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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?