Recently in politics Category
The good old London Review of Books landed on my doormat on Friday. It's a great magazine if you can find the time to read its incredibly well written but equally incredibly long articles. As a matter of fact, I've got a free subscription offer that technically I've given Clem first dibs on but it's free to a worthy home.
The lead article this week is a review of a book called Flat Earth News by Nick Davies. You can read it here and I strongly recommend that you do. As it goes its not one of the longer articles that the LRB publishes.
Ok, read it? Good. See what I mean?
I'm not going to reiterate everything that John Lancaster has written in his article but I just wanted to ruminate a little on a couple of things.
Firstly it's very interesting to read about a book that purports to give substance to what I'd hitherto suspected but not been able to quite put my finger on, namely that the contents of our newspapers have, to quote a PR monkey being interviewed about the newly diminutive Mars Bar on the Today show a couple of years ago, an increased sensation of lightness. I've felt disinclined to read newspapers for a number of years now for this very reason. For the record I read The Economist predominantly and The London Review of Books when I have time, which is not as often as I would like to even though without fail every time I do take the time I'm struck by the same thought that I wish I had more time to read this more often.
John Lancaster quotes some interesting statistics that Nick Davies' research team uncovered when they analysed the contents on the "posh" papers as he calls them and the Daily Mail. Posh I take to mean what would formerly have been described as the broadsheets. Specifically, oh what the hell, I'll stick the same quote here that's in the article, you probably didn't read it anyway:
So essentially journalists are regurgitating press-releases and wire copy (which he goes on to say is largely Press Association).
Reading all of this reminded me of a talk that I went to at the frontline club (a private club for foreign correspondents) which was an interview with John Fisher Burns, the Bureau Chief in Iraq for the New York Times. You can see that interview here. Incidentally there's also a recording of an interview with Nick Davies that you can see here. Anyway, go back to the John Fisher Burns interview and watch from about 40 minutes in until 50 minutes where Burns is responding to a question about who may have predicted the outcome of the invasion of Iraq at the time to which he responds that Robert Fisk was probably the only person who did before going on to explain that in the year leading up to the war that he was writing articles based on the premise that the human rights abuses going on in Iraq were so atrocious that getting rid of Saddam almost no matter what the cost was the correct course of action. He then expands on that thought I think with a remarkable degree of honestly to say that he felt that he measured the problem "by the standard of human rights [rather than] by the standard of history" and he concludes by saying that if he had his time again he would have studied the history of Iraq and the region in much greater detail.
I was absolutely flabbergasted to hear this from this man who was, and I say this with no trace of over-statement, one of the world's most important opinion formers leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Here was the bureau chief for Iraq admitting that he had a "failure of imagination" and didn't grasp that removing the capstone that Saddam Hussein was would cause the kinds of problems we've been seeing for the last five years.
And we wonder why our Newspapers are light. There's your answer right there.
Makes I mad.
The lead article this week is a review of a book called Flat Earth News by Nick Davies. You can read it here and I strongly recommend that you do. As it goes its not one of the longer articles that the LRB publishes.
Ok, read it? Good. See what I mean?
I'm not going to reiterate everything that John Lancaster has written in his article but I just wanted to ruminate a little on a couple of things.
Firstly it's very interesting to read about a book that purports to give substance to what I'd hitherto suspected but not been able to quite put my finger on, namely that the contents of our newspapers have, to quote a PR monkey being interviewed about the newly diminutive Mars Bar on the Today show a couple of years ago, an increased sensation of lightness. I've felt disinclined to read newspapers for a number of years now for this very reason. For the record I read The Economist predominantly and The London Review of Books when I have time, which is not as often as I would like to even though without fail every time I do take the time I'm struck by the same thought that I wish I had more time to read this more often.
John Lancaster quotes some interesting statistics that Nick Davies' research team uncovered when they analysed the contents on the "posh" papers as he calls them and the Daily Mail. Posh I take to mean what would formerly have been described as the broadsheets. Specifically, oh what the hell, I'll stick the same quote here that's in the article, you probably didn't read it anyway:
"They found that a massive 60 per cent of these quality-print stories consisted wholly or mainly of wire copy and/or PR material, and a further 20 per cent contained clear elements of wire copy and/or PR to which more or less other material had been added. With 8 per cent of the stories, they were unable to be sure about their source. That left only 12 per cent of stories where the researchers could say that all the material was generated by the reporters themselves. The highest quota proved to be in the Times, where 69 per cent of news stories were wholly or mainly wire copy and/or PR . . . The researchers went on to look at those stories which relied on a specific statement of fact and found that with a staggering 70 per cent of them, the claimed fact passed into print without any corroboration at all. Only 12 per cent of these stories showed evidence that the central statement had been thoroughly checked."
So essentially journalists are regurgitating press-releases and wire copy (which he goes on to say is largely Press Association).
Reading all of this reminded me of a talk that I went to at the frontline club (a private club for foreign correspondents) which was an interview with John Fisher Burns, the Bureau Chief in Iraq for the New York Times. You can see that interview here. Incidentally there's also a recording of an interview with Nick Davies that you can see here. Anyway, go back to the John Fisher Burns interview and watch from about 40 minutes in until 50 minutes where Burns is responding to a question about who may have predicted the outcome of the invasion of Iraq at the time to which he responds that Robert Fisk was probably the only person who did before going on to explain that in the year leading up to the war that he was writing articles based on the premise that the human rights abuses going on in Iraq were so atrocious that getting rid of Saddam almost no matter what the cost was the correct course of action. He then expands on that thought I think with a remarkable degree of honestly to say that he felt that he measured the problem "by the standard of human rights [rather than] by the standard of history" and he concludes by saying that if he had his time again he would have studied the history of Iraq and the region in much greater detail.
I was absolutely flabbergasted to hear this from this man who was, and I say this with no trace of over-statement, one of the world's most important opinion formers leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Here was the bureau chief for Iraq admitting that he had a "failure of imagination" and didn't grasp that removing the capstone that Saddam Hussein was would cause the kinds of problems we've been seeing for the last five years.
And we wonder why our Newspapers are light. There's your answer right there.
Makes I mad.
Right this is a rework of a rather drunken attempt at an entry or what should have been a large comment on the journalistic decline entry by Chris. Hopefully this is more coherent. In fact I'm amazed there was an underlying thread in my previous comment (you'll find it under Rambled Chicken) at all but there does seem to have been :-)
Why does everyone have a problem with pink Floyd after Syd Barret left? Actually it's by no means everybody, but many, I feel, get the impression there was some sort of sell out. I mean couldn't they just change? It would be rather unusual for a band to lose such a strong component and not do so.
Why am I talking about this you may ask? Well I was listening to 'Amused to Death' a very good (if you like that sort of thing) Roger Waters solo album made sometime in the mid to late 90s.Now I know that he's just not some folks cup of tea, and that's fine, I can understand that and he's not always mine. The album just popped up the other day and I hadn't listened since university and it took me back a little and I find it one of his better one's.
Depressingly, I kinda got it at the time but didn't really dwell much on the more underlying message to do with media, or more specifically TV news, journalism and such like. To cut a long story short it's rather loosely based on a monkey being fed TV news and media and trying to make sense of the world around him with these tools. The resulting thoughts and consequences......ah you get the picture. As an aside you might ask why I didn't dwell on this less obvious (though it would be glaringly so to most) fact and tended to dwell more on some more biting lyrics about recent events. Well I'm just slow/shallow whatever :-) erm....and I was...erm well....erm more interested in Jeff Beck's guitar playing at the time since I was working on becoming a self (badly styled) rock god. As you may have gathered by the fact that I'm typing this entry at 10:50 pm CET I didn't make it.
So this and another essay/forward to Animal Farm sprang to mind when I read Journalistic Decline by Chris. See I don't know how or who's to blame for all of this. Waters single release from this album was refused play by the BBC. There are 2 issues here: Firstly, it was not refused on any grounds of indecent language or explicitness in anyway, merely on the ground that it was I guess considered too anti-God. This I find staggering. The song "What god wants.. (god gets god help us all)" amounts to a long list of contradictions driven by various faiths, distortions, political takes etc on religion. So its basically anything that gets done in the name of god for whatever reason and is essentially saying how easy it is to rally otherwise good folk into parting with money for a government's war, filling the pockets of some preacher in a stadium or whatever other useless rubbish they decide to embark on. I was left me rather angry and depressed that this song was refused airplay for this, since it might seem a useful point that the populace of many countries could bear in mind now and again. The second point is that, as far as I'm aware, this is a choice of the BBC, NOT something imposed on them by government.
This brings me on to the censorship suffered by Orwell on trying to release Animal Farm. It again was not enforced censorship but a fear of stepping away from the herd of what he labels the intelligentsia of his day. Which is also touched on as a factor of our 'thinning' papers in the article referred to by Chris. Nobody wanted to buck trend saying that socialism or what was sold as a socialist society could possibly be creating the monster that was the Soviet Union at the time. I mean there were good reasons since they were our allies and it was war after all, but this again was not the government stopping release of his book. The distortions and outright erasure from history of some facts of the time in the press and often academic publishing were astonishing by their own hand. Eventually, after what is now recognised as one of the most important books of the last century was refused publishing 4 times, it made it. Orwell himself funded the translation in to Ukraine and I think some distribution/publication costs since he felt it important they had the bigger picture of what was happening to them at the hands of the Soviets.So, where are we now? Well I will buy the Guardian occasionally. It's pretty easy to find the stories that are anything to do with vaguely investigative journalism. Normally in one of those 5 page little bits in the middle about a report or excerpts from a new book which they've paid to publish some of to save themselves the legwork. And I like the odd Sudoku.
But I guess I went through a phase where I found it staggeringly hard to pick up. It just enraged me less than other papers I guess, or no actually more. These guys are supposed to care right, the clue's in the paper's title? Sometimes I wouldn't buy it on point of principle because of items by people like Julie Burchill who I eventually brought myself to just ignore. I can still get wound up about the odd article that sticks in my mind, (and so I shall) one example being her rant about people with depression effectively being slackers. I really enjoyed that while a very close friend who worked hard all her life as a nurse and stood for some values (that the Guardian at least once pretended to) suffered a break down and subsequent depression for several years. Sorry Julie, you're just a twat that'll type up any old aggravating shit for some money. You could offer this opinion as that of a mirror to work with but its not even that since it doesn't provoke reflection as there is not enough substance to provoke it. If I wanted to read offensive, unintelligible and unsubstantiated material I'll read the BNP's mandate or something. But I don't like supporting views like this so I don't like paying for it.
But apparently the Guardian did not care, why bother with Churnalism when you can save more and just turn over the back half of your 'Review' to sex chat line advertising? Indeed why not just make the paper that? It's way cheaper? If you don't care about the quality of the journalism or what, celeb columnist's utterly offensive rhetoric you print then hey, go for it. I wonder how long before their first sex line advert that their previous Germain Greer article appeared?
Well, it aggravated me less than other papers so I get it now and again. Guess I sold out too. Maybe I just buy a Sudoku puzzle book now I think about it.
Am I being over the top? We seem to be past caring.The last guardian article I read was a couple of weeks ago summed it up for me. It was about a report on the cost of the war in Iraq. They tried to give some context to the numbers by comparing them to UN budgets and various other things. I think the problem is is that the numbers are just too big to mean anything to most people.
This is the same as the media issue. Take in an hour or so of CNN. I watched a 'special report' on AIDS in Africa. You gotta hand it to CNN, we were told to come back after the break to see if the kid's parents made it or not as some sad fade out music bought me aghast into the aforementioned bank and golf adverts. Does that not make anyone scared? Who is editing that? What is their thought process there? I think we all know.
Looking for integrity, at the very minimum, is for sure a lost cause in most journalism now. Dig up a documentary called 'Spin'. That should be enough to frighten the life out of anyone with any doubts about the state of TV at least.
I wonder when CNN start sponsoring the military to try use weapons which have a better audience response when filmed, so long as they get 1st dibs on broadcasting such explosions? More frightening than that actually happening is that if a report came out (and was confirmed in some court of law to be true) stating that this was actually happening, we wouldn't know about it.
More frightening than that? If we did somehow find out we wouldn't be surprised would we.
Nothing jars any more. Just bigger, better dressed numbers fed a bit faster than yesterday.
The fat end of the wedge.