Leveson: Vole's Initial Reckon

OK, here's the Leveson points reduced from 2000 pages and four volumes to a few words:

It's 'essential' that an independent press regulation should be set up by law. They've failed to regulate themselves and lives have been wrecked because they're often self-serving and amoral.

The Metropolitan Police have behaved very badly indeed.  

And here's the political response.

David Cameron: Nice idea, but it's too complicated, it wouldn't work and any laws relating to the press are wrong on principle. And Jeremy Hunt is as honest as the day is long. I've never heard of, let alone met, Rebekah Brooks or Rupert Murdoch. 

Ed Miliband: passing a law setting up independent press regulation isn't state regulation. The press have failed, let's implement a Leveson law. 

Watching the parliamentary debate about the Leveson Report is a disgusting experience. Tory after Tory has stood up to agree with Cameron that politicians have always guaranteed a free press, which is just plain wrong - as I explain here. They queue up to praise Jeremy Hunt and they bay like seals in heat as they make petty partisan points.

The basic strategy is to sound pompously in favour of the free press while making sure that they don't do anything about it. Most sinister is the assumption that the 'freedom of the press' is the same thing as 'the freedom of the press and its owners to behave exactly as it wishes'. Meanwhile the cosy little parliamentary coterie bay like walruses in heat whenever their friends reinforce their deluded and detached world-view.

Cameron's opted for a high-wire act: all the soundbites which will make the evening news will make it sound like he's going to do something urgently from the highest principles. He keeps saying things like But the small print, carefully expressed in language tailored only for nerds and obsessives, reveals that is plan is completely the opposite: he intends to do absolutely nothing.

I'm really sad. I don't think the Leveson Report is particularly radical, but within one hour of publication it's become a weapon in the usual political sniping - and it's clearly destined for the long grass. The result? The papers will go back to business as usual and we'll all be back here again in 15 years.

O Frabjous Day

I hereby ordain that from henceforth, 29th November be known as Leveson Day. For on this day, Lord Justice Leveson – or as the Daily Mail has it 'Orthodox Jewish Leveson' because his religion is really relevant – did cause much weeping and gnashing of teeth in the office of cant-purveyors such as Rupert Murdoch, Paul Dacre and of course David Cameron.

Obviously I have no idea what Leveson's conclusions will be. But I did watch pretty much every minute of the Inquiry and noted his frustration and exasperation whenever a newspaper editor, hack or politician attempted to cloak their disgusting seediness in lofty principle. So I'm pretty certain that Leveson won't be recommending the status quo or anything close to it. And then it will be up to Cameron et al to explain why they might not go for it.

The latest tack is to claim that any legal basis for press regulation is an attack on a tradition of press freedom stretching back to 1695, when the authorities (literally) forgot to renew the press licensing laws.

This is of course what's known in the trade as 'purest bollocks'. Yes, the licensing laws were dropped, but governments found plenty of other ways to block 'subversive' newspapers, as any history of the radical press will tell you (my favourite newspapers were the original and 1968-1972 Black Dwarf).

In particular, massive taxation was the favourite weapon, ensuring that only political parties and very rich organisations could afford to publish one: the 1817-1824 Black Dwarf cost 4-6p, most of a day's wages for a labourer. And then there's the case of the Daily Worker, the Communist Party's newspaper which was banned for most of 1941-42 because opposed WW2 until Stalin out with Hitler (but don't get me started on the CP's craven, cynical and disgusting Stalinism).

Only the Daily Worker was banned, but Churchill tried to do it to the Daily Mirror too. He objected to this cartoon:

The Price of Petrol Has Been Increased By One Penny - Zec

It calls for people to conserve their petrol for the sake of the war effort, but Churchill interpreted it as an attack on the profiteering oil companies (Tory PMs more devoted to Big Oil than the people aren't a new thing) - and perhaps he was right. Certainly the Tories were determined to ensure that the collective war effort didn't undermine Capital and Empire, which is why Churchill was thrown out on his ear in 1945. Press freedom has never encompassed the full range of ideological opinion.

After that, attacks on press freedom moved into the economic and legal spheres. The Oz trial and ensuing prison sentences were a savage attack on the underground press, occasioned by cartoons of Rupert the Bear with a rather engorged procreative organ. The libel laws, especially libel tourism, are a global disgrace: if one reader in the UK has read an article from any newspaper in the world, the British courts will act for the rich and mobile oligarchs and tyrants who want free speech stifled. And then there's the corporate assault on freedom. While my appalling MP Paul Uppal defends something he calls 'corporate freedom of speech', Britain's decision to treat the press as a deregulated free market means that the Murdochs and Maxwells of this world can corner huge swathes of the market and cross-subsidise their loss-making rags with Sky profits. Result: Murdoch ideology everywhere you look, while even puny alternative voices like the Guardian are on the verge of closure.

There's also the D-Notice system: a cosy little arrangement whereby newspaper editors get called in - or receive a briefing - telling them what stories shouldn't be printed for reasons of 'national security', however that's defined.

So when you hear politicians and press barons pontificating about the noble ideals of a free press, remember that it's always been a fiction, and what they really want is the freedom to trample over the rights of the little people, to bring you exclusive pictures of celebrity mammary glands and the harlot's right to dictate public policy to venal, frightened politicians who lack the energy and originality to reach out to us in new ways.

To listen to these people go on, you'd think that Leveson's proposing a little man sitting in Whitehall deciding which articles can and can't be published (like stage plays until 1968!). I don't think this is what anyone's proposing. But we do have a problem. Newspapers are essential to the proper functioning of a democracy. We need rude, raucous, nosy publications which don't let those in power do whatever they want without scrutiny. This is why we need bloggers too, by the way. But newspapers need money. So they fill their pages with vicious reactionary politics and naked women and Richard Littlejohn because they know that the public will buy it - which means that if you want to know who bears the guilt of the Daily Mail, it's you and me. Journalism is expensive. Tits and opinions are cheap. So papers inevitably take shortcuts, safe in the knowledge that most of us would rather read speculation about Jennifer Aniston's haircare routine that what's going on in the Department for Paperclips or over at MegaCorp. Newspapers are incredibly powerful. If they go wrong, the country goes wrong. They have the power to wreck the lives of individuals and whole swathes of people. Imagine being a Gypsy, Roma or traveller in the Mail-reading counties. Then ask yourself why Jimmy Savile's phone was never hacked, or why the Sun didn't pick up on the Trafigura story. Most newspapers don't have morals. They have balance sheets and political ambitions and they're happy to ride roughshod over the rights of any one of us in pursuit of these aims, whether that means hacking the phones of dead girls or accusing odd-looking men of murder.

And that's why we need to treat newspapers as something more than cans of beans in the shop.

Whatever Leveson proposes today, it's going to be better than the existing system.

I don't recall…

If like me - and you're all like me, aren't you? - you'll have been stunned by the incidence of Alzheimer's Disease amongst those running the country or producing newspapers. Tony Blair, David Cameron, Osborne, Hunt, Dacre, the Murdochs - clearly they spent the early 90s eating British Beef and their brains have the consistency of Swiss cheese.

But how forgetful are they really? Well, one hardworking chap has done the analysis:

Being a politician        2.48% average    8x worse than the average person 

Being Prime Minister   3.77% average    12x worse than the average person 

Being involved in the Jeremy Hunt affair 5.94%  nearly 20x worse than the average man on the street 

Being a senior Murdoch Employee  5.77% 19x worse 

Being on the Government side in that deal 6.74% worse

Obviously I'm not an epidemiologist, but this looks statistically significant to me. Clearly being in the Establishment is bad for your health. And for the public sphere:

So government ministers, and their civil servants and special advisors involved in the Hunt affair have memories that are over 22x worse than  the average person. One government witness on their own had 58 memory failures, as many failures of memory as the total in the whole of the of the first module. or a rate of one memory failure every fifteen questions. 

Who has the worst memory? From this graph (click to enlarge), it's Jeremy Hunt's advisor Adam Smith, followed by Andy Coulson, with James Murdoch and David Cameron rather suspiciously close together. As the author points out, it's rather worrying for various other people that Rampaging Rebekah Brooks appears not to be relying on the Ernest Saunders defence - she'll be spilling the beans, we hope.

 More fine analysis here. Which brings us to the Readers' Poll: are our leaders liars or seriously mentally ill? Answers on a postcard…

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. 

"There may or may not have been trees"

Good morning everybody. The big event of the day of course is Jeremy Hunt's appearance at the Leveson Inquiry. He's only been up for half an hour so far and all my suspicions about the vacuity of rich Tories and the debasement of the public sphere have been confirmed.

Take the event from which the title of this post is derived: Hunt attended a party at which Rupert Murdoch was present, at a time when he was meant to be judging whether News International should be allowed to take over BSkyB. Spotting some journalists, he hid behind some trees to avoid being seen. Imagine: a Minister of the Crown, lurking behind the shrubs in case the press ask him quite proper questions about his behaviour. If this was Yes Minister, the scene would be deleted as too ridiculous. Right now he's explaining that despite being formally told he couldn't meet News International, it's 'entirely appropriate' to have the same conversations on a mobile phone. There's a man who steadfastly prefers to see trees where the rest of us see woods.

Hunt's general tenor is that of a man unshakeable in his conviction that Murdoch, Michel, Brooks et al should never be impeded, but bright enough to realise that not everybody shares his view. The records unearth a series of previously unacknowledged meetings with News Corp, unminuted but - Hunt finally admits - concerning the Sky bid, which Hunt's texts candidly proclaim he supported. The general impression is that not only does a politico-corporate elite exist, but that Hunt then and now sees this as entirely proper. There's a sense of 'now it is our turn to eat' (in the Kenyan formulation) about this government's behaviour.

They're so confident that they resent any scrutiny, hence Hunt's and Gove's use of private gmail/hotmail accounts to conduct government business, in the belief (mistaken, I hope: it's going through the courts) that such media are outside Freedom of Information rules. The last two years has seen macro-policies designed to enrich the Tories' core supporters - finance, the rich - and day-to-day corruption, such as Gove channelling money without tender to a 'charity' which helps Tories set up so-called 'free schools'. Millionaires get tax cuts, disabled children have their benefits cut.

From the testimony so far, it's hard to see how a man like Hunt has become so rich in business and so powerful in politics. The answer, of course, is that those skills - primarily ratlike cunning - and those required to be a government minister aren't the same. People like Hunt have spent decades schmoozing some people and knifing others in the back, then find themselves unable to acquire the attributes of a servant of the people: humility, judiciousness, impartiality. It was the same with the New Labour clique: having spent twenty years trashing their intellectual and ideological heritage, they found themselves tied hand and foot to their new friends in the City, and playing a self-destructive game of hardball with the press. Result: a cowardly neoliberal warmongering administration too scared to do anything other than bow to the received wisdom of a rightwing Establishment.

(Oh yes, and he uses the phrase 'going forward', referred to himself in the third person and uses 'we' when he's making things up. So he's clearly a worm).

The sun shines on the just and unjust alike

The sun's shining and I've blogged about politics and things a lot today. I think Leveson's driving me mad. Though I am looking forward to the boxed set of The Leveson Inquiry (PG: contains scenes of violent sarcasm). I loved Borgen, and this is even drier and more sarcastic (though rather imbalanced on the male side).

So here are some quick cheap musical thrills.













Have a good weekend, everybody.

He Knew He Was Right

I told you so. More importantly, so did all the trades unions when Murdoch started gobbling the world's media. Now the House of Commons Select Committee on Culture agrees.

This is the mug from which I drink my tea at work. Most of those unions are gone, but their cause is even more justified now.

Separated at birth? Leveson edition

Here's Dick Fedorcio, suspended head of press relations for the Metropolitan Police. He employed a vast number of News of the World journalists in his office. He wined and dined several serving ones. He let a NotW hack write an article on his office computer. He got his son a work experience job on the Sun. The son then moved from The Sun to the Metropolitan Police. Other officers hint that he leaked and briefed. He of course says that he's never even heard a breath of scandal ever.

But never mind that. Play this clip of the intrepid Fedorcio.



Then play this one, of Baron Greenback from Danger Mouse:



Separated at birth.

In praise of lynch mobs

I've expressed my glee at the Leveson Inquiry more than once. It's becoming a parade of shifty liars from all walks of life, from the police to politics to journalism, being exposed for behaviour they thought was 'normal'. If only Anthony Sampson, author of Who Runs This Place? was still alive, he'd have revelled in this stuff.

What we're seeing is the democratic deficit in action: élite interest groups' hegemony as its practised - the cosy worlds of deals and handshakes in which the reasonable expectations of citizens come a very distant second to the convenience of the Establishment. The revelation that the Metropolitan Police lent Rebekah Brooks a horse ('I'm going hacking'. 'OK, we'll lend you a horse'. 'Er… yes, that's the hacking I meant') is a hilariously symbolic example of the wider corruption which to them would never have appeared to be corrupt, because it was just 'business as usual'. Brian Paddick's testimony that the Met's PR department saw its job as suppressing bad news (in this case, the force's dire record on rape investigations) is a perfect example of the tribal, politicised taint indelibly associated with what should be a 'service'. The Met has become yet another centre of power playing a game with and against the government, the press and the people, in which convenience and influence often outweigh considerations of justice.

Simon Jenkins, the Guardian's tame upright Tory radical, wrote an interesting piece today about his decreasing cynicism about Leveson. Viewing it initially as a whitewash, he's become convinced that the Inquiry now serves a more profound purpose:

Where I was wrong was in underrating the cruel virtue, just occasionally, of subjecting all unaccountable power to a "show trial". As with Chilcotand Blair's Iraq war, the judgment matters little. The value lies in the public staging, in the pillory, the humiliation. It is still badly needed in the case of the banks.

British politics has frequently got its hands dirty by whipping up mob hysteria - the Gordon Riots spring to mind - but I think Jenkins is right: some symbolic blood-letting is long overdue. I actually don't think that the Leveson Inquiry impinges much on the popular consciousness beyond the Milly Dowler hacking: how can it when the Mail, Sun, Express, Star and other guilty papers have done their very best to avoid covering it? But occasionally society's need a period of taking stock, of moral outrage: the great liberations of the 60s and 70s were once such occasion, and Jenkins is right that we're due another. The press, the bankers, the way in which major corporations have defrauded taxpayers while depending on tax-funded activity (schools, transport, education etc), the cosy relationships between companies like A4E, health privatisation, the revolving door between politics, the civil service and client companies, obviously the banks, the toxic co-dependence of politicians and the press… these things are both so complex and so obviously morally wrong that we're beyond the stage of stern words from retired knighted judges. It's time for national humiliation: bankers and Murdochs should be jeered on the streets. The prisons should be filling up with white-collar fraudsters. Lamp-posts should be bearing 'strange fruit' with pinstriped skin.

Will it happen? Of course not. A few sacrificial victims will be offered, such as Fred Goodwin's knighthood, but there's no Establishment taste for a cleansing of the Augean stables - our political leaders are personally, ideologically and culturally incapable of offering any structural critique of this sclerotic society. They can't conceive of an alternative capitalism, and alternative to capitalism, a public sphere which behaves disinterestedly, a politics not in thrall to vested interests.

The question is, can we?

Monday falls with a heavy wet splat

(Me talking about my fencing competition result: may contain tedium).

Actually, that's misleadingly negative. This Monday is balmy and packed with exciting things. It's just me who feels like a broken-down old man.

Why? I went to the Keele Open Fencing Competition on Saturday. I'm too old and busy to do many competitions these days, and I can't afford to do enough to chase rankings points - travel, hotel and entry fees most weeks of the year just became impossible while I was doing my PhD, and there's no going back. So I usually do the Shropshire Closed and Open events and the Much Wenlock Olympics when I can: it's usually held on my birthday, which is OK, but everybody seems to get married on July 14th or the nearest weekend these days: I've been to 3 weddings in five years on the same day, and there's another one this year.

Anyway, Keele's close and it's a smallish event, so I thought attendance would be fun, and I went for the foil competition - the days when I'd blithely sign up for all three weapons across two days are well behind me. I dressed up in all the England/GB kit I could muster, as a minor bit of psychological warfare. Nobody need know that I acquired it by going along as team manager rather than fencer. On arrival, it swiftly became clear that there were two competitions: balding fat blokes like me out for a bit of fun before a life spent in garden centres rather than sports halls on Saturdays, and lean tall fit thin young men displaying their properly-earned international stripes. No prizes for guessing in which category Plashing Vole was destined.

They say that if you can't see the rabbit in your poule, check your tail and ears: looking at the draw for mine, I suddenly had a desperate craving for carrots. In my poule was Sam Brougham, who took a Junior Commonwealth gold medal a week ago. However, I managed to get through the poule with 3 wins and 1 loss, to Mr. Brougham and much to my surprise came out with the 5th seeding. Obviously the humiliation was postponed to the second ranking poule. This time the poule was a lot harder, but my clumsy aggression (learned from my beloved Stoke City) befuddled the fencers who should have beaten me, and I only lost to Callum Gandolfi, a tricksy tall and very pleasant left-hander from an illustrious fencing family, who beat me 5-2 thanks to his astonishing athleticism. Amazingly, my seeding stayed at 5 and I got a bye through the first direct elimination round, when the fights go from 5-pointers to 15 points, rather than going home before lunchtime as is my wont.

My heart sank though when I found that my first DE fight was against Callum Gandolfi, though it did cross my mind that I'd be able to watch the Ireland-Italy rugby once he'd disposed of me. However, things didn't go quite according to plan: despite being fat and ageing, I somehow managed to turn my natural deviousness to good account and somehow beat him 15-11. The next DE was a lot harder: against the 4th seed, Mark Leech. Another left-hander, he dropped 7 points behind me thanks to my secret move reserved for our sinistral friends, but he's far too intelligent to lose like that, and he soon came back to level the scores. I pulled a few back, when the referee announced that I'd won 15-11. It felt a bit quick to me, but I had no idea what the score was. My opponent protested that the score was actually 14-11. If I was a proper competitive fencer I'd have insisted on taking the victory, but I'm weak, or nice, depending on how you see it and I offered to carry on. Oh dear… Leech took the next three points to level the score and I only won on a difficult decision when we'd hit each other simultaneously. I still don't know whether it was my point: we'd both run out of ideas and were just battering away at each other. Leech had also managed to gouge my knuckle - I didn't feel a thing and was quite surprised when the ref stopped the fight to point out that I was dripping blood everywhere. It was a tiny cut, but I guess the heart rate and adrenaline kept it pouring out.

Finally, I got to the semi-final, which was both shocking and a victory for sly fat blokes everywhere. Unfortunately, things came to a juddering halt in an unpleasant way. My opponent was Alex Schlindwein of the GB Cadet team, who turned out to be one of the rudest, surliest teens I've met in a while - I said hello before our fight and he couldn't bring himself to make eye contact or even speak, whereas his mother was very friendly. During our fight, he shouted in triumph every time he hit me, while finding something to complain about to the ref every time I hit him. I lost 15-9, which was a fair reflection of the quality gap between us, but even then he could hardly muster the required handshake, and certainly couldn't manage a couple of words. He beat Sam Brougham (who'd spent the week since winning his Commonwealth gold suffering vomiting sickness, it appeared) in the final while displaying a similar lack of grace. I took the bronze, alongside Gary Clark, another chap of increasing age and girth, so it's not entirely a sport for the gilded youth.

Ah well, he'll learn. Fencing's a very small world and active competitors meet each other almost weekly during the season - word soon gets round if you're a git. Everybody else was lovely - I met a couple of nice guys from neighbouring Wrekin Sword club, the Keele Uni fencers are talented and very friendly, and the Sussex Uni fencers were really friendly - even when they were knocked out they stayed kitted-up and gave me warm-up fights before my successive direct elimination fights. I also wandered over to the women's competitions and saw some really good, fast fencing.

So all in all, a great day's fencing: mostly lovely people, very well organised, a refreshments stall run for the Keele bone marrow charity and a freakish result. Obviously I've spent the days since in pain: apart from the multiple bruises and minor cuts, every muscle and joint is begging for anaesthesia or the sweet release of death. I'm definitely getting too old for this. The only thing that drove me to work this morning was the threat of Jonathan Safran Foer on Radio 4's Start the Week: I can't afford to smash another radio.

The other treat of the day is the Leveson Inquiry. I've really missed it over the past couple of weeks, though I should admit that I've got a lot more work done when it's not on. However, I suddenly realised today that as half my teaching load is in Media and Cultural Studies, obsessively watching the Inquiry isn't just an entertaining soap opera larded with schadenfreude: it's WORK! Farewell guilt. Farewell, also, all other work-related activity.

Happy days!

Bah…

Teaching from 11-4 without a break today - exciting but very wearing, and I'll miss my daily hit of the Leveson Inquiry. Nothing will top yesterday's blustering, dishonest, pompous and arrogant appearance by the Daily Mail's editor Paul Dacre (virtually none of which makes it into his paper's account of the hero's singlehanded salvation of the newspaper industry), but the whole thing is a wonderful, tawdry exposure of the vainglories and pettiness of a trade rotten to the core.

What's on my agenda today? A 2 hour lecture on Derrida to media students, which I fully expect will go down like a bucket of cold sick, followed by three hours on Propp's Morphology of the Folktale applied to Joanna Davies' Freshers/Ffreshars. There's nothing like a dose of structuralism to make first-year students feel confident of their analytical abilities.

Meanwhile, I've found a new phrase to add to my marking repertoire. Given the fractured syntax and tangential logic, I'm convinced that many of them are in fact generated by automated systems. 'Are you a spambot?' will do nicely. The similarities are too strong to be coincidental.

A word in your shell-like, Mr Dacre

Over at the Leveson Inquiry, the Daily Mail editor sounded like one of his own rag's columns: ill-informed, splenetic, outraged, out of touch and blustering. He ended by accusing the inquiry of promoting a 'bleak' and negative view of British journalism.

Bleak? Negative? At least he knows what he's talking about: click the image for a bigger version. This is a random screen shot - wallow in the hatred here.

How media works, pt. 94

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

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

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

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

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

Quotes of the day

I've been following the Leveson inquiry as well as marking and attending a school meeting. In case you've missed them, there have been some jaw-dropping gems from the editors of the Daily Star and the Daily Express:


On the sources of Daily Star stories:

We don't just lift stories from the Mail website and put them in the Star... without at least checking them.

So that's alright then. 


And then there's the Express editor explaining why his newspaper withdrew from the Press Complaints Commission:

He says one of the reasons for withdrawing was because it failed to stop the paper publishing defamatory articles about the McCanns.

"Because of the McCanns I think that was a huge problem for us and I think they should have intervened … no one was intervening at all. Everybody had too much leeway, it just went on and on," 

So to be clear: the Press Complaints Commission is useless because it didn't stop his paper publishing numerous libellous articles, leading to them being convicted in court and having to pay out huge amounts of money. Stop me before I kill again!

Notes from today's Leveson inquiry

The bloody Guardian isn't covering today's hearings of the Leveson Inquiry. I tweeted one of the journalists to ask why, and he said 'resources'. It's a very lame excuse: the real reason is that today's the academics' turn. There's a list of very learned people there, thinkers who've devoted their lives to contemplating the intellectual, moral, political and commercial roles of the media. You'd think (or I would) that what they have to say might be of some interest to the public. But clearly intellectual grasp comes a very poor second to the outrage of victims and the fame of those who gave evidence on previous days. Sienna Miller (whose existence was explained to me a few days ago) clearly has much more insight than Brian Cathcart.

So I've had to go over to the bloody Torygraph for live coverage. Amongst the gems are these:

The Sun turned down the MP's expenses file - because Rebekah Brooks believed there was insufficient sexual misconduct evidenced therein

So much for the tabloids' 'public interest' defence. The Telegraph broke the law to buy that stolen information, and did the public a great service. The Sun refused the scoop of the decade because there weren't any tits in it. Other than the MPs, obviously.

The learned panel are criticising the Press Complaints Commission.Cathcart says it is a "confidence trick" by the industry. It has been describing itself as a regulator for twenty years, but it is not. Brock says it is a complaints mediation service, not a regulator. Barnett says there is no way of groups being represented - such as migrants.

We discussed this in class yesterday, inconclusively. Nobody trusts the papers to regulate themselves, nobody wants governments doing it (see Milton's Areopagitica for the reasons why). As to sanctions, I propose this: offending football teams are sometimes made to play matches without spectators. How about suspending publication of a paper for a day, two days, a week etc, depending on the level of the offence? The massive loss of revenue would certainly focus proprietors' minds.

Also:

15.05 Mac Síthigh says it's funny there's criticism of media studies as 'mickey mouse' degree. Now more than ever there's a need to explain power of the media. 

It's not all serious work here at Vole Towers though. Our piss-poor marketing department has sent us all a corporate e-card template with an editable section, the trusting, naive simpletons. Wittily doctored versions are being merrily exchanged. Here's one effort (with the name of this august institution removed):

On the agenda

It's a fun-packed day today: marking the three Shakespeare forums on which I've fallen behind, counselling the lost sheep about their dissertations, going for a swim and then going to a discussion of black holes. In a pub. Oh, and following the Leveson Inquiry too. Enthralling.

The soundtrack to the day is Adam Green's Sixes and Sevens, another £3 CD bought out of curiosity. It's rather fun: a mix of Kurt Weill, Tom Waits and nursery rhymes. I saw his former Moldy Peaches partner Kimya Dawson at ATP once: similar faux-naif fun.

News Bounty

Good morning, readerinos! After yesterday's mammoth editing session (I reduced a paper from 19000 to 8500 words - each one soaked in blood), I'm back with a vengeance. Sort of. I've to write a lecture on Literature in the West Midlands (all suggestions welcome) for Saturday's promotional event. So far, I have a massive list, and I'm attempting to construct a spine for it, probably along the lines of 'The West Midlands: Culturally Impenetrable (And That's Just The Accent)'.

The other excitement of the day is the Chancellor's speech on the state of the British economy. Normally, one word would do ('screwed'), but his job is to repeat the very tired mantra 'we inherited a mess from the last Labour government' - they'll be his dying words - and pretend that slashing services to the poor and subsidising his rich mates with new airports and motorways is a reasonable and workable solution. No doubt he'll also say 'greenest government ever', despite the Tories' despicable secret support for Canadian oil sands production and his get-out-of-jail-free bribe to the worst polluters.

And the Leveson inquiry is ongoing! It's a banquet of news! Now to persuade the media students to have a look… Talking of them, I'm spending my lunchtime leafleting the little darlings to explain tomorrow's strike action. Free stickers to anyone who doesn't spit at me.

Anyway, in tribute to the victims of Torynomics, here's a song about us: