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Melody Bartlett is deputy editor of the CBI's magazine Business Voice, unpicking government's relationship with big business. She writes at The Business Editors blog:

Why is it that any journalist who wants to speak to the relevant person in government about proposals or policy must first confront a wall of PR obfuscation? Government offices are manned with armies of PR staff who refuse to deal with queries, claim ignorance of the most mundane issues and would have you believe that all government staff are permanently on holiday. The title of your publication and the nature of your story are all too important in determining whether your enquiry will receive a response.

Surely this is not the way it should be. Government staff work for us all, and have a public duty to deal with questions about their doings. The preferred method of communication seems to be ‘placed’ copy, to which end government departments appear to employ consultancies with huge budgets. What a waste of taxpayers’ money.

That this shocks someone who works for the CBI - and someone who explores on a daily basis the state of government's relationship with commerce - is rather more shocking to me than Ms Bartlett's own complaint.

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If ever developments heralded the demise of the television licence fee, it is the ubiquitous spread of the digital media. Now that televisions have spread to the mobile phone, the BBC is not far behind. Whether it be on your PC or your phone, you must pay the pirates for the privilege of not watching them:

As the mobile industry debates the future of television on phones and other portable devices at its convention in Barcelona, there's a warning closer to home that the new technology will still be subject to licensing regulations laid down in the 1904 Wireless Telegraphy Act.

TV Licensing, the body charged with collecting the £126.50 fee (rising to £131.50 on April 1), said that it doesn't matter whether you are watching television on a PC, mobile phone or old fashioned cathode ray tube, you must be covered by a TV licence or face a fine of up to £1000.

"There is no difference between a mobile phone or a television or any other piece of electronic equipment used to watch live or as-live programming. You will need to be covered by a TV licence," a spokesman for the body confirmed.

It can not be long now before even politicians see the abolition or curtailment of the BBC licence fee as a no-brainer.

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The European Union is making soothing clucking sounds to try and calm the outraged Muslim masses with plans of a 'media code of conduct' designed to prevent a repeat of the Jyllands-Posten incident with the 'Satanic Cartoons'.

EU Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini said the charter would encourage the media to show "prudence" when covering religion.

"The press will give the Muslim world the message: We are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression," he told the newspaper. "We can and we are ready to self-regulate that right."

Who is this "we"? Does Frattini think he is speaking for the British and European on-line community? If so then perhaps I can spell out the "consequences of exercising the right of free expression" that "we" are aware of... it makes us free, that is the consequence of free expression. Are "we" clear now? These non-enforcible guidelines are just a worthless sop to people who need to be confronted, not treated as though they have a legitimate argument.

And yet later he seems to take a strangely different stance...

The chairman of World Islamic Call Society, Mohamed Ahmed Sherif told a press conference in Brussels on Thursday (9 February) that the cartoons of Mohammed published first in Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, fuelled extremism.

"Nobody should blame the muslims if they are unhappy about the images of the prophet Mohammed," Sherif said coming out from a meeting with EU justice commissioner Franco Frattini in Brussels. "It's forbidden to create a hate programme to show that the prophet is a terrorist while he's not," he stated, "Don't ask us to try to make people understand that this is not a campaign of hate."

EU justice commissioner Franco Frattini repeatedly nodded and mumbled "yes" in front of cameras and microphones during Mr Sherif's statement.

Mr Frattini also denied wanting to create a code of conduct for journalists reporting on religious matters, as indicated by earlier media reports.

"There have never been, nor will there be any plans by the European Commission to have some sort of EU regulation, nor is there any legal basis for doing so," the commissioner stated.

So in the space of two days, Frattini seems to have done a U-turn and stated his commitment to freedom of expression whilst simultaneously looking like an appeaser. That takes some doing!

Let's hear it for 'nuanced' European diplomacy!

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The Cardiff University newspaper Gair Rhydd [link down as of late 7 Feb] reprinted one of the Jyllands-Posten 'Satanic Cartoons' and as a result, the edition was recalled and pulped by the university authorities. Now as the paper is no doubt the property of the university, I do not contest their right to do as they please with their property. However the statements from them make no sence whatsoever

"The opinions expressed in that publication are those of the editorial team independently of the students' union or university. The editorial team enjoy the normal freedoms and independence associated with the press in the UK, and are expected to exercise those freedoms with responsibility."

So they recalled the edition, destroyed all the copies, suspended the editor and are 'investigating' three of their journalists but the editorial team enjoy the normal freedoms and independence associated with the press in the UK. As we say on the internet, WTF?

Several newspapers in Europe and elsewhere (and I do not mean student newspapers) have reprinted the cartoons, so this is hardly an act of unprofessional behaviour seeing as several editors who actually do this for a living decided it was in the interests of their readers to publish the damn things.

Had they said "it is our paper and we will pulp anything that bucks the party line", well fine, but please, I will thank Cardiff University to not declaim as if they were on the moral high ground when all they are doing is covering their politically correct arses.

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The ever industrious Dissident Frogman was toiling into the wee hours last night to produce some splendid graphics for blogs and other websites who want to show their support for Denmark. We now sport one of these graphics in our sidebar because we need to defend our imperfect but hard won rights to free speech in the western world.

The fact that a group of intolerant Muslims in South Africa, where they are a minority, have use the force of law to both prevent freedom of expression pre-emptively should make it clear that complacency is not an option.

Certainly we cannot just assume the media will defend itself... listen to this (mp3 sound file... may take a moment to download) and contrast the snooty BBC journalist with the Danish gentleman (a member of Parliament) who defends liberty regardless of the cost in economic terms.

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Just as newspapers around Europe and beyond are coming to the support of Jyllands-Posten in Denmark, US State Department spokesman Kurtis Cooper has said that freedom of expression in a European country is "not acceptable".

Firstly, who the hell asked the US State Department to opine on something in a newspaper in Denmark? Secondly, if they are going to take a side here, are religious extremists so deeply entrenched in the US political establishment that they cannot understand the importance maintaining secular rights to free expression in the face of attempts at religious censorship and overt intimidation?

Land of the free, home of the brave, eh? Not in Washington DC it seems. Rather than face down the intolerant face of radical Islam, the US State Department is pandering to it. This is a national disgrace and I hope some US newspapers will show how they feel by supporting their colleagues in Denmark and publishing the damn cartoons themselves and telling Kurtis Cooper where he can stick his political master's craven opinions.

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The question has recently arisen as to whether it is ever right for a journalist to hoax a person into divulging certain facts or opinions that said person might not otherwise divulge. This week, the English Football Association told England soccer coach Sven Goran Eriksson that his contract would end immediately after the World Cup tournament in July, following comments Eriksson made to a News of the World journalist posing as someone else, the "fake Sheikh".

Now, in the increasingly trivial world of British public life, all this might be of interest only to those who follow team sports. I know that a good many readers of this site probably do not give a damn about sporting contests but who might be troubled about the News of the World's antics in this case. That newspaper conned a man into giving an interview. It deliberately misled Eriksson, who divulged some not-terribly-interesting facts about members of the England team and about his ambitions in the future. (Try to suppress your yawns, Ed).

Even so, some might argue that if the News of the World was trying to nail a terrorist suspect, say, that such subterfuge might be okay. Well, maybe. But what this latest episode has done is to further reduce the already-low reputation of the press, sow further paranoia about the media's activities and hence give further ammunition to those in power who want to shackle the media. And all for a pathetic story about a venal Swede with an eye for the main chance and the ladies. How terribly British.

This writer seems to agree that there has not been nearly enough anger about what the NotW did. I hope that newspaper is made to suffer for its actions, although I suspect nothing much will be done. Had that paper been a business conning trade secrets from a rival, criminal charges might now be on the cards.

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To see a term like "Blairite Tyranny" bandied about on a blog like this by people who think things like civil liberties actually matter, is to be expected.

However to see those words in print at all in the mainstream media is quite remarkable! More of the same please.

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On Friday the 13th of January I listened to BBC Radio 4's Any Questions, The first question was "Can we trust President Bush over Iran...?"

Now I am no fan of President George Walker Bush (on his watch there has been the biggest increase of government spending since President Johnson and the biggest increase in domestic government spending since President Nixon), but it was an odd to hear someone clearly regard President Bush as worse than the President of Iran (a man who has denied the Holocaust, pledged to wipe Israel off the map, and has supported suicide bombers, in various parts of the Middle East, for many years).

The audience cheered and clapped the various anti Bush comments of Clare Short M.P., and the (rather milder) anti-Bush and pro-UN comments of the Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes present.

The Conservative party person on the panel (Mr Ian Duncan-Smith) did not really try to defend President Bush (although he did say we should not exclude the United States from world affairs). So that left the last member of the panel.

This man (whose name I can not remember) is the new editor of the 'Financial Times'. Now this newspaper has (perhaps surprisingly, given its name and target readership) normally been on the left of British politics (it tends to favour government spending and regulations, and it favours the statist European Union) so I did not hold out much hope for balance.

And indeed, later on, the editor turned out to have some very standard statist opinions - for example he supported a total ban on smoking in bars and restaurants (almost needless to say, the audience was wildly in favour of a ban "by 98%" - most likely they would have supported any bit of statism that was put in front of them). However, I was surprised as the editor started a pro Bush story of how he had met the President some time ago and...

Then the BBC suddenly went off the air. The broadcast of the show started again when the story was over. At the end of the programme the BBC blamed "technical difficulties" for the break in transmission.

So I listened to the repeat of the show (today Saturday the 14th of January) in order to hear the editor's story of his meeting with President Bush. It was cut out of the programme - even the start of the story that had been broadcast on Friday night. It seems that the BBC will not tolerate any pro-Bush comment.

Of course it is not a simple of hatred of President Bush as a man (indeed if the B.B.C. people bothered to find out about his policies they would be surprised to find that they support some of them - the bad ones, "No Child Left Behind", the medicare extension, and so on). They hate President Bush as a symbol of certain American characteristics that they, as members of the 'liberal' (i.e. illiberal) left hate - opposition to higher taxes, opposition to 'gun control', a belief that crime is caused by evil human choices (not poverty), belief in the family, and in tradition (including traditional religion), national pride and resistance to would-be world government institutions (such as the U.N., the various international 'rights' treaties, and the 'World Court').

President Bush may not be up to much, but as long as he serves as a symbol of all the BBC hates about the United States (i.e. all the good things in the United States) I find it hard to totally dislike him.

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Since I live in Australia, I am not particularly up-to-date with the ins and outs of British reality television. Hell, I am woefully uninformed regarding television produced in my own country. So it came as a surprise to see Scott Burgess poking fun at George Galloway, who is appearing as a contestant on Celebrity Big Brother. What is Galloway playing at? I do not doubt that for washed up entertainers and discarded spouses of stars, something like Celebrity Big Brother is a potential second, third or fifteenth chance. However, I cannot understand the benefits for someone like Galloway (or anyone in a position requiring credibility) of becoming involved in such a tacky programme. Contrary to popular belief, not all publicity is good publicity - especially in regards to politicians. Surely this must be mightily unimpressive to Galloway's constituents. Shouldn't he be representing them rather than swanning around some birdcage with a microphone strapped to his belt, making a tit of himself? Admittedly, he probably does less damage surrounded by morons in "The House" than in the House of Commons. Three words spring to mind - why, why, why? The only answer I can think of is that the man's a bloody fool and an egomaniac, to boot.

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A letter to The Independent:

Sir: In the article "Terror suspects describe alleged torture 'in front of MI6 agents' " (4 January) Elinda Labropoulou claimed "The British Government has issued a gagging order to prevent the publication of the alleged British agent's name". It has not.

The advice given to editors on this issue was not offered by the Government, but by me on behalf of the Defence Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee. The five standing Defence Advisory Notices on the publication and broadcasting of national security information agreed by this independent Committee (see www.dnotice.org.uk) constitute a purely voluntary code, one without any form of legal sanction. Any suggestion that the media has been "gagged" on this issue is plain wrong.

ANDREW VALLANCE

AIR VICE-MARSHAL, SECRETARY, DEFENCE PRESS AND BROADCASTING ADVISORY COMMITTEE, LONDON SW1

Which rather begs some questions. If the D-notice DPBAC has no legal sanction, what extra-legal sanctions are available to it? Is there an implicit distinction here between "the Government" and government? I'm sure you can think of others.

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Almost two years ago, David Carr posted a piece on this blog about statues in Trafalgar Square. In the comments, I made a brief observation that the person I would commemorate with a statue there was mathematician Alan Turing, who is rather inadequately commemorated given that his achievements were that he won the second world war and invented the computer. (Yes I am exaggerating, but not truthfully by all that much).

Yesterday, I received a couple of e-mails and then a phone call from the letters editor of the Evening Standard newspaper here in London. The paper had a couple of days earlier published an article on a plan to put a statue of Nelson Mandela in the square, and they wanted to publish some responses from readers. He thought that my comment (that he had presumably found by Googling) was very interesting, and would I write a short letter to the newspaper saying the same thing?

I was happy to oblige, but I asked that if they publish the letter that they credit this blog as well as me personally. And that is exactly what they did. They published my letter in this evening's newspaper (slightly edited for space, unfortunately) and credited me as "Michael Jennings, samizdata.net" at the end.

If you are a newspaper editor who wishes to use the blogosphere as a source, this is exactly the right way to go about it. Contact the blogger first, get him to update what he wrote, and always credit the blog and publish its address. We bloggers love being linked to.

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This afternoon I was in Newport in South Wales. I had half an hour or so to kill before my train back to London was to depart, so I went to a nearby pub and ordered a pint of ale. Due to the general lousy state of WiFi hotspot provision in Britain, I was not able to connect my laptop to the internet. However, I also had my PDA with me. The PDA in question is branded as an O2 XDA IIi, but the device is in fact made by a company named High Tech Computer Corporation (HTC) of Taiwan, and is known generically as the HTC Alpine, as well as being rebranded by a variety of other companies under a variety of other names. It runs Windows Mobile 2003SE, which includes stripped down versions of Internet Explorer, Microsoft Word and Excel, and a variety of other applications. The device also functions as a GSM cellphone, and in what is I think is the way of the future, the device has several different wireless technologies built into it - 802.11b (WiFi), Bliuetooth, and at that moment most importantly. GPRS, the usual packet switched data overlay of the GSM cellphone system.

What did this all mean? Well, it meant that I could connect my PDA to the internet via a GPRS cellular connection and check my e-mail and browse a few blogs. The limitations of this were that I was using a rather limited browser and I had a slow connection - in practice probably only around 20kbps. This means that I didn't want to view too many separate pages - each takes a while to load and as one is paying by the megabyte, one also doesn't want to download too much in the was of fancy graphics. Being asked to browse through six pages to read one article is something of an imposition. Lots of popups and flash animation is also bad. Relatively straightforward HTML is best.

After a quick trip to Samizdata, I went to Instapundit to see what was up. I scrolled down, and came to the observation that Time Magazine's choices as "People of the Year" were lame, and a link to a Michelle Malkin piece that had more to say about it. That wasn't terribly helpful in itself, because I didn't know who Time Magazine had chosen, but I followed the link.

Michelle didn't say precisely who the award had gone to either, but there was a comment about philanthopists, rock stars, and Bill and Melinda Gates. Okay, so at this point my guess (which ultimately turned out to be correct) was that the award had been given jointly to Bono of U2, as well as Bill and Melinda Gates for charitable efforts in the third world.

Actually I find the (joint) award of Man of the Year to Bill Gates is kind of interesting. I have long thought that it was an absurd oversight that Time had never given the "Man of the Year" award to Gates. I am no fan of Microsoft's products, but even I have to concede that that the man's career is an extraordinary one, and even that the argument that he was the most significant man of the 1990s is quite a strong one. One man came from nowhere and in 20 did a considerable job of seizing control of one of the most important industries in human history. That Time missed this and failed to give him the award at any time in the 1980s or 1990s was really lame. (Time almost got off to a good start in recognising the PC revolution with "Man of the Year announcements". They apparently intended to give it to Steve Jobs in 1982, but ultimately lamed out by giving it nebulously to "The Computer" instead after discovering that Jobs had a difficult personality. (Laming out is something they have been doing for a while).

Malkin does make some observations on this, stating that she thinks that Time's vaguely blah leftist politics are in play here, and that they wouldn't have given it to Gates in the 1990s when he was doing something significant because that was filthy capitalism of which they do not approve, and that they would now rather give it to him and his wife now that she has civilized him and he is doing something "worthy". Although Time does have a bit of a history of rewarding starry eyed "one world" stuff, and that certainly explains the Bono thing here, I am not sure it does explain the Gates award.

In truth, I think that Time is almost trying to apologise for not giving the award to Gates before.

It is a bit hard to give it to Gates for anything he has done for the world of technology lately. Microsoft makes all its money from two products, Windows and Office, and Microsoft has not produced significantly new version of Office since 1997 or Windows since 2000. (Yes, there have been three subsequent versions of Office and one of Windows, but the changes are superficial and cosmetic) . Microsoft has spent a lot of money trying to break into other markets, but has probably lost money in aggregate by doing so. Declaring Gates "Man of the Year" now in a sort of lame shared way is like giving Winston Churchill the Nobel Prize for literature: we want to reward the man in some way so how do we go about it?

In truth I don't think it was so much Time actively thinking that Gates was not worthy of the award in 1995 as their being too stupid to fully appreciate the significance of what was happening at the time, and they now feel really embarassed looking back.

Now, all this went through my mind in the pub in Newport. But, I still wasn't aware exactly who the "People of the Year" award had strictly been awarded to. More links. There was a link to Tim Blair, but all we got from him was agreement that Time's choices were lame. These sorts of links are fine when you have a big screen and a fast connection - you can open six links rapidly and you will eventually get to the information - but on a PDA under GPRS each takes too long.

But, there was one obvious way to find out, wasn't there. Yes, that's right. If I went straight to www.time.com, then they would undoubtedly have something on their award on their site.

But, as it happened, the only thing I got from time.com was this message, telling me that I needed to upgrade my browser.
After that, the Time server refused to render anything else. Of course it was impossible to do because there is no updated browser for Windows Mobile 2003. So I could not read the Time website. Period.

Presumably the Time Server observed that I was using a variant of Internet Explorer that it did not recognise, concluded that it was an "old browser" and thus shut me out. Time has decided that it will provide service only for people with a "minimum browser" level, and as it seems a browser that it deems too old, it rejects it. However, it also ends up rejecting browsers that are just different and unexpected.

This is a lousy way of designing a website and a lousy way of looking at the internet. Ultimately you shouldn't design for a particular browser. There are such things as web standards and standard forms of HTML, and you should design your website in such a way that it will render on any browser that supports a minimum version of these standards. There is no problem adding special features for advanced or late version browsers that won't appear on more limited browsers, but these should be added over the top of a page that supports standards. If a browser that supports these standards is not available, you should render something more basic. Even if you do this, you should render something. A browser that cannot support the advanced features might not then show the whole page, but it will render something. And you should not assume that a user can download a new browser. That depends what the user is doing and where and how he is doing it.

If you have only ever used Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows, it is easy to believe that the World Wide Web is consists of nothing more than this. If you are more openminded, it is still easy to think that the World Wide Web consists of nothing more than IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari (Konquerer anyone?) running on Windows, the Macintosh and Linux. (That is, it is easy to assume that the World Wide Web exists only in a PC ecosystem). A few years ago this was fairly true. But the internet's ecosystem is evolving rapidly. :Lots of people (such as myself) are accessing the internet on mobile devices. People are ripping pieces off websits and looking at the results through RSS readers. A few years ago the internet basically was the World Wide Web, but this is changing. Many of the most interesting things are now happening off the web, but the web as it exists remains a tremendous data repository and indexing system for those applications.

People accessing data on websites using non-standard methods and developing new ways of accessing and viewing are often the most sophisticated users and the most high-value users, and are often the people making purchasing decisions and selling equipment and services for people at other places on the chain. Shutting them out of your site is foolish. What's worse, if you do this, they will think you are lame and will tell this to all their friends and customers.

It is not necassary to cater directly to these users, although it is nice if you do. (If I go to Google, it checks my operating system as well as my browser, and gives me a version of the search engine customised for a PDA. Unlike Time, the BBC are exemplary in this way, also). All you have to do is adhere to standards, and not make assumptions about what they are doing. And you really, really, really, shouldn't look them out if they are not doing that. If you provide relatively dumb data and relatively dumb formatting, you allow your readers and your customers to be smart. Many people, more than you think, have perfectly good reasons for not doing what you expect them to.

Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds and Tim Blair are right. Time are really, really lame.

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How the Internet did away with UFOs, alien abductions, etc.:

. . . Wild rumors and dubious pieces of evidence are quick to circulate, but quickly debunked. The Internet gives liars and rumor mongers a colossal space in which to bamboozle dolts of every stripe - but it also provides a forum for wise men from all across the world to speak the truth. Over the long run, the truth tends to win. This fact is lost on critics of the blogosphere, who can only see the exaggerated claims and gossip. These critics often fail to notice that, on the 'net, the truth follows closely behind the lies. . . .

The blogosphere is massively better in quality than the average quality of its parts. You cannot say that telephones are pointless nonsense merely by pointing out that many and perhaps most mere individual telephone conversations are pointless nonsense, and many and perhaps most telephones woefully underexploited. And you cannot derive the crapness of the blogosphere merely from the fact that most blogs, and many blog postings even on good blogs, are crap.

Read the whole thing here. Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for the link.

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The BBC top brass are demanding a rise in the licence fee, which is levied on all people who buy a television regardless of whether they watch BBC programmes or not. The fee increase is - so we are told - designed to fund the various digital television ventures the BBC believes it needs.

As I frequently have to explain to my American friends who are left aghast at the situation, the BBC licence fee must be paid, on penalty of a heavy fine, and possibly gaol. In reality, there are people who probably have gotten away with non-payment but the threat is real enough.

In the age of the Internet, satellite and cable, how long can this monster remain in existence? And for how long can it claim that without its privileged source of income, exacted with the ultimate sanction of imprisonment, our culture would be in ruins? Who seriously believes that argument today?

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I went out this afternoon to partake of coffee with a friend, and on my way to the coffee house, I stumbled upon a news story, and took some photos of it.

Who is that?, I asked. A Father 4 Justice. Oh, one of them.

Cheap, modern, democratised communications pervade this story, and may also influence the reporting of it. Note that the guy has a portable telephone, which would probably not have been the case a decade ago, and which must surely have influenced how the authorities set about dealing with him. I mean, if you were a copper, it might make a difference if the guy you were trying to arrest was supplying a running commentary of your every move to his pals. Who were recording everything he said, as they surely were.

Other photographers were already out in force by the time I got there.

The professionals were there in strength.

But, so were the amateurs, …

… me included, with my 10x zoom lens and automatic anti-shake focussing, in a camera that cost less than three hundred quid.

One of the features of modern government, or maybe that should be recent government, is that modern/recent government often likes simply to blot stories off the airwaves. I am not saying that they wanted to squash this one. But I am saying that if they had entertained any such censorious thoughts, although they might have got away with this ten years ago, now, they would have far less chance.

They would merely have handed the blogosphere a nice little scoop.

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Some people lament the loss of the old regional television brands in the UK. In the old days, we had a choice of three channels. The privately-operated channel, ITV, was made up about 15 regional companies working together as a network - companies like Yorkshire Television, Thames, and Tyne Tees Television. Since the mid-90s, there has been a move towards a single ITV company. All the mainland English ITV regions are now simply known as "ITV1".

What did these regional brands mean? They meant that before national programming like Coronation Street and The Bill, you got told you were in Yorkshire or wherever. Big deal. Lest anyone get the idea that ITV was once some haven for regional programming, it should be noted that ITV has always been criticized for too little regional programming. For example, in the 1960s and 1970s, ATV (later Central Television) kept on getting its knuckles wrapped from the regulator for its regional output being too poor.

The reality is that with fifteen different companies making up ITV, the channel was unfocussed and bloated. That was fine in the analogue world of a handful of channels, but ITV execs knew that ITV has always been a popular, national channel. They realized that in a multichannel world - competing with global players - it needed to be a lean machine with a single, strong channel identity.

Regional programming is still done by ITV - regulation has always required that. But it may be that national television stations are not a good environment from which to do regional programming. Arbitrarily cutting up the country into a dozen or so regions makes it difficult to do meaningful community programming. Regional programming has always been about ticking boxes, rather than about democratized bottom-up community programme-making.

But the digital age has brought with it more than just competition for ITV. It has massively cut the cost of distributing moving pictures. The ten year old who two decades ago would dream of having his own TV station can now borrow his dad's £200 camcorder and put a programme up on the web or on a peer-to-peer network for his friends to watch. The digital world that has pulled regional ITV branding from our screens gives us the technology for real, bottom-up local television. Because such programming is not a box-ticking exercise, the programmes are likely to be far more meaningful for local communities than ITV has ever been.

And it is not just on the internet that we are seeing more local TV. In June 1999, Six TV was launched in Oxford bringing local television. In October 1999, c9tv started broadcasting in the North West of Northern Ireland. Technology - like digital editing - is making low-cost broadcasting a reality.

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Will someone explain that to the BBC? As part of their news coverage, the BBC website will often construct webpages that quote from various press outlets around the world with a description of commonalities that these quotes may share. For example, on Katrina, the commentary of a piece entitled "World press berates US over Katrina" notes that:

Newspapers around the world are critical of the US government's response to Hurricane Katrina, and its foreign and environmental policies more generally.

Links are made to regional concerns, with Asian papers recalling last December's tsunami and African commentators highlighting the racial issue.

But some sympathy comes from Indonesia, and an Afghan newspaper takes pride in President Karzai's offer of assistance.

However, of the thirteen newspapers quoted, the BBC does not endeavour to inform its audience that, at a conservative estimate, half function as government mouthpieces or operate under various restrictions. So, a Zimbabwean newspaper, the Daily Herald, that BBC Monitoring identifies as a government owned daily, from an unfree state, is quoted without qualification, providing free publicity for ZANU-PF.

The fact that New Orleans is a southern town predominantly populated by African-Americans explains why President George W. Bush did not see the need to cut short his holiday. All that Bush has done so far is to issue threats against the victims, and deploying trigger-happy American troops - fresh from abusing Iraqi prisoners - to go and "restore order

We should not be surprised at this. If you turn to the BBC Monitoring's profile of the UK media, you would be surprised at the prominent role of public broadcasting versus commercial outfits, backed by a picture of Broadcasting House and a link to BBC history. The passage starts:

The UK has a strong tradition of public-service broadcasting and an international reputation for creative programme-making.

The fledgling BBC began daily radio broadcasts in 1922 and quickly came to play a pivotal role in national life. The Empire Service - the forerunner of the BBC World Service - established a reputation worldwide. The BBC is funded by a licence fee, which all households with a TV set must pay.

This bias runs throughout the entire piece. Our newspaper industry are relegated to a single sentence. Even the Hutton report acquires positive spin and two paragraphs! And look at the radio stations listed...

The variety of publications on sale reflects the full spectrum of political opinion, as well as the British public's voracious appetite for newspapers.

The biased BBC does not have the capacity to objectively describe itself. It is unable to distinguish between free or unfree sources in its quotations. The global press is defined as a privileged and professional group because of the outlets they work for, not because of the objective and honest standards that journalists are supposed to maintain. Without this qualification, the writings of Comrade Bob's mouthpiece, a Chinese journalist who writes only what his masters want to hear and a reporter protected by the First Amendment are presented as equally valid to the reader. The BBC news website provides the professional credentials and recognition that propaganda masquerading as journalism craves.

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David Herman, writing in Prospect, does not think the Old Media are giving way to the New Media. He just reckons that some of the Old Media are crap:

The reason the Guardian's circulation is falling is not because of the internet or because young people have gone blog-crazy but because G2 is full of uninteresting new columnists and the op-ed page has a kind of infantile ultra-leftism that no sane person would go near. Similarly, ITV is haemorrhaging viewers not because of the challenging new multi-channel environment but because it keeps making programmes like Celebrity Wrestling and Celebrity Love Island. After all, the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times do not seem to be losing too many readers and the viewing figures for BBC2, Channel Four and Channel Five are remarkably stable. Interestingly, it is the losers in the ratings wars who tend to be the hardcore technological determinists.

But hang on. If the numbers for some of the Old Media are "remarkably stable", while other bits of the Old Media are "haemorrhaging" viewers and readers, does that not mean that the total amount of attention being paid to the Old Media is in decline?

It makes sense to me that the New Media should be better at supplying infantile ultra-leftism and uninteresting new columnists for free, than they are at replacing the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail. So, if infantile ultra-leftism is what you want, you no longer have to pay for it. However, free substitutes for the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail will be a bit longer in catching on, not least, I should guess, because their readers are more conservative in their reading habits as well as more Conservative in their opinions. The picture that Herman sketches is entirely consistent with the notion that the New Media are losing out, starting with their youngest readers and viewers.

And when the brains of all the not-so-infantile not-so-ultra-leftists cut in, as Blue Peter loses its influence over them and as Real Life impinges, will they suddenly switch back to reading newspapers, in the form of a smartened up Guardian, or the Sunday Times, or the Daily Mail? It seems improbable. They will surely carry right on with their New Media, and the New Media will expand to accommodate them, as viewers, as readers, as writers, and in whatever other ways develop.

David Herman sounds to me like he is saying that sailing ships will sail on unscathed, and that this steam stuff will never catch on. His title is: "Am I missing something?" Yes he is.

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Perfect 10, an adult website, sued Google last November for infringing upon its copyrighted material, its trademarks and, to get bang for their bucks, unfair competition. The original complaint was covered by Wendy Seltzer.

Now, Perfect 10 has requested that Google is prevented from showing any of their copyrighted images. Their argument is that, through advertisements accompanying these images, Google profits from their display even though it is perceived to be a free search engine:

Perfect 10 sued Google in November of 2004. It says that Google is displaying hundreds of thousands of adult images, "from the most tame to the most exceedingly explicit, to draw massive traffic to its website, which it is converting into hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising revenue."

Perfect 10 claims that under the guise of being a search engine, Google is displaying, free of charge, thousands of copies of the best images from Perfect 10, Playboy, nude scenes from major movies, nude images of supermodels, as well as extremely explicit images of all kinds.

Dr. Norm Zada, the founder of Perfect 10, argues that the business model of Google, whereby images can be displayed and downloaded for free without accessing the original website, reduces the profitability of pay-per-view pornographic websites. Furthermore, as the majority of searches are for pornographic images, this represents a misappropriation of intellectual property, since Google depends upon lust for its profits, at the expense of companies like Perfect 10.

Overture's Key Selector Tool indicates that most searches on the internet are sex-related," says Zada. "Google's extraordinary gain in market cap from nothing a few years ago to close to eighty billion dollars, is more due to their massive misappropriation of intellectual property than anything else," says Zada.

This court case represents an attack upon the business model of Google. It also demonstrates the unresolved tensions between the perceptions of intellectual property that pervade new and old media. Zada explains why his injunction is beneficial to other traditional media outlets:

Any website publisher can sign up for Google AdSense. It's an easy way for publishers to display Google ads – those being paid for by its AdWords customers – on their content pages. AdWords customers pay Google and Google pays a commission to AdSense publishers. So Google can maximise its revenues by maximising the traffic that it sends to AdSense affiliates. Perfect 10 does not suggest that Google is weighting its search results in favour of AdSense-supported sites; but it does argue that Google profits directly from the popularity of porn, and its particular concern is that it profits from Perfect 10's porn that has been stolen by others.

Zada believes that the outcome of Perfect 10's motion for preliminary injunction should have a major impact not only on Perfect 10, but also on traditional media outlets which are losing the ad revenue war to search engines, in part because of all the nude and semi-nude images search engines offer for free.

Right now, he says, consumers who want to view a nude scene involving Halle Berry, Nicole Kidman, or other Hollywood beauties, can view that scene for free by visiting a search engine without purchasing the DVD. "If all an infringer needs to avoid liability is to provide some sort of a 'search function,' that will be the end of intellectual property in this country," says Zada.

Is this a principled defence of intellectual property or an opportunistic front in the war against the new media?

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Earlier this week there was an interesting moment in my personal history as a libertarian-activitist-stroke-blogger. I had a phone call from someone at The Times. "Millen" was the name, I think. He was asking me to contribute four hundred "headbanging" – his word – words on how the government is using the War on Terror to trash civil libertiess. I am not sure enough of the details of this story, and suspect that if I was, I might actually favour some of these alleged trashings, so I recommended that he give Perry de Havilland a ring, and Perry was happy to oblige.

For me what was interesting was that in his phone call to me the Times man used the word "Samizdata" – and what is more he was very nice about it – rather than the words "Libertarian Alliance".

I switched to being a blogger, for Samizdata and elsewhere, from being a Libertarian Alliance person about three years ago. But because my home number used to be the contact number for the Libertarian Alliance, and because with my Libertarian Alliance Editorial Director hat on I used to do lots of little broadcasting performances and am still in their address books as that, I still from time to time get rung by media people who have me fixed in their databases as Libertarian Alliance, asking me to be on something or other. Never, until now, have they rung me up and talked instead about Samizdata.

I believe more is going on here than mere out-of-date address books. For a long time big media people simply refused to regard blogs as being of any significance. Maybe they disliked blogs for their politics. Maybe they disliked them for not charging anything and for the fact that anyone can do it. But I suspect that at lot of it was that it was a knowledge problem. Faced with having to distinguish between high traffic blogs like Samizdata (and all the other high traffic blogs) and the far more numerous low traffic blogs about breakfast choices and kittens, most old media people just said to hell with the whole thing. If you are an "institute" or an "alliance" or a "society", you are presumably not a lone nutter and you count for something. If you are a blogger, you could be anyone and are accordingly no one. If that was their attitude it was not particularly clever, but it was understandable.

Meanwhile we bloggers were and are too busy writing stuff for our blogs to be pestering the big media types into noticing us, or to be complaining when they do not. After all, our position was, is and will always be that we already have our own media, and if you old dead tree legacy geezers with your inky fingers and your rigid broadcasting schedules choose to ignore us, that is entirely your right and entirely your problem. We do not need you any more. We will link to you, copy and paste your stories, and have a chortle or a moan about them. We will, if we are the denouncing sort, denounce your stories, if we think them worthy of denunciation. But we do not need you to be aware of our existence or to be ringing us up and talking to us and inviting us to write in your publications or to appear in your radio or TV shows. We can now do our thing without all that.

I used to do quite a lot of broadcasting, and maybe, if the money improves and if they are willing to admit that I am a blogger rather than someone from an Alliance which I still support but which I stopped working for several years ago, I will find myself doing more in the future. But for now, having new outlets for my views, I find being on the radio – as a "supporter of the Libertarian Alliance" – tedious and stressful, involving as it does having to be in a particular place at a particular time, and having to get all my wording right first time. So I generally now refuse such invitations, rather as I refused that invite from The Times. Five years ago I would probably have accepted this Times invite like a dog chasing a stick into the sea. Now, I will only say yes if it truly suits me. This one? Not quite my thing mate, sorry. Ask so-and-so. He might do it. If he can fit it in.

I do not want to read too much in to one phone call. But this particular phone call has personally confirmed for me that, blogwise, things in Britain are now changing. Maybe Scott Burgess supplied the tipping point, by inflicting career threatening injuries upon some heavyweight old media personages, and in sheer self defence old media types are starting to take blogs seriously.

There has always been a little clack of media people who have loved blogs, on account of loving the ongoing saga of personal computers and of what personal computers can do, but now these technophiles are being joined by their techno-neutral and even technophobic brethren. Oh, the big old media operations have long had their websites for their techies to play with and to outreach to other techies. Now, the people who run the actual newspapers are starting to pay attention to blogs.

What Scott Burgess did to the Guardian was small stuff compared to what bloggers have done to the likes of Dan Rather in the USA. But then, 7/7 was small beer compared to 9/11, but the two together have got everyone here obsessing about terrorism. When the US blogosphere tore the trousers off Rather, our media biggies definitely noticed. Would anything similar ever happen here? Now, even if only in a small way, it has happened.

Phase one for dealing with any competitive threat or disruption in one's way of working, in any walk of life, is to ignore it. In the USA, the days of the big old media ignoring blogs in the hope that they would go away, like CB radio (a comparison of which big old US media types were once very fond), are long gone. Now, I think, they are going here too.

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Fascinating entry in the daily email Political Journal (subscription only from the Wall Street Journal, no linkee):

How come the French all think alike?

Well, OK, the French don't really all think alike: In May, 56% of them wisely voted "no" in the referendum on the European Constitution, which enjoyed the support not only of every major political party but also all of the major media outlets, from the leftist Le Monde to the right-wing Catholic paper La Croix. But if most French voters opposed the Constitution, why was their view reflected nowhere in the media? Surely there must have been a market for anti-Constitution sentiment, which any canny publisher or broadcaster could have exploited to boost circulation or ratings. But there was zippo.

This puzzle was recently solved for us by a well-placed French source. Part of the answer, he reminds us, is that much of the French broadcast media is state-owned, as is the venerable news agency Agence France-Presse.

But that's not all: Even the "private" French press is massively subsidized. It enjoys lower tariffs for freight transport, a postal discount, a reduced value-added tax rate and a complete exemption from local taxes on investment. Government also subsidizes secondary printing facilities and helps pay for the distribution of French papers abroad. If you're a journalist -- or just a "journalist" -- you also pay income taxes at a lower rate. And the best part: If a newspaper faces revenue losses because of declining advertising or circulation, the government will help make up the difference. The only catch is that, to benefit from this munificence, publications must officially register with a state agency (the French call it an organisme) run by a committee of editors and government functionaries.

The ostensible rationale for all this madness is that the government wants to avoid capitalistic media concentration and foster a plurality of viewpoints. The effect, of course, is the exact opposite: Unlike in the U.S. or Britain, in which various publications tend to represent some segment or other of market opinion or taste, French journalists are utterly indifferent to the views of their readers. Instead, they tend to write articles with a view to impressing their colleagues, a classic media echo-chamber that's as conformist as it is insular. No wonder the French public tunes out: Le Monde, the biggest and most influential daily in a country of 60 million, has a circulation of only 400,000.

Who knew?

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Although they have come late to this story, The Times has also noted Scott Burgess' TKO of the Guardian regarding their employment of an Islamic extremists and subsequent firing of him once the story came to light.

It is a pity The Times did not also pick up on the bad grace in which The Guardian took their lumps, what with their snarky no-by-line remarks about how "Scott Burgess, a blogger from New Orleans who recently moved to London, spends his time indoors posting repeated attacks on the Guardian", recalling the "guys in pyjamas" sneer made by someone at CBS following a similar humiliating mauling they received at the hands of the blogosphere. If ever you need a clear indication you have landed a painful blow against a MSM target, you have but to look for a petulant ad hominim response.

Moreover, it is fascinating how The Guardian inaccurately (follow first link to Media Guardian) attributes this incident breaking into the mainstream media down to "rightwing US bloggers" when the truth is that whilst Scott Burgess (an American living in London) sounded the charge, he was rapidly followed by Labour supporting British blog Harry's Place and ourselves (no great fans of the Tory party either), to name but two of many largely UK based blogs. The Guardian's take on this is therefore either shoddy reporting or a case of seeing what you choose to see.

Still, nice to see that the broadsheet newspapers do not feel any need to close ranks over this story.

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In its childish, impenitent comment (login: grauniad@stereo.lu, password: grauniad) - so dreadful that it seems no one on the Guardian staff wished to have the byline attributed to them - on having to sack a terror-supporting reporter, the newspaper attempts to portray blogger Scott Burgess as a disgruntled, rejected applicant for its trainee program. Burgess is the man who broke the story of Dilpazier Aslam's background, and instead of being thankful to him for helping to rid their newspaper of a cancer, the Guardian is instead trying to damage his credibility.

Except, of course, that the Guardian is fudging on this one. And they know they are doing it in full view of the network that brought about Aslam's downfall in the first place. Have they learned nothing?

First, check out the first instance on his blog where Burgess mentions applying for the Guardian's trainee program. On June 1, 2004, he wrote:

Regular readers may be interested to know that I am applying for this job. As I'll almost certainly be hired, readers are advised to quickly inform me of any competing employment opportunities they'd like me to consider.

Perhaps the Guardian's journalists do not do irony, and so took this comment by Burgess at face value. But they had another chance to catch the joke, two days later, when Burgess submitted his application:

... I thought that perhaps my responses to these two consecutive questions might raise a chuckle:

"What would you add to The Guardian newsroom?"

Ideological balance and accurate research.

"Please describe issues of the moment in Britain and the world that most interest you. Why?"

...As an American living in Britain, I can’t help but also be interested in the way in which Americans, their society and their government are perceived – not only in Britain, but throughout Europe. While many of the negative opinions expressed by Europeans are no doubt valid, others seem to be based on crude stereotyping of the sort that is rightly condemned when applied to other national, ethnic or religious groups. I’d like to help bring some balance to the way Britain and the rest of Europe view my compatriots, not only through my writing, but also by presenting myself as an intelligent, articulate, and non-obese example.

Burgess ends his post with the question: When do you suppose they'll be getting back to me? The answer seems to be: When you expose their wrongdoing, via an attempted smear on their website.

It will come as no surprise to anyone with a realistic view of how the media operate that the Guardian is in this instance less interested in the truth and more interested in limiting the damage to its own credibility. It is surprising and discouraging to see a media entity which claims to 'get the blogosphere' indulge in such shameless dishonesty, knowing full well that the evidence of the truth is public, permanent, searchable, and so easily passed along this network.

If the Guardian is as committed to the truth as it claims to be - more, as it is supposed to be - it will issue a correction and clarification of its disgraceful comments about Scott Burgess.

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Most magazines and newspapers employ "fact checkers", whose job it is supposedly to ensure that the content of articles is accurate and truthful. The nasty little secret however, is that the purpose of such people is not so much to ensure that the readers of the magazine receive articles that are accurate, but to protect the editors and owners of the magazine from libel law. Therefore, a lot of the time what is actually checked is the accuracy of human sources rather than the accuracy of facts and the internal consistency of articles. If an article says that "Joe Bloggs said that the moon is made of blue cheese" then it is likely to be checked that Joe Bloggs actually said this. If it is merely stated that "The moon is made of blue cheese" then this is less likely to be checked. After all, the moon is unlikely to sue.

As a consequence of this, one finds a great many factual errors in the general media, particularly about scientific and technical information. And one finds dreadful innumeracy - which is a shame given the fact that a basic knowledge of the modern world is pretty much impossible without a decent understanding of the workings of the modern world and a basic understanding of the modern world.

However, this varies by publication, or course. In the British media, The Guardian is far better at getting factual information on technical subjects right than any other paper with the possible exception of the BBC. The Times and Telegraph are worse, and in the electronic media the BBC is usually dreadful. (This wasn't always so. There used to be a strong pro-enlightenment wing of the BBC, but the decline of this is just one general symptom in the moonbat ascendancy in the BBC that has happened in recent decades).

In any event, an example. Last week I had a long flight in front of me, and as a consequence I grabbed a couple of magazines to get me through the flight. The July/August edition of Foreign Affairs had series of articles entitled "The Next Pandemic", which considered the possibilities as to what might happen if the world faced an outbreak of a new, nasty, influenza strain. Foreign Affairs is the trade journal of a certain kind of pompous, overly statist Washington D.C. Policy wonk. In any event, it is read by what in D.C terms are "serious" people. I find this slightly distasteful, but I have a certain morbid fascination for the subject of contagious diseases and ways of coping with them, so I bought the magazine.

The lead article in the section (and one of the others) was written by Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance and Betrayal of Trust: : The Collapse of Global Public Health". I have read the first of these books but not the second. I found it interesting in that it gave lots of historical information that I was not previously aware of, but I found its central argument - that standards of public health in the world is in decline and a consequence we are newly vulnerable to emerging diseases - to be unconvincing. I particularly disagree with the semi-stated corollary that the solution is the expenditure of vast amounts of public money. Certainly there are places in the world where standards of public health have declined (eg in British and Canadian public hospitals) but in a global sense sanitation has never been better, and global best practice (ie that of the United States) has clearly improved. On top of this we are in the midst of a biotechnology revolution of astonishing speed. Fifty years ago biology was largely taxonomy and medicine was largely "Try this and see if it work", whereas today we have real understanding of how biological systems works and how diseases work, and as a consequence a much more basic understanding of how to attack them.

In any event, despite all this I actually agree that the world is vulnerable to a dangerous new influenza strain, and I am interested in details. The possibility of the H5N1 influenza strain that has been sloshing around in the chicken populations in parts of Asia swapping genes with a strain that is highly contagious amongst humans is indeed scary. So I bought the magazine, and started to read the leading article. It started with an overview of the last time the world was hit by a really nasty influenza strain, in 1918-19. Fair enough, although the world was obviously struck at a particularly vulnerable time. Infectious diseases are opportunistic in that sense. So I read on.

On the third page of the article I read the following:

Nearly half of all deaths in the United States in 1918 were flu related. Some 675,000 Americans - about six percent of the population of 105 million and the equivalent of 2 million American deaths today - perished from the Spanish flu.

I read "six percent" and my first though was that "I knew it was bad, but had no idea it was that bad". However, 675,000 is point six percent, not six percent, which is indeed absolutely terrible, but not that bad. For this error, I was willing to forgive the author. I suspect that the Foreign Affairs style guide (if there is one) states that words (ie "six") should be used for numbers below a certain point, and numerals (ie "6") should be used for numbers above that point. My suspicion was that Garrett had written "0.6 percent of all deaths..." and that an innumerate fact checker or sub editor had attempted to comply with this policy without being capable of comprehending the nonsensicality of the resulting sentence. Bad, but sadly common. So I pressed on.

... although doctors then lacked the technology to test people's blood for flu infections, scientists reckon that the Spanish flu had a mortality rate of just less then one percent of those who took ill in the united States.

Okay, "just less" than one percent. How much less. I am sure that the scientists in question gave actual numbers in their papers. Let's be charitable and assume that "just less than 1%" means 0.9%. (It may not, but how am I to tell? There are no footnotes) With 675000 deaths this means that 75 million people were infected, an infection rate of 69% of the previously stated population of 109 million. I can just about conceive of a disease with a 69% infection rate, but it flags my "Is that reallytrue?" sensor. I keep going, to the fourth page of the article....

The official estimate of 40-50 million total deaths is believed to be a conservative extrapolation of European and American trends. In fact, many historians and historians believe that a third of all humans suffered from influenza in 1918 - and of these 100 million died

Disregarding everything else, that last sentence is astonishingly frustrating.

"A third of all humans suffered". What does "suffered" mean? I will assume it means "were infected" or perhaps "took ill". (I'm not sure what that means either, but it is what the author said last time). "100 million died" is fine, but without telling us how many people were in the world at that point it doesn't tell us what percentage of the human race died, and it makes it impossible to compare the first half of the sentence with the second, which is an elementary mistake for anyone with basic numeracy skills.

And if a third of the human race was infected and (from earlier) 69% of Americans were infected, is this likely? Given that even in 1918 America had first world standards of hygiene and most of the rest of the world didn't, it seems most unlikely that the infection rate in the US was twice that for the world as a whole. given that infection rates from most infectious diseases can be removed dramatically by better hygiene. If this is true, it is so remarkable that it requires comment, but it receives none. I am sure that these different numbers have come from different sources and are based on different assumptions, but simply stating them without any attempt to reconcile them (or any apparent grasp of the fact that they need reconciliation) is simply dreadful.

At this point I came close to throwing the magazine across the aircraft in disgust, and I stopped reading the article and went back to the new Harry Potter, which was at least acknowledged as being set in an imaginary world. (I promised myself I would finish the article at some point, but have not yet forced myself to do so). I had gone way beyond the point where I could blame editors and fact checkers of the magazine fof not detecting the contradictions, and I had to conclude that the author's methodology and numeracy were so flawed as to render her argument useless. (Which does not excuse the editors and fact checkers fpr publishing the article in the first place- somebody should have flagged this before it went to press).

Why do I care about this? Because, when you are dealing with questions as to whether public health is improving or getting worse, then you are taking improvements or declines of a couple of percent or less (usually less) a year, and a proper understanding of when these kinds of things can and cannot be extrapolated matters. If you cannot make your numbers add up in more basic contexts, then the more subtle judgements that are necessary in order to contrive good policy are obviously beyond you.

And if this is the sort of analysis that "serious" people in Washington are paying attention to in order to make decisions and health and environmental issues facing America and the world as a whole, then we are in trouble. If the sorts of people in charge of these things are incapable of reading such an article without raising the sorts of issues I have just raised, then we are really in trouble.

As it happens, I agree with Garrett that the risk of a global influenza epidemic is serious, although I don't think the effects are likely to be quite as catastrophic as she does. But if it happens, an intelligent responce requires an intelligent analysis. And my faith that we might get one has just been seriously reduced

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The Guardian has finally got rid of the anti-Semitic, terror-endorsing Dilpazier Aslam from its staff. But that does not stop them from pouting about having to do so (login: grauniad@stereo.lu, password: grauniad).

Links via Marcus at Harry's Place

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...I am shocked, shocked! No, not really.

Kudos to Scott Burgess for breaking the story that the Guardian has hired Dilpazier Aslam, a supporter of a global Islamic Caliphate, to write for them, regardless of his association with Khilafah.com and Hizb Ut Tahrir. Presumably whoever hired him at the Guardian knew all about his views as all it takes is typing "Dilpazier Aslam" into Google and then pressing Search to discover what he writes.

It is really no different than if the Telegraph has hired a white English neo-fascist supporter as a 'trainee journalist' and invited that person to report on a riot in which Jews were attacked, even though the internet was full of articles by that person calling for violence against people based purely upon their ethnicity (say, Jews, for example). But then of course we all know that when the Guardian hires someone who has called for exactly that, well, it is just that they are being 'inclusive'.

The silence on this issue from the Guardian itself has the making of a rather good story in and of itself. You would have thought a newspaper which was as aware of new media and blogging would realise that they do not get to pick and choose which stories are newsworthy anymore, particularly when they are the story. Even that fount of MSM idiotarianism The Independent has run with this one.

And this story could just run and run. Pass it on.

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I do not believe that we have a "No shit Sherlock" category for blog postings here, but maybe we should. Here is the explanation that the Evening Standard was offering today of what made those who committed the atrocities of last Thursday in London decide to become suicide bombers:

This photograph was taken outside Waterloo Station, at about 3pm this afternoon.

To be fair to the Evening Standard, their actual reportage was somewhat more informative, and more up-to-the-minute billboards revealed that one of the bombers was a primary school teacher. That was news, to me anyway.

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Overheard on Newsnight last night, from the anchor-lady person, presiding over a discussion of the recent travails of the US mainstream media. It was in connection with the Valerie Plame story, whatever exactly that is. I have not been following that, and I missed the beginning of the Newsnight report about it.

Anyway, here is what Ms. Paxman said about the US mainstream media, word for word:

The reputation of the reputable media has sunk to a new low.

This is what I love about the BBC. They have their biases, of course they do. But they also genuinely try to report the truth.

Their biases mostly impinge by determining which truths they go after in the first place, and who they then have commenting on them (to discuss this matter they had Daniel Ellsberg balanced by a guy from the New York Times), rather than in the form of pure lying. After all, when the BBC features some grotesque report put out by some grotesque gang of health fascists, or some such, rather than proper news, it is true that the health fascists did indeed say whatever it was they said. It was stupid and repellent, but they did say it, just as the BBC said they said it.

The BBC prejudice is that the mainstream US media are indeed the reputable media, and that all those pyjama-clad right wing nasties sitting at their nasty computers agreeing with President Bush are disreputable. Yet these same pyjama wearers are the ones who have caused the reputation of those same reputable media to sink to a new low. That was the story here. So, that is what popped out of her mouth.

This is definitely different to living in the USSR and I greatly prefer it to that, not least because it is so much more entertaining.

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Let us return to the lost age of blogging for a moment.

I thought I would share with readers this gem of the interwebby thing: The ChildCare Action Project (CAP): Movie Ministry

I have been going there for years, and it is less well-known than it deserves. (For former connoisseurs, the tinsel aesthetic is unaltered but the disruptive popups are gone.) It is full of wonders for liberal secular types like me.

If you do not know where to start, just plunge into the movie reviews here and discover the ungodly propaganda of the Hollywood elite in your favourites. You see, they are not just coddled world-insulated champagne socialists but servants of the evil one.

As a British atheist the Christians I actually meet seem to me mostly harmless, perfectly normal people. But this stuff is by turns hilarious, mind-boggling, and spine-shivering. Which is all you can ask of entertainment. And it has a salutary moral effect, too. If not quite the one intended by its dedicated creators.

P.J. O'Rourke got something similar from visiting the Praise the Lord theme-park in the 80s:

"We came to scoff. We left converted - to Satanism."

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I am a news-junkie, so facing this morning without the Today programme on the BBC is a gruelling prospect. For BBC staff are on strike, so most live news programmes are not running today.

I was highly amused, however, that the first replacement programme on Radio 4 at six o'clock (when Today is due to start) was an In Business documentary on podcasting. Can this be entirely coincidental?

"There's plenty of competition out there, boys. And it's free." Is the pretty clear message.

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I am one of those sad and tragic people that only goes to the movies once in a blue moon, but I've already booked ahead to see the "Revenge of the Sith", because I am a Star Wars tragic (mock in the comments all you like, I still get a kick out of these films.)

So I have been surfing round to all sorts of different sites having a look at what other people think of the film. I happened across this article in the Houston Chronicle. But my thoughts were dragged back towards this Galaxy by the final paragraph, about the reviewer:

Jake Hamilton, 17, has been reviewing films for the Chronicle's Yo! section for three years.

I did a double take at that. This kid has been reviewing films for a newspaper since he was 14?

What I think is impressive is that the Houston Chronicle is willing to take a punt on young faces with fresh ideas. When you consider this compared to the very high barriers to entry that exist in Australian journalism, I have to say that I am amazed.

It is possible of course, that James Hamilton's Dad owns the newspaper. However this sort of risk-taking and innovation is, as I say, a world away from the closed-shop of Australian journalism.

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There can surely be no more conclusive evidence of market success than the trademark name of a particular company becoming the commonly used verb to describe the activity for which said company provides its products. Have you 'googled' anyone today? Have you ever been 'googled' yourself?

As someone who 'googles' on pretty much a daily basis, I can find no material fault with this richly-deserved and glowing tribute in the UK Times:

Google is the modern Oracle, the all-knowing mechanical sage we consult to find, if not the answers to life’s questions, then at least a comfortable, reasonably priced hotel in Torquay. But is Google God?

I cannot recall such a mystical (and, for some, blasphemous) suggestion ever crossing my mind but, like the author, I am only too ready to wax lyrical about the benefits of Google's simple and effective information gathering machine.

Google may have all the answers but, unlike God, lots of Google’s answers tend to be wrong, loopy postings from lonely people typing late at night in their underwear. Google moves in mysterious ways all right, but some of those ways are downright weird.

To whom could he possibly be referring?

That was before Google invented a new algorithm that took the search engine an enormous step closer to divinity. Last week, the company filed worldwide patents on a system enabling it to rank news search results not just by date and relevance, but by veracity and quality.

Google will not only be omniscient, but supposedly trustworthy; not just a reference guide, but a machine that urges the user to believe in it, to have faith, to trust in Google.

In my opinion (which is seldom humble), this is not a good idea and I say this not because I am any authority on mathematics (far from it) but because I simply do not understand how any set of algorithms are going to judge what is and what is not 'quality' information when even the human beings who creat those algorithms can rarely (if ever) be relied upon to do just that. By what criteria is 'quality' going to be measured? Whose 'veritas' is going to be sought after and delivered?

If a user is searching for information on, say, the Iraq war, then whose 'truth' will be offered up in response? John Pilger or Mark Steyn? Noam Chomsky or Victor Davis Hanson? Could it transpire that these magical algorithms merely reflect the pre-existing views of their authors?

The beauty and, yes, the popularity of Google lies in the fact that it not only provides information quickly and efficiently but also that it does so without the added burden of value judgements. It affords the user the opportunity and the courtesy of sifting the chaff from the grain and working their own way to their own conclusions. In other words, it is the perfect market mechanism.

But pointing the user to what it believes to be the truth is the very 'service' which could, I exaggerate not, be the death of Google. At the very least, the proprietors of that fine institution could find themselves in a world of pain where they are plagued by complaints, lawsuits, demands for rectification, boycotts, denunciations, governmental restrictions and being written off as Barking Moonbat Central or a lackey of the Neocon-Halliburton-Wingnut-McChimp- Bush- Hitlerstein Conspiracy.

Let them unleash all their veritable algorithms if they must but I predict that it will not be long before the proprietors of Google are desperately searching for a way to hand the whole thing back to the comparatively safe hands of the lonely underwear brigade and yearning for a return to the quiet, halcyon days of comfortable hotels in Torquay.

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At last, that bastion of idiotarianism the BBC is going to go off the air for a while, God willing! That these grasping tax funded parasites are going to strike during major televised sporting events is splendid news so maybe now more folks might be a bit less willing to shell out £125 (about $240) per year in order to support an institution filled with moral relativists, collectivists, reflexive anti-Americans and pro-Islamofascists.

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The Economist (the link, alas, leads to their premium content) has an interesting little article about fake news - 'news' broadcasts put out by the government via local television networks. Bogus reporting (or, more kindly, a video equivalent of issuing a press release) they call it:

The televised interview with John Walters, the White House drug tsar, ran on hundreeds of local stations before the 2004 Super Bowl. "Many parents admit they're still not taking the drug [marijuana] seriously," explained the news anchor. "Mike Morris has more." It ended with the usual sign-off: "This is Mke Morris reporting." It looked like a new report, and quaked like a news report. but it was not one. The segment had been produced by Mr Walters's Office of National Drug Control Policy. The apparently independent Mr Morris was on contract to the government.

As the Economist points out the government should not be in the business of advocacy, but it may use public money to provide information. The question is which is which? Regardless of the formality of the decision and which watchdog or arm of the administration has the final say about the legality of such "news management", the issue here is transparency. Both the government agency and the news programmes should identify the originator of the material they are running.

The most interesting point of the article is not even that - it is highlighting that this administration does not think that the press has "a check-and-balance function" and that this is a fundamental change of attitude compared with previous administrations and makes this one's use of fake news different.

If there is nothing special about the press, then there is nothing special about what it does. News can be anything - including dress-up government video footage. And anyone can provide it, including the White House, which through local networks, can become a news distributor in its own right. Given the proliferation of media outlets and the eroding of boundaries between news, comment and punditry, someone will use government provided information as news. In short, the traditional notion that the media play a special role in informing people is breaking down.

The conclusion is one that many bloggers have been trying to break to the traditional media and journalists.

Behind all this lies a shift in the balance of power in the new business. Power is moving away from old-fashioned networks and newspapers; it is swinging towards, on the one hand, smaller news providers (in the case of blogs, towards individuals) and, on the other, to the institutions of government, which have got into the business of providing news more or less directly. Eventually, perhaps, the new world of blogs will provide as much public scrutiny as newspapers and broadcasters once did.

For myself, I am not too worried about "covert propaganda" in government broadcasts provided there is an individual somewhere in the process who will simply blog about it on his blog...

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A journalist never reveals his sources - that is the stern injunction issued to any reporters. Reporters have even gone to jail in the past than reveal a source. Journalists who reveal sources are unlikely to be trusted again, and without trust, it is very hard for an ambitious correspondent to grab a great scoop. The problem for me, though, is how can one protect a "source" for a story if there is an allegation that the source stole an item for the story? How does one deal, for example, with alleged theft of industrial secrets? In my view theft trumps the right to keep a source private.

A test case in the United States is pitting three bloggers against Apple computer concerning their release of details about Apple products yet to be put on the market. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is acting for the three bloggers in this case.

Apple's lawsuit accused anonymous people of stealing trade secrets about the Asteroid music product and leaking them to the PowerPage, Apple Insider and Think Secret websites.

All three are Apple fan sites that obsessively watch the iconic firm for information about future products.

Apple is notoriously secretive about upcoming products which gives any snippets of information about what it is working on all the more value.

The lawsuit to reveal the names of the leakers was filed against three individuals: Monish Bhatia, Jason O'Grady and someone else using the alias Kasper Jade - all of whom wrote for the Power Page and Apple Insider sites.

This case could remind us, rather sharply, that weblogs are as subject to the laws of libel and the rest as any part of MSM. Stay tuned.

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I would like to start this posting with a long-windedness warning. Basically I have only recently thought of the notions that follow. The separate bits of these ideas have mostly been present in my mind for quite a while, but the bundling of them is, for me, new. And stuff you are still excited by on account of its extreme recentness is generally the stuff you write least well. Apologies, but there you go, that is blogging for you.

Anyway... here it is. Cough, all sitting comfortably, begin. (Or skip, of course.)

Much is made, and quite rightly, of the empowering effect of the Internet for the little guy. We can all have our blogs and our say.

Recently I have begun to wonder if a similar Internet impact might be about to become unmistakably clear at the very top end of society, the bit where Great Men (as opposed to us little guys) try to have their say.

Great Men trying to have their say?!? But do they not do this already, all the time? Well, yes they do, but they are often either misunderstood or just plain ignored, and often relentlessly so.

I have lost count of the number of times when a Great Man has given what he hoped would be a Big Speech, laying out a major strategy for the months and years to come, only for all the questions from the assembled mob of hacks to ask only about the latest scandal that they have either observed or invented, concerning the petty details of the life of the Great Man. So, what about your wife's astrologer? What about those crazy daughters of yours? About this intern. About your mortgage. This dodgy land deal you and your wife did ten years ago. How about this National Guard skiving then?

In a kind of hybrid category are the scandals that are less personal but equally demeaning and diminishing, like the scandal of Blair and Bush invading Iraq in pursuit of weapons they knew were not there, or Reagan doing whatever wicked thing he did with the Nicaraguan Contras.

Now I certainly would not want the hacks to neglect such questions. The idea that they should be compelled to ask only about the high and mighty abstractions laid before them in the Big Speech, is repellent not to say totalitarian. But one of my many complaints about our mainstream media is that they have a tendency only to ask the embarrassing questions. The attitude of the mainstream media when reporting a speech given by a Great Man is to look only for clay at the bottom end of his body, rather than to pay any attention to the noises emerging from the top end.

This is not a complaint that is unique to me, to put it mildly, nor is it new. It is the story of the age of the modern electronic media, starting with radio and then really getting into its stride with television. During this era, the only Great Men who have managed to get some piece of real Content past the cynical mob of hacks and through to the general public are the ones who managed to craft some soundbites that effectively alluded to their grand strategies. The first great exponent of this art was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Churchill was of course a particular genius at this. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher also did quite well.

But Margaret Thatcher's career also illustrates how the electronic media can, by seizing upon some stupid soundbite that the Big Shot did say but wishes she had not said, bite you back. In Thatcher's case the most famous stupidity was: "There is no such thing as society", which was seized upon by her enemies to identify and denounce an evil attitude which they believed her (wrongly in my opinion) to personify. Another famous example of this genre, from a slightly earlier era, was Harold Wilson's unfortunate claim that "the pound in your pocket" was not being devalued. See also John Major's "Back to Basics" slogan.

All of which illustrates how, in the age of "the media", as opposed to the mere newspapers, even the cleverest politicians tended to lose control of how they came across in public.

But this may now be changing. What got me thinking along these lines was a posting at Powerline, which included a large chunk of a recent speech by President Bush.

The Presidential quote was preceded by these introductory comments and questions:

President Bush gave another excellent speech at the National Defense University today. When was the last time an American president laid out his philosophy, his strategy and his vision in such a series of speeches? For over three years now, Bush has given one after another: eloquent, determined, clear and persuasive. When collected, they may represent the most substantial body of speeches delivered by any President since Lincoln.

You absolute do not have to agree with Powerline writer Hindrocket, to the effect that these speeches have been "excellent", to get the point I am trying to make here. I have not read these speeches myself, and if I did, I daresay I might have many complaints. Not my point. What I am saying here is that I think this may illustrate how the Internet, blogging in particular, may have changed the communicational climate within which people like President Bush now work. Simply, when President Bush now gives what he obviously wants to be thought of as an important speech, then all those who want to can now read it with ease. Even if the only thing that the mainstream journalists have to say about it is that however-many-people-it-was were today killed in car bomb attacks in Iraq so what a bunch of hot air that was – that is not now the end of the story, by which I mean the story. Just as we can all now say whatever we want on our various little blogs, and have at least some people read it carefully, appreciatively and thoughtfully, and then agree or disagree thoughtfully, so too, now, can the likes of President Bush. This changes the world, I think, and in a good way.

Why did President Bush make these speeches? Partly it was events, dear boy, events. Big ones, which demanded big speeches. But partly, he made this series of carefully thought-through orations because he could. He can now state the broad strategic outlines of what he is trying to do, in the sure knowledge that even if all that the hacks on the spot or the commentators and editorialisers in tomorrow's newspapers want to take about is trivia, that his words will nevertheless get through with great ease to all those who want to learn of them.

And that does not just mean fans of his, like Hindrocket. Enemies can now fisk him. Above all, the many, many people who simply want to know what is going on inside the Presidential head now have a nice easy way of finding out.

Oh sure, you could read Presidential speeches a quarter of a century ago. But it was cumbersome, and probably costly. You could not read them within minutes or even hours of them being delivered. You relied on those hacks to summarise the speeches for you. So, if their summary was: blah-blah-blah President's drunk daughters, or: blah-blah-blah blow job in White House, you had a real probolem trying to work out what The Man actually said.

Now I am not saying that the only way to understand a politician is actually to read his speeches, but it is definitely one way. I still fondly remember how someone wrote a book about how Ronald Reagan, in defiance of all expert mainstream media opinion, had first got himself elected President, in 1980. The writer in question adopted a daring and revolutionary strategy to try to find out what it was that people seemed to like about Ronald Reagan. He followed Reagan around on the campaign trail, and listened to what he said.

That brings us to another point about the mainstream media, highlighted in particular by this article: their deliberate ignorance. Deliberate because it is so often based on ignoring what is being said straight to them. Time and again, President Bush told these people that, for instance, the election in Iraq was going to happen, and that it would make a big difference. When it duly happened, and duly made a big difference, the hacks were amazed. Who saw that coming? – they asked in amazement. They were too busy writing their blah-blah-blah car bomb pieces to listen.

Much as I disapprove of Tony Blair in lots and lots of ways, I really feel for the guy when it comes to him getting his Big Ideas across. He has really suffered from the fact that political Internet commentary is only now getting into its stride in the UK, just as he seems to be running out of steam. (And what is more, although this could just be my ignorance, I get the impression that the last political people to catch on to this stuff are the Blairites. Conservatives and libertarians are doing it. Lefties are doing it. But the Blairites, unless I am way behind on this, are still at the blogs-don't-really-matter stage. They are too busy being the government, I guess.)

A few years back, I recall listening Blair on the telly moaning about the exact thing I have here been writing about. He would give some great big speech, about something like the threat of global terrorism. And by the way, he was giving speeches about the threat of global terrorism long before 9/11, which is why he was so extremely quick off the mark on the day. He had already thought about it. Who saw that coming? – said the hacks, watching in amazement as Blair strode immediately to centre stage on the US media. I did, said I, because I happened to have read one of those speeches. If my opinion, Blair was a lot better prepared, in terms of his own preparatory thinking, for 9/11 than President Bush was. Not all his thoughts were wise (see UN vital role of), but at least he had some to fall back on, come the evil day.

Anyway, as I say, Blair would give a big speech, and all that the hacks wanted to ask about afterwards and write about the next days was: so what's all this about your mad wife's mad astrologer then? Or: tell us about your drunken son! Or: what are you going to do about Alastair Campbell's swearing down the telephone at people?

I believe that Tony Blair probably regards himself as in many ways a failure. Not in the sense of being wrong about things, God no. But in the sense of not having been able to dictate the British national political agenda in nearly as much detail as he would like to have done, not just not to everyone, but to anyone. Instead, he has had to endure being told, day after day after day, by people who can only do this by ignoring what ought to be the evidence of their own ears, that he does not have any political ideas at all other than the idea that it would be lovely for him to win the next election, and the next, ad infinitum.

The default setting of the mainstream media is not so much leftism as anti-ism. Or rather it is leftism, but of a peculiar sort. It says that the Big Shots are all corrupt bastards, and their speeches are all such bloody lies and windbaggery that they are not worth bothering with. It is a kind of class warfare which refuses to concede that any Big Shot could ever, possibly, have thought seriously about what he wants to do with his power, and have anything to say about this that is worth listening to, or is of any predictive value in terms of what they Big Shot might then do.

(I am a libertarian, yet here I am apparently defending the Big Shot politicians. Well, yes and no. I do believe that these people, time and again, mean what they say, or try to say. It is just that, as a libertarian, I tend not to like what they mean and say. But I do not hate politicians because they have wives whom they cannot Stepfordise, brothers or sons whom they cannot keep from getting drunk, or because they sometimes get in a mess with their money. This is often the only stuff about these people that I do like.)

Anyway, my central point here is that all this may now be changing. Now, the Big Shots may be starting to regain control of their own public words and public thoughts again, thanks to the Internet.

I have long believed that the Internet will correct – is already busy correcting – the cultural havoc unleashed upon the world by television. Television, I believe, has dumbed down our culture (although the dumbness is not particular TV characters so much as the general habit of being immobilised for six hours a day in front of the damn machine), but I further believe that the Internet is now doing something equal and opposite. The Internet is, I want to believe, smartening up the culture. I have been told, and want to believe, that the latest batch of children are now spending more time reading stuff on the Internet and less time just staring in a state of stupefaction at their TVs, and that eventually a generation of children will come on stream who are systematically better educated and informed about the world than their own parents. Well, this change in the incentive structure of political speech-making could be a juicey titbit of evidence that my hopes will perhaps be fulfilled. It certainly illustrates my opinions on these matters, so to speak. I think, that is to say, that it is evidence, even if nobody else does.

I think that how the Top People in a society go about their business has a huge effect on society generally. In the USSR of Stalin, below the Stalin level, there were to be found lots of Little Stalins. Below Thatcher, in Britain, there were lots of Little Thatchers. Now, Britain abounds with Little Blairs. So, if the big politicians are now switching back to a more thoughtful, nuanced, less soundbitten, pre-television style of public communication, because they can, that example will likewise have consequences.

And, I think, good consequences.

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During the last fortnight or so I have watched with fascination as the Eason Jordan story has unfolded. Here is a recent Instapundit posting about it.

Briefly, at a meeting in Davos on January 27th. Eason Jordan accused the US army of deliberately killing journalists. When challenged he retreated, but what exactly did he say, and how far did he retreat? A video exists, apparently, but has not yet been unveiled. For about a week, the Mainstream Media, hereinafter termed (as my QC Dad liked to put it) the MSM, ignored the story, while bloggers went to town with it.

Last Friday, Eason Jordan resigned from his job, as executive vice president and chief news executive of CNN. He did not accept any blame for his remarks, but said that he wanted to protect CNN from being "unfairly tarnished".

At first, Eason Jordan and his colleagues probably hoped that this would be the end of the matter. Now that the lynch-bloggers had got their scalp, maybe they would stop their baying and yelling and go back to writing about God, guns, kittens, and suchlike. But the bloggers are not satisfied.

Eason Jordan himself is only the label for this story, he himself being only a part of it. The matter is absolutely not now closed, as the increasingly horrified MSM (mainstream media) are learning, to their severe discomfort. They have much more to learn yet.

This furore, remember, was triggered by Jordan saying that the US military has been targetting journalists. So - question one - how much truth, if any, is there in this charge? This question will not go away just because, for the time being, Eason Jordan has.

Given that what Jordan said at that Davos meeting, and given who he was when he said it (the news boss of CNN), why – question two – did those other MSM people ignore the fact that he said it? Every MSM news editor in the USA stands accused of not doing his job. It is absolutely not Eason Jordan who stands alone in this killing field, and his mere corpse, for the bloggers most centrally involved, is not the point. What did he say? Is there any truth to it? And why the MSM silence?

Besides which, it is not a corpse. Eason Jordan resigned to save his career. He was not admitting career defeat and slinking off into retirement. By resigning, as the wording of his resignation announcement makes clear, Jordan was proving to his Team that he is still a Team Player, and he presumably hopes that in the future, when all this silly blogger nonsense has died down, that he will be appropriately rewarded. And he probably will be, despite everything.

The claim that the blogosphere is nothing but a bunch of bloodthirsty right wing lynch mobbers, which is what the MSM is now saying (the original wording for this yesterday was "what I expect some in the MSM will now to try to say" but things move fast), is false. Yes, there have been virtual high-fives in the blogosphere over the weekend, following Jordan's resignation. But the emotional and intellectual fuel driving the blogosphere in this matter is not just the partisan desire to humiliate and to hurt.

Somewhat (I would have preferred "rather" but that word is best avoided in this context) in the way that the movies and television finally overcame their initial mutual antagonisms and started working together properly, creating both combined career paths (for entertainment creators and actors) and a combined entertainment package (movies on TV, DVDs, etc.) for us punters, the MSM and the bloggers are even now working out how to combine and to cooperate, albeit with much heat as well as light. When the MSM and the blogosphere arrive at a new media equilibrium, they will together add up to a truth engine mightier than the world has ever before seen. This is what the best of the bloggers now want, and the passion driving them to sink their collective teeth into stories like this Eason Jordan rumpus, in the end, creative, rather than only destructive.

The self image of the MSM is that they Speak Truth to Power. But, they are not themselves Power. Which is humbug. We all know that the MSM are the most successful exercise in left of centre politics in the USA since the Second World War. The MSM are definitely Power, and they have been Power with a Plan, rather than just Power for the hell of it.

The irony is that the MSM people who are now cursing and screaming about blogger lynch mobs, now, really are not Power anymore. Time was when such insults would have been The Story, because they said so and they were the only ones telling it. Not any more. As Tim Blair puts it:

Certain footwear now resides on an alternate pedal extremity, and journalists don’t like it.

Insults like this one from commenter "William Boykin" (?) here …

"Jordan has just been tire-necklaced by a bloodthirsty group of utopian, bible-thumping knuckledraggers that believe themselves to be bloggers but are really just a street gang."

… now serve only to draw attention to the writings of these "knuckledraggers". Will this knuckledragger thing join the pajama crack as the Easongate soundbite that defines the idiocy of the blogosphere's ignorantly abusive enemies, the way pajamas did for the Dan Rather story? Or will it be salivating morons? Simply, the MSM no longer control the news agenda. Nobody does. The news agenda is no longer a decision, it is the outcome of a truly free and never-ending debate.

Speaking from a purely British point of view, I cannot help being envious of the intellectual firepower, time and effort, above all the weight of quality numbers, that the US blogosphere can now bring to bear on whichever MSM foolishness they decide to focus on, the way they have lately been focussing on the Eason Jordan story. The British blogosphere just does not have anything like a similar presence, yet.

And speaking some more from a purely British point of view, I wonder how long it will be before this kuckledragging lynch mob – that has already provoked Eason Jordan into resigning and is now busy pressing him and all his MSM defenders to stop screaming like knuckle-dragging baboons and to start talking sense and to start answering the blogosphere's questions – decides to focus more intently than hitherto on the nearest thing we have to MSM in the American sense over here, namely the BBC.

I think it is only a matter of time. (It seems that a BBC man is actually a quite important part of the Eason Jordan story.) It will be a fascinating contest, and I expect the BBC to be a formidable opponent, far more cunning and more impressive than its pompous and arrogant USA counterparts. The bloggers will not, I predict, have it all their own way. If I were them (and I am!) I would say: pick on particular BBC people and particular BBC shows, and take it slowly. Do not attack the entire BBC. Try to change it somewhat, because that is all you can really hope to do.

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This is an interesting titbit, in today's Guardian:

Peter Mandelson has attacked the BBC's coverage of Europe and accused Today presenter John Humphrys of "virulently anti-European views".

In a letter to BBC chairman Michael Grade, Mr Mandelson, the European trade commissioner, says the corporation has a "specific problem with the anti-European bias of some presenters" and said it was failing in its charter obligation to promote understanding of European affairs.

I seldom listen to the Today show, but it is clear from further remarks of Mandelson's that the Guardian goes on to quote that what Mandelson means by "anti-European views" is "anti-EU" views, which is a typically sneaky piece of EUrophilia. Has Humphrys been denouncing French cuisine, or Italian opera, or German engineering? Has he been saying that the French are all rude, the Italians rotten at driving, and the Germans all crypto-Nazis under a veneer of politeness. Has he been saying bad things about Estonians? No, of course not.

What Mandelson has accused Humphrys of is making EUroscepticism sound convincing, in the following rather interesting way:

The former trade secretary, who was appointed to the European commission last year, says the BBC gives too much coverage to moderate Eurosceptics and not enough airtime to extreme Eurosceptics such as UKIP.

So Mandelson has now become a UKIP supporter. How is that going to look? No doubt it is all part of some cunning plan designed to split the anti-EU camp and present it as all bonkers, xenophobic, etc., but it sounds to me like a somewhat high risk strategy. What if UKIP gets more airtime, in accordance with Mandelson's demands, and uses it to be rather persuasive?

I wonder if Mandelson also thinks that this man should have more airtime?

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An interesting email arrived in my inbox this morning. It was from Stephen Mayne, telling me, along with 5,300 other subscribers, that he and his wife had sold their e-magazine crikey.com.au for $A1 million.

The interesting thing about this is the business plan that Mayne established. Although the website holds plenty of interesting articles about Australian politics, news, sports, media and business, the main effort that Mayne and his team put their energies into is the daily news email. Subscribers pay a fee, and in return, the daily email with between 15 and 20 news and gossip items come into their inbox.

It is a gossipy sort of publication, but no more so then the mainstream Australian media, and it was at least a different point of view then the reliably statist points of view that are published in the mainstream Australian press. Although Mayne has given up control, he will still be contributing so I hope the 'crikey.com.au' spirit lives on, and I am pleased for Mayne personally. The man has worked incredibly hard over the last five years to build up his little niche in the Australian media.

And it also gives hope to others that there is a long term viability to 'new media'. You do have to work incredibly hard, and take risks, and you need a bit of luck. The only equivilent online publication I can think of is the Indian website Tehelka.com, which, after many adventures, seems to have made the transition from online to print media. (Samizdata magazine, anyone?). So well done to Mayne, and I hope he enjoys his new fortune to go with his more established fame.

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[T]here is not much future in being a gatekeeper when the walls are down.

- the final words of this article by Jack Kelly about the travails of old school journalism

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From yesterday's Telegraph comes this amazing story:

A 10-year-old girl saved her family and 100 other tourists from the Asian tsunami because she had learnt about the giant waves in a geography lesson, it has emerged.

Tilly Smith, from Oxshott, Surrey, was holidaying with her parents and seven-year-old sister on Maikhao beach in Phuket, Thailand, when the tide rushed out.

As the other tourists watched in amazement, the water began to bubble and the boats on the horizon started to violently bob up and down.

Tilly, who had studied tsunamis in a geography class two weeks earlier, quickly realised they were in danger.

She told her mother they had to get off the beach immediately and warned that it could be a tsunami.

She explained she had just completed a school project on the huge waves and said they were seeing the warning signs that a tsunami was minutes away.

Her parents alerted the other holidaymakers and staff at their hotel, which was quickly evacuated. The wave crashed a few minutes later, but no one on the beach was killed or seriously injured.

I missed this yesterday, but Norm Geras, linked to today by Instapundit because of another posting about Guardian foolishness, caught it, to whom thanks.

I am sure that some time during the last few months I have blogged things which have at least suggested that blogging etc. is capable of replacing the existing media. If so, apologies, and if not, lucky me. This tsunami disaster has made clear what has long been obvious, that the old media and the new media complement and feed into each other, or at any rate they ought to.

Bloggers in the right places at the right times can feed stories not just to other meta-bloggers, but to the mainstream media. A few of them were, after all, actually there. And then other bloggers, as I have just done, can point blog readers towards particularly choice mainstream media stories.

I particularly admire the way that the Guardian, for all that it is easy for the likes of us to criticise it for all kinds of other reasons, has at least learned how blogging can actually help in times like these, not just by telling the terrible story, but by helping to make it less terrible.

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Polly Toynbee gets her priorities right:

Social democracy and global cooperation are struggling under the tsunami of US neoconservatism.

Few things in life are as reliable as the Guardian.

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The England cricket team is doing really rather well just now. They are not the best. Australia are the best. But England are well on the way to establishing themselves as the best of the rest. Yesterday they completed a fine victory against South Africa, in the first of the series of five test matches they are playing down there, having earlier in the year, in England, beaten New Zealand in 3 games out of 3 and the West Indies in 4 games out of 4. Before that they toured the West Indies and beat them 3 games out of 4, with the last game drawn. In other words, England have won 8 out of their last 8 test matches (more than any England side has ever won consecutively before), and it would have 12 out of 12 had it not been for that final game draw in the West Indies. Recent England recruit Andrew Strauss, who batted superbly, both in the game against South Africa that finished yesterday morning and throughout last summer, has now played in just 8 test matches and has been on the winning side every time. This is amazing.

All of which means that, what with England doing so well, now was a very good time for the England cricket authorities to be renegotiating the TV rights to cricket matches, and here is what they have done:

Live coverage of England's home Test matches will no longer be available on terrestrial TV from 2006 onwards.

The England and Wales Cricket Board has awarded an exclusive four-year contract to BSkyB, which will run until 2009.

In other words, I and millions of other BBC License Fee payers will not be able to watch test cricket live on the telly without paying extra.

I am selfishly unhappy about this. I like watching test cricket live on the telly, in among doing other things. Cricket is a slow game, and now that they have instant replays of anything very exciting, it mixes well with working on other things.

However, it is clear to me that the cricket people in question (the England and Wales Cricket Board – or ECB) are perfectly entitled to make this deal. If I want to go on watching their games, I will have to pay more. That is the deal they are offering, and it is up to me to decide what to do about that.

Others, however, take a more interventionist line.

Criticism of the ECB's decision was swift. The backlash amongst cricket supporters has been fierce and the governing body stand accused of ignoring their responsibility to promote the sport at a time when the England team is enjoying great success.

Labour MP John Grogan, a Yorkshire CCC member, told the Guardian he wants the list of "crown jewel" sports, which include the FA Cup final and Olympics, to be reviewed. Cricket was removed from the protected list in 1998.

"I think it's disastrous for English cricket," said Grogan.

"There is a real danger (cricket) will disappear from half the public's consciousness and youngsters will take up other sports.

"The government has to review what sports are included in the listed events."

Listed events. If you think that sounds like 'listed buildings', you would be right. What it means is that The Government, on behalf of The People, seizes control of various Big Sporting Events, and says that the people who have spent the last century or two organising them, and building up into the Crown Jewel Events that they have become, do not own or control them any more. Oh, they have to go on organising them. But they are no longer allowed to charge what they want to charge for their events. Which means that the events are not theirs any more. Greedy cricket supporters who, like me, want to watch cricket on the telly, but who do not want to pay what the supplier of the events is asking, are now agitating for the Government to steal test cricket from its rightful owners.

As usual, when the Government is being urged to Doing Something, the question of whether the people on the receiving end of this Something are being wise, or generous, or generally doing their jobs well, is all mixed up with whether the Government would be right to barge in and rearrange matters. But, these are two absolutely distinct matters. Maybe your taste in music is poor. Maybe you are worth more money than your employers are now willing to pay you. Maybe in refusing to marry this virtuous but rather plain girl rather than that silly but prettier one you are being both cruel and stupid. But that is a long way from saying that the government should force you to listen to better music, force your employers to pay you more than they want to, and decide who you should marry.

And maybe the ECB is serving cricket badly, by denying many of the potential next generation of England cricketers the chance to watch test cricket at an impressionable age. Maybe this is a mistake. Maybe the money they will make from the deal and which they will distribute to the England county cricket clubs, is money they should have been willing to do without. Maybe.

But – and no maybes about it – it is none of the Government's business to be deciding on behalf of the ECB what they should charge for their product, and to whom.

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The Washington Times has a blog called simply Politics Blog that fulfils the bare basics for blog-hood: Reverse chronological order and permalinks to individual articles. It is even written in a suitably bloggy informal style and takes an irreverent look at issues from an unabashedly partisan perspective.

And yet Politics Blog is not really a good blog for quite technical reasons.

Firstly it does not provide readers with useful sidebar links. Secondly and more crucially, it seems to studiously avoid external links in the blog articles themselves. This is a major failing as the whole point of journalistic blogging is to establish 'accessible credibility' and the way you do that is by linking to external sources relating to the things you write about.

For example, in this article called Race Hypocrisy by John McCaslon, an organisation called Project 21 is mentioned as well as the fact that left-wing cartoonist Gary Trudeau referred to Condaleeza Rice as 'Brown Sugar'. And yet Mr. McCaslon just seems to assume people will take his word that what he says about Project 21 and Gary Trudeau is correct because he does not add links to either Project 21 or the offending cartoon by Gary Trudeau.

There! See how easy that was? If you link to the things you discuss, people actually have some basis for judging the merits of your words and in the on-line commentaries of tomorrow, to write a critical article without external links as citations will start alarm bells ringing as to the soundness of your views. It it not enough to have a blog, you need to know how to blog.

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Michael Bloomberg, founder and owner of the unlisted financial media firm bearing his name, is planning to sell up and transfer much of his assets to a charitable foundation on similar lines to that of Microsoft's Bill Gates. As Mayor of New York, Bloomberg has not really been able to give much day-to-day attention to his media empire, preferring to spend his time on matters such as banning smoking in bars.

I do not like much of what I hear about Bloomberg the politician, but I do greatly respect Bloomberg the businessman. The single-minded determination he has shown to challenge, and in some cases beat, rivals such as AP Dow Jones and Reuters has been impressive. In the space of little more than 15 years, Bloomberg has broken the near-duopoly on wholesale financial news and data once held by Reuters, the listed British firm which is more than 150 years old, though still bigger in terms of overall coverage of news.

If Ayn Rand were still alive, I would wager a small bet that she would think of the fellow as a likely business hero. It is going to be interesting to see what happens to this segment of the news business over the next few months and years.

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I am given to understand that the art of being a successful confidence trickster lies in the ability to identify what their victims really, really want and then plausibly appearing to offer it to them.

This con artist knew exactly what his 'mark' wanted and he offered it up to them on a plate:

The BBC was forced to apologise yesterday for a story claiming that tens of thousands of victims of the Bhopal gas disaster and their families would receive compensation from a $12 billion fund.

A man purporting to speak for the Dow Chemical company told the BBC that its Union Carbide subsidiary, which owned the chemical plant when the gas leak killed 3,500 people immediately and later up to 15,000, would be liquidated and the proceeds used for compensation....

The programme was aired twice on BBC World and followed up on Radio 4 and BBC News 24 causing Dow Chemical's shares to fall 3.4 per cent in Frankfurt before it was discovered that the whole thing was a hoax.

When the victims of con men recount their tales of woe, it nearly always results in the same charge: 'How could you have fallen for that'? The answer is always the same: the victim believed what they were told because they wanted to believe it.

On the face of it, a claim that a major global concern was going to fall on its collective sword is wholly implausible. At the very least it is the kind of claim that begs for verification; verification that could easily have been sought by means a quick and expedient telephone call to the company's headquarters and which would have resulted in dismissal.

But that telephone call was never made because the apparent admission of guilt by Dow Chemicals had set BBC hearts-a-flutter. In their minds, Dow Chemicals is guilty, regardless of any facts to do with the Bhopal disaster. Dow is guilty of profiteering, of raping the planet, of making evil chemicals, of being a multinational corporation, of being big. All of a sudden they get an iron-clad confession from the Beast itself: an unimpeachable confirmation and reinforcement of everything that BBC journos believe as Gospel.

They sought no corroboration for the claim because they wanted it to be true. They needed it to be true and, like lovesick adolescent girls who swoon for the duplicitous declarations of love from disingenuous paramours, they gladly opened their legs.

This grubby little incident is a snapshot of everything that is wrong with the Fourth Estate and the BBC bit of it in particular. It is not they are negligent or dishonest but neither are they objective and therein lies the problem.

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Like many libertarians I often attack the BBC. I doubt that it is actually more statist in the opinions it supports than ITV and C4, or, perhaps, than ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN in the United States - but with the licence fee (the tax on television owners that goes to the BBC) it hurts more to experience the endless blather about Welfare State spending being the ultimate good and the solution to every problem being another government regulation.

However, the BBC does sometimes get things right. Yesterday, when reporting yet another Chinese coal mine accident, the BBC reporter said "and this makes 7,000 deaths over the last year in the state owned Chinese coal mining industry" and pointed out that there were claims that the Chinese government had cut corners on safety in order to boost production (shades of Stalin's "war on the limiters").

In reporting the large numbers of deaths (i.e. that the accident was not an isolated incident) and that the industry was state owned (i.e. that the deaths were not caused by wicked businessmen), the BBC showed a depth of reporting and a fairness that should be praised.

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Tonight at midnight I am to be on the Richard Bacon debate show on Radio 5 Live, arguing about censorship. My job, and that of my pro-censorship opponent, will be to poke a stick into the wasps nest that is the Radio 5 phoning-in community, thereby 'involving' lots of people. They hope. If no one calls, we will no doubt talk amongst ourselves, although if I know these people they will have done some preliminary poking already, and lined up some callers of appropriate extremity and craziness, for if we two official debaters let the side down by talking too sensibly.

Libertarianism, civil liberties, etc., is strictly stuff that they squeeze in when nothing real is happening (i.e. football). However, I take such chances when they are offered, and if they make it worth my while. They have promised me £80, which for me is not bad for an hour's intermittent chit-chatting. Wish me luck.

I keep trying to get these radio shows to introduce me as a Samizdata blogger, instead of just as "from the Libertarian Alliance", but they still do not understand about this, or perhaps fear that their listeners will not understand. I suppose the problem with writing for the internet is that, you know, anyone can do this and it is very easy so therefore it is of no importance. I mean, what on earth could 'blogging' possibly have to do with a debate about the official control of and suppression of information?

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Glenn Reynolds has a good article in the Guardian about the election and expresses some interesting ideas about its lessons for the media.

Thanks to the internet, cable news channels and talk radio, media bias is easier to spot and easier for people to bypass. This not only changes views, but prevents the formation of a phoney consensus - what experts call "preference falsification" - resulting from widespread, and unified, media bias.

Those of you across the Atlantic may wish to take a lesson from this. As the BBC's atrocious handling of the Gilligan affair - and, indeed, its war coverage generally - illustrates, media bias is hardly limited to the United States.

But what is with that photo? I would not have recognised that as Glenn but for the context in which it was displayed.

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The European Court has dispelled any residual doubt that it is little more than a politically motivated tool of the European Commission and continues its slow but steady construction of the means to make investigative journalism impossible in Brussels by ruling that Belgian police could seize Hans-Martin Tillack's computers and records to identify his sources regarding reports on EU corruption.

The Euro-court has made little attempt to hide that is has colluded with EU political interests in a judgement that cuts to the heart of journalists ability to report on wrong doing and corruption by politicians.

Euro-judges accepted commission claims that it played no role in the arrest of Mr Tillack, even though leaked anti-fraud office documents show it orchestrated the raid from the beginning.

Whistleblowing will not be tolerated. The superstate is not your friend.

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Here is an interesting effect of the Internet, I think you will agree.

The Telegraph declines to run this article, and Mark Steyn declines to change it until they would.

So, he just sticks it up at his website anyway. (Without the Internet, might he have been more pliable? Without the threat of the Internet, would Mark Steyn be such a good writer?)

Quote:

Paul Bigley can be forgiven his clumsiness: he's a freelancer winging it. But the feelers put out by the Foreign Office to Ken Bigley’s captors are more disturbing: by definition, they confer respectability on the head-hackers and increase the likelihood that Britons and other infidels will be seized and decapitated in the future. The United Kingdom, like the government of the Philippines when it allegedly paid a ransom for the release of its Iraqi hostages, is thus assisting in the mainstreaming of jihad.

By contrast with the Fleet Street-Scouser-Whitehall fiasco of the last three weeks, consider Fabrizio Quattrocchi, murdered in Iraq on April 14th. In the moment before his death, he yanked off his hood and cried defiantly, "I will show you how an Italian dies!" He ruined the movie for his killers. As a snuff video and recruitment tool, it was all but useless, so much so that the Arabic TV stations declined to show it.

If the FCO wants to issue advice in this area, that's the way to go: If you’re kidnapped, accept you’re unlikely to survive, say "I'll show you how an Englishman dies", and wreck the video. If they want you to confess you’re a spy, make a little mischief: there are jihadi from Britain, Italy, France, Canada and other western nations all over Iraq – so say yes, you’re an MI6 agent, and so are those Muslims from Tipton and Luton who recently joined the al-Qaeda cells in Samarra and Ramadi. As Churchill recommended in a less timorous Britain: You can always take one with you. If Mr Blair and other government officials were to make that plain, it would be, to use Mr Bigley’s word, "enough". A war cannot be subordinate to the fate of any individual caught up in it.

That last sentence would make a fine Samizdata quote of the day, and I nearly posted it that way instead.

Commenters will no doubt have all kinds of things to say about Scousers, Italians, the FCO, Mr Blair, etc. But what interests me about this little circumstance is that it is yet one more straw in the wind, gently falling onto the back of the camel that is the Mainstream Media.

It just cannot be such fun being an MSM editor these days. You spike an article. But it gets 'published' anyway, with your spike marks on it as a badge of pride.

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The Guardian, biased but, so far as I can tell after one skim-through, accurate:

For supporters of John Kerry, who have seen allegations about the Democratic candidate's military record sap his campaign, it must have seemed like a case of just deserts.

The president, George Bush, was last week looking vulnerable on the same grounds after CBS's flagship current affairs show, 60 Minutes, broadcast a report claiming he had been suspended from pilot duties for failing to meet the required standards. It was also claimed that a commanding officer had been put under pressure to 'sugar coat' Mr Bush's performance reviews.

But while CBS stands by its story, allegations have now surfaced that 60 Minutes based a large part of the report on forged documents.

Now as in last Friday. Surfaced as in we have now heard about it other than just via the blogosphere, who have been all over this for some time. But, better late than never. Much better.

Later on in the same report:

60 Minutes does not have a reputation for irresponsible journalism - it was the show that first broadcast the now notorious photographs of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq - and it takes the reliability of its stories seriously.

The CBS news president, Andrew Heyward, told the Baltimore Sun he had confidence in the story and it was appropriately vetted, but conceded it was a "political hot potato".

Indeed. CBS throws more chips on the table with every passing hour.

My one objection to this Guardian report (apart from the fact that I knew it all already) is that it refers to things like "a report on the Free Republic weblog", while linking only to the Free Republic weblog in general, rather than actually linking to the particular post it refers to. But such links – there are others to the top of other weblogs (Little Green Footballs, Power Line) – are, again, far better than no links at all.

If you do want links, you can of course track all of this on Instapundit. Scroll down and, you know, find the postings for yourself. Unless you think that everything of importance has all been said here. Oh all right then, here is a good Insta-posting to start, with lots of links, to other actual postings.

Changing the subject completely, I have just been reading a very fine description in this book (Maritime Supremacy and the Opening of the West Mind by Peter Padfield) about the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Light, better armed, much more agile little English ships sporting cruelly with the stately galleons of Philip II of Spain, occasionally capturing one, and changing the course of history. An excerpt (about the country that gained most from the Armada's defeat, Holland) from the book can be found here. Sorry. Flying off at a total red herring tangent. Must stop doing that.

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Here, at last, is the truth that the US Government tried to suppress.

They did not want the world to know but, thanks to the painstaking forensic skill and integrity of the Fourth Estate, the skeleton is finally out of the closet!

"We stand by the authenticity of this document" - CBS

".....the smoking gun" - Reuters

"...incontrovertible proof" - Guardian

"...a major setback for the Bush Whitehouse" - BBC

"What else are they trying to cover up?" - New York Times

Case closed.

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One of my favourite scenes from the funniest ever Carry On film, Carry On Up The Khyber, comes right at the end when the villanous Khazi of Khalabar (Kenneth Williams) discourteously attacks the Residence while Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond (Sid James, of course) and his good lady wife (Joan Sims) are having a formal dinner.

In a gloriously demented show of stiff-upper-lippery the assembled diners refuse to admit that anything is happening. The musicians play on even while the ceiling falls in and the walls crumble. Change our ways because some dashed foreigners are set to slaughter us? By Gad, Sir, next you'll be asking us to pass the port to the right!

Robert Fisk and the other staff of the Independent probably do not often think of themselves as Sons of the Empire. But I was rather struck by the headline an unknown sub-editor gave Fisk's front-page Independent article yesterday. The article commemorated the third anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001 - when the crumbling walls and the slaughter were, alas, real rather than part of a movie. The headline said: "We should not have allowed 19 murderers to change our world."*

* = full story archives here.

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For an organization that boasts that it does not carry advertisements the BBC seems to carry rather a lot. There are the adverts for how wonderful the BBC is and for various books and other products that the BBC produces, and there are the endless trailers boasting of the wonders of various BBC shows.

Two recent trailers (both trailers were often repeated) on BBC Radio Four caught my attention. One was for a standard communist comic - not someone with any great grasp of Marxism of course, just someone who makes various anti-British comments (such as that Gibraltar should be under the control of Spain) to a standard BBC studio audience of Guardian reading scum - who hoot their agreement. The United States is (as always with such folk) an evil power that controls British policy (more hoots of agreement).

The other trailer was for a series on the history of the Arts Council (the government body that hands out art subsidies). This trailer declared that the creator of the Arts Council, J.M. Keynes, was a 'brilliant economist'. Lord Keynes being the man who argued that the way to create prosperity was for the government to issue money and spend it (perhaps by giving it to the banks and borrowing it back - or perhaps directly). Any government spending (including having men dig holes and fill them up again) being "investment" and this 'investment' stimulating the economy via the magic of the 'multiplier' (a concept used by cranks long before Keynes).

We were also told that before the Arts Council the only thing people in Britain could do was 'go down the pub'. The vast network of activity in the world of the arts before World War II (both supported by mutual aid - as in the literature to be found in Working Men's Institutes, or the voluntary theatre groups) or by charitable giving (as with the art galleries to be found in every major British town) being totally ignored.

I do not know if the series is as bad as the trailer - such was the impact of the trailer that I could not bring myself to listen to the series. And such was the impact of the trailer for the communist comic that I could not bring myself to listen to his show (perhaps he has lots of witty lines that did not get into the adverts - I will never know).

Well it seems advertising does have some power. Due to the BBC adverts I will never listen to these programs.

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On today's morning news, a BBC presenter referred to the Chechen terrorists responsible for the Beslan massacre as zealots. I think zealots ought to be told...

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Terry L. Heaton has a sound article on the realities of TV and internet as the news medium. The dynamics of local news reporting and news breaking have changed and the broadcast industry is in a situation where the first-mover can have the real advantage.

The "situation" is that the marketplace is ripe for a local station to have the balls to break stories online — when they have them — and not wait until their alloted broadcast time. If not, the local paper will do it, and if not them, then somebody else will. If yours is the "live, local, latebreaking" brand, you'd certainly better be adopting that same slogan online. Otherwise, you're simply shooting yourself in the foot every time you wait until 6 o'clock to present the efforts of the day, because you're not telling the truth.

And here comes the new, in the local newsrooms resisted medium:

Until we begin respecting the power of the immediacy offered by the Web — and especially RSS — we'll be hopelessly left behind in the race to see who wins the local online news prize. Money follows eyeballs, and the eyeballs are abandoning broadcast in favor of the Internet at a speed that frightens every corporate broadcast executive on the planet. And yet, there isn't a single station that will put the full weight of its news operation into feeding this explosive growth market. Why not? Because we think it would be self-destructive to spill our goodies online and that people wouldn't watch our programs if we did. But is that really so?

• People already aren't watching our programs.
• There is zero evidence to support this belief.
• It is actually self-destructive to NOT adopt such a strategy.

Moreover, and regardless of what's going on around us, we seem to be the last to figure out that news is an ongoing conversation, not a program that appears when we say so. Old habits not only die hard; they can be dangerously deceptive.

Yes, news is a conversation. With those who are in the middle of it and those who are affected by it and those who have opinions on it. There have also been changes on the receiving end - the user (formerly known as consumer) is in charge.

Building an Internet strategy around this isn't as difficult as it might seem, but it begins with fundamental changes in our attitudes and approaches to the Internet. The attitude adjustment is this: We meet the news and information needs of our community wherever they are, and meeting those needs is far more important than beating the competition.

The major media outlets have already adopted internet strategies that do not wait for the news hour. That is how it was possible for a group blog such as the Command Post to scour the breaking news from most of them and provide a useful one-stop information source about the Iraq conflict. It also starkly highlighted the different biases in the major media reporting that were embedded deeper than their reporters with the troops in Iraq.

The local news are closer to home and such inherent biases may be more obvious. So let them scoop the big media and each other beyond the box of the 6 o'clock news...

via Doc Searls

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It will be found from the Foreign Prints, which from time to time, as Occaſion offers, will be mention'd in this Paper, that the Author has taken Care to be duly furnith'd with all that comes from Abroad in any Language. And for an Aſſurance that he will not, under Pretence of having Private Intelligence, impoſe any Additions of feign'd Circumſtances to an Action, but give his Extracts fairly and Impartially ; at the beginning of each Article he will quote the Foreign Paper from whence 'tis taken, that the Publick, ſeeing from what Country a piece of News comes with the Allowance of that Government, may be better able to Judge of the Credibility and Fairneſs of the Relation

- from the The Daily Courant of March 11, 1702. The Courant was probably the world's first daily newspaper.

Bloggers might not like the next bit:

Nor will he take upon him to give any Comments or Conjectures of his own, but will relate only Matter of Fact ; suppoſing other People to have Senſe enough to make Reflections for themſelves.

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Although Australia and the US have signed a free trade agreement, it is an imperfect document, with many exemptions on both sides. In Australia, there has been a loud campaign to have existing 'local content' rules for Australian television excluded, and this campaign has been successful.

The 'local content' rules mean that a certain proportion of television programmes that are broadcast on Australian television must be locally made. The scrapping of this rule was an American objective in the free trade negotiations, as it meant that US television companies were restricted in their access to the Australian television market by what in effect is a quota.

Australia resisted this; we should not have.

Australian television has had local content rules for a long time, they provide that at least 55% of the programming on Australian television between 6am and midnight must be locally produced. This creates a local internal market for television, which is actually quite a cut-throat industry. The economies of scale mean that Australian television products are not cost-competitive, but they do rate well.

That is the rub- many of the people involved in the industry here do not wish to concern themselves with anything so grubby as 'ratings'; but would rather follow their artisitic vision. A noble thing, to be sure, but television is a business. Local variants of the 'reality tv' genre have been ratings winners and have made a lot of money for their networks through advertising sales.

The local lobby present a 'nightmare' scenario where Australian television is totally dominated by US television product. This seems curious since Australian television networks are more worried by market share rather then raw cost. But then the local content lobby are more about emotion then cool business sense. In point of fact, the ratings show that many of the best rating programs are local productions.

But there is a strange sense of values in the local content lobby. Their catchphrase seems to be 'telling Australian stories with Australian voices'. But this is a remarkable way to be going about it. It is almost like forcing a 'book quota' on Australian readers, making Australian readers read a set proportion of Australian written books.

What is screened on Australian television screens should be decided by the television networks, who make (more or less) rational decisions based on the ratings of what people want, rather then by a government directive decreeing what is best for them. It is most unfortunate that this principle has been lost again.

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...but not all the time. If you don't look at the listings page and life's busy schedule halts the urge towards the sofa, then television may take up two hours tops a week, unless Euro 2004 is on. The invasion of reality programming provides no real attractions. Big Brother, Survivor and the Sex Diaries of Ayia Napa don't entice. (The last one is made up but the outline is on my desk, if there are any budding producers out there!)

The only time that couch potato indulgences come into play is on holiday. A recent vacation in Visby provided insights into the enthusiasm of Swedish tv for US sitcoms. Square eyes are developed after a couple of snifters before hitting the clubs (pre-season doubles of scotch are obligatory given Swedish beer prices). It was during these preparations that I came across the programme, Swag.

The series was first introduced on porn-lite, history heavy Channel Five in 2003, under the auspices of Guy Ritchie, and involves enticing the criminal element and potential lawbreakers to demonstrate their stupidity on camera. Some of the celebrity stunts are clearly staged but others demonstrate a naive verisimiltude that only chavs could provide. In the first series, one likely lad was so enraged at being trapped in the car, he stabbed a cameraman with a screwdriver.

Two examples of the programme will suffice: an open lorry with boxes of goodies, tempting for the greedy, and transforming into a cage which is driven around calling upon onlookers to look at the imprisoned thief; or the driver, who took a disabled spot, and returned to find her car encircled by a chain of wheelchairs.

Reality television has included a number of themes over the past decade: preying upon the self-indulgence of the would-be famous, manufacturing celebrities out of the public and wielding the intrinsic voyeurism of documentaries. Ritchie has demonstrated that this medium can also tap into other basic human reactions: the anger that people feel when they see a clear transgression such as theft, and a sense of justice at the comeuppance of a budding criminal.

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I do not imagine that Samizdata readers spend a lot of their spare time reading Arena magazine (it does not appear to be available online). It is a chap's monthly publication that fancies itself as being at the more intelligent end of the man's magazine world, mixing glossy advertisements for insanely expensive wristwatches and fast cars, not to mention pictures of minor French actresses in a pleasing state of undress, with post-modernist ironic pieces on anger management, etc. I get the impression that it is the sort of publication that pitches to the sort of man who reads the Guardian or Observer but who wants to indulge his blokeish tendencies with a clean conscience - in short, to have his low-fat steak and eat it.

Occasionally the tension shows. In the August edition, for instance, we have a largely gushing and Bush-bashing film review of the latest Michael Moore propaganda effort, sorry, 'documentary', Fahrenheit 9/11, which contains a remarkable admission by the obviously pro-Moore reviewer that the filmaker had a "cavalier attitude to such niceties as facts" while stating what a swell film it is. Facts eh, who gives a damn about em?

But what really did it for me was an article (page 77) containing one of the nastiest attacks on a group of people in a magazine that I have read for some time: the overweight. The writer, Giles Coren, whom I have heard of before, rants against overweight people in terms of amazing verbal violence. Words such as "mountain-arsed", "the great lumps", "these pigs", etc, are sprinkled around. Witty, no?

Now I accept that there is something dumb about those who are overweight trying to present themselves as victims. However, I also have nothing but contempt for the way in which the fast-food industry has been targeted for assault by an unsavoury mixture of ambulance-chasing lawyers, moral scolds and sundry bores who would legislate our pleasures out of existence rather than rely on our own self-restraint and personal responsibility. Coren's article, in particular, seems to be steeped in a sort of fashionable puritanism and also draws on a deeply suppressed need to be able to hate a particular group. Let's face it, hatred is out of style. There are laws against it. If our demented British Home Secretary, David Blunkett, gets his way, it will not be possible to express anything more than polite scepticism about the irrational superstitions known as official religions. But humans love to hate, or at least some of them do.

I very much fear that the overweight among us are in the cross-hairs of our fashionable haters. Of course, one should not make too much from a single article in a pretentious guy's magazine, but Coren's piece is all part of a trend.

To hell with him, I am sending out for pizza with extra cheese.

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This post is one of my articles that explains how it is possible to screw an industry up beyond words with excessive regulation, and the consequences of doing so can occur in unexpected places. The story is in this case about how government attempted to protect the BBC and ended up giving enormous quasi-monopolistic powers to Rupert Murdoch. Next week, I shall post a similar history of the regulation or television in Australia, which explains how government attempted to give enormous quasi-monopolistic powers to Kerry Packer, and ended up giving enormous quasi-monopolistic powers to Kerry Packer.

Until a week and a half ago, British people were watching the European Championship football championship between the national teams of the best footballing countries of Europe, the English in the hope that England would win the tournament, and the Scottish in the hope that England would be eliminated early and embarassingly. Neither of these things happened: England played decently but not spectacularly and were eliminated on penalties in the quarter finals. If England had stayed in the tournament the number of cross of St George flags attached to people's cars in this country would have steadily increased, it would have been impossible to go into a pub and had a discussion of anything else, national euphoria may have even broken out and, sady, there would have been a somewhat unpleasant yob element on the streets shortly after closing time. As an Australian, I think I would have found that (and the fact that the English would have been gloating for years if not decades) a bit much, so I am glad that it didn't happen. Instead, I watched the rest of the tournament (which finished yesterday evening) with interest both on television at home and in pubs with much smaller crowds than would have been the case if England were still participating. The story of the tournament was that the large heavyweight countries of Europe were eliminated relatively early, and the teams from the smaller countries excelled themselves.

In yesterday's final the host nation Portugal (regarded as a good side from before the start of the tournament, although not one of the extreme favourites to win it) took on Greece (who at the start of the tournament were absolute rank outsiders who most people would not have picked to win a match let alone the tournament). And as it happened, Greece won a perhaps a little dull and defensive (but with lots of heart) 1-0 victory, and a team that had never won a match in the finals of either the European Championship or the World Cup before are now champions of Europe. (The slightly desperate question of whether the Olympic stadium in Athens will be complete in time for the start of the Games in six weeks now has the added question of whether the Greeks will have stopped partying by then. I was in Sydney four years ago for the 2000 games, and at this point we were just coming to grips with the fact that the games were almost upon us. We didn't really start partying until the games actually started.

It was not hard to find a place to watch yesterday's final, because it was on two terrestrial television channels (licence fee funded BBC1 and advertising funded ITV1) simultaneously as well as satellite channel Eurosport. This followed what happened earlier in the tournament, which is that the matches have been divided evenly between the two broadcasters. Half the matches were on the BBC, and the other half on ITV, and who got to show which matches was decided more or less randomly. Neither network has been able to gain an advantage over the other by advertising itself as "The Euro 2004 channel" or anything like that.

This may seem curious. Why is what should be one of the biggest sporting events of the year on two television stations simultaneously? Given that lots and lots of people are likely to want to watch it (or would have if England were playing) would it not be of lots of value to advertisers and therefore wouldn't the organisers of the tournament want to make huge amounts of money by auctioning the television rights to the highest bidder.

Well, actually no.

Well, actually probably yes, but this is not permitted.

You see, the European Championship is what is known as a "listed" event under the laws that govern British television. There is a list of events that subscription television channels - satellite and cable - are not allowed to bid for. In the interests of the nation, or of small boys living in deprived areas of Liverpool whose parents cannot or will not pay for satellite television, or perhaps in the interests of self-righteous, patronising and meddlesome bureaucrats, or in the interests of members of the House of Lord's who think it is much too declasse to have cable, or something, these events are only allowed to be on terrestrial television that is free to watch (after you have paid £120 a year that you must pay to the BBC to watch television, even if you want to watch some other channel or just a couple of DVDs at home).

Most sporting events on British television are no longer regulated like this. Most events (including virtually all football between club teams) are not listed, and of these a huge portion are on Rupert Murdoch's subscription Sky Sports channels. The remainder are on the private terrestrial channels ITV1 and Channel 5, with a few on the BBC and a few on the commercially funded but state owned Channel 4. Some would argue that this proves the need for the "listing" of events of national importance. If the list did not exist, these events would end up on satellite and cable television too, and that would be bad.

Disregarding the question of whether there is such a thing as a sporting event of national importance, and disregarding the fact that this law basically amounts to the theft by the state of whatever money the organisers of the sporting events could have got for the rights if they had sold them to the highest bidder, this is probably true. If Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB were allowed to bid for the exclusive rights to the European Championship, Wimbledon, the FA Cup Final, the World Cup, the Olympic games and the like, they probably would, and even big events like this probably would would end up on satellite television exclusively. Supporters of the status quo would probably take this concession from me as a concession that the status quo is good, and is necessary. But they would be wrong.

On the other hand, our readers in the US are probably just wondering whether what I have just said is really true, because the most important sporting events in the US generally do not end up on subscription only television. The Super Bowl and the World Series and the NBA finals and the Olympic Games etc generally end up on one of the free to air networks, as they are of more value to networks who want to sell advertising than to networks who want to sell subscriptions. Is this not so in Britain, and if not, why not?

Well, the answer is no, this not so in Britain. As to why not, that is a long story, which isn't going to stop me from telling it.

Until the mid 1950s, the BBC had a monopoly on television in the UK. The establishment at the time thought that this new medium was such a dangerous and potentially powerful medium that if commercial interests had access to it, they would use it to vulgarise the nation, and therefore it was necessary for people like them to control it and control what people watched. So came the peculiar tradition of the BBC, which was traditionally run by people who considered them too good for the medium they were working for, but did it because as they saw it somebody had to in order to protect the nation from itself. And thus started the BBCs tradition of relentlessly middlebrow programming (that was recycled for Americans and shown on "Masterpiece theatre) for "people like us" (or at least people who aspired to be like us) mixed in with rather ghastly game shows and soap operas for people not like us. (Thankfully, these seldom make it out of the country).

In any event, by the mid 1950s it was clear that there was a problem with this model: not that the BBC had a monopoly on programming (this was generally seen as a good thing) but that there was no television advertising in Britain. You see, this new form of advertising had come into being in other countries, and businesses wanted to be able to advertise on television. (Radio advertising was considered much less important, and as a consequence Britain had no legal radio stations other than the BBC until 1972, something that I find mindboggling). After a few years of arguing over this, the problem was eventually solved by the creation of a new channel named ITV in 1955, to predictions of civilizational collapse by certain parts of the establishment. This new station was funded by advertising, and was in theory owned by private companies, but with a really strange caveat, which was that the owners of the network essentially did not control their own programming. Everything that could be done to prevent the owners of the new channel from gaining any power, and as a consequence a television network was created with an astonishingly bizarre corporate structure.

The United Kingdom was divided up into 14 pieces, and a different company was required to own the ITV franchise in each region. London, Manchester, and Birmingham were considered too big to allow one company to have the franchise, so different companies got to broadcast depending on the day of the week (and later also the time of day). Economies of scale and marketing realities meant that the different regional companies would show essentially the same programming as each other, but an extensive process of negotiation was necessary to decide precisely which of the individual companies got to provide how much programming to the network. The market could have decided this, but this was not allowed, and a government set up bureaucracy came into existence to decide just who got access to how much of the schedule. News was considered much too important for the same companies that theoretically controlled the rest of the programming, and yet another company (ITN) was created to provide news for the ITV companies. This was required to be "impartial" and another set of bureaucrats got to judge this. (As an aside, this rule still exists for all television news transmitted in the UK, and the successor to this body recently ruled that America's Fox News, which is shown on satellite television, is not "impartial" and it may theoretically therefore be illegal to broadcast it in the UK. But I digress). I government appointed bureaucracy named the Independent Television Authority (ITA,), later the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) and later still the Independent Television Commission (ITC), was set up to regulate the new station.

Now, the licenses to operate the pieces of this new television network were not granted in perpetuity. They came up for renewal ever few years, at intervals that have varied over the decades. At the end of of a franchise period the bureaucrats of the ITA got to decide whether the operators of a licence had satisfied something called a "quality threshold". If the programming did not satisfy the bureaucrats views of what comprised quality, then the ITA could direct the franchise operator to change its programming, or conceivably could awrd the licence to someone else. And over the years this happened a few times.

And this created exactly what was intended. Commercial television came into being, and advertisers were able to advertise on television. And what all these regulations added up to was that a new bureaucracy had been set up by the government to control the programming of this new commercial networks. Commercial ownership of the network was fragmented. The owners had no certainty that they would control their piece of the network in future, and different regional owners were not allowed to merge with each other. A substantial portion of the profits of the networks (over and above normal taxes) had to be paid to the state, which kept the network poor.

Which is where we get back to the question of sporting rights. The concept of a "listed" event is not actually a new one. It actually came into being at the same time commercial television came into being in 1955. At that point we had two sets of bureaucrats, one running the BBC and the other running ITV. Actually competing for the rights to show things like sport was the sort of thing that these bureaucrats found unseemly. And it could lead to money that could be spent on programming or given to shareholders or the government being given to other people, such as sports administrators. The bureaucrats found it better to divide the rights for such events up between themselves, in much the same way that the rulers of Europe divided up the African continent by drawing lines on a map in Berlin in 1884. Some events (eg Wimbledon) were left to the BBC, but most events were divided up the way in which the European Championship football were divided up. "Listing" was the legal justification for this. A "listed" event could not sell exclusive rights to only one television network, but had to share them. Half the games were given to one network and the other half to the other. This suited the BBC - it was able to spend licence fee money on "important" programming and didn't have to justify doing things like giving licence fee (ie tax) money to sporting bodies - and it suited ITV, which got a share of the television rights to many sporting events without actually having to pay any significant amount of money for them. And while the BBC and ITV did sort of compete with each other for audiences, it was a strange game they played, becasue ITV had 100% of TV advertising revenues.

And that is how things remained until the 1980s. The BBC got a second national television channel in 1967, but there was a gentleman's agreement that this would not produce programming aimed at mass market audiences. Things changed a little with the introducation of Channel 4, a second advertising funded channel, in 1982, but even this was subject to a manner of gentleman's agreements and regulations. For one thing, Channel 4 was (and is) state owned, with a charter declaring that it is to provide programming of interest to audiences less well served by the traditional channels. And again there were bureaucratic stretches designed to prevent it competing with ITV for advertising in any serious way. Essentially Channel 4's budget was set by bureaucrats, and ITV was then put in charge of selling Channel 4's advertising. Once Channel 4's budget had been recouped, ITV got to keep the remainder. (That's right. If Channel 4 managed too boost its share of television advertising revenue at the expense of ITV, it was rewarded by being forced to give the additional money to ITV).

In terms of sport, this had essentially no impact. Channel 4 did dabble in odd American sports like baseball and foreign football a bit, but that was all. Sport remained largely on ITV and the BBC, which between them provided a pretty feeble selection of sporting events, and with production values that demonstrated a level of incompetence that was hysterically funny unless you were actually trying to follow the sport. (It was not uncommon in the 1980s for television networks in Australia to take the pictures from the BBC or ITV and provide their own commentary. I have one or two recollections of this commentary consisting largely of apologies for the poor quality of the pictures).

Finally, in the late 1980s, things started to change. They were bound to. Internationally (at least outside America) sporting bodies had failed to properly take advantage of television prior to about 1980, but at this point they started to realise that they had considerable bargaining power. Worldwide, the number of television channels available was increasing, and things were changing for there being a limited number of television channels for which it was a privilege for a sport to get its programming on one of them to a world where there were many many channels and only limited audiences. Much of the world had had the number of channels artificially reduced from what was technically possible as was done in the UK, but this was not sustainable, however tried the rent seekers and the bureaucrats would try to maintain the status quo. And in the UK, the rent seekers and the bureaucrats did at least have an enemy. For television rights were valuable, everybody was starting to realise this, and sporting bodies were not going to put up with receiving a pittance for their valuable rights for much longer. And in any event, in Britain the status quo had an enemy.

And that enemy was of course Mrs Thatcher. Mrs Thatcher loathed the BBC almost as much as I do, but she was never really willing to take on the status quo. The political fallout from doing so was simply too great, and the number of people in Middle England who were willing to declare that "Britain has the best television in the world" as if it was something said by God to Moses on Mount Sinai was simply too great. (Even a decade ago you heard this a lot, although I haven't heard it recently). What Mrs Thatcher was willing to do was to give Rupert Murdoch a relatively clear run to get subscription satellite television off the ground in Britain. Different regulatory decisions in the distant past had prevented Britain from getting cable television in the way that America did, and by the late 1980s a national platform for subscription satellite television was viable.

Whereas in America the companies that created premium cable television channels and the companies that owned the cable networks themselves were largely different from each other, in Britain Rupert Murdoch was able to create a system that owned most of the principal premium channels and the (satellite distribution system as well. (Yes, there were and are some companies in the US involved in both businesses, but it was usually the case that if you were watching cable television the company that owned the channel you were watching was different from the company that owned the cable network). Murdoch and has BSkyB company was able to package his channels in such a way that he maximised his revenues by forcing people to pay for his premium channels, even if they had minority tastes and didn't really want them (And he was willing to gamble his whole empire on his ability to dominate subscription television in the UK, coming close to bankruptcy in the credit crunch of 1991). And he quite correctly figured out that there was a market for far more sport (particularly football) than was being shown on television, especially if production values were improved dramatically.

Prior to 1990, the amount of club football that had been shown live on British television was quite small, but BSkyB changed this for people who were willing to pay for it. BSkyB paid unheard of sums for the rights to the new Premiership of the top 20 clubs, and provided viewers with several live matches a week. The gamble paid off spectacularly, and by the mid 1990s BSkyB was worth many billions of pounds, was immensely rich, and was able to outbid all other television networks in the UK for any sporting rights it was legally permitted to buy. And it did so.

Meanwhile, things grew worse for ITV. While Mrs Thatcher was not willing to take on the BBC in any substantial way, she did attempt to try to turn ITV into a company that obeyed something like market rules. She proposed that rather than being required to satisfy a spurious "quality threshold" to retain their licences, companies should be simply given the right to bid for the licences once in a while and the licence would be given to the highest bidder. This is one of those arrangements that Treasury likes because it brings in revenue, but for which isn't ideal for competition, because people will pay more for a monopoly.

However, by the time this came into practice things got worse, because politicians kept amending and complicating the new process (particularly after Mrs Thatcher lost office in 1990) and the auction that took place in 1993 ended up applying both a financial auction at the same time as a "quality threshold" question. Companies were forced to bid large amounts of money for the quasi-monopoly licences, because they were sure to lose their licences if they didn't, but they could still be disqualified almost arbitrarily if bureaucrats didn't like them. This left us with an ITV that was owned by companies that had a lot of debt, but which still didn't especially control its own destiny.

However, there were other things in the 1993 change in the law that did lead to greater competition. Channel 4 was still state owned, but was now entirely independent of ITV, and was allowed to keep the revenues from its own advertising. Since then it has behaved far more like a normal company than it could before. And the 1993 bill also allowed some mergers between regional ITV companies.

By 1995 BSkyB was an enormous success, and the terrestrial sector and even the bureaucrats that ran it knew that their real enemy was BSkyB and Rupert Murdoch. It became clear that Britain had no commercial television companies that could compete in a globalised market, due to the fact that regulation for the previous 40 years had been specifically designed to prevent them from being able to compete. In addition, many of the ITV companies had bid so much in the previous round of franchise auctions that they could barely afford to service their debt. To bail them out, the regulation of ITV was relaxed even further, the merger rules were relaxed further, and no government has felt the need for any further "quality threshold" tests since then (although they are technically still on the books). This process culminated this year with all the major ITV companies finally merging into a single company.

This was expensive and time consuming, and the resulting ITV plc has lots of debt and little capital, particularly after an expensive attempt four or five years ago in which the two largest ITV campanies attempted to take on BSkyB at its own game by buying sporting rights and selling subscriptions to a sports channel that eventually foundered due to the fact that BSkyB had the rights to the most popular events already, that BSkyB had much wider distribution, and that ITV had lousy management and BSkyB had outstandingly good management, it means that the resuliting ITV Inc. has large quantities of debt and a limited ability to compete.

But, finally, ITV has a fairly sensible ownership structure, (mostly) has control of its own programming, is listed on the stockmarket as a single company, and is generally the sort of television company that exists in fairly competitive markets. Except that it is broke. On the other hand, given that ITV had had 50 years of regulation that was specifically designed to keep it broke, to contol its programming, and to prevent it from getting decent management, none of this is perhaps surprising. On the final merger into a single company earlier this years, institutional investors insisted on sacking the mangament. I do sympathise, but it didn't really help. The legacy of 50 years is too much.

One other change occurred in British terrestrial television in the 1990s. In 1997, a fifth terrestrial station was finally launched in the UK. This was from the start regulated in an entirely sane way. The licence was given to a single company for the whole country, with relatively few restriction on its programming. However, it was a new channel started up with relatively little capital that had to establish an audience, and its programming was on the whole fairly "cheap and cheerful". Channel 5 is profitable, and great for that portion of the viewing audience that wants to watch programs late at night in which people wear relatively few clothes, but it presently lacks the money to really compete for mass audiences.

Which is where we come back to the original question. Why would Rupert Murdoch's satellite channels win the rights to all the listed sporting events if the rights were sold on the open market? The reason is simply that BSkyB is very rich, and the private free to air terrestrial networks are very poor. Whereas in the US the privately owned free to air networks are rich and can more than compete in an auction for rights, in the UK BSkyB will always win. The reason why the private free to air terrestrial networks are very poor is that 50 years of regulation designed largely to prevent them competing with the BBC and operating in an open market has kept them poor, and it did so quite deliberately. In the end, this regulation backfired, which is why Rupert Murdoch and satellite television gained the immense power that it has in Britain today.

From time to time the European Competition Commissioner looks at the immense pile of television rights held by BSkyB and suggests that it would be good if they weren't all in the hands of one company. However, auctions always end up the same way, with BSkyB winning everything it wants. Talk of compeition law being applied comes up, but sporting bodies then become unhappy. For the problem is that BSkyB is the only company with any money. Not so much can really be done.

There is only one way in which the terrestrial networks will ever be able to compete with BSkyB in these sorts of situations, and that is if one or both of the two privately owned networks ITV and Channel 5 is bought by a new owner with very deep pockets. This means a foreign media conglomerate. As it happens, Britain was compelled by EU law to open up ownership of its media to investors from anywhere in the EU. Britain decided that if Germans and Greeks were allowed to own its terrestrial TV stations, then there was nothing wrong with them being owned by Americans or Brazilians either, and the law was changed last year to remove most foreign ownership restrictions. Therefore, it is now possible for an American media conglomerate to buy a British television station, recapitalise it, and then compete in a big way.

At least it is in theory. But in practice it is not going to happen in the short term. American conglomerates have other things to do with their money, and entering the British market would mean competing with Rupert Murdoch, very expensively. And nobody really wants to do that.

So for now it we watch premium sport on BSkyB most of the time, except for the occasional listed event that is shared between the BBC and ITV. And even these are declining in number, for sports are being slowly removed from the list, due to the fact that administrators and athletes want the money. And one tends to think that the listing system wouldn't stand up in court if anyone really wanted to contest it.

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The Barclay brothers have won the fight for the Daily and Sunday Telegraph (the leading Conservative newspapers in Britain), I welcome this victory as the leading counter bidder (at least the one that made the most noise) was the company behind the Daily Mail - a fanatically anti-American newspaper.

My attitude towards the victory of the Barclay brothers (or rather the defeat of the Daily Mail) may suprise those people who think that my doubts about the policy of war and my dislike of President Bush indicate anti-Americanism. However, a good look at the Daily Mail would show such people what real anti-Americanism is like.

By the way, the Daily Mail is not a socialist newspaper (at least not in the way the word 'socialist' is normally understood) it is part of a different tradition of statism.

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Here is a poster I snapped in the London Underground the other day, through the Jubilee Line glass screen at Waterloo. It is quite amusing, but should they really be boasting about things like this?

And look down at the bottom. Is this a conclusion they really ought to be proud to be drawing? Or is the implication that if they ever do make any mistakes, they are all just typos?

Detail of the bottom corner, with a bit of help from Photoshop to make it more readable:

So, may we now expect a poster with a big mistake corrected?

We have been supporting state centralised socialistic stupidity and stagnation for, you know, a long time. We were wrong. Sorry and all that. Capitalism has its problems, but it is, we now realise, much better.

DifferentNow guardian.co.uk

Such will not, I suspect, be the substance of my next posting here.

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Ronald Reagan was, as we know, dubbed among other things as "The Great Communicator". Through his speeches, radio broadcasts and writings, Reagan had a wonderful knack of communicating important truths in clear-cut ways.

What intrigues me is wondering what he would have made of this new field of blogging. I reckon he would have loved it and could easily imagine the old fella writing one. As a talk-radio host, he had a lot to say that would have fitted in perfectly with the weblog format. I have recently been reading a collection of his radio show broadcast transcripts and it blasts the idea of him being a dope. Anything but, in fact.

Reagan was eager to make full use of the modern technologies of his time in spreading his views about the role of government, capitalism, the evils of communism and the like. I don't think it impertinent to imagine that this great man would have loved our medium and enjoyed the fact of its challenge to Big Media. I wonder what he'd have called his weblog. How about "Shining City on a Hill"?

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Thoughts here have turned towards what good news might consist of, what with most of the news from Iraq lately having been so bad. Do we really want the media to be dominated by the stuff? I mean, might good news not be rather … boring?

Personally, what I dislike is not bad news as such. It is the drawing of wrong conclusions from it. Yes, there has been a terrible flood in the Dominican Republic, and I want to be able to read the details of it. But this does not mean that all the people out there live all of their lives in a state of permanent Tidal Wave of Mud Terror. You think that is an exaggeration? Well, I was living in a hotel in Krakow for the first weekend of the Iraq War, the easy bit. All I had to learn about the war was BBC 24 hour news, and this was, as I am sure you all vividly remember, the exact mistake that the BBC made. Hey, here are some soldiers who have been ambushed! Ergo, Iraq is one Great Big Ambush. No, it was just an ambush, and actually, even I could deduce that, despite all the gloomy commentary, My Team was winning big. Here was a classic piece of good news that the BBC truly did misread and misreport as bad.

But unlike the good news of how well that war was actually going, a lot of good news is genuinely dull, compared to bad news.

Consider those Twin Towers, the ones they used to have in New York. The building of those Towers was quite interesting, especially if you saved up the news of their existence until suddenly … hey! … there they are! How about that!! (Perhaps one of the reasons why I was so taken by the Erotic Gherkin is that I only noticed the thing just before it got finished.) But no matter how you package it, the building of those Towers can never compare, newswise, with the extraordinary way they were destroyed.

But genuinely good news can sometimes be quite dramatic.

One regular place to look is in the Science/Technology parts of the media. There, you get things happening, or being announced, which are both genuine triumphs for humanity, and which are quite dramatic and interesting. Think of Dale Amon's postings about space travel. Testing a space rocket is an inherently dramatic procedure and the news that everything went well is still news, even if the news that it was a disaster would probably be bigger news.

Here is some good news:

An operation to remove the tonsils of a seven-year-old girl has been broadcast live on the internet.

Jessica McNeal, from Blackburn, Lancs, underwent the hour-long operation at Blackburn Royal Infirmary using a new coblation technique which lessens the patient's pain.

Michael Timms, the consultant surgeon performing the operation for East Lancashire NHS Trust, has pioneered the technique for the past four years.

It uses salt water which is turned into plasma and can cut through tissue. The technique is less painful, reduces bleeding, and has a shorter recovery time than traditional methods.

Mr Timms said: "Performed well, coblation tonsillectomy has a number of advantages over traditional techniques that significantly improves both the patient's and surgeon's experience of the procedure.

"This broadcast should help patients and surgeons understand the subject better."

The news here is doubly good. Not only is there a new surgical procedure proving its worth, and on a seven-year-old girl – cue the photos! There is also the further bit of good news, to the effect that by shoving the whole drama onto the internet, medical education is also being propelled forward. And there is just enough controversy about it all (should this really be on The Internet, question mark question mark) to fan the flames of newsworthiness. Personally I'm all for it, if only because televising a dramatic medical procedure helps to pay for it, by spreading the benefits around.

In general though, it has to be admitted that the good news in our lives just at the moment is small stuff compared to the big bad news. I've been toying with another good news posting for here, about a new brand of instant coffee a fellow Samizdatista introduced me to, even better than Nescafé Gold Blend, but I am still working on how to make it seem, you know, not silly.

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For an interesting insight into how the statist meme became so dominant, check out these comments by an Instapundit reader:

Perhaps the most pervasive way in which journalists are different from normal people is that journalists live in a world dominated by government, and they reflexively see government action as the default way to approach any problem.

. . . .

It's no accident that for the most part, the news is dominated by people whose value is largely driven by how much publicity they receive: politicians, athletes and entertainers. The people who actually make the world work - people in private industry, rank-and-file government employees and conscientious parents - are largely invisible in the news, except when they're unlucky enough to make one of the rare mistakes that reporters manage to find out about.

My reading of this is that the mainstream/elite media and the state sort of bootstrapped each other to the top of the pile, in classic one-hand-washes-the-other fashion.

The media propagated the statist meme because it was both easy and it elevated them to the degree that centralized media is parasitic (or perhaps symbiotic) with a centralized state.

The comments come just as yet another survey is released demonstrating that the denizens of American newsrooms are significantly more "liberal" (in the newfangled sense of the term, the one where the jackboot is made by Birkenstock) than the general public. Perhaps the best illustration of the whole dynamic is that a survey showing the media is significantly more hostile to President Bush than the general public went out under the title Press Going Too Easy on Bush.

You can't make this stuff up. Now, I certainly have my beefs with the current President, but the self-appointed Fourth Estate has really gotten up my nose lately. They could play an important role in society, as a necessary feedback mechanism, but they have largely abrogated that role, in my view. Thank goodness that a new, distributed feedback mechanism is emerging in the form of the blogosphere.

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Instapundit posts today on how two stories are playing out in the elite media and in the on-line world. (Aside: I know, I know, it looks incredibly lame to link to Glenn Reynolds' blog. But hey, the man has already done the heavy lifting on this issue, so why shouldn't I take advantage? I mean, he's a public utility, isn't he?)

To summarize:

The Nick Berg murder story holds all of the top ten slots for searches at Lycos and elsewhere. The elite media, if it ran the story at all, has "moved on" and renewing its obsessive focus on the Abu Ghraib story. This would certainly seem to point up, at a minimum, a disconnect between the elite media and web-savvy info consumers. The kind of disconnect that should have you purging your portfolio of media shares.

The real question is, as always in the blogosphere, what kind of uninformed speculation can I heap onto this occurrence?

First, it certainly seems to support the conclusion that substantial swathes of the elite media are not only opposed to the war in Iraq, they are shaping their publications to justify their opposition and to ensure the political defeat of those who support the war.

Second, it is striking how the elite media's opposition to the war plays out in ways that undercut the American/coalition side and give aid and comfort to the Islamofascist side. The Islamofascists, of course, want the Abu Ghraib story played up in the West and the Nick Berg murder played down in the West, and this is exactly what the elite media is doing. The phrase "useful idiots" comes to mind, although for the most part "fellow travellers" seems too strong.

For the most part. There are exceptions. I can't think of a better word for news outlets that peddle obvious fakes and frauds put forth by our enemy's crudest propagandists. I saw the fake rape pictures a couple of weeks ago, and you would have to be total naif not to see instantly that they are porn - the posing, the production values, the uniforms, the haircuts, the whole thing practically shouts "not candid photos of US servicemen."

Of some interest is the historical fact that many of Islamofascism's useful idiots were also Communism's useful idiots. Make of that what you will.

Finally, it must infuriate the media elite that, despite their most urgent efforts to make Abu Ghraib the logo of the occupation, their best and most sophisticated audience is much more interested in the Nick Berg story. This, I think, bodes well, for it demonstrates the degree to which we set our own priorities and interests, and seek information, independent of those who buy ink by the barrel.

Top down information management is defeated, yet again, by a distributed network.

UPDATE: On the fellow traveller front, we have pretty solid confirmation that the photos of alleged British abuses were faked as well.

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As a rule (well, more of a 'guideline' really) I do not fisk the 'readers letters' section of media organs.

There is no objectively good reason for me to refrain from doing so except that I regard it as bad form; rather too close to bullying for comfort. After all, the whole point of 'readers letters' sections is for the public to let off some steam and drawing attention to the wild and woolly nature of the some of the contributions hardly makes me a clever dick.

Still, this particular missive in the 'Feedback' section of the Spectator is so extravagantly barking that I am going to grant myself a (temporary) exemption:

It is an indictment of the pitiful state of our ‘democracy’ that Britain’s future role in Europe should depend on the whim of one egregious Australian-born businessman (‘The man who calls the shots’, 24 April).

I did not realise that Prime Minister Blair was an Australian-born businessman.

How to stop similar circumstances arising again? Our broadcast media — i.e. the BBC — is the envy of the world.

If that is true, then all I can say is that the world must be in a piss-poor state.

The solution is obvious: we need a British Press Corporation, an equivalent of the BBC for print media. The ‘Beep’ could run a small stable of publications from tabloids to broadsheets (and even perhaps weeklies too).

Of course!! (meaty slap to the forehead). The solution is so obvious. Damn my eyes for not thinking of it sooner!

It could be part-subsidised out of general taxation, and would therefore be more independent of the business interests whose ownership deforms the content of so much of our press.

It would have to be subsidised out of taxation. Nobody is going to voluntarily hand over hard-earned money for that crap.

Drawing as it would on the existing structure of news-gathering available to the BBC, the BPC would be cost-effective as well as provide an intelligent and informative source of news. Its competition would surely have the effect of undercutting the worst at least of the present tabloid excesses and the dominance of a handful of private individuals over the British polity.

Listen, buster, if any 'handful of private individuals' are going to have dominance over the British polity, then it is the Samizdatistas. Got it?

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Every few days, with this in mind, I trawl through whatever google has to offer under the heading of "education". Mostly, it is dreary and depressing stuff about how (a) things are terrible, and (b) it is all the fault of those other bastards, or (if it is Africa) (a) things are terrible, and (b) things are terrible. Only when it comes to Chinese people or Indian people is the education news ever very good by the time national newspapers get hold of it, and of course that only depresses other people.

So, this story made a nice change:

The quality of education and behaviour of pupils at Probus Primary School have been praised by Government inspectors.

Ofsted inspectors highlighted children's good behaviour and attitudes towards learning and the partnership with parents and the local community.

The report notes the improvements made since the last inspection and concludes that achievement is satisfactory overall and standards are rising.

It said: "Probus is providing a sound education for its pupils. There is good teaching through the school. The school is well led and managed and there is a good partnership with parents. There is a good team ethos and members of staff are supportive of each other.

"Pupils are well cared for and those with special educational needs make good progress."

What this really illustrates is probably only that whereas national newspapers like bad news, local newspapers prefer good news. The national newspaper definition of news is: whatever someone does not want printed. Local newspapers are such that whatever someone does not want printed tends not to get printed, because that someone plus all their employees and friends and relatives add up to a significant slice of the readership. Thus, local newspapers are full of sickeningly satisfactory happenings, where everything went according to plan and everyone was happy and satisfied with the outcome. The news, every time is: our readers are good people, successful people, happy people.

There is occasionally bad news, so bad that its occurrence cannot be concealed, in which case the story is how nobly our readers are coping with the situation, but on the whole, there is simply not enough bad news to go round.

Britain as a whole cranks out enough misery, conflict and personal embarrassment per day to satisfy the nationals, and of course the nationals also have a whole world of misery to contemplate beyond their nation's borders.

But Truro and Mid Cornwall, the area reported on by the newspaper that supplied this Probus Primary School story, is just too nice a place for all the news to be bad.

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In my usual stupor, this morning, before all the drugs in my constitutional cup of tea kick-started my ageing brain cells, I watched a snippet of the popular BBC children's programme, Blue Peter.

This is a perennial of tax-funded British programming, imbibed with your mother's milk, which delivers a twice-weekly compendium presented by a rotating set of three bright young things, who tour the world looking for informational opportunities for five to 15 year olds.

When I grew up with the programme these were the splendidly quirky John Noakes, the woodenly hip Peter Purves, and the prim but smouldering Lesley Judd. Ah, the things Lesley could do with a hot wet bucket of clay which would warm the confused cockles of a 12 year old boy.

So I watched this morning's programme with interest. A fresh-faced pretty female presenter wandered around a cocoa plantation in Africa explaining the cocoa pod origins of chocolate production. 'Fascinating,' I thought. There was plenty of factual information and so far a distinct lack of anti-capitalist agitation. 'What is wrong with the BBC, this morning?' I wondered.

Alas, I think the presenter could feel my disappointment at her failure to take a regressively tax-funded opportunity to try to brainwash British children into becoming politically correct. So just to make me happy she moved up into the BBC's more usual anti-capitalistic gear. This is the essence of what she said next, in front of a group of happy smiling African children:

Now this cocoa farm worker, Mary, only has primitive tools [including a machete and a pole-handled knife] to collect her cocoa pods, which I do find puzzling, but she is happy because she belongs to a co-operative. All the workers here share the co-operative's profits and are funded by the 'Fair Trade' organisation. This means that they have enough money to pay for a water pump and a school for their children. So please make sure that when you buy chocolate it is covered by the 'Fair Trade' logo, to help people like Mary, her family, and all the children you can see here.

Absolutely shameless. Leni Riefenstahl would have been proud of her. The subtext message is, of course, very clear:

Collectivism is good. Free markets are bad. Feel guilty if you buy free market chocolate.

At the end of this bright young thing's piece to camera there was a big smile and then a 'Fair Trade' photo plug for their supported brands of chocolate. This was followed by words of hearty support from an even prettier himbo back in the studio. In fact it seems the Blue Peter report is part of a concerted BBC effort to help the 'Fair Trade' cocoa campaign. That I am coerced into funding this anti-capitalist rubbish is one thing, as hopefully being over 18 years of age I can make up my own mind about such matters, but broadcasting this anti-free market poison to five year olds is morally outrageous.

So just to preserve a smidgin of balance I thought I would try to improve on what the Blue Peter presenter said this morning, particularly as she seemed so genuinely puzzled as to why Mary had nothing more than iron age tools to cut down her cocoa pods:

Now this cocoa farm worker, Mary, only has primitive tools, such as her machete and a pole-handled knife, which at first I found puzzling until I thought about it. I then realised that Mary and her family are kept deliberately poor at a bare subsistence level by two different sets of collectivists. The first corrupt set of thieves are the tyrannical political classes in Africa who routinely steal from their governmentally-controlled populations, via taxation, import tariffs, and export license corruption, to help finance their personal purchases of Swiss gold and to fund their governmental purchases of arms, which they need to keep their own people down. This deprivation by taxation, inflation, and regulation, means that African farmers are never able to save enough re-investment capital to improve their farm production methods beyond subsistence or to increase their revenue to create better lives for themselves and their families. The second group of corrupt collectivists are the politicians in the protectionist blocs, like NAFTA and the EU, who do everything they can through taxation, subsidisation, and import controls, to increase food costs for their own populations and to protect their rent-seeking farmer clients. The resulting western tax revenue is used to give large numbers of these western parasites comfortable secured incomes and to help African tyrants buy even more western weapons systems to further suppress African people through the arms supply mechanism known in these parts as 'international government aid'. So all you five year olds out there, if you really want to decrease poverty in Africa, always try to see beyond the immediately obvious problem and try to discover the underlying causative factors, which will almost always be some kind of government intervention. Free markets feed. Collectivism starves. And now back to the studio.

Now if the BBC were to broadcast that kind of propaganda, though only to adults of course, then even I would be willing to pay the BBC television license fee.

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Some time ago I posted here that the weekly British publication, The Spectator, edited by Tory MP and jolly good chap Boris Johnson, had lost some of its quality and class.

I can just about take reading Simon Jenkins on why we should stop worrying about terror, even if his comments are published on the day of the Madrid horror. I can even take reading Ross Clark on why we should learn to love speed cameras and pay inheritance tax, or learn from Sir Max Hastings as to why we British are so much finer military strategists than those awfully common Americans with their silly Apache helicopters. And of course the Spectator has the brilliant Mark Steyn, who looks increasingly uncomfortable amid the snobs, America-bashers, Murdochphobes and BBC castoffs like Rod Liddle.

But that magazine's 'High Life' columnist, Taki , is neither witty, interesting or informative. His writings frequently plummet depths I thought it impossible to tolerate in that magazine. He has got into difficulties before over his outspoken attacks on the often Jewish policymakers and intellectuals he associates with the neo-conservative movement. That of course is not necessarily proof that Taki is an anti-semite, and it is a charge one should only make with great care.

But when you read about Taki's thoughts in this week's magazine (link requires registration) on the "wallet-lifting" Richard Perle, what on earth is one to suppose Taki is getting at? ("Those People, you know, very crafty with money").

One might ask why one should care. Well, I care about the fate of what has been at times the finest magazine in the English language, a place that has inspired me with writers of such grace as the late Colin Welch and the brilliant satire of the late, and much missed, Auberon Waugh. We also need, in a healthy media world, a weekly alternative to the awful New Statesman. But the Greek boy has always been the bad smell at the back. Time for him to go. Go on Boris, make my day.

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This is the story that is all over the broadcast news tonight, and will be all over the English newspapers tomorrow:

Three Leicester City footballers have been charged with "sexual aggression" after three women claimed they were attacked at a Spanish hotel.

Paul Dickov, Frank Sinclair and Keith Gillespie, who deny the charges, will now spend another night in custody.

The judge in Cartagena said the charges were serious enough to go to trial.

We are now enduring that horrible moment when someone very famous is charged with something very serious, but when no one other than the arresting officers and the accused has the faintest idea of whether the accused are guilty or not, and when the logical thing for everyone else is to say nothing.

I can now hear the ITV news, trying desperately to turn whatever tiny scraps of information and background chit-chat they have in front of them into something portentous enough to serve the needs of this, their top story this evening. But what on earth can they say? The real writing of the story can only seriously begin when whatever court ends up being involved reaches its verdict.

Meanwhile, you have to remember just how important lots of people in England feel football to be. (A great, great many of them make our own David Carr look like a total football agnostic.) In the city of Leicester, this is the biggest news story for years. Leicester City are facing relegation from the Premier League. This could quite well finish their chances of avoiding that fate. To talk about something as trivial as the relegation of a sports team from a football league to a lower football league when some men have been charged with a crime may seem very odd. But that is what this is about, and why this is such big news here.

It is the combination of vagueness and disastrousness to something which so many people take so seriously which gives this story its special atmosphere.

With a regular disaster, like an earthquake, or a terrorist outrage, the disastrousness of the disaster is not in doubt, and there are plenty of things to say because there is actual news to report, in ghastly abundance. But not with this. Fans and other players foolish enough to open their mouths on the subject are now queueing up to say that they "do not believe" that these men would do such a thing. Others who are equally ignorant are muttering under their breath that there is no smoke without fire, and what can you expect of footballers, who are a law unto themselves and think they can get away with murder? Neither opinion is worth anything. This is why the civilised world has law courts, to replace ignorant speculations like those with disciplined investigation.

The only solid facts here are that this is very bad for Leicester City football club, and that these charges are serious.

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This is quite a little story, and with my libertarian stirrer hat on I say that the more it gets around the better, because the more it will draw attention to the existence of the libertarian journal Liberty, and of the libertarian movement generally. And when a little story gets written about in the New York Times, I guess that makes it not such a little story:

ALPINE, Tex., Feb. 16 — The first indication that Dr. Larry J. Sechrest's neighbors and students had read his article titled "A Strange Little Town in Texas" was when he began receiving death threats and obscene phone calls and his house was vandalized.

The article by Dr. Sechrest, an economics professor at Sul Ross State University, was published in the January issue of Liberty, a small libertarian magazine with a circulation of about 10,000 and only two local subscribers, one of whom is Dr. Sechrest. But it was weeks before people heard about it in remote Alpine, which is three hours from the closest Barnes & Noble, in Midland, Tex.

The article lauded the beauty of West Texas, the pleasant climate, the friendliness and tolerance of the locals. But Dr. Sechrest, who has a Ph.D. in business administration from the University of Texas, also contended that "the students at Sul Ross, and more generally, the long-term residents of the entire area, are appallingly ignorant, irrational, anti-intellectual, and, well, ... just plain stupid."

Well, death threats and obscene phone calls does sound pretty plain stupid to me, so although Sechrest may regret his candour, he has nothing to apologise for.

Sadly, Liberty seems to be one of those paper publications which is reluctant to give all its writings away on the Internet until several years have passed (which you can understand), so the actual article by Larry Secrest that caused all the fuss is not linkable to. But in addition addition to the NYT piece linked to above, there's also this from the Desert-Mountain Times:

Sechrest said he regretted publishing parts of the article that have caused such a strong reaction in the community.

"I thought there were two libertarians in the community," he said. "If that’s true, I thought, ‘Who will ever see it’ – it never crossed my mind it would cause such an uproar. If I knew the reaction it would cause, would I have done it? Of course not."

Ah, but the libertarian movement is bigger and more pervasive than you think!

The New York Times piece ends on a positive note:

Last week Dr. Sechrest said he had begun to receive more positive e-mail and phone calls. He noted in particular an e-mail message from a former student.

"As I read your article I found myself laughing out loud and saying things like 'amen' and 'true,' " the former student wrote. "At the same time I felt somewhat guilty because it really did offend people I really care about. There's no denying these are legitimate concerns. The lack of interest in anything beyond Brewster County lines also baffled me."

The student added, "It is my sincere hope that all involved can extract what is true and good from your article, and get over the rest."

The message was signed, "A former clod."

Maybe getting a not unsympathetic write-up in the New York Times will stir Alpine into being less cloddish, and Sul Ross State University into improving its standards. It certainly sounds as if that could be the longer term outcome. Maybe Sechrest has done the whole area a favour, in other words. If he has, it would not be the first time in human history that criticism was met first with anger, but then with a resolve by the people criticised to do better in the future.

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For a wonderful account of the BBC's world famous dispassion and impartiality, check this out.

Some views are more welcome than others it seems.

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We Brians must stick together, so here is a plug for this campaign by Brian Whiley (linked to by b3ta.com) to replace either Greg Dyke or That Bloke From The City as BBC DG or BBC Chairman, whichever.

What was Gilligan's crime? That, early in the morning – at a time when nobody except insomniacs and farmers would be listening – a bleary-eyed journalist embellished a report that, in all honesty, probably needed it. My first duty would be to defend to the last BBC journalists from a Government that feels the need to hound reporters whose only error has been to make a boring story a little more interesting by inventing conversations that never took place.

I particularly like the promotional products peddled on this website, which downplay the "Whiley" aspect of the situation in a way that will surely meet with widespread approval here.

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It made me chuckle when I received a cheque for £50 ($85) from the BBC for my recent appearance on BBC News 24. It is rare that I get both the satisfaction of responding to a question pertaining to the Kilroy-Silk affair on live TV that, to paraphrase, "Surely this was not objective journalism by Kilroy-Silk" by saying "Surely you are not going to claim that the BBC itself is purely objective and does not take editorial positions in issues?"... and then to get paid by the BBC for saying it!

But then it dawned on me that £50 is less than half of the TV tax I am forced to pay annually to fund that monstrosity... and in any case they were only giving me back my own damn money. Oh well.

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Despite taking a big one amidships with the Hutton Report, the BBC is still at it. If anyone happens to be watching right now, they are showing a 'documentary' about 'How the Americans and British got it Wrong'.

The documentary consists primarily of every single photo or film clip they have of civilian deaths. Nearly every segment begins with the line 'The Americans were fearful ...'. I'm not exaggerating and given the calibre of writers at the BBC it cannot concievably be accidental. It is an intentional construction of a rhetorical framework.

These people hate us with a white fury I have difficulty fathoming. I finally had to just walk away from it.

I wonder if I can sue the BBC for Hate speech against Americans? Yeah, that's the ticket. I have Rights too! The EU says so!

A reader has noted that I was completely incorrect and the show was actually on ITV\\\Ch4, not BBC. Mea Culpa. I was certain the TV had been set to BBC and the announcer's style was so BBC that I just assumed it was. My apologies for this error.

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In today's Telegraph Charles Moore has an excellent summary of what is wrong with the BBC, its deeply entrenched institutional bias and its undeserved influence:

It seems to me that the BBC today is the enemy of conservative culture in Britain. This is not immediately obvious, because elements of the BBC's output, particularly on radio, are justly loved by many conservative-minded people. But it is nevertheless the case. The few glorious programmes are used as the camouflage behind which political correctness can advance.

How does the BBC approach subjects such as American power, organised religion, marriage, the EU, the Middle East, the actions of the Armed Forces, the rights of householders to defend their property against burglars, public spending, choice of schools, or any perceived inequality?

Who will be more politely treated - Gerry Adams or Norman Tebbit, a spokesman for Hizbollah or Paul Wolfowitz? If someone appears on a programme described as a "property developer" with someone described as a "green activist", who will get the rougher ride? If a detective drama features a feisty lesbian and a chilly aristocrat, which is more likely to be the murderer?

And when it comes to a war - it applied both in the Falklands and in Iraq - the BBC takes a pride in being what it calls "even-handed", which means inventing moral equivalence between the forces of our country and those of aggressive dictatorships.

None of these attitudes is unique to the BBC, but what is unique is the BBC's power to impose them. In order legally to have a television in your home, you have to pay the BBC £116 a year. This allows it to dominate virtually all forms of broadcast media, many of which have nothing to do with any idea of "public service broadcasting".

Out of the deference that this power instils, senior BBC executives are paid more than anyone else in the entire British public service. Greg Dyke, the now ex-director-general and editor-in-chief who seems to have been too busy to edit, got £464,000 last year. BBC executives are like the princes of the Church of England before the commutation of the tithes. They are rich and powerful, and no doubt they mean well, but there comes a time when non-conformists get fed up with paying for their sermons and their privileges.

That time is surely near. We must find a way of abolishing or hugely reducing the licence fee while reviving the core of public service broadcasting. How half-witted of Tory Britain to hand this chance to Tony Blair, instead of claiming it for itself.

Apologies for such a long quote but apart from a tiny disagreement about the license fee - it should be scrapped, not just reduced - I have nothing to add.

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The Director-General of the BBC, Greg Dyke, has now resigned.

Mr Dyke's decision to step down came 20 hours after BBC Chairman Gavyn Davies resigned following the Hutton Report.

An emotional Mr Dyke told BBC staff at their central London headquarters: "I don't want to go. But if in the end you screw up you have to go."

What with Gavyn Davies gone and now Mr Dyke, the corporation will hopefully be a bit less 'hideously white'.

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I am just watching the evening news that reverberates with the release of the Hutton report . It exonerates the government of lying about their 45-minute claim and pretty much damns the BBC.

1. Editorial system at BBC was defective in allowing Mr Gilligan's report to go to air without editors seeing a script
   
2. BBC management failed to make an examination of Mr Gilligan's notes of the interview with Dr Kelly
   
3. There was a defect in the BBC's management system relating to the way complaints were investigated
   
4. BBC governors failed to investigate Mr Gilligan's actions properly

Channel 4 were gloating relishing that the BBC is in "disarray", "deep crisis" and words to that effect. They read extracts from the letter by the BBC Chairman who acknowledged that the trust the viewers had in the BBC had been undermined. I'd say! And add that it is not due to the Hutton report but by institutionally engrained bias and arrogance that one comes to expect from public institutions with no accountability. The BBC governors are admitting that the 'procedure failed' and are considering resigning en masse. Oh, the Chairman has already resigned. I think we will get over it.

Now Andrew Neil a BBC presenter, is complaining that Lord Hutton is an anti-journalist judge. Oh yes, the BBC never errs. And the government is not right either - look they still haven't found any WMD!!!! The report favour the establisment, he keeps mumbling. I expect any minute they are going to lead him out to meet nice men with a lovely long-sleeved jacket.

The political impact of publicly unveiling just how political and biased the BBC is will be considerable. I am not sure that the result will be to our liking. The government is not going to disband the BBC but will call for a full-scale regulation and the license fee will become an even less conspicous form of taxation.

Update: This is such major news that I have been wondering whether any other news have been 'buried' today. I think I found it.

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Journalism is a dog-eat-dog business these days. Lack of talent is no longer enough. No, you have to do something truly original and spectacular in order to get noticed.

Take, for example, Osama Bin Laden. After years of fruitless struggle (and the customary mound of polite rejection letters) he has finally been rewarded with his own column in the Guardian:

The west's occupation of our countries is old, but takes new forms. The struggle between us and them began centuries ago, and will continue. There can be no dialogue with occupiers except through arms. Throughout the past century, Islamic countries have not been liberated from occupation except through jihad. But, under the pretext of fighting terrorism, the west today is doing its utmost to besmirch this jihad, supported by hypocrites.

Employing him was clearly the right decision. Who else can boast such an enticing combination of political commentary, history and anti-Western rhetoric? This is sizzling stuff. Looks like the Guardian has landed itself a new champion of social justice and the environment.

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There's a curious use of a word to be found here, or there is now, as I concoct this, at about 4.40 pm on Sunday afternoon, London time. Maybe it will change soon. I refer to the little heading which leads to this story. The story itself is headed "Blair praises UK troops in Basra" and I have no problem with that. But the bit at the main website that leads to this story says, on the left, just under where it says "NEWS":

Blair rallies UK troops in Basra.

Rallies. Yes, you read that right. Evidently some twit at the BBC thinks that Britain's army has just suffered some sort of defeat.

Please understand that I am not in any way blaming Blair for this absurd word, merely the fool who put it up at the BBC website, and as I say it may soon vanish.

These people are starting seriously to believe their own bullshit.

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There were big anti-terror/pro-democracy demonstrations in Baghdad today. Glenn Reynolds points out they were noticed grudgingly, when at all, by the 'professional' 'media'. A few years ago this would have meant the story didn't exist.

Times change.

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Greg Dyke, the BBC director general, attacked American reporting of the war in Iraq and derided news organisations that were prepared to bang the drum for one side or the other. Mr Dyke, who was speaking after collecting an honorary award at the International Emmys in New York on Monday night, said the Iraq coverage illustrated the difference between the BBC and US networks:

For any news organisation to act as a cheerleader for government is to undermine your credibility. They should be balancing their coverage, not banging the drum for one side or the other. If that were true in Britain, the BBC would have failed in its duty.

He cited research showing that of 840 experts interviewed on US news outlets during the war only four opposed the conflict.

Yes, unlike the BBC that has accomplished what we would call a pervasive bias, an affliction where the reporters cannot even tell just how loudly they are banging the drum for one side. This is the news outlet that regarded the Iraqi Minister of Information a source on a par with the Command Centre. Oh, and whose reporters kept insisting that there are not US troops in Baghdad when the rest of the world were watching their tanks moving down the streets of central Baghdad.

I came across an interesting report by River Path Associates that looks at the BBC Reporters' Log and examines evidence of bias in the BBC's reporting during the Iraq conflict. They chose the Reporters' Log since it is immediate and reflects assumptions of the reporters themselves. (I would argue that the more pronounced bias was at the editorial level, it was interesting that some reporters who posted to the Reporters' Log complained that their raw reporting was given a rather different spin by editors in the UK.)

The report analyses all 1343 posts to the BBC Reporters’ Log. The majority of posts contained factual statements or accounts of reporters’ personal experiences. Others discussed strategy, Coalition and Iraqi claims, and the progress of the war. The authors focused on these latter posts, allocating them to 8 different categories:

1. Praise for Coalition strategy
   
2. Criticism of Coalition strategy
   
3. Praise for Iraqi strategy
   
4. Criticism of Iraqi strategy
   
5. Coalition successes
   
6. Coalition setbacks
   
7. Scepticism over Coalition claims
   
8. Scepticism over Iraqi claims

They concluded, among other things, that:

A quantitative analysis of entries in the Reporter’s Log indicates that most reports are factual in nature, and do not contain comment or speculation on the nature and progress of the war.

1. Reports that do include comment and speculation, however, are likely to be critical of Coalition strategy and to report Coalition setbacks. Reporters are also more likely to be sceptical about Coalition claims than Iraqi claims. This provides some evidence of bias.
   
2. It is notable that many of the more provocative reports are made by the BBC’s most high profile journalists, especially by those based in Baghdad. While most BBC journalists concentrate on objective factual reporting, others habitually adopt a more confrontational role. On occasion, this leads to exaggerated, speculative or incorrect stories, which seldom receive any correction.
   
3. These findings call into question BBC attempts to try and originate more stories, in order to set the news agenda. Questions arise over whether the BBC can 'create' the news, while holding to the standards of impartiality and independence which its Director General sets for it.

There you have it. And for more juicy evidence there is, of course, Biased BBC, which, by the way, has also something to say about Mr. Dykes arrogant comments about the US media.

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I received an email from Dave Winer who is fighting a battle for an Internet free from interference from Big Media pointing to a post on Harvard Law School blog*. Here is the message:

I would love to see their candidates [ed. Clarke and Dean campaigns] make an impassioned plea to keep the Internet free of interference from the entertainment industry. I would welcome this for two reasons.

1. First, I'm part of a constituency, like many others, who are looking for a candidate to vote for who supports our primary issue. Nothing unusual about that, easy to understand.

2. But as important, it would signal that the candidate is not beholden to the media companies. I would happily give money to candidates for ads that warn that the media industry is trying to rob us of our future, and explains how important it is to protect the independence of the Internet. Use the media industry channels to undermine their efforts to the control channels they don't own, yet.

...

If you agree, pass this idea on to each of the campaigns and to other voters. Let's use the Internet to keep the Internet free, in a positive way. Make a clear statement, I will only vote for a candidate who supports a free Internet. And it's a open source idea, Bush, Kerry, Edwards, Gephardt, Kucinich, Moseley-Braun, Sharpton, et al are welcome to use it.

"Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet."

Although I could not give a flying f*** about political campaigns and presidential elections, I am very much concerned about the Internet remaining free from political intereference. Dave Winer is correct in drawing attention to this pointing out how the symbiotic relationship between politicians and the media can spell danger for Internet as we know it today. Quite apart from the argument about the impact of pundit blogs on political discourse in the traditional media, Internet is undeniably changing balance of power in many areas in ways mostly unpalatable to politicians and the established media.

*There is a disclaimer that points out that he is speaking for himself and not on behalf of Harvard Law School or the Berkman Center for the Internet & Society.

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The BBC has appointed a "Middle East policeman" to oversee its coverage of the region amid mounting allegations of anti-Israeli bias.

Malcolm Balen, a former editor of the Nine O'Clock News, has been recruited in an attempt to improve the corporation's reporting of the Middle East and its relationship with the main political players. Mr Balen, who left the BBC three years ago, will work full-time with the official title of "senior editorial adviser".

Another way to describe this is the expression 'putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound'. Yeah, that will fix it.

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An article in today's Fox News contains an interesting numerical statement, one of those 'gee whiz' comparisons we so often see:

Compounding Aziz's information, U.S. intelligence agencies have been going over millions of documents — 9 1/2 miles' worth if laid end to end — left behind by Saddam's government after its sudden collapse around April 10.

There is just one problem: their math is wrong. There are 5,280 feet in a mile; and 12 inches in a foot. Since Fox is an American news outlet, the paper size can be assumed as 8.5x11 inches. So we have, using the archaic system of measurements based on lengths of a long dead English Monarch's appendages:

9.5 miles x 5,280 feet/mile x 12 inches/foot = 601,920 inches.

If we take 'end to end' literally, we get:

601,920 inches / 11 inches/sheet = 54,720 sheets.

This falls a few short of millions. Oh well... let's try again. We'll give them the benefit of the doubt and line the pages up side by side instead of end to end:

601,920 inches / 8.5 inches/sheet = 70,814 sheets.

Either there are only .07 million pages or someone can't handle simple math.

Any engineer who grew up using a Pickett (sliderule) would have immediately seen the unreasonableness of the statement.

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Our Man in Basra (now back in the UK) has some thoughts on the difference between how the media reported Gulf War 1991 and how they reported Gulf War 2003 and why that matters.

During the Gulf War of 1991, media reporting went something like this: About a month of showing pictures, entirely controlled by the US military, of Allied airplanes flying over Iraq, followed by the announcement by General Schwarzkopf that the war was over and we had won.

Although they had their suspicions, none of the journalists, all kept behind the lines in Riyadh, knew that Allied troops had crossed the border into Iraq until three days after the ground offensive had started, the Republican Guard in Kuwait had been virtually destroyed, and Schwarzkopf announced victory. This severely limited the opportunity for the media to criticise the conduct of the ground war.

The above is a simplification, but it covers in essence the way the media war was fought in 1991 – by the journalists out there, by the military out there, and as it was seen by everyone else on their TVs. Naturally, the military regarded this as a great success. Equally naturally, the media regarded it as a disaster. The viewing public generally seemed satisfied, bar a few dedicated peaceniks, who wanted pictures of military screw-ups.

Two factors therefore set the context for the reporting of Gulf War 2003. First, the media were determined not to allow the military to keep them away from 'the story', the way they were kept away in 1991.

Second, the military recognised that advances in media technology meant that it would be impossible to keep the media off the battlefield. It is now possible to transmit broadcast quality footage direct from the front with a device the size of a suitcase. During Gulf War 1991, the equivalent kit needed something the size of a large campervan. In the future the media will probably have more RPVs (remote piloted vehicles – i.e. the American Predator) flying over the battlefield with cameras than the military, not least because compared to almost all military budgets other than the American one, the media have far more money to spend.

During the Kosovo conflict, there were more freelance reporters with hand-held video cameras (or as the mainstream media think of them: rogue reporters) than 'official' ones. The military in 2003 therefore realised that they could not keep the media off the battlefield, and instead they had to try to control what the media showed, by feeding them the stories that the military wanted told.

This is not just a matter of propaganda. Third World armies such as that of the Iraqis have no hope of getting aircraft in the air against the US, but they can make great use of media reports as a form of reconnaissance. Imagine if in World War II every single movement of the forward Allied platoons was broadcast immediately by the BBC. This would have helped the Germans a lot, given their lack of air power.

The military solution was to offer journalists the opportunity to be "embedded" in front line units. The military thought this was good because they would thus have some influence over what got reported. They expected that journalists would start identifying with the soldiers they were with. They also thought that this would be attractive to news organisations, as it would enable them to go straight to the front with some degree of protection.

How the journalists reacted to this was very important in explaining how the war was reported. Experienced war reporters (Kate Adie, John Simpson) refused to be embedded, as they saw it as compromising their journalistic integrity. Unlike in World War II, such journalists see themselves as separate from the nations they come from, and believe they should report in the manner of impartial bystanders (though this does not stop them being biased).

Therefore the media organisations sent inexperienced journalists with no knowledge of the military or of war whatsoever. The result was that three types of journalism came out of the war.

Reports from embedded journalists.
These were a partial success for the military, as the journalists did indeed identify with the soldiers they were with. During the course of the conflict, the embedded journalists gradually moved from referring to "allied soldiers" to "our soldiers". However, the embedded journalists were rarely in a position to get very exciting pictures because not much of a modern battle, still less a modern war, makes for exciting pictures.

In Wellington's time, weapons were short range, and everyone could see everyone. Now, if you get seen, you get killed. This phenomenon is known as the "empty battlefield". The enemy is there, but you can't see him. An embedded front line journalist, just like a front line soldier, only sees a tiny and probably very misleading fragment of the battlefield.

More importantly, the embedded journalists understood nothing of the subject they were reporting. It is a strange fact that while any major media outlet would immediately fire their fashion correspondents for not knowing about the smallest detail of the doings of Gucci or Louis Vuitton, most defence correspondents have not even the most basic understanding of military organisation, or of the conduct of military operations. This severely irritated the military, and misled the public.

Two examples: The British failure to take Basra immediately was described as due to heavy resistance. In reality, resistance was light and was not the military problem. The British stopped in an attempt to minimise Iraqi civilian casualties.

Similarly, when the Americans paused during their drive on Baghdad, embedded journalists and their editors described this as if it was a major setback. In fact it was simply a routine matter of re-supply and reorganisation before the final offensive. This would have been obvious to anyone with even the slightest military knowledge.

Reports from experienced war reporters.
The experienced war reporters, having refused to be embedded, were generally in the wrong place. The classic example of this is John Simpson, who went to the north. There had been a plan for war in the north, but the Turks vetoed it. The result was that Simpson, who had been in enough real wars to know how they worked, was forced to try to manufacture stories from a very minor front. When the Simpson convoy got bombed, it was dramatic, but in the context of the war it was unimportant. But it was the only story Simpson had, so it got a lot of notice.

Reports from freelance reporters.
They took more casualties than the media regulars, and I think they even took more casualties than the Allied armies. This was largely because they drove around the front of the battlefield in exactly the same vehicles that the Iraqi fedayeen were using, and then acted surprised when they found themselves getting shot at. Amateur journalists with no understanding of the dangers of the war may by luck and by numbers get the best pictures, perhaps even a few of the best stories, but they are very poorly equipped either mentally or organisationally to put those stories into a wider context.

The overall result of all this is that the view of the war shown by the media to the general public was possibly the most inaccurate depiction of the progress of a war that there has ever been. This at a time when news gathering and communications technology has never been more sophisticated. This proves the axiom that the successful Western military have all learned: no matter how shiny the kit, what matters is the ability of those using it.

(To put the above into context see my previous article. Regardless of what individual journalists may have felt, as far as the media as a whole was concerned, none of this matters. Gulf War 2003 was a great success. They sold a lot of stories.)

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'Our man in Basra' is back in the UK, with some first hand stories and a different perspective on what is going on both in Iraq and in the media. His first post (out of three planned so far) is about his view of the media and why they report the events in Iraq the way they do.

Most people have an implicit, nebulous, and generally unthought through understanding of the media and what their job is. It has to do something with getting the facts and reporting the truth or at least the reality to the best of their abilities. The media is a sort of civilian intelligence agency. This is how the military, in particular, view them and when the media are not reporting the facts, they are seen as failing in their job.

The media do not see their job in this light at all. Their job is to find and sell stories. Of course, these should not be completely divorced from the facts, but facts are merely the raw materials of the stories. More importantly, the media do not feel obliged to report all the facts, especially in a place like Iraq, where there is either very intense competition among reporters and therefore not much time to investigate the story in detail. Alternatively, the interest is fading a bit, so it is not worth investing the time. Either way, the result is the same.

What has become obvious to me while in Basra and helped me understand the media better is that they have now decided what their story is in Iraq. They have signed up this story as their product before they even arrive. They are not there to research 'the facts' - they are merely looking to illustrate their story.

If they arrive in Basra and find a huge drug selling ring inside the British Army, they will report it, because it confirms their preconception of disarray in Allied ranks. If they find that 99 percent of Iraqis support what the British Army is doing, they will not report that, as it does not fit their meta-context within which their story was created. From the individual's point of view, it is hard to be the one journalist telling a different story to all the other journalists. Mark Steyn manages that and that is why he is the beloved of the blogosphere.

Exceptions nothwithstanding, it is therefore pointless to criticise journalists for not publishing the facts. This would be like criticising a soldier for fighting the wrong battle. A soldier does not get to choose his battles. He fights the ones he is in. You can criticise him for being a soldier. And you can criticise a journalists for being a journalist. But once that choice has been made, there is no sense in complaining about a journalist behaving like a journalist.

This is why the internet in general and blogs in particular have done so well during the war, and are continuing to do well in balancing out the negative reporting on the developments in Iraq.

This is not to say that blogs do not posses their own meta-contexts, but in the case of the blogosphere this is not a bug, but a feature. In blog totality, they bring a variety of different meta-contexts to bear. There will be some that are open to the real facts, because for them, the real facts fit. It just so happens that the official media have meta-contexts that cannot accommodate recent and current reality in Iraq, while those of many bloggers do.

The difference between the media and the blogosphere is reinforced by the emphasis on pictures in the modern media, especially during the war itself. Every story must have a picture, and the reality is that with no picture, there is no story. The picture comes first, the story is then attached to the picture.

I can think of an example most of the readers will probably remember: The British Army has Basra surrounded and is making progress everywhere with very few casualties.

There is no picture to illustrate that. The most the media can show you is a picture of a couple of tired soldiers in a foxhole, because most of the time, that is what they were doing. Don't hold the front page. (Note: This is true. The soldiers were in a foxhole, and they were tired. But this tells you nothing about progress on Basra. This is like trying to understand what France looks like by being shown a picture of a street lamp in Bordeaux.)

Meanwhile, an American self-propelled gun has an ammunition accident and explodes. This is a great picture, and it will therefore be shown repeatedly. What you cannot show is the fact that this did not matter to the war effort. The Americans replace the kit. The barrage continues uninterrupted. Nothing important is illustrated by the picture that contributes to understanding of the situation. But, it is a great picture. And it is the picture that becomes the story, not the 'big picture', for which there is no actual picture.

Can you blame the media for this? They do this because people like to look at pictures and will 'buy' more news, if they are interesting to look at. The great advantage blogs have is that they do not have to sell their stories the same way. Therefore they can be more interested in telling the truth as they see it and fill in the niche that the media are leaving wide open.

My impression based on my experience of the Iraqi reality, media reporting and the blogosphere before and after my stay in Basra is that both people 'in the know' and people who care are starting to trust blogs more than they trust the mainstream media.

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Samizdata.net often makes references to the importance of the 'meta-context' in explaining and determining events around us. A question to consider: What would happen if the mainstream media were somehow forced to refer to Saddam's old regime by its own official title, which is The Arab National Socialist Party or Arab NAZI Party? What a thought…

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I have just heard a reporter on the BBC 'Newsnight' show describe the European Common Agricultural Policy as an expensive 'boondoggle'.

I cannot recall ever having heard that term used in the mainstream British press before. Is that a first?

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There's an article in today's New York Times, an article about another article, in Homes & Gardens. But follow that Homes & Gardens link and you won't find any mention of this article, because it was published in 1938 and was about Adolf Hitler's "Bavarian retreat".

The predominant color scheme of Hitler's "bright, airy chalet" was "a light jade green." Chairs and tables of braided cane graced the sun parlor, and the Führer, "a droll raconteur," decorated his entrance hall with "cactus plants in majolica pots."

Such are the precious and chilling observations in an irony-free 1938 article in Homes & Gardens, a British magazine, on Hitler's mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps. A bit of arcana, to be sure, but one that has dropped squarely into the current debate over the Internet and intellectual property. This file, too, is being shared.

The resurrection of the article can be traced to Simon Waldman, the director of digital publishing at Guardian Newspapers in Britain, who says he was given a vintage issue of the magazine by his father-in-law. Noticing the Hitler spread, which doted on the compound's high-mountain beauty ("the fairest view in all Europe") at a time when the Nazis had already gobbled up Austria, Mr. Waldman scanned the three pages and posted them on his personal Web site last May. They sat largely unnoticed until about three weeks ago, when Mr. Waldman made them more prominent on his site and sent an e-mail message to the current editor of Homes & Gardens, Isobel McKenzie-Price, pointing up the article as a historical curiosity.

Ms. McKenzie-Price, citing copyright rules, politely requested that he remove the pages. Mr. Waldman did so, but not before other Web users had turned the pages into communal property, like so many songs and photographs and movies and words that have been illegally traded for more than a decade in the Internet's back alleys.

Still, there was a question of whether the magazine's position was a stance against property theft or a bit of red-faced persnicketiness.

Now this episode could be turned into yet another intellectual property comment fest, and if that's what people want, fine, go ahead. But what interests me is the ineptness of the commercial Homes & Gardens response, their woeful neglect of a major business opportunity. An honest response from them about their reluctance to get involved in political judgements of the many and varied political people whose houses they have featured in their pages over the decades, and about all the other famous (and infamous) people whose homes they've written about over the years, together with a website pointing us all to their archives, might surely have served their commercial purposes far better, I would have thought.

This might have morphed into a discussion of the comparably fabulous pads occupied by other famous monster-criminal-dictators (including some featured in Homes & Gardens, of the exact degree of opulence/disgustingness of the homes of the Russian and Chinese Communist apparatchiks, but of their far greater reluctance (when compared to openly inegalitarian despots like Hitler) to reveal their living arrangements to the world, in the pages of such publications as Homes & Gardens. There might also have been some quite admiring further thoughts on the nice way that Hitler had arranged matters for himself, from the domestic point of view, the way the design of the house made maximum use of the view of the mountains, etc., etc. It does sound like a really nice place.

Such a discussion could surely have been combined with a robust defence by Homes & Gardens of their intellectual property rights under existing law, and in a way that might have been to their further commercial advantage. They might have simply reprinted the entire piece in a current issue, together with their current comments about it.

But no. Down go the shutters. And an opportunity to bring Homes & Gardens to the non-contemptuous attention of a whole new generation of readers, instead of to its contemptuous attention, is missed. Or is about to be missed.

This posting of mine may now seem like a typical example of the media, in this case a blog, telling some wretched victim of a media frenzy (such as this story now surely is) that they "now have the opportunity to tell their side of the story", to yet another bit of the same damned media, who will then slant that new bit of the story as cruelly as they have slanted every other bit of it. But that isn't how this part of the media works. If you take the minimum bit of trouble you need to take (e.g. by setting up your own blog), you really can, these days, "tell your side of the story" in a manner over which you can have editorial control. Be interesting. Be honest. Don't be boring. Follow rules like that, and you can influence all stories about you in a very big way, because any decent journalist will want to refer to anything you have to say, simply to prove that he is on top of the story.

The same new media world which makes it impossible for you to snuff out the original article (still less the media frenzy about the original article), no matter how much the law may be on your side, also makes it impossible for you to be silenced, unless you silence yourself.

As the New York Times piece concludes:

For all of that, though, IPC Media's unwillingness to discuss even the content of the Hitler article is puzzling to Mr. Waldman. This skeleton was abruptly yanked from the Homes & Gardens closet, yes, but the article reflects more about the mind of aristocratic Britain in 1938 – well known to have given Hitler the benefit of the doubt – than it does about the magazine itself. Even the American press noted the beauty of Hitler's compound, including The New York Times, which on Sept. 18, 1938, wrote that the chalet was "simple in its appointments" and that it commanded "a magnificent highland panorama."

Posting these pages online "doesn't damage Homes & Garden's reputation," Mr. Waldman said. "In fact, putting them up, along with a letter from the editor explaining a bit about them, could be a very positive thing for them to do."

I do admit that, done wrongly, such a letter might only fan the flames of the story, but what are the alternatives? Either you feed your genuine opinion of what is being said about you into the frenzy, or you don't. The frenzy still happens. The situation is either: definitely bad – or: it could vary anywhere from bad through okay considering and we held up our end, and onwards and upwards to downright excellent and we made a stack more money this year than we ever expected to, and all because of something rather stupid we said about Hitler in 1938.

Maybe in the next few days Homes & Gardens will, under the pressure of events, change their tune, and end up singing the one I here recommend for them. But my guess is they'll say to themselves, better play it safe.

But my point is: safe isn't safe these days. There's only truthful and positive and risky, and evasive and negative and risky. The biggest risk being that you turn your back on all the gains you might have won if you'd played your hand right.

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Given the trademark timorousness of the British Conservative Party, I must grudgingly concede that this is something of a brave pronouncement by their standards:

The Conservatives are to propose that the television licence fee should be halved as part of a radical overhaul of the role of the BBC.

Why 'halved'? Who does that help? What does that achieve? Why not scrap the iniquitous television tax altogether? 'Half' indeed. Pah! Presumably they don't feel quite bold enough to go the whole hog.

I see an upside and a downside here. The upside is that I think this is the first time that the BBC's looting rights have been publicly challenged in the mainstream. That's a start. But it is only a start.

The downside is that the Conservatives cannot be entirely trusted to see through even this lily-livered compromise. All it takes is a Guardian op-ed denouncing them as rabid fascists for them to drop the idea like a hot brick and run away.

Even if that were not the case, the Conservatives actually have to be back in power in order to effect their semi-decent idea and the prospects of that happening are looking dimmer by the day.

'Auntie' is still a long way from threatened.

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The latest Free Life Commentary is the occasional essay series written and e-published by the Libertarian Alliance's Sean Gabb. In the latest, number 112, he descibes how he yesterday spent An Afternoon with Tony Martin:

Since time immemorial, on the third Thursday in September, Thame in Oxfordshire has hosted what is now the largest agricultural fair in the country. From all over England people come to buy and sell things and to see one another. There are tractor displays, and cows, and horses, and stalls selling clothing and food and drink, and vast car parks for the thousands of people who attend.

I was there yesterday at the invitation of the BBC. Bill Heine, a populist libertarian from America, has a show with Radio Oxford, and is in the habit of getting me on air every week or so for five minutes at a time. Yesterday, he wanted me not on the end of a telephone, but in person. Without offering the usual fee that I charge for leaving home, he wanted me to drive for a round trip of 300 miles to spend an hour live on air discussing rural crime and the right to self defence. For that distance and that time, regardless of fees, I would normally have refused. However, this was different. One of the other guests was to be Tony Martin.

He is the farmer who shot two thieves in August 1999, killing one and wounding the other. He was put on trial for murder and convicted. On appeal, his conviction was changed to manslaughter, and he was eventually released on Friday the 8th August this year, having spent more than three years in prison. He could have been released last year, but the authorities argued at the parole hearings that his lack of repentance made him a continuing danger to any thieves who might try to break into his home. He is presently facing a tort action for damages from the thief he neglected to kill – the man is claiming for loss of earnings and for reduced sexual function. His legal fees are being charged to the tax payers.

This is a case that has at times filled me and many other people with incandescent rage. It is the perfect summary of all that is wrong with modern England. Now, I was invited to meet the man at the centre of the case. Let alone driving – I might have walked the entire circuit of the M25 to be with him. So off I went.

And so should you, by reading the whole thing. Sean took photographs of the event, or persuaded others to take photos in those cases where he was a photographee. Sean, to those who have known him at all long, looks impressively slim, while Tony Martin looks pleasingly plump despite his ordeal by injustice, and subsequently by celebrity.

The piece may be about a rather doleful subject, namely injustice and official stupidity. Nevertheless I found that reading it made me feel quite cheerful – cheerful that such men as Tony Martin exist, cheerful that I have a friend like Sean Gabb who is prepared to go to all that trouble just to lend him moral support and then to write about it, and cheerful that I now have the chance to give the whole event another little boost, thanks to Samizdata.

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Peter Hitchens, the arch-conservative (small-c) journalist and detester of Blairite Britain, might be thought on the surface to have a few things in common with the scribes at this blog. Well, this article in The Spectator in which he defends the British Broadcasting Corporation, should nail that idea in short order.

Hitchens - brother of maverick left-liberal fellow journalist Christopher - shares with many people a widespread loathing of the BBC, the trashiness of its downmarket programmes, the bias of its news service, and so forth. And yet he is fiercely opposed to abolishing the BBC's licence fee, the tax which is imposed on all current purchasers of television sets to fund that organisation.

Indeed, Hitchens seems to bemoan the rise of commercial television, cable and satellite outlets, as having created pressures on the BBC to dumb down. He yearns for the days before the mid-1950s when the BBC had a total monopoly on broadcasting. He seems to be saying that the BBC is okay so long as it is run in the way he likes. It is totally outside his frame of mental reference to imagine how quality television, however defined, can thrive in a market where consumers pay out of their own free will.

To be fair, he says the BBC should openly allow its broadcasters to admit their political biases in full rather than cover them up under a pretence of impartiality, but also ensure that for each avowed leftwing journalist, there should be a counterpart of a conservative. This may sound quite an improvement, but it is entirely unrealistic to suppose that the programme makers who run the BBC in its present privileged state would concede such ground. The beast cannot be tamed. It must be consigned to the abbatoir.

There is a broader point. Even if the BBC was a genuine paragon of truth, objectivity and high culture, its licence fee would still be unjustified. It is a tax and increasingly hard to justify in a world of diverse broadcasting channels, not to mention the Internet.

In his great book, The Constitution of Liberty, the late FA Hayek wrote in his final chapter, "Why I am Not a conservative." Hitchens' article is a good reminder to me why I am of the same view as the great Austrian economist.

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Chief Wiggles is is on the warpath. I wouldn't approach him too closely today if I were a reporter.

He's absolutely right. The correspondents in Iraq are lying to us by choosing to report only the negatively spectacular. It's an inherently false view and doesn't help anyone understand what is actually going on.

I personally saw the same thing happen here in Belfast. I can remember more than one lovely peaceful day on which I found out from the international news there had been rioting a mile away from where I live. From what I have heard, there were times when reporters outnumbered rioters. You can do wonders with the right camera angle.

You see, reporters are like flies. The entire forest can be full of sunlight through leaves and the smell of spring flowers... but they will manage to find and congregate on that pile the bear left behind in the back of its' dark den.

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Sweden's broadcasting watchdog was censuring an Oprah Winfrey talk show for showing bias toward a U.S. military attack on Iraq. The censure means Swedish television network TV4, which broadcast the show in February, must publish the decision but there are no legal or financial penalties. Annelie Ulfhielm, an official of Sweden's Broadcasting Commission, said:

Different views were expressed, but all longer remarks gave voice to the opinion that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States and should be the target of attack.

The Swedish government strongly opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, saying it lacked a U.N. Security Council mandate. A TV4 spokesman said the Oprah Winfrey show usually drew an audience of about 100,000-140,000 Swedes, making it one of Sweden's more popular day-time television programs.

Just as people were getting carried away with the NO result of the Swedish referendum on the euro, the above news items is a timely reminder of the fact that the Swedes are even further down the statist route than most of Europe. A frightening thought indeed. Obviously, the Swedish 'authorities' felt that they had to 'protect' the country from the US imperialism as perpetrated by the one and only Oprah. Something's rotten in the state of...er... Sweden?

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Posting looks as if it may be thin here today, so a quick comment on the economics of the internet.

The usual story is that the big, bad, old organisations could be in trouble now as the internet whistles into existence a million new nimble players to run rings around the big, bad, etc. … blah blah.

But how about this for a train of thought?

Selling text on the internet is working, okay, sort of, but it hasn't really taken off. There's too much free stuff, and anyway, people don't want to pay. Maybe they're scared that if they start surrendering £30 here and £30 there, it will never stop and they'll be bankrupt. Maybe they just reckon the prices will come down, and they're waiting.

But what if you are a huge, globally celebrated organisation which wants to be able to swank even more than you do now about how much beneficial impact you are having on the world, to your donors, charitable or political, and would actually quite welcome the simplicity of not having to be too businesslike about it all, and to have to chase every last cent for every bit of virtual stuff that you part with?

What if you are the BBC? Despite all that our bit of the blogosphere may say, the BBC still counts for a hell of a lot in the world; that's why our bit of the blogosphere complains about it so much.

Or what if you are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology?

I finally took a look a long overdue look at the MIT OCW site (OCW = OpenCourseWare) today as a result of my Education Blog activities, but it seems to me that the give-away principle is far broader than merely educational – and incidentally that education itself will gain from many other institutions besides straight-up educators giving their stuff away. (Like the BBC.)

I still don't think it's right that the BBC should be paid for by me, in the form of a tax on my television viewing of over £100 per annum, and I hope they lose this privileged economic position no matter how generous they now say they want to be to the world. Nevertheless, as a matter of fact (whether business or political) rather than of morals, it seems to me that we may see a lot more of this kind of reputation-building giving-it-away stuff.

I reckon that for the right kind of global institution, basically an already globally leading operator which is eager to stay out in front of the pack, and which has a big archive the selling of which is not (as it would be in the case of, say, a big record company) central to its economic success, a huge give-away could be the smartest possible move.

The BBC is fighting for the current version of its life, and their give-away may only be talk, as part of that fight.

But MIT have, I reckon, taken a huge leap into the educational twenty first century with their great, global give-away, in a way that can only secure their position as global brand leaders in higher education.

There must be big organisations whom it would suit to do the same. There must be others who are doing the same.

The blogosphere is going to love it.

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This must have happened before, but it's the first big example of it that I've heard about at all recently. Tomorrow's British press is apparently full of reports of what Mr Blair "said" to a bunch of trade unionists. In other words, the press printed the stuff that they had been given by Downing Street beforehand. They printed a whole load of stuff that he was going to say. The trouble is, BBC2 TV's Newsnight has just reported, several trade union leaders who were present at the meeting at which all this was going to be said are adamant that Blair didn't actually say it.

There must have been occasions where the print media have written reports in the past tense about events that had yet to occur, only for them not to happen as scripted, but it is somewhat unusual for our Prime Minister to be directly involved in such a mess-up. Why didn't Blair follow his own script? Did he chicken out? Did he set the papers up on purpose? Did he think the whole thing would remain permanently in two separate compartments, with the trade unionists getting one message, and the rest of us getting another, without anyone comparing notes?

Maybe this sort of nonsense happens every day, and the government has (had) a gentleman's agreement with the BBC that what it says it is going to say is what it said, regardless of what it really said. And if the newspapers print a load of bollocks they are too embarrassed to admit it, and it all dies the death without any embarrassment to anyone. Except, that - maybe, could be, I don't know, I'm guessing - the government forgot that the BBC now hates it.

What the Prime Minister was apparently going to say was that the trade unions are going to have to jolly well behave themselves and not protest or demand lots of money or behave like lefty idiots.

Here's what it said just a moment ago at timesonline.co.uk, which we copy and paste from here but don't link to (because the links don't last), in the "BREAKING NEWS" box:

Blunt warning to unions from Blair

The Prime Minister tackled union militancy head on, warning senior trade unionists that the idea of a left wing Labour Government as an alternative to a moderate one was an "abiding delusion". Tony Blair told leaders of the country's top unions that he would not be deflected from controversial reforms of public services, despite rising anger over the increased involvement of private firms. He told a dinner in Brighton, attended by the TUC general council as well as other members of the Cabinet and a string of Government ministers, that there was no alternative to the Government's agenda.

And that is what Newsnight just said he didn't say after all.

The Prime Minister gets tough. Or not as the case may be. And the BBC has either plunged another poisoned dagger into Blair, or the real story here is that it is trying to, but has made its own story up. Either way, it's a great little contretemps.

Now I've had a look at the BBC website, and here's what the BBC is now saying (in a report timed at 11.16 pm our time, i.e. at the same time as the Newsnight report about half an hour ago as I write this:

Tony Blair has told union leaders not to delude themselves about having a more left-wing government as his policies face a day of criticism at the TUC annual congress.

One union leader has cast doubt on whether Mr Blair actually made some of tough remarks attributed to him by Labour officials when he dined privately with the TUC governing council.

… which is downright schizophrenic. Paragraph one says what that the PM said what he said, and paragraph two says maybe he didn't say it after all, but that his people merely pretended he did. In other words, the BBC is as confused as I am!

What a delightful mess.

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You know, I'm beginning to suspect that Rod Liddle is on the same journey I took, albeit in a higher plane, from New Labour placard-waver, to semi-rabid libertarian back-street raver. There have been several excellent articles in The Spectator, recently, topped off I think by his latest piece on the travails of the Reverend Tony.

I did have Rod pegged as being a straightforward leading member of the liberal elite, with his column in The Guardian, and his editorship of the Today program. But ever since the BBC let him go I've really begun to welcome his regular appearances on Channel4 News, his pieces on the stupidity of over-regulation, and his devastating broadsides against the Spin-Meisters of the champagne socialist lie machine.

So is the end in sight for Boris's demise as editor of the Speccy? As a South Oxfordshire resident, an occasional bag-man for Boris, and a one-time writer for his magazine, my opinion is torn in two opposing directions. But if Boris is happy to give up the mantle, to concentrate better on his task of becoming a serious politician in the mould of Lord Salisbury, then is there a better potential editor around than Rod Liddle? I'm becoming ever more confident that Lord Black doesn't think so.

And following Jonathan Pearce's earlier article, on the matter, would a change be a good thing anyway, for one of my favourite magazines?

One thing though, Rod, if you're reading. Gonna have to give up that Guardian column. Sorry.

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I cannot recall hearing of such a petulant outburst from the normally stately and dignified BBC:

The controller of BBC1 launched an unprecedented attack on Rupert Murdoch yesterday, calling the media billionaire a "capital imperialist" who wants to destabilise the corporation because he "is against everything the BBC stands for".

Sounds like my kind of guy.

Lorraine Heggessey said Mr Murdoch's continued attacks on the BBC stemmed from a dislike of the public sector. But he did not understand that the British people "have a National Health Service, a public education system" and trust organisations that are there for the benefit of society and not driven by profit.

Methinks the executives of the BBC sense that they are in trouble. They realise that 'Auntie' no longer enjoys an exalted status as a national treasure and, hence, is vulnerable.

The time-honoured and global reputation for fairness, accuracy and objectivity is something they have dined out on, abused and terminally tarnished. And, even if this were not the case, in an era when the market provides so many choices, it is impossible to stem the growing discontent with the arcane and punitive television tax that funds the BBC.

But it's all the fault of Rupert Murdoch and his band of evil capitalists. (Oh, and George Bush of course).

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I read an article over on Fox News which does as a good a job explaining media bias as any I've seen.

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Since postings here today seem a bit thin on the ground, let me recycle a link which I've already featured on my Culture Blog, but which I think is interesting enough to make a posting for the mass media. (I originally found it at b3ta.com.)

I'm talking about this, this being a site which includes something I've read about a lot but never actually seen demonstrated with the relevant contrasts. I'm talking about the ancient and now technologically rejuvenated art of picture retouching.

The most striking is the picture you get to straight from the link, but there are lots of others at the same site.

Okay I admit it, at this point I did pause a bit to think of a political moral to stick at the end, a thing not needed on a Culture Blog. But I think there is one, concerning the degree to which cameras do or do not tell lies. Put it this way, I think maybe I'll give this site a mention at White Rose as well. An awful lot of credence is placed these days on photographic evidence. What this before/after site reminds us is that photos are only as reliable as a way to tell the truth as are the people in charge of them. (You have only to think of Stalin's graphics department.) As it gets easier to manipulate images, so our readiness to trust them ought to diminish.

This site shows what is the result of retouching. But does anyone here know how long it takes to do this kind of thing, and how difficult it is? And can all of it simply be done with Photoshop?

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On B.B.C. Radio 4's Today Programme (on Monday's show - if my memory serves) there was a story about the destruction of the forests of Eastern Europe.

The B.B.C. journalist would refer to forests in country after country and talk about how the trees were "illegally cut down" and the timber "illegally imported into Western European countries".

I noticed something about the B.B.C. man's remarks. In each Eastern European country he discussed he talked about the 'national parks' or the 'national forests' - never once did he talk about privately owned forests being destroyed.

Whether forests are owned by old aristocractic families or by private companies (as in the State of Maine) there is no question of them being destroyed for a quick buck - ownership (as opposed to licences, or 'rights to' or other nonsense), brings concern for the long term.

Of course the B.B.C. man did not notice this - he just claimed that things would be improved when the Eastern European nations joined the European Union and there were even more regulations than there are now.

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For media establishment pundits ranging from lowly tabloid hacks all the way up to the Brahmins of academic political correctness, the world seems to be a much more intellectually hostile place since September 11 2001. Previously unchallenged opinions about the way the world works are now being judged under the harsh light of reality cast by two burning skyscrapers in New York.

One of the good things to come out of the horrors of that day is that the western world, or at least the dynamic Anglosphere part of it, is undergoing a most astonishing intellectual 'shake out'. The system is in a state of flux and it is unclear what the zeitgeist is going to feel like when it all starts to settle down again. One thing is for sure, it will be different.

Former prince of the statist 'left' Christopher Hitchens is a striking example of this process. Whilst always articulate and insightful, it seems he is also possessed of a critically rational mind capable of simply jettisoning the demonstrably false when the evidence deems that the correct thing to do. One only has to read his devastating carve-up of former fellow travellers like Noam Chomsky to see just how far he has come. In his article in the Guardian called "Ha ha ha to the pacifists" he pours scorn on those who would side with the vilest regimes in the world and claim moral superiority.

Of course people do not like being proved wrong, and they like others pointing out their cock-ups even less. Last night I was listening to pundit-lite Michael Brunson on the TV reviewing the early editions of the British newspapers. At one point he became almost apoplectic with a double page spread in the print version of The Sun (a low-brow tabloid) titled 'Shame of the Traitors'. This article quotes the Guardian, New Statesman, the Independent, the Mirror, members of Parliament, members of the European 'Parliament' and sundry others. All made dire predictions about the war, questioned the morality of it and scorned its progress.

So was Michael Brunson angry that the pundits had got it so wrong? Hell no! He was outraged that a lowly tabloid like The Sun had questioned the motivation of people making clearly ridiculous unsupported claims to the point they could be described as giving 'aid and comfort to the enemy'. He said "I fail to see the point of this whole article" and "Why should they criticize people for saying that they believe?".

To give you some idea of what the people whose 'honour' Michael Brunson was defending were actually writing:

"Opposition leaders about to quit battle against Taliban. US blunders leave key fighters disillusioned. Key Afghan opposition commanders are on the verge of abandoning the fight against the Taliban because their confidence in US military strategy has collapsed. Insurgents are no longer willing to infiltrate eastern Taliban-controlled Afghanistan because they believe American blunders are destroying the opportunity to spread revolt against the Islamist regime."

Rory Carroll, the Guardian, November 9: the day Mazar-i-Sharif fell to the Northern Alliance! This 'news' is either Taliban propaganda, astonishingly bad reporting or simply made up to suit Rory Carroll's anti-Americanism. Take your pick.

"If the Northern Alliance does take Kabul on, the battle is likely to be very bloody. The recent successes of the Northern Alliance are unsurprising but it will take more than carpet bombing to win southern Afghanistan."

Richard Norton-Taylor, the Guardian, November 13: The recent successes are... unsurprising? I guess Norton-Taylor was not reading the Guardian on November 9 beacuse if he had, he should have been utterly astonished that the Northern Alliance was winning! Moreover in reality Kabul fell with a whimper, not a roar.

"The message we want to get out is simple - stop the bombing...Recognize that bombing pleases one person above all others - Osama bin Laden."

Tam Dalyell, Labour Member of Parliament, November 1: so if the Taliban and Al Qaeda were asked "would you like the bombing to continue or stop?"... presumably Tam Dayell would have us believe that they would say "Continue, we would like some more of that invigorating bombing please".

Judging from Michael Brunson's remarks, it seems that being correct is not a very important part of a pundit's job. However what is really important is not to point out the stupidity of other pundits or, even worse, that a great chunk of what they said was proved by events to be completely incorrect. That simply is not cricket!

And higher up the established media food chain, no wonder they really hate people like Christopher Hitchens, as he cannot be dismissed as a mere hack for some boorish English tabloid... not only is he making the doves of the 'left' and ostriches of the 'right' look extremely bad, he is an apostate who has been attacking Sauron Chomsky himself. Hitchens is actually calling himself a libertarian these days. As Bob Dylan sang: Oh the times, they are a’ changin'