to texts and contexts. Down with Great Men. This is what the know-nothings refer to as Cultural Relativism and Political Correctness Gone Mad. We need to do this: there's nothing intellectually stimulating or informative about constructing league tables of playwrights. You can't compare The Frogs, Hamlet and Shopping and Fucking in qualitative terms: what you can do is compare technique, staging, setting, their relationships to each other and their contexts and learn things through those comparisons. This isn't controversial in my world, but there are plenty of reactionaries (most of whom haven't seen a play since they were the Third Ass in their primary Nativity) who think this is treason, subversion and filth.

As an encore, I went straight into a class which pulled apart the concept of universal morality based on utilitarianism, Bentham and Mill's formula which problematically relates ethics to a complicated calculation of pleasure, pain-avoidance and consequences while covertly relying on very subjective ideas (we don't agree on what constitutes happiness, nor on how to acquire it). We successfully demolished conventional bourgeois morality in one two-hour slot and thus it was a day well-spent.

Peter: if you're lacking material for next week's column, you're welcome to turn up at any of my classes.

What's wrong with this picture?

As you may know, I'm an enthusiastic Twitterer. I follow and converse with all sorts of people: journalists, academics, readers, politicians and anonymous interesting people. I've found it invaluable in my academic work and in helping political campaigns. It's also a great outlet for my sarcastic and unfunny one-liners.

But the strengths of Twitter are also its weaknesses. Speed is a strength, but also a serious weakness, particularly in the case of breaking news. Yesterday, someone hacked Associated Press's feed, announcing a bombing in the White House. Cue panic on the stock markets. In the aftermath of the Boston bombing, thousands of Twitterers posted pictures of Sunil Tripathi, claiming him to be a suspect: one racist assumption led to the demonisation of a man guilty of nothing more than being brown in a public space. He is now missing, and some news outlets are claiming that police think a body pulled from a river could be his.

A few months ago, a Conservative lord was named in thousands of Tweets as a predatory paedophile without a shred of evidence. On a lighter note, last week saw liberal Twitterers claiming that the Sun was faking pictures of the Thatcher funeral crowd, because a building in the background looked like the unfinished Shard, which opened months ago. In fact, it was another building entirely.

So we know that the desire to jump on a bandwagon can – maliciously or not – lead to terrible consequences. Twitter isn't the forum for mature reflection: it's about instantaneous, widely-disseminated reaction. In the hands of non-professional news-gatherers, it should be accorded the same reliability as gossip overheard in the pub: sometimes true, often inaccurate, usually fascinating.

But professional news organisations have a different duty. In the days when newspapers appeared weekly, then daily, writers had the opportunity to investigate a story, establish the facts, consider the implications. 24 hour news sped up the process, and errors started to creep in, as well as hoaxes taking advantage of the media's desperation to fill up the space. Getting there first became far more important than getting things right. Where TV goes, newspapers follow – on the internet, there's little distinction.

Which brings me to the Daily Mail. Its owner, Lord Rothermere, whose Wiltshire mansion is actually in France for tax purposes (very patriotic), said this to Journalism Weekly:

Twitter is a major form of primary source material for us and the guys on Mail Online try and turn around stories from Twitter in about three minutes. So the timeliness of news is becoming much more important and journalists have to learn a lot more different skills in understanding that – and they are.

Sadly, the noble Lord fails to explain what these skills are. But this statement worries me. Certainly Twitter is a useful network, but it can only be a secondary source. As far as I'm aware, journalists' jobs include going out there to find stories. But in Rothermere's model, the stories come to people sitting at HQ.

The idea that a news story can be researched, verified and written in three minutes is antithetical to the notion of informative journalism. There's no reflection, no consideration of implications – not even time for a phone call to verify, or to check a story with the in-house lawyers. It leaves the newspaper entirely vulnerable to the whims of a mischievous public. There's no actual journalism at play: simply desperate reaction to whatever's caught the eye of the Twittersphere.

If I were running a newspaper, on- or off-line, I'd be running a mile from this rubbish. Sure, it gets lots of people clicking on the Mail's misogynistic website, and makes the advertisers very happy. But in this race to the bottom, the Mail can only lose over the long term. A newspaper should play to its strengths: verified news, supported by informed comment by experts written when the facts are in. Any idiot can spread rumours, whereas a newspaper has the people and resources to be authoritative (if it wants to be). Otherwise it's just a shell and a list of hyperlinks with no authority whatsoever. More than that: the Mail's new model is dangerous. It leads to witch-hunts, panics and untruths. No doubt the Mail is careful to use lots of 'according to' and 'claims that', but they'll be legally responsible for whatever they print. Their lawyers must be terrified by Rothermere's new approach.

But the truth is that the Mail and papers like the Mail don't care. They want hits: if that means error and distortion, so be it.

Woah… this guy bites

A while back, I criticised Peter Rhodes' column in the local press, which called advocates of equal marriage and supporters of immigration 'Blackshirts' and liberals 'Fascists'. 

The offending article

Apparently that's reasonable commentary while my satirical response is 'defamation' (I can tell you're not legally trained, Pete) and 'character assassination'. This morning I updated the piece to make it clear that I don't think poor suffering Pete is a racist, just an ill-informed reactionary know-nothing. 

A man with a public bully pulpit in the form of a column in two newspapers seems curiously thin-skinned judging by this morning's email:

You are quite sure about this?

Regards,
Peter Rhodes (former winner of the Commission for Racial Equality "Race in the Media" Awards)

and later today

That's an apology? Still looks like defamation to me. Thank the Lord no-one actually reads it.
But it does occur to me that on the one occasion we met, you did not stand up for your principles and harangue me as a frustrated bigot (incidentally, where on earth did you get the idea that I resented never going to Fleet Street?) but shook my hand and smiled sweetly.
How very easy it must be to indulge in character assassination from the safety of an anonymous website.  But it's a bit cowardly, isn't it? Hardly a proper job for a grown-up.

Did no-one read it? Well, I'm up to 154,000 readers cumulatively, and I get about 180 a day. I can't be that 'anonymous': Peter managed to find my personal e-mail address and worked out that Plashing Vole is someone he met before. And by the way Peter, blogging isn't my job. It's a hobby. Whereas you call people with whom you disagree 'Fascists' and 'Blackshirts' for money. The only differences between you and I are that I have a grasp of history and you distort things for cash. Are you suggesting that only newspaper columnists are allowed to bandy around strong words? If I were you, I'd look up the terms 'fair comment' and 'satire'. And I'd really consider how silly it would look for a newspaper columnist to take legal action against a mere reader before you bandy around legal terminology. 

Why didn't I spit upon Peter and his terrible opinions when we met? Well, for a range of reasons. Firstly, I'd never heard of him then: if I'd known you were a frustrated bigot, I'd have called you him on it. I do distinctly remember, however, mourning the fate of your newspaper, founded as a progressive organ and turned into the mouthpiece of Enoch Powell and his racist, reactionary followers. And I'm generally polite. And because we were in a radio station discussing other matters. I suspect that if Peter met one of the liberals he calls 'Blackshirts' and 'Fascists', he wouldn't be rude to them either. 

Why do I think you're a frustrated Fleet Street hack? Because your 'style' is a third-rate version of the ill-informed poison purveyed by characters like Clarkson, Moir, Littlejohn and all the other Little Englanders who infest the pages on the grubbier end of the national trade. 

All clear now?

And a final update:

Actually, I am legally trained (all real journalists are) and I know a clear case of libel when I see it.  I am a long-established columnist working in a racially- mixed area. I have a commendation for the quality and balance of my work from the Commission for Racial Equality. Yet you blog:"Rhodes and his friends spend their time muttering darkly about 'them'. They promote Section 28 and dream of the days of Empire when black people contentedly cut sugar cane for white people's tea and didn't moan about having their countries invaded by the Bwana."
Under the circumstances, it is hard to imagine a more wicked and damaging allegation. If this came to court, the lawyers would wipe the floor with you.
However, I am a proper journalist with a proper disdain for this country's draconian libel laws and would never dream of suing. You have been man enough to apologise, and I accept that. Sleep soundly.

I meant legally-qualified actually. Still, that'll do. Not sure what he means by 'real journalist'. I'm not claiming to be one by profession and he's simply a columnist: offering opinions, such as that people who support gay marriage are the same as Blackshirts who wanted Jews exterminated. I offer opinions, but they're a) free and b) better-informed. But I'm still not a journalist. 

And yes Peter, I sleep very soundly indeed. Despite being 'wicked'. 

Superman and me

You might think I have little in common with Superman. And you'd be right. I used to have a skinny-fit Superman t-shirt (worn with a degree of irony, I should add), but I rapidly stopped being skinny and unlike Comic-Book Guy, I surmised that this wasn't a good look.

Now, however, Superman and I are colleagues. He's quit his job on the Daily Planet and become a blogger, after becoming frustrated by the limitations of print media. In particular, according to this report, the authors see Clark Kent as a man alienated from his profession by the relentless cheapening of newspaper journalism. Ironically (that word again), this occurs in the pages of a comic book. Actually, it's not ironic at all: comics have been addressing the big issues, including the erosion of the public sphere, for years.

It's a sad moment: newspapers made comic strips, and now comic strips have cast off newspapers, even though we're only talking about fiction. The point about Clark Kent being a journalist was that he was fighting for Truth and Justice in his suit and day job just as much as his alter ego was in external underpants and cape. He, Lois and Jimmy were heroes of a relatable sort, fulfilling the professional demands of their vocation. But when we think of journalism now, we don't associate it with the investigative derring-do of the Guardian or the Sunday Times Insight team (RIP): we see a bunch of sleazy blokes hacking into phones in pursuit of seedy sex scandals. We imagine Daily Mail drones putting together another set of prurient, skin-crawling euphemisms which make it OK to leer over an underage girl or a celebrity doing something outrageous like not wearing mascara. Clark's an old-fashioned guy in the best sense: he sees newspapers as part of the public sphere, holding power to account - something American and British newspapers have singularly failed to do in recent years.

I hope Clark Kent's wrong. But he's not the first fictional journalist to move into the blogosphere: Doonesbury's Rick  Redfern is finding it hard going: the Huffington Post and such sites are notoriously exploitative and still don't have the credibility associated with a newspaper (click to enlarge)

Mind you, if you think it's hard for the dispossessed journalist, what about the effect on us? I certainly wouldn't want any of you to depend either on partisan news channels or even my efforts in the field for enlightenment. (Click to enlarge). 

Blogging is important: I've pursued the egregious Grant Shapps and my local excuse for an MP, Paul Uppal, because I don't have institutional responsibilities - I'm not spending anyone's money and I don't have a deadline, but it's no substitute for a press card, an editor and a budget. Despite the heroic work of Eoin Clarke et al., we don't have the mass reach, access or credibility a decent newspaper still possesses. 

In the beginning was The Word…

Sometimes it seems like every music magazine I read goes bust. I'm like the Typhoid Mary of popular journalism. First Select, then Vox, now Word - it got thinner every episode while the price inexorably rose, so the writing was on the wall. NME staggers on as a repository of press releases and fawning interviews, but there's very little of anything recognisable as journalism in there. 


I'm a Word reader more by default really: its proportion of dead/60s+70s rock blokes on the front cover was slightly lower than Mojo or Q: if I never see Richards-Jagger-Bowie-Weller-Cohen-Waits-Curtis (even though I like the last three) on a newsstand again I'll be a happy man. Once a year they allow a woman to grace the front page, as long as it's Kate Bush or PJ Harvey (again, both of whom I like). Word was similarly guilty, but to a lesser extent. It was well-written and thoughtful - a mix between the good bits of Radio 4 and Radio 3's Late Junction. It was, like all these magazines, pretty masculinist, and paid far too much adoration to 'craft', but it was always a good read. The music coverage was fairly wide-ranging, they took popular culture seriously without being pompous, they took criticism well and their passion shone through in every article. 


Where does an ageing indie-kid go these days? I'll cut off my ears and pull out my eyes before touching Mojo or Q, and NME is now like a bright 15-year old hopped up on E-numbers telling me that everything's brilliant, but the dominant websites are similarly unbearable - the Quietus and Pitchfork are so po-faced, so utterly determined to be the hippest kids on the block that I want to leave their authors locked in a bunker with only Whigfield and The Corrs for company. 


One new kid on the blog is Hand in Glove, written by some friends of mine. It's only just launched, but sounds like it could be good:

Hand in Glove is a new on-line magazine, it is a scrapbook of nostalgic memories and artefacts, a sound board to voice our anger against anything that irritates or annoys us, a vehicle to showcase the talent that is inherent in us all.
It is unashamedly biased towards bands, artists, football teams, culture, emotions and ideas that have shaped the people we have evolved into, and will continue to change by the volatile and dynamic environment in which we are ensconced.

Hand in Glove is currently in an embryonic state and unsure of its future direction at this moment in time…

I'm cautious: it's a bit nostalgic and they don't know how to deal with apostrophes, but we'll see how they get on.

Crocodile tears for Marie Colvin

Marie Colvin was a brave (she lost an eye while covering the Sri Lankan civil war) and talented journalist for the Sunday Times who was killed in Syria today, with several other journalists and activists. Renowned for her dogged pursuit of stories other papers and journalists didn't bother with, her death is a loss to her profession. 

Cue, of course, the outpouring of 'tributes' from politicians:


Cameron:

UK Prime Minister David Cameron said American Ms Colvin's death was a "desperately sad reminder" of the risks journalists took reporting in Syria.

 Hague:

"Governments around the world have the responsibility to act upon that truth - and to redouble our efforts to stop [President Bashar] Assad regime's despicable campaign of terror in Syria." 

"Marie and Remi died bringing us the truth about what is happening to the people of Homs.

Miliband:

"an inspiration to women in her profession".

Humbug, the lot of it. Every politician who remarked on her death used it to make anti-Assad propaganda. I fully support the Syrian rebels - and unlike our political leaders, I've always wanted the Assad family's regime to fall. But what I object to here is the cant: UK politicians claiming an unswerving devotion to free and independent journalism. 

One of the things I've taught in recent years is the relationship between governments and the press. Vietnam is the government PR department's nightmare - many on the right accused journalists of 'losing' the war for the US, by bringing the horror into Americans' living rooms. Lyndon Johnson famously remarked: 'If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost the war'.  


After that, the military everywhere cracked down on independent journalism. The Falklands war literally became a text-book example of censorship: with no way to get there other than with the Navy, and no way to report back other than via Navy communications, the media pack was completely subservient to military command. 


After that, governments tried to be a bit clever: Clinton, Blair and co. (including Hague, Miliband and others) didn't want to look like Cold Warriors, and generated the Liberal Intervention credo, which held that all wars would now be for Democracy and Human Rights (why we haven't yet invaded Saudi Arabia, my MP couldn't tell me). When it came to the press, they were determined to look 'open', while tightly controlling the pictures. They hit upon 'embedded journalism', which was a stroke of genius (though Churchill in South Africa might be considered the first embedded journalist). They knew that TV demanded two things: action and the 'human angle'. By making access to the theatre of war dependent on close association with soldiers, the government got what they wanted. The embedded journalist depended on a small group of soldiers for food, water, transport, safety and good pictures. Travelling and living with them, the chance of critical commentary or images which broke the unspoken bond between them was minimised, as this fine piece explains. What we got were personalised stories - Wayne the Squaddie telling us about how he missed his wife and kids, while a politician posed with a Christmas turkey under the fierce sun. (Ironically, I found the perfect video but 'embedding is disabled on request'!). But here's another one:





There's a word for this: 'propaganda'. And even when the embedded journalist does his/her best (on the basis that one-sided access is better than none at all), it's impossible to gain a rounded view of events from the 'worm's eye' view in this manner. Certainly it caused plenty of media soul-searching: witness this piece by the BBC, and the BBC/Cardiff University report which eventually decided that embedded journalism was 'not a service to democracy'.  


What of the strategic analysis of the war? Easy. The US and UK set up CENTCOM, a massive steel shed in the middle of the desert outside Doha, Qatar. Into it were corralled all the media's most pompous armchair generals - hundreds of miles from the action, dependent on two sources for information on which they could comment: the military, and live streams of the news media. This led to the grotesque sight of London or Washington newsrooms asking their 'experts' in the field to comment on reports from… London or Washington, with no access to people on the ground for corroboration. 


Where does Marie Colvin come in? Well, there were people like her present in the Iraq War. She was there, and she had this to say:
When you go out with the American military, you make a decision you're not going to cover Iraq from the safety of a press conference… The lesson is that if you're a reporter, you're a target'.


There's more to this statement than meets the eye: the Allied press strategy was to make sure that any independent reporter was unsafe. They refused to rescue independent reporters, they ensured that the insurgents viewed reporters as pro-American, they explicitly considered independent reporters as 'collateral damage' - if a reporter was killed in the zone, it was their own fault. Consider the case of Terry Jones, shot dead ('unlawfully', according to the coroner) by American troops having already been injured in crossfire. Jones refused to be an embedded journalist because he wouldn't submit to censorship: in the eyes of many politicians and troops (remember that the Sun and the Tories made a huge fuss when the BBC referred to 'British forces' rather than 'our forces' in the Falkland), Jones was a subversive, as were any other journalists who wanted to find their own stories rather than swallow them whole. 


David Mannion, Jones's boss, had this to say:

"Independent, unilateral reporting, free from official strictures, is crucial; not simply to us as journalists but to the role we play in a free and democratic society."

And Colvin would agree. But Hague, Cameron, Miliband and Co have each, agreed to ever-increasing military restrictions on independent journalism when it suited them. When the Colvins of this world expose the evils - and they are evils - of our enemies, they're heroes. When they expose our own, they're meddlers and traitors. 


Truth, like democracy, is something we drop on our enemies.  

Is journalism rotten?

Here's a little anecdote that suggests journalists have completely lost their way. A few days ago, a live microphone picked up Nicolas Sarkozy telling Obama that the Israeli PM is 'a liar', to which the American responded 'I have to deal with him every day'.

Interesting - an insight into the true nature of political relations which are usually hidden behind glib press conferences assurances of respect and accord.

The real story is this:

the reporters agreed not to publicise the remarks because of their sensitive nature

We teach media ethics here. One of the things we discuss is news values, and I have repeatedly made the point (derived from Milton, Mill, Jefferson et al.), that democracy is guaranteed by an independent press. However, if news organisations are suppressing news at the behest of power - and remember, this isn't a matter of life and death at a time of war, for example - then the citizens of France, the US, Israel and Palestine have no way to ascertain the true state of their political affairs. We become passive, excluded drones rather than active citizens, hooked on TOWIE rather than holding our representatives to account.

How Journalism Works, pt. 94

Last night saw the verdict on the Knox/Sollecito (yes, an unphotogenic male was in the dock too) appeal against their murder conviction. (Disclosure: I have absolutely no opinion on their guilt or innocence).

As you might expect, the British tabloids were out in force. Especially the Daily Mail, which must have been wracked by the configurations of fruity girl and black man may have murdered a British fruity girl. Still, it's all good photographs.

The Mail left nothing to chance. Pressed by tight deadlines, they prepared two versions of the story… in advance. Then they posted the wrong one on the internet, leaving us to marvel at how a journalist can write an eye-witness account of something that hasn't actually happened, complete with made-up quotes from a range of people:

and things which didn't happen:

Preparing an either/or article ready for tight deadlines makes sense, especially for the print edition of the Mail, but this was the web, and making up quotes is unforgivable: how do we know that the quotes used in the real story aren't made up too? And all those in every other Mail article. It's not as if they don't regularly lie to their readers, for instance here, here, here here, and here, to mention just one story (links in reverse order).

See also the Daily Telegraph's use of made-up names for county cricket and other sports reports, to make it look like they actually had reporters there rather than simply reprinting newswire copy.

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):

Sadly back to an earlier age

Today's big media story is the ongoing effort to rescue four Welsh miners: two have definitely died, and the fate of the others is as yet unknown. The mass media and the social networks are keeping a kind of vigil, with individual citizens expressing their concern and sympathy.

In a sense, this outpouring of kindness is symptomatic of how our lives have changed. A hundred years ago, Welsh (and other) mining accidents regularly took the lives of hundreds of men (women and children too). Industrial life, familiar to a far greater proportion of the population then than now, was nasty, dangerous and short. Newspaper coverage presented scenes of mass grief: long lines of coffins, anxious groups of wives and coal-blackened colleagues waiting at the pit-head: the mine disaster is a set-piece in all the Welsh industrial novels I specialise in. Lewis Jones's Cwmardy and We Live depict in shockingly naturalistic fashion the explosion and social destruction which follows: Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley uses mining accidents to make cheap and dishonest political points.

Bill Brandt's 'Welsh Miners'

Robert Frank, 1950s.

This latest disaster is both similar to, and different from, those previous events. Thankfully we are less ready to accept mass death as a natural feature of work. The mass media both cheapens and heightens our feelings about these men: their small number means that each individual will be afforded greater personal attention. Soon we'll hear about their children, partners, interests and activities. To those capable of empathy, such things will depeen their sorrow. To many - and to the newspapers -  these details are ingredients in the pornography of grief, grist to mill of sales.

This latest accident exists on two planes. On one, some brave men have lost their lives, families have lost loved ones, and more names are mournfully added to the list of those who died for our comfort: the constantly updated story tries - dishonestly, I think - to close the gap between our distant sympathy and the visceral, inconsolable grief of these miners' families and friends.

On the other plane, the events become a narrative, one which is inescapably linked to the New Zealand and Chilean dramas (and for historically-aware working-class and Welsh observers, the hundreds of previous mine collapses): one can sense the journalists' disappointment that the familiar 'grief' story is edging out the excitement and drama of the Chilean 'heroism and triumphant rescue' one, which could have sold newspapers for weeks.

I hope this doesn't sound cynical. The web is full of emotional responses, and I fear that people's understandable outpourings will obscure the complexity of how such things occur (was the mine safe, for instance?), are reported, and felt. I don't want the specific, special horror of this particular event to be swallowed up in the tired, familiar narratives of media reporting.

(Finally, let's not forget that the privatised coal industry is rife with exploitation and recklessness: here's an extract from Seumas Milne's piece about it from 1994):

On Friday nights in the Welsh valleys, miners go from pub to pub hunting for their employers to claim unpaid wages. Pay cheques bounce, mining companies close and re-open under other names, men are sacked for being union members or refusing to work on Christmas Day.
In some pits, miners get no basic minimum and are only paid by the tub of coal produced. Underground, they stand in streams of water, hacking at the face with picks and shovels. Wooden roof props, phased out in publicly owned mines 40 years ago, are standard.
Pit ponies haul rusting carloads of anthracite back and forth from the face. On the surface, there are no showers. The coal owners are back with a vengeance. This is private mining in 1994: the promised future of the British coal industry....
Last year, the fatal accident rate in privately owned mines was 23 times that in British Coal collieries.
Government health and safety officials advise caution when comparing the public and private safety records because the smaller numbers in private mining can lead to sharp fluctuations in the fatality figures. So it seems fair to mention that the death rate in private mines was only seven times as high the year before.
One man who fell victim to the new cost-cutting coal owners was Phillip Rees, a 32-year-old miner electrocuted at the Blaengrennig colliery in the Amman valley just over a year ago.
"The manager called me up and asked if this boy was one of my members," recalls Anthony Jones, the local National Union of Mineworkers official in charge of private mines.
"I said I'd have to look in my records. It's just there's been a bit of an accident, he told me. I said I'd come right over anyway. He was dead when I got there. They didn't even know where he lived."

How modern journalism works

There's a story over in Ireland/N. Ireland about a Presbyterian minister who made a speech at the Sinn Fèin Ard Fheis. It's a big deal because even though 18th and 19th century Irish republicanism and nationalism was often led by Protestants, the political struggle became polarised between competing sectarian groups.

But anyway, that's not the bit of the story I want to moan about. It's this: in the Guardian's media coverage, there's some criticism of the mainstream British media not covering the event. One of the readers, Ruth Gledhill, suggests that it's not the newspapers' fault:

I am afraid, in the modern world of competing media demands and top flight PR, it is rather up to these people, or their PRs, to make themselves known to newspapers if they care about their activities being covered or not.

Ruth is the Daily Telegraph's religion correspondent. I've even got one of her books. She probably calls herself a journalist.

But I always (naively) thought that journalists chased stories, decided which the important ones were, and wrote them. But I'm old-fashioned. Nick Davies' Flat Earth News demonstrates that 80%+ of newspaper stories originate in PR and press releases, because journalists' resources and time are limited, and reporting is expensive.

What's new and shocking about Ruth Gledhill's claim is her plain declaration that this isn't a bad thing. To her, journalism is simply soaking up PR releases. If you want something covered, shout about it. This means that news isn't any longer defined by trained journalists with a nose for a story: it's defined by an industry with no commitment to the public sphere. PR agencies are answerable only to their clients, not to the public. (And if you don't have a PR agent, you're not news, to her).

Ruth Gledhill has abandoned any claim to journalistic independence or the primacy of the public sphere. This actual story isn't earth-shaking, but the Daily Telegraph's decision to hand its pages over to PR companies is.

Ruth's no longer a journalist. She's a typist.

Pimp My Schoolgirl

We're all wearily waiting for the annual pictures in the Mail, Telegraph and (last year) even the Guardian of fruity blonde girls celebrating their A-level results, as though ugly, male and minority people never get good grades.

It's lazy journalism, right? Well, not entirely: the fee-paying schools responsible are actually pimping their students to the newspapers for advertising purposes.

"Last year, I received an unsolicited voicemail from the press liaison at Badminton School in Bristol...'wanting to give ...some details of some absolutely beyootiful girls we've got here who are getting their A-level results tomorrow'..."
Meanwhile Cook adds that "Bedales School in Hampshire... supplies photos..."

In one case, the school actually invited journalists to watch a sports match for the purpose of scouting out the prettiest ones ready for results day.

"Most alarmingly, another (very grand) private school invited the FT... to an end-of-year sports event [and] said that watching the girls playing sports would have given... a unique opportunity to pick out promising candidates for A-level day pictures."

That sure feels wrong. Wonder what the parents have to say.

What I'm reading…

In yet more proof that fiction is an essential guide to human behaviour, I'm processing the News of the World story by reading Howard Brenton's and David Hare's 1985 'Fleet Street Comedy', Pravda. Here's the Frank Rich quotation from the New York Times review which is on the back cover:

Pravda is an epic comedy: part The Front Page, part Arturo Ui - in which a press baron resembling Rupert Murdoch… does battle with over 30 characters as he conquers Fleet Street journalism and, by implication, liberal England's soul.

Mr Le Roux, the Murdoch avatar, turns broadsheets into tabloids and poisons the public sphere by deliberately dumbing-down the debate, while truth is replaced with whatever suits the business aims of his company. It's got leaks, dishonesty, fraud, arrogance, betrayal and incompetence.


Here's an extract on the nature of press-politician relationships:

The press and politicians. A delicate relationship. Too close, and danger ensues. Too far apart, and democracy itself cannot function. There must be an essential exchange of information. Creative leaks, a discreet lunch, interchange in the lobby, the art of the unattributable telephone call, late at night – ‘A source close to the Prime Minister’, meaning ‘the Prime Minister’. Yes. This mutual relationship is a good thing, and if it can be made concrete, formalised by an actual commercial arrangement...If I, for instance, were to offer you my private skill and influence, and in return you were to guarantee me access to your newspapers, if the channels of free expression were to be...(He pauses)...channelled in my direction, if ‘Man Of Steel’ were to be a regular feature, a column, written by myself, by me then democracy would be safeguarded. And we would have a very satisfactory deal.

Pravda; Act I Scene III 

Sound familiar?