A friend (you know who you are) informed me that the Economist magazine was "getting better", for example it had a lead story denouncing government debt. Of course this was the government debt that the Economist had urged government to take on (to bail out banks and other corporations and then to "stimulate the economy"), but it was good that it was denouncing the debt.

So I decided to give the Economist a chance and read their article ("editorial") on American health care. After drinking a bottle of cider to recover (what a nice new bottle shape Henry Westons have produced) these on my thoughts upon that article:

It starts with a lie - Barack Obama was elected in part because of his plans to "fix American health care".

In reality it was Hillary Clinton who stressed her health care plan during the Democrat primary campaign (Barack Obama just attacked her plan and made vague noises about his own). And during the general election campaign it was John McCain who came out with a specific health care plan, allowing people to buy health cover over State lines and switching the tax deductibility of buying health care cover from employers to individuals, whereas Barack Obama just (dishonestly) attacked the McCain plan and was vague about his own.

Barack Obama was elected President of the United States for several reasons (white guilt about mistreatment of black people, the total ideological devotion of the education system and the mainstream media, the insane judgement by John McCain to back the bank bailouts...), but stressing some specific plan to "fix American health care" was not one of them.

Still the Economist does not let the truth stand in the way of its articles, so it then outlines its position.

"Starting from scratch their would be a good case for a mostly publicly funded system" even for a magazine "as economically liberal as this one".

This is a standard Economist trick - propose some form of statism and defend it by saying even we, the free market ones (the European meaning of "economically liberal"), are in favour of this statism. Of course the Economist never actually produces any evidence that it is pro-free market - but it is at trick it has been using since Walter Bagehot (the second editor, the first editor actually was a free market man) so I suppose it is a lie hollowed by history.

However, we are not "starting from scratch" so the Economist reluctantly concedes that some little freedom (about half of American health care is already government funded and the rest is tied up in regulations - facts that the Economist avoids, see later) must remain for awhile - it suggests five years.

The first step, according to the Economist, must be to make everyone buy health cover by statute with the poor being subsidized by the government "as is done already in Massachusetts". That the Massachusetts "reform", introduced by Governor Romney, has turned out rather badly is a fact that the Economist article neglects to mention - even though the percentage of "uncovered" in Massachusetts was very low compared to other States so if this "reform" was going to work anywhere it would have worked in Massachusetts.

Of course, says the Economist, insurance companies must not be allowed to exploit government subsides for the poor. They must provide "affordable" plans (no prices are suggested - it is all left vague), and must not be allowed to exclude the old or the already sick from their plans.

In short - lower prices and covering high cost groups. As (contrary to the propaganda) American health insurance is already not a high profit margin industry, these "reforms" should be enough to bankrupt the insurance companies - even before the five year period comes to an end and the government plan the Economist suggests takes over.

However, just in case the private health companies are not bankrupted, the Economist also suggests that "anti trust" be introduced into the area. As the late Ayn Rand (and so many others) have pointed out, there are no clear principles (things that can be clearly defined in advance) in "anti trust" or "competition policy" in fact the whole thing is an excuse for arbitrary power for the government working with the politically connected. But the Economist either does not know, or does not care, about this point - and loves "anti trust".

Almost needless to say the Economist does not mean getting rid of regulation (such as the licensing regulations for doctors - exposed as a racket by Milton Friedman 60 years ago,. or the F.D.A. and its price inflating and new medical adavance preventing "health and safety" regulations). On the contrary the Economist means yet more regulations on top of all the ones that exist already.

Of course the Economist does not mention the real problems of American health care. Neither the ones I have mentioned already or the others. It does not mention how Medicare and Medicaid and SCHIP have vastly inflated prices (just as the subsidies for higher education have had the effect of inflating tuition fees over the decades) or how the vast web of Federal and State regulations prevent much of a real "market" in health care at all, or how American hospitals are forced to provide free ER cover in spite of the fact that an expensive (although terrible - rather like some British NHS hospitals in fact)) network of government "county hospitals" already exists, or... But of course it does not - because it wishes to add subsidy schemes and regulations, not get rid of them.

Lastly I must mention one other policy suggestion of the Economist.

It suggests abolishing the tax deductibility of employer health care provision - not to switch the tax deductibility to individuals to buy health cover themselves, but because the lower taxes "cost the government" lots of money (all money belongs to the government it seems - although it should kindly allow people to buy toys, not important things like health care).

This massive tax increase is something that even Barack Obama is wary about talking about (although it would only pay for a fraction of the costs of his plans), but have no fear the Economist will hold his hand - it is all about "The Renewal of America" to quote one of the most vile magazine front covers I have ever seen.

As for the Obama plan of one and half TRILLION Dollars (according the Congressional budget office in reality it will grow to far more than that, entitlement programs always do) that will only cover a fraction of the people he says it will. Well if the Economist is truly "economically liberal" it will help lead the fight against this evil - but judging by this article...

Of course it could be claimed that I am being unfair - that the American coverage of the Economist is the worst element in the magazine. Although I have not noticed the Economist denouncing the move to income support schemes and government health cover in India (in spite of the ever growing fiscal deficit) in India - or indeed in any country.

Be that as it may, it is the United States where the alternative of a free market current affairs magazine is most needed - an alternative to the statism of Time and Newsweek and the rest of the mainstream media. And the Economist utterly fails to provide this alternative.

So, friend (again you know who you are), do not ask me to give the Economist a chance again - to do so is not good for my liver.

I rather like the recently-launched magazine of UK current affairs, Standpoint. This item on Ken Loach, the film-maker, is particularly good.

I wish the magazine success and it should give publications such as The Spectator, Prospect and The New Statesman a run for their money.

In an earlier piece here today, Perry de Havilland referred to the great fuss that Britain's broadcasters are now making about the rather small successes of the BNP in the Euro elections, and their relative silence concerning the much bigger success achieved by UKIP. True. UKIP is indeed being ignored, and the BNP is indeed being talked up. But I don't think it's right to dismiss the talking up of the BNP entirely as tactics. I think that genuine fear is being expressed by our former gatekeepers of correct thought. The rise of Adolph Hitler has been obsessively taught in British schools for the last generation or so, as the very definition of that which Must Not Happen, yet now, something not wholly unlike it appears to be happening, here in Britain! Calamity!

I say "former" gatekeepers of correct thought because that is surely the other thing now happening that scares these people. The internet, as we enthusiasts for it have been saying ever since it got started as a mass phenomenon a decade ago or more, entitles people to say whatever they like. They no longer need the permission of anybody more important to reach a quite large audience with an opinion that quite large numbers of people agree with but which the Gatekeepers disapprove of and want suppressed. Very suddenly, in a matter of a year or two, servile and carefully crafted letters to the newspapers, that conceded almost everything but cunningly managed to slip a tiny few incorrect thoughts past the Guardians, could be forgotten about. A blog can now be cranked up, and the blogger can tell it exactly how he reckons it is. Potential supporters can be directed with a link to the manifesto of whatever crank party the blogger happens to approve of or find interesting. If a Gatekeeper now wants to quote a "crank" out of context, Google ensures that the rest of us can read the opinions of said crank, in context, whether the Gatekeeper himself deigns to include an actual link or not.

My eldest brother is a UKIP activist, and I sense in him none of the frustration that he and his UKIP brethren used to feel, about being ignored by the masses, because then ignored by "the" (there then being only one great lump of them) media. When he now knocks on a door, the householder knows just what Elder Brother stands for. Conversation can immediately proceed to the matter of what a splendid front garden or front door the householder is presenting to the world, thus establishing that although firm in their opinions, UKIPers are still humans, able to see the world through eyes other than their own. Seemed like a nice enough bloke. Yeah, maybe I'll vote for him, if I don't fancy any of the others. That the big media are still trying to ignore Elder Brother now no longer worries him. The Gatekeepers now have to convince him, and all the other people who think as he does, that he and they are wrong. Good luck with that.

As a radical libertarian activist, I built the entire early first half of my career (if you can call it that) contriving to navigate, with cunningly photocopied pamphlets, around Gatekeeper assumptions that such opinions just could not be sincerely held, by anyone who mattered. I helped to contrive a local internet, you might say, for London libertarians, and I helped to feed libertarian memes into low-grade BBC local talk shows. Ever since the real internet came along, I have had a great deal to say for myself, but have nevertheless been feeling somewhat at a loose end.

All of which means, as the title of this posting proclaims, that the burden of proof has now been reversed. It used to be that someone who favoured radical tax cuts, or bringing immigration to a halt, or expunging the EU from British life, or that Jesus Christ is Our Saviour and gayness is evil, or that Islam is not welcome in these islands, or any other such challenge to Gatekeeper orthodoxy, had to prove to the Gatekeepers that his opinion was worth being heard and had some flicker of merit, perhaps because (see John Stuart Mill) it ensured that the Gatekeepers were at least prodded from time to time into keeping their orthodoxies in full working order. Now, the Gatekeepers, their gates electronically melted, have to explain why such notions do not have any merit, and why people should not vote for them. Since the Gatekeepers have spent all their lives loftily refusing to participate in any such arguments, instead only contriving verbal formulae to demonise all such notions as "extreme", "selfish", "old fashioned", "racist", "far right", and so on, they are, not surprisingly, very frightened at suddenly having to overturn the habits of a lifetime. What, they wonder, if they make even greater fools of themselves than the internet, by telling voters directly about all these wickednesses, has made of them already? What if they join in these arguments, but then lose? Well, indeed.

Last night, for instance, I watched a lady cabinet minister carefully refusing to reply to what the man from the BNP was actually saying, and instead insisting that the BNP is "really", "essentially", racist. By all means throw that last point in incidentally, but ad hominem attack and nothing else no longer works as an argumentative technique, because the argument is now raging anyway and Milady Cabinet Minister can only decide whether or not she joins in. The BNP can decide what it will now say, and say it. It does not need permission from Her Ladyship, or from her friends in the BBC or in the big national newspapers, to say whatever it wants to say, to anyone who wants to listen. The man from the BNP oozed confidence. The Lady Cabinet Minister looked uncomfortable.

As it happens, I share quite a few Gatekeeper objections to some of these "extreme" ideas, even as I am enthusiastic about others of them. I quite like immigration, especially from Eastern Europe. Jesus Christ is not my saviour, and gayness is fine by me. I fear that if Britain leaves EUrope, economic freedom (let alone any other kind) may not erupt, but rather something far nastier and stupider and more xenophobic and more economically wrong-headed. And so on. But, I do favour radical libertarianism. And I do not like Islam at all, and believe that the only defence of its unchallenged presence in our midst that makes any sense is based on believing that what it actually says will be almost unanimously ignored by its supposed supporters in favour of far kinder and far gentler mis-readings of it.

But then, I am not saying which opinions I think should be allowed and which not allowed. I say: allow them all. In fact, the nastier and more belligerent they are, the better it is for us all to be able to acquaint ourselves with them. Where I agree I will say so, and where I disagree I will say so. I just did.

And when it comes to voting, vote for one of the little parties, that actually believes in stuff. Don't waste your vote on the Conservatives, LibDems or Labour. What will voting for them accomplish? How will voting for those people tell anyone what you actually think and actually want?

At the bottom of this, you can read this:

This is a parody and in no way expresses any political ideology, nor does it intend to defame the BBC.

But don't let that put you off. My thanks to this guy.

There is no doubt that - apart from some smart writers like Liam Halligan - not many people in the financial journalist profession saw the current crisis coming or predicted its full extent. Clive Davis, over at his blog, makes that point by linking to an article that goes into what is rather mysteriously called the "shadow banking" sector: ie, any institution that gets involved in trading in or holding credit, such as hedge fund. I wrote about misconceptions surrounding this issue the other day.

So why were financial journalists or many economists unaware of the gathering storms? Well, assuming that they were oblivious, my explanations are as follows. I'd be interested in the comments. Here goes:

First, over-specialisation in the economics profession. One of the great benefits to me in discovering those Austrian economists such as Ludwig von Mises and writers like Henry Hazlitt all those years ago as a callow youth was that it reintroduced me to the days when "political economy", as it was known in the 19th Century, was not hung up on mathematical models or big, wooly macro-economic systems, but addressed the incentives, laws, and actions of man. I had the benefit of getting a good grounding in microeconomics, in understanding an economy as a dynamic process that changes through time, not a set of artificial "games" with nonsense such as models of "perfect competition".

Second, I think that for many journalists who did learn economics, the sort of ideas that have given me and other classical liberals/libertarians some insight into the gathering storms are simply not on their intellectual radar, or if they are, they are led to believe that people with surnames such as Hayek, or von Mises, or Friedman, are somehow eccentric, even malevolent creatures. Most of them have either read their JK Galbraiths, or their Krugmans, and get their views from the still-powerful tradition of Keynesian economics. The idea that fiat, state-monopoly money and Big Government - the two are related issues - lie at the core of the issue just does not apply to a group of folk who generally tilt left in their politics (although this is far less the case than in other parts of journalism, in my experience).

Also, as a result of overspecialisation, a journalist who writes about, say, the government bond market may not always join the dots when it comes to information coming out in a different area of the economy. There is also the fact that as sectoral journalists covering their beats such as energy, retail, telecoms, etc, get involved in the day-to-day job of covering these things, that the broader trends get obscured because of the sheer volume of stuff that journalists deal with. Given how financial journalism has developed as a profession in the last two decades - I have some insight into this via my day job - I am not too sure how to deal with this. Part of the trouble may even be what I might call the "showbiz" trend in financial journalism: reporters at channels such as CNBC often talk about the market in a sort of sports-coverage way: who's up, who's down, etc.

There are reporters - the FT's Gillian Tett springs to mind - who have been very good at trying to keep on top of how the credit markets have evolved and some of the risks associated with that. And there are commentators and investors such as Jim Rogers, for instance, who have been pretty astute at seeing the disaster and warning about it. But a lot of people, as Clive Davis says, have not been aware of the magnitude of what has hit us. Maybe, however, Mr Davis has to remember the flip-side of this coin: we may now be blind to the chances of a pretty rapid recovery, at least in some parts of the world.

In its ironically titled 'Lexington' section the Economist magazine attacks those who point at the influence of collectivist ideologies on American government policy. Rather than refuting the evidence and argument the critics of government policy produce, the Economist (in the best education system and mainstream media tradition) just ignores evidence and argument, and denounces those who point to Marxist and Fascist origins of much modern "Progressive" government policy.

One example of the Economist approach really caught my eye:

For years Glenn Beck has denounced wild spending Republicans (especially President Bush) and since moving to Fox News he has continued to do this. He has also (with the help of many people who have written scholarly books on these matters) continued to try and explain the influence of collectivist philosophies on American politics over the last century - from Teddy Roosevelt to Barack Obama.

The Economist collapses all of this into - Glenn-Beck-claims-Obama-leading-the-United-States-to-Fascism.

If 'Lexington' was attacking me this would make some sort of sense, as I have often pointed out the Marxist background of Barack Obama (and Marxists sometimes evolve into Fascists - as this involves no rejection of their basic collectivism). However, Glenn Beck has clearly stated (many times) that he does not believe that that Barack Obama is a Communist or a Fascist - what Beck is trying to do is to show how collectivist philosophies have increasingly influenced American government policies over time, often without the leading politicians being fully aware of the origins and nature of the principles they try and put into practice.

Anyone who has seen the show, as opposed to tiny bits of the show taken out of context, would know this.

However, 'Lexington' would rather write about something without bothering to watch it - getting his "information" from the far left smear site "mediamatters" instead.

And the mainstream media wonder why libertarians and conservatives despise them.

Why we should shut these bastards down now and add TV Licensing to the unemployment figures.

The arrest. The outcome.

Raze White City to the ground and cast salt upon the earth...

Hat tip: Biased BBC

You probably missed it, because how the hell can anyone keep up with this stuff? But, I just happened to chance upon a couple of comments (numbers 269 and 276) on this at Guido's, both of which had, copied and pasted into them, this:

Downing Street in 'meltdown'

PRWeek - David Singleton 15-Apr-09

Downing Street was this week in 'meltdown' as Gordon Brown's inner circle attempted to limit the fallout from the Damian McBride scandal.

Well-placed sources told PRWeek there was mounting fear in the heart of Downing Street that fresh revelations about senior MPs could emerge over the next few weeks and months leading up to the general election.

Brown's close lieutenants such as Ed Balls, Tom Watson and Ian Austin are all believed to be vulnerable. It is feared fresh stories could be revealed by the handful of journalists who were fed negative stories by the Brown camp - or as a result of further emails that were sent to Labour blogger Derek Draper being made public.

One Downing Street insider said there had been 'endless conference calls and crisis meetings' since the story of McBride's plans to smear senior Tories broke on Saturday.

The source added: 'This is a full on disaster for Gordon - Downing Street is in meltdown. But it is more of a problem for Brown's inner circle than it is for the Government more broadly.

'The great fear of Brownites is that all of their activities over many years are suddenly now at risk of spilling out. It is an open secret that Gordon’s operation has been carrying out character assassinations, leaking documents and briefing against ministers and so on, but nobody has ever caught them red handed - until now. Now they have been caught out, it becomes legitimate to talk about all the other occasions.

'It is a bit like getting Al Capone on his tax returns; it is actually one relatively minor misdemeanour - by no means are those emails the worst thing that Brown’s operation has ever done.'

Another source with close links to Downing Street said the PM’s defence was looking increasingly fragile: 'Brown has had to stake his defence on this being a rogue operation, a single aberration that nobody else knew anything about.

'The worry is that someone will produce evidence that it went much wider than this handful of emails and it went much wider than McBride.'

Which they will, because it did.

In short, matters are developing exactly as I told you they would in this posting. Brown's ludicrous claim not to believe in dirty tricks has turned this from a few dogs chasing a small smear of dirt (The Emails and who knew what about them and whether anyone had tried to spread the particular smears in them) into a thousand dogs swimming happily in a quarter of a century of liquified shit, and now, too late, Downing Street realises it. But, like I say, it's too late.

These people are smart enough to realise the terminal mess they are now in. Good. Nobody is smart enough to extricate them from it. Good again.

Classic:

"I take full responsibility for what happened. That's why the person who was responsible went immediately."

This ridiculous Prime Minister of ours can't now string two sentences together without talking drivel. If sentence one is true, then he is resigning, as Guido's commenters are already queueing up to point out. But sentence two says he isn't. Not yet, anyway.

The BBC gets a lot of flak from right-wing bloggers, but the BBC is now objectively anti-Brown. Just by solemnly reporting everything that this ghastly and now absurd man says, with or without any further comment, they are destroying him.

Brown's problem, to spell it out, is that he created the atmosphere within which The Emails were exchanged, and we all know it. He has been a dirty trickster all his adult life. Yet, again and again, he is now taking every opportunity he gets to deny this universally known truth. Not only he is a liar, which in politics is very forgiveable. He is an obvious liar.

The BBC's caption under the video of Brown's latest bout of self-strangulation says this:

Mr Brown said he was working to clean up British politics

LOL. In fact that is my LOL of the month so far.

You probably read all this first everywhere else, the exact same quotes and the exact same complaints, but I don't care. This is a chorus now. Maybe Instapundit, who does read Samizdata and link to it from time to time, will finally work out what's happening over here (a libertarian blogger is destroying a Prime Minister) and copy out a chunk of something relevant and comprehensible. Here would be an excellent place to look.

See also: this.

Alice Miles in the Times:

The media are all chorusing now: we knew, we called him McNasty and McPoison, we had nothing to do with him, he sent us foul messages, we didn't like him. But the point is, we did know. We may not have known the detail of the nasty smears about senior Conservatives that Mr McBride was dreaming up, but we knew about the smears against his own side. We knew what he was up to, and we knew that he was being paid more than £100,000 a year of public money to do it - and we did nothing to stop it.

Mr McBride used the system of anonymous briefings under which political journalism operates to spread dirt about Labour opponents of Mr Brown. Should journalists still be under a duty to protect their sources when those sources are abusing public money, or should we have been bolder in exposing it? Mr McBride did not poison the well on his own. There has long been a "dirty tricks" cabal around Mr Brown that any Westminster journalist or minister could name - Ian Austin, Tom Watson, Ed Balls, Mr McBride and, formerly, Charlie Whelan, who is now political officer of the Unite super-union (and working hard to place favoured candidates in winnable seats for the next election).

The poisoning was at its worst in the run-up to the leadership noncontest two years ago. Yesterday I spoke to somebody who balked at challenging Mr Brown then, because he couldn't face the poisoners. "It's the reason why Gordon came to office untested," he said. "When I considered challenging him for the leadership, people warned me it would be a very unpleasant campaign; and it would have been an unpleasant campaign because Gordon's people would have run it in an extremely vicious way."

Which makes quite a change from:

Mr Brown is a good, decent man but ...

See what I mean about the dead tree dog pack? These people just are not scared of Gordon Brown any more, or of his dogs. They are now more scared of him getting booted out before they have each stuck their knives in. I can't see Brown lasting into next year now, I really can't. I give him a month at the most.

UPDATE: Here's Guido. Summary: Now they tell us. Watch the film clip and note that the Cameron machine gets mentioned, not at all grovellingly.

This, as the robot bomb in Dark Star said to the astronaut who was trying to persuade him not to explode, is fun. I think that things are now developing on the Gordon Brown front very fast.

As I have already commented today (I've recycled my comments earlier today here, and have added relevant links) on an earlier posting, I think that one of the key moments in this was when this got said, two days ago now:

The spokesman added that nobody in Downing Street knew of the e-mails and that it was Mr Brown's view that there was "no place in politics for the dissemination or publication of material of this kind".

If Downing Street had left it at "nobody in Downing Street knew of the e-mails", all might have been well. I say "well", for these things are relative. Well as in Brown might have been able to stagger on for another year. But, I think fatally, they continued to the effect that it is Mr Brown's view that there was "no place in politics for the dissemination or publication of material of this kind". This is a flat lie, and we all know it to be a lie. The spokesman knows it. Brown knows it. We all know it.

Worse, from the purely tactical point of view, this lie turns the story from one of merely a few particular and, approximately speaking, deniable emails, into one where anything nasty presided over by Gordon Brown, and the longer ago the better, becomes relevant, because it proves that the Prime Minister not only does now believe in dirty tricks, but always has done. Suddenly, every newspaper hack in Britain knows what to ask, of anyone he can find with anything remotely like an answer. You were at school with Brown, were you? What was he like? Ran the University paper with him, did you? So, how did that work? Tell me about Scotland back in the eighties, the nineties, the noughts. Hm, sounds nasty. What's that you say? Wales as well, well well. What exactly did he say about Blair? How exactly was Blair toppled? ... The whole miserable litany of nastiness going back about three decades suddenly roars back into the centre of British politics, right now. The Prime Minister, with his fatuously excessive denial, has made this happen. (As always with these things, it is not the thing itself that does the fatal damage, it is the denials. See the prediction to that effect in this, although I had no idea then how quickly the fatal denial would come.)

For all the surreal daftness of the Daily Telegraph printing Guido stories after he's blogged them, but mentioning him only to call his a "Tory blog", Janet Daley does have a point when she says that this story only really got seriously going when the clunky old dead tree media got around to printing it. But now, printing it they are. The dog pack has now assembled and is baying for blood.

Even Brown's demise will not quieten them, for as soon as he is gone, which I now think could happen very soon, the next cry will be: general election, general election, general election. Not only might the country soon be slightly less disastrously governed, it might be less disastrously governed before this week is finished. Because if a general election campaign does start in a week's time, there is at least the faint hope that the politicians will - and call me a mad dreamer but I just cannot help saying this - stop doing things.

Well, maybe. We shall see. What I do definitely know is that when The Sun starts saying that Brown must go, that must count for something. The story is adorned with a picture of one of the mere Brown creatures (an MP and Minister called Watson), but pretty soon it is clear who is the main target:

The Prime Minister HIMSELF needs to be taken away by the men in white coats.

Men in white coats? How Guido, who has been blogging for month after month about the Prime Mentalist, must be loving that. The Prime Minister is not just disastrous. He is mad.

Every Labour politician in the country must now be in despair. Will this despair finally cause them to make the decision they should have made about Brown ("Oi! Brown! No-o-o-o-o!") decades ago? Maybe, maybe. I really think that this time, they might. If you doubt this, do what these people are now doing. Consider the alternative.

UPDATE (see the update here): Watson is about to resign. He will spend the rest of his life being the ex-Minister for Digital Engagement, which according to a commenter on this was his actual, no really, title. CLANG! "Isn't going to resign." The wish was father to the thought. Sorry. He just didn't know about the emails. Blogs eh? No quality control. Apart, that is, from the fear of looking like a prat, being told one is a prat, etc. etc. Here's the story.

Douglas Carswell, who is still merrily blogging away despite the happy intrusion of fatherhood, wonders whether the days of the spin doctor might be starting to fade. He says the internet is seriously starting to cut into the middleman of the spin doctor. I am not so sure about that - presumably, spinners will use the internet to try and prolong their role. But there is no doubt that spin doctors, rather like old fashioned advertisers, are seeing their roles changed, and in often uncomfortable ways, by the Internet. Look at how the traditional "gate keepers" of the media castle have been sidelined by outlets such as YouTube, for instance.

Talking of advertising, I just love the series, Mad Men.

The BBC does not even pretend to be impartial these days. Iain Dale, the blogger for those junkies of Westminster politics, notes that for the second week running, the Andrew Marr Sunday politics show did not have a single guest from the opposition Conservative or Liberal Democrat parties. There may be a suggestion that the broadcaster is going along with the government's refusal to put on any ministers if their opposite numbers appear on the show.

I happen to think this is, unwittingly of the BBC perhaps, a good thing. By making the bias of that channel so blatant, it advances the BBC closer to the guillotine. At least when Fox News puts "fair and balanced" on its strapline, we know it is having a bit of a snigger.

Here is a website that is obviously produced by people very, very angry about what they see as the one-sided coverage of Mr Obama in his recent victorious campaign. You do not have to buy into conspiracy theories to be alarmed at the fawning press coverage that Mr Obama received during the campaign. As for the treatment of the McCain/Palin ticket, while I am certainly no great fan of either, the hysteria over Mrs Palin's personal life or supposed wing-nuttery over religion seemed totally out of proportion.

In the end, we get the media we do because the underlying philosophical assumptions of the public at large are reflected by it and at the same time, those assumptions are held by the media outlets themselves. It pains me to say it but in many respects, the US is now closer to the social-democratic, corporatist model of Europe than many in the US will want to admit. There will, I hope, be a backlash, but whether that backlash is a particularly libertarian one is not something I am very confident about at this point.

Thanks to fellow contributor Paul Marks to alerting me to this website.

...and so they face the final curtain:

"Current estimates are that 700 of the 1,400 US newspapers will be out of business by the end of the next decade.."

Things have gotten so bad that the situation has even inspired a grass-roots effort of the kind usually aimed at curing deadly diseases, saving endangered species, or freeing the unfairly imprisoned: Today has been designated America's "National buy a newspaper day".

Their friends will say it clear, they'll state their case of which they're certain:

I don't think it's overstating the problem to say democracy is at stake.

But there were times, I'm sure you knew, when they'd print off something not quite true. But through it all, when there was doubt, they'd make it up and churn it out. The record shows, the public chose....

Tinsley says she's optimistic that "after a period of markedly less in-depth reporting, the public will realize what it's missing and the market will respond with a solution."

....to do it our way.

Another milestone is reached as channels of distribution change:

2008 will be seen as a landmark year in global communications in the textbooks of 2100 – it was the year that the internet finally surpassed what was once considered an unassailable bastion of main media, newspapers, as the leading source of national and international news in America. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press is an independent opinion research group that studies attitudes toward the press, politics and public policy issues. This year, for the first time in a Pew survey, more people said they relied mostly on the internet for news than those that cited newspapers (35%). Television retained top spot with 70% but it’s now clear that it’s when, rather than if, the internet will become the key news communications medium.

This is not as radical as headlined, given that newspaper and television websites are important sources for online information. Yet the march online will intensify as the credit crunch accelerates change. Curiously, this could result in less news, as the institutions of mainstream reporting wither away.

Watch for the state to support and protect the coterie of reporters, newspapers and channels on the grounds that politicians are far too important not to be heard. After all, this is already done in the UK with the licence fee, public sector advertisements for the Guardian and various subsidies. As the market retreats, subsidies will become more overt, expensive and extensive.

I don't often praise The Times. It is too often busy pleasing the administration of the day, in order to maintain regulatory tolerance for its proprietor's market dominance. But this is wicked, in both senses.

Commentary on Chancellor Darling's performance yesterday includes a nonsensical Labour-loyal diatribe from Roy Hattersley... which is beautifully undercut by this by-line:

Roy Hattersley was Secretary of State for Prices and Consumer Protection, 1976-79

Andy Burnham MP to the Royal Television Society (in questions after the speech):

The time has come for perhaps a different approach to the internet. I want to even up that see-saw, even up the regulation [imbalance] between the old and the new.

[Reported by The Register]

Twice is coincidence...

In response to a letter from the UK Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), Nominet is announcing an independent review of its current corporate governance structure, to be benchmarked against established best practice corporate governance standards.

Three times is enemy action...

Hazel Blears MP:

There will always be a role for political commentary, providing perspective, illumination and explanation. But editors need to do more to disentangle it from news reporting, and to allow elected politicians the same kind of prominent space for comment as people who have never stood for office. [...]

Unless and until political blogging adds value to our political culture, by allowing new and disparate voices, ideas and legitimate protest and challenge, and until the mainstream media reports politics in a calmer, more responsible manner, it will continue to fuel a culture of cynicism and despair.

I take it that "adds value" means 'supports us'; "legitimate protest" means 'sneering at our enemies'; and a "more responsible manner" means 'without questioning our control of the discourse'.

Charles Moore, writing in the Daily Telegraph, urges Britons compelled to pay the outrageous tax, sorry, licence fee to the BBC should refuse to do so following the recent episode over two radio presenters who chose to mock an elderly actor about one of the presenters having had sex with the actor's grand-daughter. I urge readers to read the Moore article. It is devastating and gets to the heart of why the Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross saga is not just a minor issue, but a brutal example of what is happening in the culture of the UK.

It is a lamentable fact about Britain that one of the things we are best known for these days is braying vulgarity, rudeness and cruelty, although certain issues, such as football hooliganism, seem to have become a bit less of a problem in recent years. For example, I tend to find US television far funnier, far sharper and yet also less cruel. Of course this is a generalisation - I am sure Samizdata readers living abroad can give me examples of cruelty-as-entertainment - but in the UK, it is becoming more and more the norm, not the exception. And the BBC, paid for by a tax, is at the heart of it. What is even more pathetic about the brutality of this culture is that its targets are not powerful dictators or scoundrels, since that might be dangerous. It is the sheer cowardice of these folk that appals.

As Sean Gabb has written, the BBC is part of the "enemy class". As libertarians, we need to realise that privatising the odd bit of the state is not enough. The BBC, as part of the media class that is so interwoven with the political, corporatist class, must be destroyed, totally.

This, by Charles Spencer in the latest Spectator, made me smile:

"This is a time for making the most of small mercies. One of the greatest of these, as the financial system collapses around us, is the splendid joke that is Robert Peston of the BBC. His extraordinarily camp, over-emphatic delivery would be perfect for reporting glitzy Broadway first nights but seems hilariously at odds with worldwide economic catastrophe. Peston has all the glee of the callow cub reporter rejoicing in the size of his scoop while lacking the imagination to understand the anxiety his excitable tales of doom-and-gloom might be causing others."

I admire the scoop-getting skills of Mr Peston, if not always his analytical skills. Anyway, as Mr Spencer continues:

"Like poor Mr and Mrs Spencer of Claygate, Surrey, for instance, who somehow managed to commit themselves to £40,000 worth of home improvements (double glazing and a new kitchen) just before the current crisis went big time. As I do my lengths at the swimming pool, I sometimes experience a knot of fear forming in my guts. Mercifully, thinking of Peston, an egregious character both Jane Austen and P.G. Wodehouse would have been proud to have invented, makes me laugh and my panic disperses."

On a nicer note to Robert Peston, however, he has put economics at the top of the BBC news agenda in a way that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Part of this is down to simple events, but part of it is due to Peston's skills in ferreting out the news, not to mention his status as a friendly journalist to NuLab. Whether this continues if the current bunch get kicked out of Westminster is a moot point.

I guess the Bloomberg editor who transmitted this story in error has suffered the equivalent of being thrown into a pool of sharks, as happened to a baddie who got on the wrong side of Largo in Thunderball. There has always been a Spectre-like feel about the Bloomberg news operation, not to mention a cultish aspect, even. In their London office, there are lots of fish-tanks dotted about, presumably designed to make the staff feel calmer, but you never know what sort of beasties might lurk.

There is this wonderful story - I am not sure if it is totally accurate, though - about how an employee who fell out with a notorious Bloomberg editor, called Matt Winkler, managed to transmit headlines on the service that repeated for hours, with the words: "Winkler is a Wanker - Official".

I just love the news business.

I am getting used to finding nonsense in the Daily Telegraph - when I still look at it.

Whether it is an absurd claim that the Rosenbergs were innocent - a claim made in an obituary of someone who was involved with them, and based upon the sainted authority of the New York Times of all people. Or a claim that Fox News (amongst other wicked things) characterizes Mrs Obama as a "golliwog", a claim based on a far left smear site - as actually watching Fox News before writing about it would be beneath the dignity of the correspondents the Daily Telegraph sends to the United States.

And, of course, the endless favourable coverage for Comrade Senator Obama himself.

However, I am still capable of being shocked and I was shocked by Andrew O'Hagan's despicable article on Solzhenitsyn in the same issue of the Daily Telegraph (Tuesday, August 5th) that carried Solzhenitsyn's obituary - indeed on the very page before the obituary.

No doubt O'Hagan would defend his article (if he bothered to defend it) as light-hearted and basically supportive.

"Light-hearted" being English in this part of the world for "I can get away with being a swine, if I pretend it is all a joke" and "basically supportive" meaning kicking someone when he is down. The reader is told that Solzhenitsyn was not a great writer. Well Mr O'Hagan is entitled to his opinion, although it was odd day to choose to state it - with the man not even being buried yet. But the article went a lot further than that.

The reader is told that it is impossible to read the works of Solzhenitsyn - not just the very late works, but any of them. And then there is weird rant that trying to read Solzhenitsyn drives people to "banjo playing, feeling sympathy for Stalin" and various other stuff. No doubt this would be defended as being "amusing".

Almost needless to say there was no mention of the tens of millions of people murdered by the Marxist/Leninists in what was then the Soviet Union, or the tens of millions of people the Marxists (the side of such people as the Rosenbergs and Saul Alinsky and his modern followers) have murdered in other parts of the world.

Instead Mr Andrew O'Hagan says that "We didn't read him, but his thinking changed ours".

Who "we" might be is not explained (although I think I know), as for "his thinking changed ours", I have seen no sign of that in Mr O'Hagan himself.

Solzhenitsyn had flaws (as all human beings do), but he had a great respect for truth and Mr O'Hagan has no respect for truth at all. He, like so many at the Telegraph group now, sees his role as pushing 'progressive' propaganda at a once conservative newspaper - and if the truth does not fit the propaganda line, too bad for the truth.

I remember well him waxing with rage about how the wicked rightwing Bush and his evil cronies had denied New Orleans money after Katrina. One can rightly attack all layers of government for their messing up at the time of Katrina, and readers of this blog will know how much I despise George Walker Bush. But the O'Hagan picture of a skinflint Bush denying people money years after the event, did not fit well with my knowledge of President Bush as a spendthrift - so I checked. In reality, the Federal government had thrown billions of taxpayer Dollars at New Orleans and much of the money had vanished - as anyone who knows much about the place would have expected.

But O'Hagan had visited the place and so facts were not important - only his empathy with the suffering masses.

Solzhenitsyn would not have had the same opinion. He was no ardent friend of the West - but he was no lover of criminals either. Neither the 'honest thieves' (the open criminals with their 'thieves law' of the gang) or the 'bitches' - the trusties, or local government people and 'community activists'.

"But the majority of the population are not thieves" - quite so, they are victims and will continue to be so whilst the criminals, both open criminals and government and community activists, continue to rule so many cities.

Lastly I apologize for any slight errors there may be in my account of Mr O'Hagan's article - I am writing from memory [good thing you have an editor to embed the links for you, Ed.]. After looking at his article in the library I could not bring myself to buy the Daily Telegraph even to get the obituary of Solzhenitsyn - so I bought a copy of The Times instead.

It is unfair to expect writers to be consistent in their views from week to week. Consistency is the "hobgoblin of little minds" and all that. I am sure that if I wanted to, I could trawl back through this site and find something that jarred with what I write today, and I would not be at all surprised if that were to happen in the future. Even so, it does make me wonder when you read a comment like this, about a recent environmentalist doomongering film. The piece is by AA Gill, who is not exactly my favourite news columnist. The review is actually pretty good, to be fair. But then I remember that he writes that the only main benefit of the space race was to kindle interest in Green issues. So what gives?

It might be nice to think that he is learning that the Green movement, or at least its more militant parts, is in fact a menace. Maybe what is happening is that for a part of the London chattering classes, even that bit that likes to be thought of as "hip" and trendy, bashing Greenery is now socially acceptable, or at least no longer an activity that gets one sent into social oblivion. Maybe, just maybe Gill and his friends have picked this up during their dinner parties. "Oh, what about global warming darling?" is simply not clever any more. I bet he has poked fun at all those folk driving around in their Priuses and laughed himself hoarse at the motoring antics of popular TV shows like Top Gear and its merciless mockery of Green prudery.

Politics and culture can often shift in subtle ways. What is, and what is not, thought acceptable to mock often sets the tone for a few years. I get the impression, partly because of the darkening economic climate, that the Green movement has lost a little headway or may even be retreating in some respects.

Or perhaps I am reading too much into a few scraps of writings.

I do love Guido:

Knife crime is the media scare of the moment and on Sunday Jacqui Smith spun Sky News that "something would be done". The knife carrying and stabbing classes would be taken to hospital A&Es to confront the results of their crimes.

See the snag? Sounds tough and progressive to triangulating wonks. Sounds more like adding insult to injury when you are lying on a trolley bleeding, hoping you won't catch MRSA - "Here's Wayne, he is very sorry he stabbed you". Doctors and the opposition went ballistic. By lunchtime today the plan was dropped.

The official line here is that They're As Bad As Each Other, but I actually think that the Cameron regime, as and when it materialises, might show real glimmerings of adequacy, at any rate compared to this lot. I realise that much of my optimism is based on believing David Cameron to be a liar, and not as bad as he says he will be about such things as the environment (which I am basically opposed to), and taxes (ditto), and EUrope (ditto again). But I think it is reasonable to hope for the best, as well as to fear that he might be telling the truth. Except re EUrope, about which I assume Cameron to be lying only in hinting that he might do a teensy bit of good.

Meanwhile, it says a great deal about the terminal state of this present government that they are now making such particular fools of themselves in the one solitary area that they used until a year or two ago to excel at, namely manipulating the contents of the newspapers and the television. They have taxed and regulated the British economy into stagnation and presided over the relentless decline of all public services except weather forecasts and cricket commentaries, and this process of degradation began, or rather continued, as soon as they were voted in in 1997. But they used at least to be able to boss the newspapers. Not any more.

John Redwood MP has a blog, which is very party political as is only to be expected of a party politician, but I find him quite good. Not so long ago he had a posting entitled Legislation – just a longer press release?

You sense that everyone in and around the government has now come to similar conclusions themselves, about themselves. It is being said that what is keeping Mr Brown in his job is that they are all far too busy abandoning ship to care who the captain is. Although, maybe they are being too pessimistic about how badly they will do. Presumably their extreme pessimism comes from reading the newspapers every day.

At a time when the credit/money bubble financial institutions are in crises the Economist chooses to lead with a story on Mr Cameron - the leader of the British Conservative party. I can not claim to have read the story as I do not find Mr Cameron very interesting - at least compared to other matters. And, as I am British and have been an active member of the Conservative party since the end of the 1970's, if he was of such great interest to anyone (other than his family and friends) it would be surely be me.

In case anyone makes the defence that the financial crises was not known at the time when the Economist went to press...

Well the absurd government created Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae had not lost 50% of their stock market value when the Economist went to press - but their problems were obvious, as were the problems of the compassionate lender to the poor (always run a mile from a company that says it is in business to help the poor) Indybank of California, the run on that enterprise was well under way.

The people at the Economist could have made some reasonable predictions about the general financial situation, but they did not - or at least did not lead with them. I will make the prediction now that the the gutless Bush Administration will not order the arrest of the corrupt Mr Johnson (the ex head of Fannie Mae and leading Democrat) as this would upset his friends, such as Senators Obama and Durbin and Congressman Barney Frank - and we must not upset these upstanding individuals...

...Any more than we must upset Speaker Nancy Pelosi by having a Presidential press conference asking people to telephone her to ask why she will not allow a vote in Congress on whether or not to allow more drilling for oil at a time of record fuel prices - although it is fine for Speaker Pelosi to have a press conference telling everyone to telephone the President Bush to blame him for high fuel prices.

Of course the Economist did have other stuff in it:

A brief look, thanks to the library, showed an article sneering at Governor Bobby Jindal (the upcoming Republican and someone the Economist shows signs of fearing) and another puff piece about the all wise Senator Obama - this one claiming that his cynical habit of saying anything to get elected (even, supposedly, reversing positions he has held all his life - well reversing them till after the election) is a good thing, and pointing to his economic advisers as the height of "sensibleness".

No doubt they will prove about as sensible as the fanatical collectivist Paul Krugman - a man the Economist long favoured.

I could go on, for example examining their obituary of the late Senator Richard Helms and showing how the obituary shows the Economist writers do not understand the nature or effects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but I will stop here.

Anyone who is still buying the Economist is beyond rational argument.

The reason I ask is that I was half listening and I heard a really good and rather funny quote go by. I stopped what I was doing and typed as much of it into the computer as I could remember. Then I went to the ABC News website and replayed the story. The quote was either removed from the story or I am confusing two similar stories on the same night. That is why I am asking for help.

As I recall, a reporter, I think but I'm not certain it was the John Berman piece, was reporting Obama's latest policy shift as he maneuvers against McCain. Apparently a campaign staffer said or was quoted as saying : " [Obama] makes decisions based on what he thinks is right." To which the reporter added rhetorically "The question is 'how far to the right?"

Great quote. Where'd it go? Obamabots?

And as an aside, I realize that Obama is promising us "change". But does it have to be so often?

A forceful article in the Times today stating that the pessimists are wrong. In Iraq, in Afghanistan and at home, the death-cultists of Islamism are on the run.

What is also clear that if this progress is lost, it will not be because of the lack of bravery or skill of the US, British and other allied forces. They have been magnificent. No, the weak link in the chain remains, in my view, the craven attitude of the domestic western populations to the constant demands from home-grown radical Islamists. The farcical treatment of Mark Steyn in Canada is a case in point.

What remains an issue for advocates of isolationist foreign policy - which is actually not a policy at all - is how any of the gains that the Times' article talks about could have been achieved by adopting the equivalent of hiding under the bed with a bottle of whisky.

The Economist ran a comparison of Senator McCain and Senator Obama this week. Senator McCain was damned with faint praise for his 'orthodox' supply side deregulation proposals (things the Economist itself is supposed to believe in) and then the magazine (sorry 'newspaper') dismissed proposals to deregulate health care and other areas of life with the following statement.

"America is already a pretty deregulated place".

So the thousands of pages of Federal, State and local regulations that are strangling life in the United States, do not really exist?

And people wonder why I hate the Economist. The writers know nothing about the political economy of the United States - or anywhere else. Ignorance is not fatal if someone understands that they are ignorant (for example, I am ignorant of spelling and grammar) but to be ignorant and to think oneself knowledgeable is a fatal combination.

However, how can the writers of the Economist be anything other than ignorant - when they are the products of modern universities?

I recently heard a Professor of Economics from the University of York on BBC Radio. This person suggested that a good way to reduce inflation (so that the Bank of England could reduce interest rates) would be to take yet more things out of the (already rigged) Consumer Price Index. The Professor was not being ironic - the man really thought he was making a sensible suggestion.

The students of such people go on to be writers for the Economist.

If a Mafia don forced you and your neighbours to pay him protection and he later had the brass neck to claim that you were getting great value for money instead of the services offered by free marketeers, I think you would, humble reader, suspect a bit of a flaw in the logic. Well, that flaw appears to be lost on the author of a piece that carries the headline, "Why Jonathan Ross is worth the money". For people who have been blessed with ignorance as to whom Ross is, he is a foul-mouthed, extremely well paid late-night chatshow host and movie pundit who, among other recent glittering performances, told the US actress Gwyneth Paltrow and mother of two children that he'd like to f**k her. Classy.

Excerpt:

The most important thing is that in everything the BBC does, the trust is looking for it to demonstrate as often as possible an understanding that it must justify the licence fee by striving constantly to deliver the highest standards and programmes that stand out from the crowd.

The public values talented performers - but expects, rightly, that it will get the best possible value when paying for them.

The author of this piece forgets that value is in the eye of the beholder. If I think that I get value for money for shopping in Tesco's, Sainsbury's or Walmart, that is my judgement, made on the basis of my choice, for specific goods that I happen to buy. If one of those supermarket chains demanded that I pay them a flat fee every year regardless of whether I shopped there or not, and claimed that its services/goods were "great value for money", and employed loutish staff, I think I might be a tad unimpressed by that logic.

The only way to know if the BBC offers value for money is to let customers pay for it out of their own free will. Everything else is special pleading.

Is the Guardian becoming increasingly illiberal? It may have a section of its website called "Comment is Free", yet it is now attacking free speech when it disagrees with the opinions expressed.

Once a supporter of liberal values, the Guardian was the sort of paper that would have quoted Voltaire's "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it." But just as it has dropped support for liberal ideas on economics (it was once a free trade paper), it now appears to be dropping liberal ideas about freedom of expression.

In that vein, it is getting itself worked up because one of its rivals, the Telegraph, runs a blogging platform, like Blogger or Typepad, where members of the public can start their own blogs. That blogging platform has been one of the reasons why the Telegraph, according to moaning articles in the Guardian, has recently overtaken the Guardian in online readers.

Among the 20,000 people who have signed up for a 'MyTelegraph' blog, one is a member of the anti-immigration British National Party. The Guardian thinks the Telegraph should ban him, but the Telegraph says that it believes in free speech - even when the views are wrong - and rightly so.

The Guardian's lack of faith in free speech is not just restricted to BNP-type comments. It whines that: "My Telegraph is also inhabited by some very unsavoury characters, including a minority of active members of the far right, anti-abortionists, europhobes and members of an anti-feminist 'men's movement'."

Anti-abortionists! Europhobes! Opponents of excessive feminism! I wonder if the Guardian would prefer a return to the old days before the decentralisation of publishing in which only the elite, who knew best, were allowed a voice.

This would have been the Samizdata quote of the day if there was not one already. It is from our own Michael Jennings, commenting on this posting at my blog, which is about the promising future of specialist publications online - as opposed to general purpose ex-newspapers:

Newspapers employ "fact-checkers", but their job is not to check facts but to avoid libel suits. Therefore they check that Gordon Brown really did say that, but if the article says that "The moon is made of green cheese" it will go straight through because the moon is not going to sue.

This was only in a comment, so Michael should not be blamed too severely if his facts turn out a bit wrong. Very probably, the moon does now have lawyers.

I do not much care for Simon Heffer, the columnist who writes regularly for The Daily Telegraph. Even if I agree with him on certain issues, he has a way of making his points in a state of such constant anger that I find him rather wearying to read, rather like Paul Johnson in the Daily Mail - though Paul Johnson is to my mind much better when writing his history books, which I regard as superb. Mr Heffer also has a bit of a chip on his shoulder, if my judgement of this column, attacking Boris Johnson, is correct. Mr Heffer went to a grammar school in Essex, one of the best in the country, in fact. Boris Johnson went to Eton. For some people of a certain cast of mind, that is damning enough. But Heffer goes on to write a remarkably personal attack on BJ for his frivolity, lack of management skills, exploitation of old friends and colleagues, and so on. Blimey. I wonder what personal animus might bubble beneath the surface. It is not as if Johnson's shortcomings were heavily classified secrets.

I sympathise with Heffer to an extent: if the Tories are going to challenge for the mayorality, is Boris really the best on offer? Maybe the harsh truth is that he is. For all that the mayor has a large budget and can make quite a difference to life in The Smoke, the job still has a slightly circus-act feel about it.

But as I have said before, I have reservations about why London needs to have a mayor in the first place. I am still undecided whom I will vote for on 1 May.

There are plenty of appalling things in the world, but the amount of media coverage is far from a reliable guide to what's important or even real. Really bad things get scant notice if there's no populist hook ("who now remembers the Armenians?" And see my last post, the story of which featured once in the most serious UK media and then disappeared).

Meanwhile non-stories, virtual risks, and popular panics are underwritten by massive investment in sensational coverage. If you have not read any coverage of horror stories surrounding a former Jersey children's home, then read this first. If you have but now wonder why it has all gone quiet, I recommend this article on Spiked. I am left wanting to know more about what happened, when, in the investigation team itself.

The BBC is under fire after altering a news story about global warming as a result of activist pressure. Tim Worstall writes that:

I must say, I think this is an absolutely marvellous advance. We pay for the BBC, after all, so we really shouldn't have any of that elitist nonsense about a factual reality or anything. No, news should be presented to show the world as "you" believe it to be, not as some impartial reporter of the facts would have it.

That, at least, was the view of one Jo Abbess, a climate activist (and a remarkably confused one at that, a little googling reveals that she worries about both global warming and Peak Oil: mutually exclusive concerns one might think. Bless.) who... did indeed manage to have a BBC news report changed to reflect her views. We mustn't actually talk of static temperatures, or even worse, of 1998 being the hottest so far (and thus since then we've had cooling) because that might make people think that the world has, umm, not been warming and might even have been cooling since 1998. Can't let the proles know the truth now, can we?

Will the BBC's Roger Harrabin please put the article back to how it was before the lobbying started? Email him your views at roger.harrabin@bbc.co.uk.

Shane Greer - a sound centre-right blogging celeb - keeps popping up on Sky News. The news channel's blog posting about his appearance yesterday bills him simply as "top blogger Shane Greer". He was on the channel to discuss the stories moving across the web, although the last time I saw him, he was reviewing the papers.

Shane has got an important political media job too (he is executive editor of the forthcoming magazine Total Politics). The presenter did mention that (it is just before the clip below starts), but while Shane was speaking the caption was www.shanegreer.com, his personal blog. I noticed, similarly, Jeff Jarvis being introduced on the channel either today or yesterday as being the author of the BuzzMachine blog.

This is yet more evidence that blogging really is fully mainstream. Additionally, Shane's blogging-print media combination highlights for me that the traditional media and the best of the blogosphere are now increasingly one in the same.

…then you should check out Right On, a 15 minute weekly programme from Telegraph TV. Unlike BBC programmes, it is advertiser-funded; it uses Telegraph journalists with the production outsourced to ITN. The libertarian-leaning show each week features a studio debate, a short segment of Iain Dale and Simon Heffer arguing, and Andrew Pierce's take on Westminster gossip. In the latest episode, Ann Widdecombe - who should know better as an elected politician - throws a hissy fit under questioning about taxpayer money being spent on the second homes of MPs.

I suspected this much would happen but perhaps not quite so quickly.

In the post below, I provided a link to 'Live Leak', the only internet video site that was willing to host the movie. Apparently, YouTube and Google were approached but their joint and several response was to hastily gather up their skirts and run away screaming like a pair of Victorian maiden aunts.

The owners of Live Leak are clearly made of stronger stuff but they can hardly be blamed for pulling the plug once their lives had been threatened. The film has been removed from their server. Their official statement says:

Following threats to our staff of a very serious nature, and some ill informed reports from certain corners of the British media that could directly lead to the harm of some of our staff, Liveleak.com has been left with no other choice but to remove Fitna from our servers.

[Emphasis mine].

I cannot say that I am entirely surprised by this development but what I do find discomforting is the reference to 'certain corners of the British media'. Which 'corners' are they talking about? I think we ought to know. Does anybody have any details here?

Anyway, it seems that the film is now being spread virally on all manner of mirror sites so, if you are interested, you will still be able to find it, albeit that you may have to dig a little deeper.

The top headlines from BT Yahoo! news a moment ago:

* Anger problem 'ignored' in UK

ITN - Chronic anger has reached endemic heights in the UK but is often ignored, according to a new report.

* Miss Bimbo website provokes outrage

It is a widely accepted fact that one of the key ingredients to the Allies' victory over Nazi Germany and Japan in the Second World War was the ability to crack the Enigma codes used by these powers, and keep that code-breaking achievement a secret.

A question I'd like to put to Jon Snow, the chief news reader of Channel 4 news and usually a fairly cool-headed fellow, is whether he would have complied with any wartime requests to keep the Enigma achievement a secret, had he been a working journalist in the 1940s. Judging by his antics over the Prince Harry and Afghanistan episode, the answer to that question would be a no. It also makes me wonder whether anything on the scale of the Enigma code-breaking and its remaining a secret could be repeated now. Of course, the argument cuts both ways: in our more open world, it might also be harder for a country like Hitler's Germany to make its moves in the first place. (I admit that is a guess of mine, not a prediction). Even so, the implications for military secrecy, when it is something of vital importance in defeating an enemy, are troubling if the media outlets refuse to protect a secret for an agreed period of time. And libertarians, even the most ferocious opponents of censorship, need to realise that keeping military secrets is perfectly consistent with supporting armed forces necessary for the protection of even a minimal, nightwatchman state.

There may have been an element of PR in the whole Prince Harry kerfuffle, but he's already shown more balls than most of the folk who have sneered at him in some internet comments I have read. Come St George's Day this year, I will be very glad to hoist something alcoholic to the fellow. Well done him.

Alex Singleton's most recent posting here was on the subject of libertarians in the mainstream media, one in particular. Maybe that has some connection to the fact that Alex seems to be becoming a mainstream media person himself. A few days before that Samizdata piece about a fellow journalist, he did another Samizdata posting about Fairtrade beer, and he returned to the subject of Fairtrade, this time Fairtrade coffee (at the time of me writing this there is a problem with that link - hopefully it will soon work again), in a piece last Friday in one of the Telegraph blogs which he now regularly writes for. Yesterday's Sunday Telegraph (paper version and online) included a shorter version of that same piece. This was the bit (I'm quoting the longer Friday version) which I found most interesting, and most depressing:

Despite Fairtrade's moral halo, there are other, more ethical forms of coffee available. Most Fairtrade coffee on sale in UK supermarkets and on the high street is roasted and packaged in Europe, principally in Belgium and Germany. This is unnecessary and retards development. Farmers working for Costa Rica's Café Britt have been climbing the economic ladder by not just growing beans but by also doing all of the processing, roasting and packaging and branding themselves. Shipping unroasted green beans to Europe causes them to deteriorate, so not only is Café Britt doing far more to promote economic development than Fairtrade rivals, it is also creating better tasting coffee.

But Café Britt is not welcome on the Fairtrade scheme. Most of Café Britt's farmers are self-employed small businesspeople who own the land they farm. This is wholly unacceptable to the rigid ideologues at FLO International, Fairtrade's international certifiers, who will only accredit the farmers if they give up their small business status and join together into a co-operative. "It's like outlawing private enterprise," says Dan Cox, former head of the Speciality Coffee Association of America. ...

Fairtrade is, in other words, a front organisation, crafted by unregenerate collectivists to con believers in nice capitalism to buy something which is neither nice nor capitalist. And the way to deal with cons is to expose them for what they are, so that only those who really do believe in the actual values being promoted here continue to support the thing. Telegraph commenters declared themselves angry and disillusioned, and congratulated Alex on a well-researched piece. I long ago stopped being angry about such people as those behind Fairtrade. I expect duplicity and destructiveness and inferior produce from this quarter. But I do congratulate Alex on a good piece of journalism, and on managing to get paid for doing it.

UPDATE: Patrick Crozier weighs in, quoting another commenter.

I was pleased to read that Allister Heath has been appointed as Editor of City AM, the free daily newspaper distributed in the City of London. The City is generally quite sound, but somehow I think the addition of a noted Hayekian libertarian as editor of this popular freesheet will help the City get even sounder.

Allister came on the scene in the 1990s when he co-founded the LSE Hayek Society. During the heyday of The European Journal, a Eurosceptic magazine, it was Allister who was editor. He says that when someone gave him a copy of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, he found it full of things that resonated with him. For the past few years, he's been working on The Business, firstly as Economics Editor, then Deputy Editor and finally as Editor, where he has been a consistent and effective critic of Gordon Brown's economic policy.

We all know that the Olympics is a money-pit; ask any council-tax payer in London about the cost of the 2012 London Olympics and you are likely to get a scowl. The benighted citizens of Communist China, like the Brits, have relatively little say over the vast circus about to start later this year.

And of course, anyone who wants to watch television has to pay for the BBC; "Auntie", bless her, is sending 150 journalists to cover the Beijing Games. 150 sentient lifeforms. The next time I hear a BBC executive carping about job budgets, I will bear that fact in mind.

On the BBC Radio Four News at 18:00 tonight, there was a story about a ceremony in Spain marking the two hundredth anniversary of a 'liberation struggle'.

The listeners were informed that this was a struggle against the Empire of Napoleon and it had helped create 'modern Europe' where everyone works together. Of course it was actually Napoleon who was working to 'get all of Europe working together' (it was called the Code Napoléon and Continental System). The words 'national independence', what the Spanish were actually fighting for, were not mentioned. And although it was mentioned that the British call the conflict 'the Peninsula War' the name "Wellington" was also not mentioned.

Sometimes I suspect that even North Korean radio presents a slightly less distorted view of the world than the BBC does.

CNN man to Senators Clinton and Obama: "People all over the country are saying if you got together it would be a Dream Ticket".

Senator Obama: "I was a friend of Senator Clinton before the nomination race began and I will be a friend of Senator Clinton's after the nomination race is over".

Senator Clinton: "The Republicans are more-of-the-same, we represent change. You can tell that just by looking at us".

In short "change" means race and gender - not lower government spending or less regulations.

Indeed both Senators Clinton and Obama think the Republicans should have spent even more taxpayers money on health, education and welfare, and passed even more regulations.

As for CNN - it is like the rest of the main stream media. It can not ask tough questions to 'liberals' because its folk share all their basic assumptions.

Guido Fawkes, the blogger who focuses on political sleaze in Britain, can claim a fair measure of credit for exposing the odious Peter Hain's financial misdeeds. Guido is on the BBC Newsnight programme. It starts at 10:30 tonight. I hope he handles it a bit better than last time.

In terms of sheer effectiveness, Guido is probably far more deadly than Private Eye is these days. If I were Ian Hislop, the Eye's editor, I would start to wonder whether it was time to pack it in.

"He must be a credit to his country and his newspaper abroad; he should be either a bachelor or a solidly married man who is happy to have his children brought up abroad; his personality must be such that our Ambassador will be pleased to see him when the occasion demands. He must know something of protocol and yet enjoy having a drink with the meanest spy or the most wastrelly spiv. He must be completely at home in a foreign language and have another one to fall back on. He must be grounded in the history and culture of the territory in which he is serving; he must be intellectually inquisitive and have some knowledge of most sports. He must be able to keep a secret; he must be physically strong and not addicted to drink. He must have pride in his work and in the paper he serves, and finally he must be a good reporter with a wide vocabulary, fast with his typewriter, with a knowledge of shorthand and able to drive a car."

Ian Fleming, former Reuters and Sunday Times journalist, intelligence officer, and creator of 007. Quote taken from this book, on page 171.

Pretty good guidance. Suffice to say that this applies just as much to women as men, of course (Mr Fleming was not what you would call PC).

How's this for a title and opening for an article:

Gender or race: White male voters face tough choices in S.C.

For these men, a unique, and most unexpected dilemma, presents itself: Should they vote their race, or should they vote their gender?

The howls of outrage that framing an article in such terms would cause is easy (and rather fun) to imagine. If ever there were two things that should not have have an impact on whom a person votes for, it should be the genetic characteristics of skin colour and gender. Dare I suggest that ideology and honesty might trump those two non-factors every time?

And yet this article will most likely pass without the slightest murmur from a great many people.

Gender or race: Black women voters face tough choices in S.C.

But if it is reasonable for black women in South Carolina to vote on the basis that someone is black or female, presumably they cannot object if other people decide to vote for candidates on the basis they are white or male. After all, it does appear that framing the choice on whom to support on the basis of racism or sexism is perfectly acceptable to the mainstream media. And there I was mistakenly thinking that those things were the cardinal politically incorrect sins of our day! Who knew?

To this piece by Frank Fisher:

When asked to name countries that impose extensive internet censorship, you might think of China, Iran, or North Korea; I doubt you'd think of the UK, but, after the home secretary Jacqui Smith's speech to the International Centre for Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence today, you really should.

Britain is not a free country. It is free-er than most perhaps, but at most free-ish; and moving steadily towards a free-esque pantomime freedom.

For the inevitable commentators who think I'm whinging about nothing because I'm able to write these lines, consider this: Britain also has an historically low murder rate. Yet generally homicide is still deplored, and we would like less of it. No politician would dare stand up and call for more gang-violence because 'known criminals' being murdered is a good thing.

Seeing as we have been talking about Tom Cruise and Scientology earlier today, there is an interesting ruckus brewing on Gawker, who have posted a rather interesting (in a 'huh?' kind of way) video of Tom Cruise talking about Scientology. The Church of Scientology's lawyers have demanded they take the video down and in response fearless Gawker VP Gaby Darbyshire politely invited them to go rotate, citing 'fair use' (Gaby is delightful and rather hot, by the way. I met her at Les Blogs in Paris a few years ago).

I take no conclusive view of the legal merits of the case (certainly if extracts of a proprietary video are used, it is a 'fair use' slam dunk... not so sure about using the whole thing), but I am much taken by Gawker's sheer bravery going up against the deep pocketed Scientologists, who are prone on the slightest pretext to sue people who cast aspersions on, or even reveal the details of, their religion. Does that remind you of someone else?

The Scientologists deserve every brickbat they get for their strong arm tactics against detractors. However I do not really understand the intellectual animus directed at the Scientologists for their religious beliefs. Their key myths do not strike me as any more preposterous than those of other more mainstream religions. It seems to me that their only big mistake was going into too much detail, thus in their case it is harder to fog the issue with the 'allegorical interpretations' that help us avoid tears of mirth when reading the literal word of other holy texts, ones which were not written by L. Ron Hubbard but rather by his more time hallowed equivalents in antiquity.

A Muslim lawyer in Canada is trying to use the profoundly illiberal notion that 'contempt and hatred' should be criminal offences (which are by definition 'thoughtcrimes'), to silence Mark Steyn for his critical remarks about Islam. Bizarrely, the move to sanction Steyn is being billed as a 'human rights' action. That said, I suppose it is indeed a 'human rights' action in the perverse sence that the intention is to abridge Steyn's human right to express his opinions in favour of allowing Islamists to have a veto over anyone printing anything they dislike.

Well, that sort of fascistic behaviour makes me both hold the likes of Faisal Joseph and the Canadian Islamic Congress in utter contempt and to hate them. I suppose I better give my lawyer a heads up then. Or then again, as it is their behaviour which makes me hold them in contempt and hatred, can I sue them for making that happen? Would that actually be any more unreasonable than what they are doing?

Just askin'.

Of course do not kid yourself that thoughtcrimes do not get prosecuted in Britain, or that it is only something Islamofascist lawyers do to us non-believers, because sadly nothing could be further from the truth.

The Spectator magazine is allergic to the city of Liverpool. Now, having never been there, despite some distant family connections to its 19th Century history (one of my ancestors helped to erect the magnificent St George's Hall), I cannot comment on whether Liverpool is the sort of place that the Germans should have obligingly finished off in 1939-45 or a place full of cheeky, merry Scousers all singing Beatles tunes and watching Everton and the Reds. Sorry, no idea. But there is something - even to my non-PC eyes - rather grating about how the likes of Rod Liddle, the Speccie's House Yob, never fails to lob a literary hand grenade at the city. Here it is again:

So the mop-headed ingenue teacher Gillian Gibbons has been released from her torment in Sudan without being horsewhipped or banged up for too long. The Scousers - Ms Gibbons is from Liverpool, naturellement - had insufficient time to organise a candlelit vigil for her or a minute’s silence at Anfield, but they did manage to festoon lots of railings with yellow ribbons and bouquets from the local garage.

Ah, those sentimental scousers. They are such thickies, aren't they?

Meanwhile, that strange Frank Spencer manqué Gibbons returns safely to Blighty all jolly with stories about how the Sudanese prison authorities gave her lots of apples, what lovely people they all are, and she doesn’t regret a thing, etc. Fine, love — however, on that latter point, we do, so you can pick up the travel bill for the Muslim peers who supposedly sprang you from chokey, you deluded, asinine fool.

She may not be the brightest light in the harbour, but I would love to see Rod Liddle put in an Islamic slammer for two weeks. The benefits would be salutary.

My own rather uncharitable view is that she was released from prison far too soon; having told us all that Islam was a gentle and peaceable religion, she should have been allowed proper time inside to reflect upon this interesting perspective. And without apples. The whole affair also made me worry about my children’s education; teachers interviewed on TV seem to get more stupid, further down the league tables of sentience, with every year that passes. And now we have Gillian Gibbons. Please God, they can’t all be that thick, can they?

Quite possibly, Rodney, she is as dumb as a stump. Naivete might be the worst thing she can be accused of (I must agree to sharing his nagging worries about the sort of folk who are schoolteachers these days). But this sort of gratuitous name-calling against a person imprisoned and threatened with flogging for something so batshit insane is beyond the pale. But hey, let us not turn up the chance to take the piss out of those sentimental scousers.

His article does move on to better ground here, however, where I think Liddle has a decent point:

But - whisper it quietly - some considerable good may have come of the whole shebang. The most unequivocal and persistent protests about Ms Gibbons' arrest, back home, came from Britain’s self-appointed guardians of Allah, the Muslim groups. Including the Muslim Council of Britain. Note the word 'unequivocal'. They protested loud and strong and without those previously ubiquitous caveats always beginning with the conjunction 'but ...'. As in 'We condemn this outrage entirely, but you have to understand that...' This time there were no buts, just condemnation. And it was truly heartening to see a niqab-clad British woman protesting outside the Sudanese embassy holding aloft a placard bearing the photograph of a teddy bear, under which was written, with wit and acuity, 'Not in my name'.

Quite possibly true. It may be the case that the sheer, oh-my-god-how-mad-can-they-be craziness of the teddy bear-as M. has made even the more ardent Muslims wonder whether certain regimes are taking their professed religious beliefs a step too far. He may be right.

Gary Rosen has been out in China, burning his boats, the ones that might ever take him back to China in the foreseeable future. Good for him. My thanks to the ever useful Arts & Letters Daily for the link.

I particularly liked the bit about how the Chinese regime censors the awkward stuff, and I offer no apology for quoting it at some length:

Someone asked (well, it was me again) how Mr. Liu could reconcile his presentation of China's peace-loving ways with Beijing's clear position that, if Taiwan were to declare independence, the mainland would invade - a threat made more credible by its arms build-up across the Taiwan Strait and its provocative military exercises in recent years. Mr. Liu did not like my use of the word "provocative." In the first place, he said, "You should phrase your questions with more respect." More to the point, he rejected the underlying premise: "China has a population of 1.3 billion people, including the 23 million people of Taiwan. It is not for them to decide their own status."

Which is about as excellent an exposition of the imperfect correspondence between the ideals of democracy and of liberty as you could ever hope to encounter, don't you think?

Rosen continues:

None of this was exactly surprising, since it adhered closely to long-standing Chinese policy. What was surprising, as we shook hands and prepared to leave, was Mr. Liu's insistence that his remarks were entirely off the record. This was news to us. All of our sessions, unless restricted in some way beforehand, were explicitly on the record, and we had been busily taking notes, with our tape recorders in plain sight. Liu Jieyi, in all his worldliness, was perfectly aware of what we were doing. Out of pique at my impertinence or perhaps because he did not like having lost his cool, he wanted the interview to go away.

This task fell to Mr. Huang, who called us together in the lobby once we were back at the hotel. "I need you to tell me that you won't report about this," he said. "It is best to respect the host; that is the international practice." Pressure had plainly been brought to bear on him, and several in the group, feeling that they had no particular use for Mr. Liu's words (and not wishing to jeopardize our sponsors or future trips), said they were unlikely to write about the session. Others, myself included, were less accommodating. One member of the group explained that she would find it hard to continue with the tour if the rules were continually changed after interviews. "We are not Chinese journalists," she told Mr. Huang, "and this smacks of censorship."

Knowing that I considered the material from the session valuable and might well use it, Mr. Huang pulled me aside several more times the next day to ask again that I "respect the host," adding that if I did, "I would get better interviews the next time." The threat in this, as reporters who cover China informed me, was that my future access might be limited; denying visas is a favorite tactic for punishing Western journalists who upset the authorities. But as I said to Mr. Huang, I was unsure that I would ever again report from China, and I could not relent on a key journalistic principle. Moreover, I felt obliged to tell him, his effort to suppress the story had become the story.

You seldom read reportage like that from China, or from any other efficiently administered despotism with a definite future, do you? And the reportage itself explains why. The exception that explains the rule, you might say.

The only thing I believe in print these days is the date.

- Sienna Miller

In this weeks edition of The Economist, the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, is attacked for 'spending' money by promising to reduce taxation in a targeted way so that people can better afford to send their children to independent schools. We are also told that "professionals and economists" (no names are given) hold that the money would be better spent on increasing the government school budget even more.

So tax reductions are 'spending money', as if all money belonged to the government and allowing taxpayers to keep a bit more of their own money is 'spending' it, and the solution to the problems of government education is to increase government spending on it even more than it has already been increased.

In recent times I have attacked the Economist for pretending to be pro free market whilst, when one reads it closely, not really being so. Articles like the one on the Australian elections mean I can no longer fairly make this charge. The Economist having now 'come out' as an openly leftist publication.

In a recent visit to the local library I had a look at this week's edition of the Economist. There was a forty page section on Central Banks (government, or government backed, authorities that control the money supply - such as the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Union Central Bank, the Federal Reserve system, and so on) and couple of other articles on the same subject.

In the few minutes I spent looking at the material there seemed to be little on the money supply. Neither proper definitions of the various measures of the money supply, or information on their growth rates in the various countries over time. Of course, as an arch reactionary, I do not support the existence of Central Banks, but if was to write about them I would give most space to the primary function of these things - rather than just writing about interest rates, price rises (the modern definition of 'inflation'), unemployment and so on. Unsurprisingly the rate of growth in the money supply may well effect these other things, but to write about them, in the context of Central Banking, without much examination of the record of various Central Banks and Central Bank like institutions in controlling the money supply is rather like writing about a room without really dealing with the elephant standing in the middle of it.

Of course there were other things in this week's edition of the Economist, but some of this content was also rather odd. For example, we were informed that the Democrats were presently taking a harder line on controlling government spending than the Republicans in the United States.

Now it is quite true that over the last few years the Republicans, led by President Bush, have increased government spending wildly. However the Democrats denounced them for not spending enough money on X, Y, Z, over the same period. Also the article was about now, not the last few years, and presently the Democrats are pushing for vastly more government spending. Not just the Democrat candidates for President of the United States, but the Democrat controlled Senate and House of Representatives as well. These demands for more government spending are far greater than what the Republican candidates for President of the United States or the Republicans in the Senate and House of Representatives are suggesting. The article said that the Democrats support a "pay as you go" rule. But this has nothing to do with limiting increases in government spending, all it means is that massive increases in government spending should be matched by massive increases in taxation, and, sure enough, the Democrats support both.

I can only conclude that the person or people who wrote the article either do not know very much about the current situation in the United States, or do not know what the "pay as you go" rule is about - or both.

There does seem to be a basic knowledge problem in the Economist, even on British matters. For example, only last week there was an examination of the pre budget statement. It was not really a big increase in taxation, the Economist declared, - for example there were "many winners" from the changes in Capital Gains Tax.

An examination of the facts should have told the writer or writers of the article that the changes in Capital Gains Tax would mean far higher tax for most payers of it - and that this and the other tax changes did indeed mean higher taxes overall.

Why does anyone buy the Economist when it neither understands the relation of Central Banks to monetary policy or understands the fiscal situation in the United States or even its home country?

With infuriating credulousness, the BBC has taken as its top story (on radio as well as the web) the launch of a report from the 'All-Party Committee on Identity Fraud':

The All Party Group on Identity Fraud said a tsar was needed to co-ordinate the work being done by the government, police and private sector. The MPs also called for the government to make the public and businesses more aware of identity fraud and how they can avoid becoming victims. [...] In their report the MPs also recommended police are given the resources to employ dedicated identity fraud officers. They said tougher sanctions should be placed on organisations that put people's personal information in danger.

(Such as the Identity and Passport Service, local planning authorities, the Department of Health, ContactPoint, DVLA...and all the other branches of the caring data-sharing state? Just asking.)

So far so hopeless. The usual call for for more officials and more powers rather than any attempt to analyse the problem. The committee itself is not quite that stupid, even if it has not taken a particularly fresh look. It rightly blames the indifference of institutions and the foolishness of the public for much of it.

What is really damaging to the BBC's credibility and to the honesty of public debate is what is next.

The crime costs the economy about £1.7bn a year, according to government estimates, with 171,488 cases coming to light in the UK during 2006. Recent surveys suggest as many as one in four people may have been affected by identity theft.

"Surveys" by whom? I wonder if the reporter knows. I can guess: Experian. But I can not readily find where this headline comes from. It appears in a more nuanced version on the National Identity Fraud Prevention Week site as...

"A quarter of the UK population has been affected by identity fraud or knows somebody who has."

My emphasis. Not remotely the same thing. I know several Catholics quite well. My catechumenacy is a distant unlikelihood.

YouGov did a proper poll a year ago on behalf of NPower and found one in ten claimed to have been a victim in some way - without themselves providing a rigorous definition or checklist. The difference ought to indicate to anyone with the remotest curiosity that something is screwy about all these figures. You have to be suspicious of anything described as a "survey" - do BBC reporters not learn that in training?

And worse, they persist in quoting the entirely spurious "government figure" for identity fraud of £1.7bn a year. Anyone working in this field ought not just to ask, "What is the source for this figure?" and then check it. They should know that the Home Office report has been utterly discredited...
See here, or, in more detail, here.

... but it keeps coming back time and time again, as if you can make a fact by repeating a lie often enough.

There is no agreed definition of 'identity fraud'. There are few useful figures, and in the circumstances there can hardly be. Meanwhile several interested parties - Experian, the only organisation linked to from the story on the BBC site, being one, and the Home Office being another - are engaged in a sustained campaign of hype for their own benefit. That is a scandal in which you would expect the news media to take an interest.

It is (at least) disappointing that the BBC apparently uses no critical judgement or background knowledge - or even Google - in reporting these things, but sees fit to reprint the gush of press-releases, as if it were a cheap fashion magazine handling a cosmetic company's announcement of the latest face-cream. For all its admitted corporate culture problem in editorial matters, this is one of the world's most widely trusted news sources (which, unless you take Fox or Xinhua to be gospel, you may say only shows how appallingly untrustworthy the others are). But it is starting to give the impression of not caring about the integrity of basic, readily-checkable, facts.

A few days ago we quoted Adriana sticking it to Andrew Keen in a debate. Well she is at it again in a bit more detail this time on her own blog.

Irritatingly, debating with the man invariably leads from his arguments to the person he is. It is like trying to have a conversation about a picture or an image with a colourblind man. He is looking at the same thing but, in his vision, there are colours missing and so in his mind the resulting image may be fundamentally different from reality. In the end, you find yourself insisting that the colours are really there and that he should just take your word for it. He, on the other hand, insists on describing what is in front of him without taking any notice of others telling him that his vision is flawed.

I particularly like the bit about him 're-setting' each time so that no intellectual progress is possible with the man over time even if you successfully refute some part of his argument... next day it is as if the previous debate never happened (kind of like watching old non-story-arc episodic SciFi shows that never referenced previous events).

Read the whole thing.

The BBC is a strong brand for reasons that I dislike. Yet we must recognise that the Corporation straddles a paradoxical position. Some aspects of the Corporation are very good and provide a superior listening or viewing experience to its commercial rivals. Radio channels 3 and 4 may have declined in recent years but the stations still stand above their rivals. The contribution of the BBC to the nation includes a shared cultural and national experience that binds all four nations from Churchill to Blair, until alternatives undermined the cohesive agenda of public-sector broadcasting.

Discussing the parasitical coercion of the BBC's institutions and its output today in Borough Market with Michael Jennings, the pessimism was palpable. As technology undermines the reasonable expectations of the licence fee, our views diverged. Michael thought that the levy would be converted into a tax, as the Political Class grasped at cultural hegemony. I was more sanguine, viewing the abolition of the licence fee as a cheap populist act for a government facing a public sector borrowing crisis. After all, people no longer 'need' the BBC, if they ever did.

This left a quandary. What shall we do with the BBC? And the answer is that the Corporation should be sold to Google. Like all public sector corporations there are strong centres of quirky innovation that could thrive in such a culture. Google has already linked up with the BBC and competes in certain media. Google could derive profit from providing premium services on worldwide subscription. It is a very valuable brand that no private sector owner would wish to dilute. The rush of creative abilties into the private sector from BBC redundancies would stimulate our media industries that are currently stifled by the dominant oligarchies of various publicly funded and regulated channels.

And households would save over one hundred pounds every year. It is a win-win.

Andrew Keen: Are you comparing the Instapundit, the idiotic crazy libertarian ex-law professor, to Polly Toynbee and Robert Fisk? They are my heroes!

Adriana Lukas: No, I am not comparing Instapundit to Polly Toynbee or Robert Fisk. That would be unfair to Instapundit.

- Adriana Lukas, speaking at a debate at the Front Line Club.

Michael Gove, the Conservative MP for Surrey Heath, has written an interesting and very 'bloggy' article in The Times with a subsection that was right on the money called Left-wing cant and the indefensible:

There’s a special sort of piece that appears only in The Guardian (or The New York Times) that deserves to be recognised as a journalistic genre in its own right. They masquerade as balanced and judicious profiles of individuals. But in fact they are vigorous defences, or at least pleas in mitigation, for people who cannot be allowed to be seen as guilty of any great sin because they’re On The Left.

We had two this weekend. We discovered last week that the playwright Arthur Miller, who abandoned his disabled son after the child was born because he was, in Miller's words, "a mongoloid", avoided all contact with the child until they met, to the playwright’s surprise, at a meeting where Miller was championing a better deal for disabled people. This sort of behaviour is beyond satire. To seek applause for your stance on behalf of suffering in general, while being so indifferent to the fate of individual suffering, is the quintessence of canting left-wingery. But for The Guardian Miller was as much the victim as anyone.

But their treatment of Miller was positively caustic besides their lionising of one of Britain’s most shameless intellectual apologists for evil. A fawning tribute to the Eric Hobsbawm, 90, made light of his championing of Soviet communism and his support for Stalin, the gulag and totalitarian tyranny. I’m happy to leave the old devil in peace to enjoy his dotage. But can we at least be spared any more laying of garlands at the feet of this man who supported mass murder?

Quite, although I am not so forgiving as the Honourable Member for Surrey Heath. It is intolerable that the Guardianistas get a free ride on these sort of issues. Now if only the leader of Gove's hilariously misnamed party would call a spade a spade like that.

Normally I am wary of claims that "trying to please actual or potential readers" is a reason for why newspapers go in for pro 'liberal' elite content (I suspect that the desire to seem 'modern' and 'with it' is far more powerful than the desire for more readers - indeed may even lead people who control publications to drive away actual or potential readers).

However, the Iraq war is so unpopular that I am inclined to think that the choice of the Daily Telegraph to rat on its support for the war may indeed have been to try and please actual or potential readers.

So the editorial yesterday about how the "American involvement in Iraq limps to its inevitable and ignominious conclusion" was not much of shock to me - although I do find the language disgraceful. I, unlike the Daily Telegraph, did not support the judgement to go to go into Iraq in 2003 - but I would not use sub-Marxist death-to-America language like "inevitable" and "ignominious".

However, there was an excuse for the editorial. The Daily Telegraph reported that a retired American General had suggested that the British army send more troops to Iraq - being either too stupid or too dishonest to understand that the British had no more troops to send. General Keane's comments were, according the Daily Telegraph, just an effort to use the British as an excuse for the failure of the Americans.

"The trouble with this was...." I heard the retired American General's comments (on BBC Radio 4's "Today Programme") and far from being too stupid or too dishonest to understand the small size of the British army he actually said that the British army should be "grown" - i.e. made bigger, as he also said the American army and Marine Corps should be and he hoped would be. Of course one can argue about whether the British army really does need to be bigger (for example why are there over twenty thousands British troops in mainland Europe?), but the basic point here is clear.

The Daily Telegraph misreported the retired American General's comments - in order to have an excuse for a standard 'liberal' elite death-to-America editorial.

Michael Skube is having a fit about the demise of what sounds like beautiful, beeeaaauuudiful journalism in Blogs: All the noise that fits.

The more important the story, the more incidental our opinions become. Something larger is needed: the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence and, as the best writers understand, the depiction of real life. Reasoned argument, as well as top-of-the-head comment on the blogosphere, will follow soon enough, and it should. But what lodges in the memory, and sometimes knifes us in the heart, is the fidelity with which a writer observes and tells. The word has lost its luster, but we once called that reporting.

Who'd have guessed that he's describing journalism in the above?! Skube reads like an old journalist pro (and I use that word in the loosest possible sense) who bemoans the fact that his hard-earned 'right' to be published is being trampled upon by the barbaric hoards of bloggers. Well, the Big Editor in the Sky is no longer, there is just the internet with the online equivalent of printing press. With distribution bundled in. The bargain of the millennium. But the likes of Skube want to convince the world (or what's left of those who haven't taken to blogging) that this is bad for the luxury brands of MSM. We already know that, Michael. The real luxury is not having someone like you misrepresent what people are, do and mean by your selective 'fact-sifting', out of context quoting, and sloppy reporting. I am not accusing Michael Skube of such practices here, I'll leave that to Ed Cone, I am targeting the entire profession here. I am an equal opportunity ranter.

It always amuses me - right after it annoys me - how his type (Andrew Keen et al) only trawl through the bad stuff online and construct their argument around the worst they can find. Granted, nowadays they find a parenthesis or two to reluctantly admit that bloggers have some influence.. but no matter, if things continue this way, we are all dooomed. DOOOOMED! Well, yeah, dude.

Instead of supporting their arguments about the plebeian nature of the blogosphere and the rubbish we are all inundated with, they merely demonstrate their lack of skill in navigating blogs and finding the daily gems. So Jay Rosen of PressThink put together a blowback that's worth bookmarking - a collective effort of many to list examples of a blogger doing a journalist's job. It has also been published in LA Times. For the record.

cross-posted from Media Influencer

Obituary of Bill Deedes, newspaper editor, reporter, humanitarian campaigner and soldier.

Rest in peace.

Tabloids don't sell movies or help anyone's career. If that were true, every Lindsay Lohan movie would open to 80 million dollars.

- Cameron Diaz, putting the much vaunted 'power of the media' into perspective.

A weekend co-optition. Here are two BBC stories about politicians promising to reduce regulation. Let's see how many differences in presentation we collectively can spot.

May 24, 2005: Brown pledges law to cut red tape

August 12, 2007: Tory plan for business 'tax cut

Let me start:

1. Headline: the first is personal; the second is treated as the collective decision of a party.
2. Comparing standfirsts, the first talks about cutting "the burden of red tape on business'" as if an altruistic act, in the second the cutting is "radical" and "for UK businesses" hinting that this is a dangerous scheme undertaken on behalf of business.
3. In the second story, there is a direct quote from a political opponent; in the first, no criticism of the proposal appears.
4. Indeed, in the second story the boxed quote is ad hominem party-political criticism, whereas in the first it is a press-release quote about the policy from its proponent.

Over to you.

He wrapped up his Friday broadcast with carefully bracketed video of young Republicans in Washington. His softly presented outrage leads to the inevitable conclusion that he is embracing the libertarian principle of individual, personal action. The only other possible interpretation being that he is a sanctimonious hypocrite.

Ending his July 27 broadcast of Bill Moyers Journal, he makes his opinion very clear that unless someone has committed to personally experience the greatest possible cost of what they are advocating, their opinion is without standing and worthy only of ridicule and moral reprobation. His quiet anger is directed at people who advocate actions for which others will bear the burden. I for one consider this to be a marked improvement in Moyer's politics. Prior to this he has always identified strongly with activists who want to force the rest of society to bear the burden for their projects. I look forward eagerly to seeing him apply his new standard to every guest that he invites onto his program. It will be refreshing to only hear opinions from people who have first made a total personal sacrifice to a cause, before they may express belief in the justice of that cause. Because, Bill's right. If you have not given yourself totally to some great endeavor first, 'volunteering' others is the very essence of hypocrisy.

transcript excerpt:

BILL MOYERS: ... Less than a month ago, July 6, Private First Class LeRon Wilson, and another member of his platoon were killed when their military vehicle hit a roadside bomb south of Baghdad.

I was thinking of LeRon Wilson a few days later as I came upon this internet video the independent journalist Max Blumenthal. He had gone to a gathering of young Republicans in Washington and interviewed some of them. Here are some excerpts:

JUSTIN YORK, UNIV. OF CENTRAL FLORIDA '10: We are all supportive of the war; we all believe that it is very important to win the war and to fight Al Queda in Iraq so we are not fighting them here in the United States.

DAVID CLARY, UNIV. OF ILLINOIS '09: I like the Republican standpoint, fight them over there not over here. That's what we're doing right now and we should keep doing it.

RACHAEL DAVIS, UNIV. OF ARKANSAS '09: Um, basically, what I don't think people understand is that, if it's not fought in Iraq, we don't win over there, it's going to happen here.

CLINT PETERSON, UNIV. OF NORTH TEXAS, '08: I think frankly we went there because Al Qaeda was already there, they may not have [had] the forces they have now but they were there and essentially if we leave there we give them a stronghold.

BLUMENTHAL: Why are you not fighting them over there?

DAVID CLARY, UNIV. OF ILLINOIS '09: Why am I not fighting them over there?

BLUMENTHAL: Yeah?

DAVID CLARY, UNIV. OF ILLINOIS '09: Because I'm in college right now.

BLUMENTHAL: Do you plan to enlist?

DAVID CLARY, UNIV. OF ILLINOIS '09: I haven't ruled it out.

BLUMENTHAL: Are you going to serve?

JUSTIN YORK, UNIV. OF CENTRAL FLORIDA '10: I've thought about it, thinking about it, haven't decided.

BLUMENTHAL: Undecided? Why aren't you serving currently?

JUSTIN YORK, UNIV. OF CENTRAL FLORIDA '10: Well I'm an undergraduate right now and I had a scholarship...I just didn't have any real urge...I just didn't have any strong urge...

RALPH KETTELL, COLBY '09: Why am I not serving? I don't know...I mean... I really support this country strongly and I...you know... I didn't enlist. There is not much else I can say. I don't think that you can't talk about this issue if you're not serving.

BILL MOYERS: Private First Class LaRon Wilson has been posthumously awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. He was the 30th 18-year-old American soldier to be killed in Iraq. That's it for the JOURNAL. I'm Bill Moyers.

Even to a jaundiced observer of the mainstream UK media like yours truly, it is sometimes surprising how much bias there is against private property and privately owned business. The left just about tolerates big listed companies, I suspect because socialists imagine that such companies are easier to harass and bully via large shareholder groups like pension funds. This has certainly been part of the thinking in the United States, where large state pension schemes, such as the Calpers fund in California, have used their shareholder voting power to hammer the boards of firms they dislike or think are letting investors down. It is odd, as I remarked a few months ago, that the left, in the form of writers like Observer columnist Will Hutton, used to wax indignant about the short-term investment horizons of listed firms, and now regard them as the finest business model that there is, while regarding companies that are owned by private equity firms as somehow bad, even evil. Well, we had another example of the sort of prejudice against non-listed companies today in the Observer:

Britain's leading bookmakers, including the private equity-owned Gala Coral, face serious allegations about the vulnerability of thousands of staff who are regularly attacked during robberies and by punters who have lost huge sums on new-style gaming machines. Gala Coral is owned by Permira, the private equity company headed by Damon Buffini.

Union officials paint an ugly picture of betting shop staff regularly abused and intimidated by gamblers, with hundreds of employees experiencing serious attacks. Staff have been injured and murdered as robberies of shops become an increasing occurrence.

The implication, lazily expressed, is that the horror of being robbed and murdered is somehow connected to the private ownership of the firms in which these people work. The Observer has been among the most vociferous attackers of private equity firms - firms that buy businesses and restructure them, usually with large amounts of borrowed money - and its criticisms are usually wide of the mark. Various studies, such as from Nottingham University, have shown that private equity firms invest for the longer term, create more jobs in total, and generate more profits, than listed businesses. But these firms are mega rich and their owners are very wealthy men (it is a male-dominated world) and so are clearly evil in the eyes of the left-leaning media. But even I was struck at how casually the Observer has tried to link the problems of robbery to private ownership in readers' minds.

Of course, with interest rates rising and debt markets getting a lot rougher due to the sub-prime mortgage SNAFU in the US, the ability of private equity firms to borrow money will drop, so those economic illiterates at The Observer can rest easy, and go back to bashing publicly-quoted firms.

Nice piece in the Spectator about the contrast between shows like Sex in the City and older, "screwball" movies made in the 1930s and 1940s, such as the peerless His Girl Friday (starring Cary Grant). I found SITC quite funny at times - well, at least in the first series - but the joke wore thin. On the other hand, however many times I watch it, His Girl Friday will never pall. And as a sendup of the journalist world at its time, there's been nothing better, arguably, than Evelyn Waugh's novel, Scoop (the old British TV sitcom, Drop the Dead Donkey, was great, but set in a later era).

A marvellous article by Antony Jay in today's Daily Telegraph confirms what has been obvious for some time to anyone reading political blogs and pundits - the BBC is biased. And not only that, it has its own ideology that Antony Jay calls 'media liberal ideology'. His article analyses impact of technology, history and perspectives on individual and institutions that defined the BBC and with it the chattering classes. A must read as it provides a solid backbone to our rants against the BBC politics. Here are a few morsels that should give you a taste of the piece.

Of people working at the BBC and particularly on Newsnight, which he produced for several years.

...we were not just anti-Macmillan; we were anti-industry, anti-capitalism, anti-advertising, anti-selling, anti-profit, anti-patriotism, anti-monarchy, anti-Empire, anti-police, anti-armed forces, anti-bomb, anti-authority. Almost anything that made the world a freer, safer and more prosperous place, you name it, we were anti it.

I disagree with the final sentence of the following quote. There is never too much freedom or too much variety, nevertheless the distinction is brilliant. Saying that there is too much freedom is like saying that there are too many notes in Mozart's music... which ones would you like to remove? But I digress:

...there have always been two principal ways of misunderstanding a society: by looking down on it from above, and by looking up at it from below. In other words, by identifying with institutions or by identifying with individuals.

To look down on society from above, from the point of view of the ruling groups, the institutions, is to see the dangers of the organism splitting apart, the individual components shooting off in different directions, until everything dissolves into anarchy. Those who see society in this way are preoccupied with the need for order, discipline, control, authority and organisation.

To look up at society from below, from the point of view of the lowest group, the governed, is to see the dangers of the organism growing ever more rigid and oppressive until it fossilises into a monolithic tyranny. Those who see society in this way are preoccupied with the need for liberty, equality, self-expression, representation, freedom of speech and action and worship, and the rights of the individual. The reason for the popularity of these misunderstandings is that both views are correct, as far as they go, and both sets of dangers are real but there is no "right" point of view. The most you can ever say is that sometimes society is in danger from too much authority and uniformity and sometimes from too much freedom and variety.

A brutal description of the media elite's views and attitudes and how they got there:

The second factor which shaped our media liberal attitudes was a sense of exclusion. We saw ourselves as part of the intellectual élite, full of ideas about how the country should be run, and yet with no involvement in the process or power to do anything about it. Being naïve in the way institutions actually work, yet having good arts degrees from reputable universities, we were convinced that Britain's problems were the result of the stupidity of the people in charge. We ignored the tedious practicalities of getting institutions to adopt and implement ideas.

This ignorance of the realities of government and management enabled us to occupy the moral high ground. We saw ourselves as clever people in a stupid world, upright people in a corrupt world, compassionate people in a brutal world, libertarian people in an authoritarian world. We were not Marxists but accepted a lot of Marxist social analysis. Some people called us arrogant; looking back, I am afraid I cannot dispute the epithet.

And here he spells out their anti-market bias:

We also had an almost complete ignorance of market economics. That ignorance is still there. Say ''Tesco'' to a media liberal and the patellar reflex says, "Exploiting African farmers and driving out small shopkeepers". The achievement of providing the range of goods, the competitive prices, the food quality, the speed of service and the ease of parking that attract millions of shoppers every day does not show up on the media liberal radar.

It's an ideology!

For a time it puzzled me that after 50 years of tumultuous change the media liberal attitudes could remain almost identical to those I shared in the 1950s. Then it gradually dawned on me: my BBC media liberalism was not a political philosophy, even less a political programme. It was an ideology based not on observation and deduction but on faith and doctrine. We were rather weak on facts and figures, on causes and consequences, and shied away from arguments about practicalities. If defeated on one point we just retreated to another; we did not change our beliefs. We were, of course, believers in democracy. The trouble was that our understanding of it was structurally simplistic and politically naïve. It did not go much further than one-adult-one-vote.

We ignored the whole truth, namely that modern Western civilisation stands on four pillars, and elected governments is only one of them. Equally important is the rule of law. The other two are economic: the right to own private property and the right to buy and sell your property, goods, services and labour. (Freedom of speech, worship, and association derive from them; with an elected government and the rule of law a nation can choose how much it wants of each). We never got this far with our analysis. The two economic freedoms led straight to the heresy of free enterprise capitalism - and yet without them any meaningful freedom is impossible.

But analysis was irrelevant to us. Ultimately, it was not a question of whether a policy worked but whether it was right or wrong when judged by our media liberal moral standards. There was no argument about whether, say, capital punishment worked. If retentionists came up with statistics showing that abolition increased the number of murders we simply rejected them.

And the damning conclusion:

It is not so much that their ideas and arguments are harebrained and impracticable: some of their causes are in fact admirable. The trouble - you might even say the tragedy - is that their implementation by governments eager for media approval has progressively damaged our institutions. Media liberal pressure has prompted a stream of laws, regulations and directives to champion the criminal against the police, the child against the school, the patient against the hospital, the employee against the company, the soldier against the army, the borrower against the bank, the convict against the prison - there is a new case in the papers almost every day, and each victory is a small erosion of the efficiency and effectiveness of the institution.

I can now see that my old BBC media liberalism was not a basis for government. It was an ideology of opposition, valuable for restraining the excesses of institutions and campaigning against the abuses of authority but it was not a way of actually running anything. It serves a vital function when government is dictatorial and oppressive, but when government is ineffective and over-permissive it is hopelessly inappropriate.

I can't deny that my perceptions have come through the experience of leaving the BBC. Suppose I had stayed. Would I have remained a devotee of the metropolitan media liberal ideology that I once absorbed so readily? I have an awful fear that the answer is yes.

I may not agree with everything Antony Jay says and believes but that does not detract from the value of his, well, confession. Aptly, the article is an abridged extract from 'Confessions of a Reformed BBC Producer' to be published tomorrow by CPS.

Yes, I know what the actual charges filed against Black were, but there is an interesting article in the Guardian by former Telegraph editorial director Kim Fletcher called The wages of envy which raises some interesting points.

It is in the nature of court cases that findings of guilt lend an artificial certainty to the world. Black will now find himself spoken of as another Robert Maxwell. But while Black's detractors were quickly out of the traps to say "we told you so", it became clear during the trial that nothing going on at Hollinger was in the same league as the Mirror under Maxwell. Before his trial the result had been seen even by Black's circle as a foregone conclusion. "There's no way a blue collar jury in Chicago can let a man who looks like Conrad off every charge," said one of his friends to me, before the trial began

Given that the central charges failed, it does make me wonder if he was not in truth convicted of being unapologetic about being rich and being called Lord Black. Perhaps the verdict had as much to do with the jury selection process and where the prosecution chose to hold the trial than whatever Lord Black actually did or did not do.

"If Michael (Moore) thinks healthcare is expensive now, just wait when it's free."

P.J. O'Rourke, in a remark attributed to him in this nice takedown of Moore's latest "documentary", Sicko, a film making the case that we would all be better off in having tax-funded healthcare free at the point of use, like the magnificent British National Health Service that is the envy of the world (cue sarcasm alert, sounds of hollow laughter).

Arnold Kling has thoughts on the movie. Here is what I wrote about some of the issues arising when people want healthcare free at the point of use (ie, they want someone else to pay for it).

Do not misunderstand me: private healthcare in some countries, such as the US, is far from perfect. For a start, it does not have a lot to do with unfettered laissez faire capitalism, as anyone who has encountered the powerful American Medical Association will point out. The insurance system in the US encourages inflated prices for treatment, and there are other regulatory and legal costs which have become a lot worse in recent years. But if Moore thinks British cinema audiences will be wowed by his paean of praise for Britain's Soviet model of healthcare, he needs to have his head examined.

Mind you, I have often wondered whether Moore is for real, or a sort of performance artist secretly working for Dick Cheney.

(Update: further thoughts on whether Moore is a clown damaging the already-weak case for socialised medicine can be seen here.)

...Abolish it. That is what the latest Libertarian Alliance press release demands and I find it hard not to agree.

In this era of channel fragmentation, cable, satellite and the rise of the internet as a method of distribution, what on earth is the point of the BBC? If I want to see what the other side is thinking I can watch Al Jezeera or read the Independent.

It's a bit like walking into a Sunday meeting of the Flat Earth Society. As they discuss great issues of the day, they discuss them from the point of view that the earth is flat. If someone says, 'No, no, no, the earth is round!', they think this person is an extremist. That's what it's like for someone with my right-of-centre views working inside the BBC.

- Jeff Randall, formerly the BBC's business editor. The BBC does quote this against itself, but my experience of the bien pensant left in the media suggests that it will not be much apprehended inside the corporation.

In Lebanon media bias goes to a whole new level:

A Lebanese TV news presenter has been sacked over comments in which she gloated over the assassination of anti-Syrian politician Walid Eido.

The presenter, who has not been named, then went on to name a Lebanese MP who would be assassinated next.

She was unaware that her microphone was on and that the comments were being broadcast live.

That is taking character assassination way over the top.

Have reports of the death of the mainstream media been greatly exaggerated?

The Home Office [Bureau of State Security for overseas readers] would be ludicrous in its crudity, if it did not present such a threat to liberty. Bids for more arbitrary power are always, but always, acompanied by a scare story.

Today's example:

Reid proposes register for terror offenders

John Reid will today propose setting up a terrorist offenders register as part of a series of long-term counter-terror measures.
The proposal, based on similar lines to the existing sex offenders register, is one of a series of ideas that the Home Secretary will suggest should be part of the country’s antiterror defences.
One idea being studied by Mr Reid would be to allow the register to operate retrospectively, making an estimated 40 people convicted under terror laws since 2001 liable for immediate listing.
The Home Secretary will say that police should be allowed to continue questioning terror suspects after they have been charged.
He will also outline a plan to allow judges to impose a harsher sentence on people with links to terrorism who are convicted under the criminal law.
This would apply in particular to people convicted of credit card fraud who have links to terrorism.
Another measure would give police the power forcibly to enter the home of a terror suspect held under a control order.
But the pamphlet, to be published today, will not include firm proposals to extend beyond 28 days the length of time that police can hold terror suspects.

Is juxtaposed with:

Security checks on petrol tankers in London

Security spot checks are being carried out on petrol and chemical tankers, cement mixers and other vehicles that could be used by suicide bombers.
Police are monitoring lorries on key routes into London amid concerns that terrorists might copy tactics which have been deployed to deadly effect by insurgents in Iraq. [...]
But Scotland Yard stressed today that there was no specific intelligence to suggest that any kind of lorry bomb attack was imminent. [....]
"A counter-terrorism element has been added to the routine work of checking vehicles carrying dangerous goods,” said a police spokeswoman.

The first story is filed by the Times' home affairs editor. The second by an interesting chap called Sean O'Neill, co-author of The Suicide Factory a highly sensational account of Abu Hamza's career at Finsbury Park mosque. According to his agent's website:

"Sean O’Neill joined The Times in 2004 after working for the Daily Telegraph for twelve years. He has covered the Matrix Churchill affair and the Scott Inquiry into arms to Iraq, the Soham murders and the trial of Ian Huntley, and has reported extensively from Northern Ireland. Since 2001 he has focused largely on the al-Qaeda terrorist threat in the UK."

Mr O'Neill has something of a speciality in reporting the suspicions of the authorities. He clearly has very good police and intelligence contacts, and can make a livid story out of a change in a police checklist. But the inclination of such unofficial official contacts will be to feed such tidbits to the press to suit themselves, knowing an energetic journalist will make much of them.

There is an excellent article in the Telegraph by Charles Moore called What if Israelis had abducted BBC man?, addressing the morally demented attitude amongst the tranzi media and government set.

But just suppose that some fanatical Jews had grabbed Mr Johnston and forced him to spout their message, abusing his own country as he did so. What would the world have said?

There would have been none of the caution which has characterised the response of the BBC and of the Government since Mr Johnston was abducted on March 12. The Israeli government would immediately have been condemned for its readiness to harbour terrorists or its failure to track them down. Loud would have been the denunciations of the extremist doctrines of Zionism which had given rise to this vile act. The world isolation of Israel, if it failed to get Mr Johnston freed, would have been complete.

If Mr Johnston had been forced to broadcast saying, for example, that Israel was entitled to all the territories held since the Six-Day War, and calling on the release of all Israeli soldiers held by Arab powers in return for his own release, his words would have been scorned. The cause of Israel in the world would have been irreparably damaged by thus torturing him on television. No one would have been shy of saying so.

But of course in real life it is Arabs holding Mr Johnston, and so everyone treads on tip-toe. Bridget Kendall of the BBC opined that Mr Johnston had been "asked" to say what he said in his video. Asked! If it were merely an "ask", why did he not say no?

Whatever one thinks of Israel's policies on various issues, the nauseating double standards so consistently in play by so many 'news' organisations are something that need to be pointed out often and unapologetically. Charles Moore is to be commended for his article. Read the whole thing.

I am sometimes told that I should not "bang on" about the Economist journal (much in the way that Mr. Cameron tells everyone that they should not "bang on" about the endless regulations that come from that absurd extra layer of government called the European Union), as it is just another leftist publication like the Guardian, the Independent, the Financial Times (the newspaper for corrupt, politically connected, "business people") and so on.

However, people continue to defend the Economist so it is worth "banging on" about it.

The Economist stands, at least most of the time and in the case of most nations in the world, for more money for the various 'pubic services' and for more regulations (gun control, anti trust - competition policy and so on) as part of its Welfare State ideology and 'perfect competition' (i.e. neo-classical excuse for endless government intervention) conception of economics. So its defenders' claim that it is 'free market' is very obviously false.

However, the defenders of the Economist make another claim - that the journal provides coverage of world news that an ordinary newspaper does not.

In a break in a series of Kettering council events I popped out to the town library and had a look at the Economist - I wanted to read its reports on the local elections in Spain and Italy.

There was one line "centre left governments do badly" - no reports on the elections, nothing on what cities and regions were won by who. Even concerning nations in the European Union - the entity that the Economist supports and claims to know so much about.

The Economist fails the final test - it did not even bother have a proper report on either set of elections. It does not provide coverage that ordinary newspapers do not.

I have just got back from sitting in a discussion about how far should journalists go in chasing a story. It is a good question to ask and not as easy to answer as one might think. Is a journalist justified, for example, in breaking and entering a person's property without consent to obtain facts even if the story is one of supposedly major importance? Can a journalist eavesdrop on confidential phone calls between X and Y in order to get a story and does that story have to pass some sort of "public interest" test? In my own hazy thoughts on the matter, I tend to take the view that the public interest test has to be very rigorous indeed, ie, life has to be at stake. It is not enough to say that "X is a famous man who is interesting to lots of people" sort of yardstick. It has to involve the exposure of murderous, criminal behaviour by the person(s) being investigated to justify breaking into a private home or breaching a confidential document.

Of course, as the discussion unfolded, it became pretty clear that the world of the internet and blogs, that a lot of media laws, as well as the whole idea of journalism being a licenced profession, is under threat. On the whole, I think this is a good thing. If journalists want to form their own trade associations to promote best practice and carry emblems on their news channels or newspapers saying that Mr J. Pearce is a member of the Journalist Society, well and good. It will be rather like plumbers, electricians or bricklayers forming such bodies, bodies that stand for reputation and high standards. Miscreants can and will be thrown out. Being a member of such a club will be a big deal, except that it will not be a state-approved body, but a genuinely private one.

Anyway, the weather is too glorious for me to write further. Time to light the barbecue and open some wine.

If this story about Britain's so-called 'public service' state owned broadcasting channel is true, the end of the BBC cannot come to soon.

Amid the deaths and the grim daily struggle bravely borne by Britain's forces in southern Iraq, one tale of heroism stands out. Private Johnson Beharry's courage in rescuing an ambushed foot patrol then, in a second act, saving his vehicle's crew despite his own terrible injuries earned him a Victoria Cross.

For the BBC, however, his story is "too positive" about the conflict. The corporation has cancelled the commission for a 90-minute drama about Britain's youngest surviving Victoria Cross hero because it feared it would alienate members of the audience opposed to the war in Iraq.

To be honest I find it hard to believe the people who run the BBC could be so overt in imposing their tax funded biases on the channel. If this is true, even I am shocked by the crassness of it.

Like most 'evil free market people' I hold that collectivist (i.e. big government) ideas taught at schools and universities give the media a built in bias in favour of big government and against liberty. I am sometimes asked to give a specific example of what I am talking about and I will now do so.

A recent edition of Newsweek magazine attracted my attention because it had Europe at 50 in big letters on the front cover.

It turned out that the cover indicated a story about the European Economic Community - European Union (50 years old this year). This story being the normal nonsense, crediting the EU (rather than NATO) with peace in Europe, and crediting it with the economic recovery after World War II. Something that was actually achieved by the policy of deregulation, such as the scrapping of price controls, and tax reduction followed by finance minister Ludwig Erhard in Germany from 1948, and by political leaders in some other European countries.

However, it was a story in China that really interested me. New government spending increases in China were justified on the basis that they were in the spirit of "FDR's depression busting" policies in the 1930's which countered the "blows of the free market".

In fact President Roosevelt's spending schemes and regulations helped prolong the depression. And the depression was not caused by the 'free market' , it was caused by the boom and bust monetary policy of the Federal Reserve System.

In 1921 a previous government credit-money bubble, that of World War I, had burst, and the government of President Harding did nothing much, other than cut government spending, and the economy was well on the road to recovery within six months.

In 1929 another government credit-money bubble bust, that of the late 1920's - caused by Governor B. Stong's, of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, policy of trying to support the overvalued exchange rate of the British Pound by a loose credit money policy with the American Dollar.

The administration of President Hoover (contrary to the 'did nothing' myth) went in to overdrive - doing all the wrong things. Trying to hold up wages (in order to protect "spending power - demand"), by rigging agreements with industry, agreeing to more government spending, and agreeing eventually to a large increase in both domestic taxes and, in 1931, in the tax on imports.

The administration of President Roosevelt carried on the interventionist policies of President Hoover and, in some ways, deepened them. Thus making the depression the longest in American history.

Why do the good people at Newsweek not know any of the above? Why do they, instead, write of FDR's "depression busting" schemes, and the "blows of the free market?

It is because of what they were taught at school and university - as simple as that.

People can not be expected to understand current events (such as the government schemes in China) if they have been taught a false view of the past.

I have always had a soft spot for Camille Paglia. I am not sure how much I agree with her (on a number of issues, not at all), but I always find her entertaining and stimulating. You do not often find lefty gender academics with a taste for guns and (American) football.

Her last bout as a columnist for Salon came to an end several years ago when she took time off to write a book, but she is back, and as acerbic and idiosyncratic as ever. A few tidbits:

On Hillary Clinton:

Does Hillary Clinton have a stable or coherent sense of self? Or is everything factitious, mimed and scripted (like her flipping butch and femme masks) for expediency?

On capitalism and leftism:

Last year, Global Exchange, a San Francisco human rights group, pressured Hershey to disclose the sources of its cocoa beans and to take further steps to ensure proper working conditions.

This kind of outreach to expose and remedy injustice represents the finest spirit of leftism, a practical, compassionate activism - not the pretentious postmodernist jargon and sanctimonious attitudinizing that still pass for leftism among too many college faculty. Capitalism, which spawned modern individualism as well as the emancipated woman who can support herself, is essentially Darwinian. It expands any society's sum total of wealth and radically raises the standard of living, but it leaves the poor and weak without a safety net. Capitalism needs the ethical counter-voice of leftism to keep it honest. But leftists must be honest in turn about what we owe to capitalism - without which Western women would have no professional jobs to go to but would be stuck doing laundry by hand and stooping over pots on the hearth fire all day long.

Prickly and provoking, its good to have her back.

This is a shame, since I have grown to greatly value Wikipedia and hope it does not get badly damaged:

Wikipedia, the on-line encyclopaedia, has been plunged into controversy after one of its most prolific contributors and editors, a professor of religion with advanced degrees in theology and canon law, was exposed as a 24-year-old community college drop-out.

The editor, who called himself Essjay, was recruited by staff at Wikipedia to work on the site’s arbitration committee, a team of expert administrators charged with vetting content on the on-line "free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit".

The open-source and on-line dictionary has been a roaring success in its brief life. I use it constantly both at work and in my spare time. I also consult other reference tools and would strongly advise people never to rely on just one source for the sort of information that Wikipedia and its rivals provide. But it is a shame that this character hoodwinked the site in this way. The best way for Wikipedia to handle this is put its hands up, admit the problem and deal with it.

Which is more than one could say about some organisations.

As in: creative accounting:

We've had experience in the past - the New York City subways come to mind - with businesses that began as conventional, for-profit corporations, and, for one reason or another, were later rendered unprofitable while still being viewed as essential services. It's time to apply some creative thinking to newspapers and, for that matter, to serious journalism in other media. Then we need to convince Americans that they should pay attention to it - and pay for it.

Convince as in force people who do not want newspapers to pay for them nevertheless.

I do not know who Steven Rattner is (here are a few clues. His wife is apparently a fundraiser for the Democrats). Nor do I know what the Quadrangle Group, LLC is, of which he is managing principal, whatever that may mean (again, some clues here). But he seems like a fool. The entire essay of which the above recommendation for plunder is the concluding paragraph is about how Americans are becoming less interested in "the news", and more interested in other things. Which is why, actually, they are less willing to pay for the news than they used to be.

It is also about why tradesmen do not need newspapers any longer to reach potential customers, which is why tradesmen are less willing to pay for newspaper readerships.

That ought to lead to a simple recommendation to potential investors in newspapers. Do not invest in newspapers. Let people tell each other the news for free, for instance by people writing and reading blogs. If some still want the news, then let them read news blogs, which gather together what various different bloggers think is the news.

But Mr Rattner seems to love newspapers. So, seeing no profit in newspapers as a business, he switches to the second-last resort of the scoundrel, a bare-faced claim that the taxpayer owes him and his friends a living. Having ceased to be attractive to mere readers, newspapers must be transformed, by some kind of political hocus pocus, into "essential services". Like the BBC, if you please. And when all that falls on deaf ears, he will presumably go with the cosmeticised version of the same claim, about how taxpayers should pay for newspapers despite not wanting to read them anymore, because this is their patriotic duty.

At 2p.m. British time on Monday the 12th of February, I turned on Sky News. I was greeted by the sight and sound of various people (including a bearded person in Washington DC - who I think I remember watching on the BBC some years ago) going on about how the "legislators and media" in America doubted the "claims" that Iran has been arming and training the terrorists in Iraq (O.K. "the resistance" to you 'progressive' people out there).

Supposedly the evil Bush and his henchmen are cooking up stories to justify plans to attack the peace loving Islamic Republic of Iran.

Of course the Iranians (and their friends 'The Party of God' in Lebanon) have been arming and training people in Iraq for years. Many Americans and British soldiers and Iraqi soldiers, police and civilians have been killed by these Iranian actions.

Indeed the Iranian regime has even armed Sunni groups in Iraq - even though it knows that some of these groups kill large numbers of Shia. Causing blood soaked chaos (in order to undermine the Western will to fight) is the main aim - even if very large numbers of Shia are killed.

The Iranian regime has been in a de facto state of war with the United States (really with the West generally) for 28 years - even since the Iranian Revolution which occurred after President Carter betrayed the Shah.

To give a example, the Iranian regime was behind the suicide bombings against the Americans and French in Lebanon in 1983. Bombings that killed hundreds and mutilated many others.

The President of Iran is one of the people who invaded the American embassy in Iran and held the Americans there hostage (in various places) for a year, he holds that Israel should and will be wiped off the map and that the 'hidden Iman' will soon lead the Faithful to world conquest. The 'Supreme Leader' of Iran and the 'Council of Guardians' agree with this theology and they wish us all dead (or enslaved).

Now the people of Sky News can ignore all this if they choose. They can say that President Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (but for some reason they do not mention President Clinton, and many others, who believed much the same) and they can ignore (as The Economist now chooses to do) the evidence that Saddam Hussain was still very active in his plans to gain atomic weapons, although he did not have the same industrial capacity, thanks to such things as the Israeli attack of 1980 and the Gulf war of 1991 and its consequences, that Iran does.

The actions of Iran (in both terrorism and development of weapons of mass destruction) are on a much bigger scale than Saddam's were by 2003 (as Iran's capacity is greater). I did not support the judgement to go into Iraq, but I understand what retreat in the face of Iranian pressure would mean. But, as I have said, Sky News is free to ignore all this.

Indeed it is free to support the 'American media' that it so faithfully cites. Even though the entertainment end of the American media were busy giving ex President Carter an price for his latest everything-is-the-Jews-fault book on Sunday night (he was honoured with the 'Dixie Chicks' and other profound thinkers).

However, my question is simple. What is the point of Sky News?

I can see the point of Fox News, which is to offer an alternative to the standard 'progressive' line of the broadcasting media. But what is the point of Sky News?

How is the "Bush dubious claims" stuff I heard there any different from the BBC, or from CNN, or from the English language service of France or Russia or India or China, or Head Hacker TV with David Frost?

In Britain, Sky News is no different from the BBC or ITV or Channel Four - so I say again, what is the point of it?

No doubt I will be attacked (again) for writing critically about this 'free market', 'pro-American' journal. However, I will proceed.

The Economist magazine (or newspaper, as it chooses to describe itself) last week had a weird racialist rant against Secretary of State Rice. A whole page devoted to claiming (amongst other things) that Condi Rice went along with the evil Bush on Iraq (that the Economist supported the judgement to go into Iraq was somehow forgotten) because she was black and,. therefore, had learned that the way to get ahead was to conform to the will of powerful white men (Rice as Aunt Thomisina?).

There was also a claim that Secretary of State Rice was a poor administrator who ran the State Department badly - this claim rather pleased me, as it can only have come from State Department staff and anyone who is unpopular with the death-to-America fanatics who have tried to dominate Foggy Bottom for decades can not be all bad.

This week the Economist ran a little article on the trial of Lewis Libby. The article claimed that the defence of Mr Libby (against the claim that he obstructed justice in the inquiry into the exposure of CIA agent - the fact that the person was a CIA staff member, not a secret agent, was of course not mentioned in the article) would be that it was all Karl Rove's fault. But (the Economist article explained) the guilt of Mr Rove does not mean that Mr Libby is innocent.

In fact the 'exposure' of the CIA 'agent' was nothing to do with Mr Libby or Mr Rove - the person responsible was Richard Armitage.This is common knowledge and Mr Armitage has himself has admitted it.

The whole thing goes back to the effort of the husband of the CIA employee (an ex-State Department person and donor to the 2000 Gore and 2004 Kerry campaign) to discredit American and British claims about Saddam Hussian efforts to buy materials for his atomic weapons program, specifically from the nation of Niger. Elements in the State Department and the CIA opposed British and American policy on Iraq and so tried to discredit the claims made in support of that policy. Richard Armitage, then working for Secretary of State Colin Powell, tried to fight back by pointing out to the media that the supposedly independent people attacking the Administration were part of these factions in the State Department and the CIA who had an agenda of their own. All perfectly normal in the cat fight that is politics.

I am no expert in these matters, but my understanding is that Saddam was after such material. But the Economist article did not cover any of the basic matters - or even that it was Richard Armitage (not Mr Libby or Mr Rove) who 'leaked' the fact that the ex Ambassador's wife was part of a certain faction at the CIA.

All the Economist was concerned with was the 'lies' of Mr Libby and Mr Rove. The fact that, whether or not there should be a court case, the whole thing is directed at the wrong person, Mr Libby not being Mr Armitage, escaped them.

In fact the prosecutor involved is politically motivated (no surprise there, we are dealing with the United States after all) and has attacked Mr Libby in order to attack the Vice President and, through him, the President. The jury is of course stacked with Iraq war critics. I did not think highly of the judgement to go to war myself - but I do not like political show trials either.

As for the Economist's level of knowledge: It was as if an American journal had run an article about British politics and had talked of 'Prime Minister Cameron' and 'Queen Diana'.

I do not know where the Economist gets its staff from (some 'school of journalism' perhaps), but I rather resent that they get paid money for writing about things they know nothing about.

Still, as I am careful never to pay for reading bits of the Economist, at least they are not spending my money.

David Cameron, the Leader of the Opposition and of the Conservative Party, is mainly known here as the man who makes Perry de Havilland spit blood.

But quite aside from the fact that most of us here disagree with the things that Cameron has been saying in recent months, there is the puzzle of why he has been saying them. I am thinking of things like fluffing on tax cuts, the NHS, Europe, and so on. He seems determined not just to be more left wing than Conservatives used to be. He seems to want to be more left wing than the country. All the politicians, for instance, now seem to accept the virtues or at least the inevitability of relentlessly high taxation. Except the voters!

Tony Blair did not get where he got by altering the substance of Thatcherism. He did it by putting a more amenable face on the front of it, that of a Hugh Grantish ingratiator, rather than of a bald, out-of-touch, Conservative. Cannot Cameron see that? What the country seems to want is Conservatism with a non-Conservative face. Thatcherite policies, but without those smug bastard, crowing and thieving Conservatives fronting for it all. They want Blair, before he became mired in sleaze and incompetence. But Cameron has gone out of his way to supply more than this. The Conservative Party has changed, he says. Who is he trying to convince, and of what?

Why is he apparently dumping all of the substance of Thatcherism, and thereby risking the very leakage that Perry notes, of voters from the Conservatives to things like UKIP, or almost as damagingly, to the screw-them-all-we're-not-voting-for-anybody party? The we're-not-voting-for-anybody party has really hurt the Conservatives in recent elections. Why is Cameron risking the wrath of this party yet again?

I think we can best understand Cameron's performance so far as an exercise in allowing the mainstream media to attack Labour.

Media people are never going to like Conservatives, but towards this Conservative or that Conservative they feel very variable degrees of dislike. Cameron has presented himself to London's media people as the kind of Conservative Prime Minister that they would be willing to put up with, given that they have to put up with Conservative Prime Ministers from time to time.

This has made a big difference to the political atmosphere of Britain. I recall, somewhat over a year ago (I have searched through the Samizdata archives but have failed to find the posting in question – sorry), noting that something had happened to what used to be called "Fleet Street", and that suddenly they were really putting the knife in. At the time, I was rather puzzled, but guessed it might have something to do with some particularly annoying tax things that Gordon Brown had just been doing. Now, I believe that the biggest difference has been made by David Cameron.

There has never been a lack of stories about this Labour Government which the mainstream media might have used to ruin it. The sleaze and incompetence have been more or less continuous, from the start. What has changed is that 'Fleet Street', as it used to be called, never liked to put the knife in too deep, for fear of letting the hated Conservatives back in. Now that they do not hate the Conservatives nearly so much, they are now ready to indulge their natural instinct to wreck the government of the day. Wrecking governments of the day is what mainstream media people live to do. This is their real bias. They are biased in favour of their own power to smash things up whenever they decide to, and they hate having to restrain themselves, year after year. Of course they have their various prejudices, which you have to doff your hat to if you want to get a good press. But the point is at least as much the doffing of the hat as the particular content of their opinions at any particular time, which in any case keep on changing.

There has for some months now been a savagery about press attacks on the Government that was lacking when the alternative to a Labour government was Hague, or Duncan Smith, or Howard, none of whom were nearly grovelling enough towards Fleet Street, although they did sometimes try. All they said was: we realise that we have to seem different. That was not nearly good enough for the media people. They wanted real substance. They wanted real policity switches, away from Thatcherite Blairism, and towards their own prejudices. Cameron has given them this, on a whole series of issues, and they are now in the mood to reciprocate.

There was much talk over the weekend before last about how the government had used its plan - real or imaginary - to split the Home Office, into separate bits of incompetence rather than having the one big incompetent slab, as a way of deflecting attention from the fact that one of the Prime Minister's closest advisers had just been arrested, and in a manner strongly suggesting that the police reckon she was guilty. But were the journos just allowing the government to get everyone thinking about the Home Office again so that, only a day or two later, they could take another crack at its various blunderings? It certainly looks that way now.

Now the journos are starting to flag up the story that Guido Fawkes has been banging on about for weeks (presumably with journo help) about the non-charitableness of the Smith Institute, which now earns its keep laundering bribes to the next Prime Minister by paying the salaries of his gofers. These reports, and all the other tails of sleaze which the journos will soon be dredging up again about Brown mean that the new broom of Brownism will be covered in shit before it even starts to sweep.

(By the way, it is somewhat off the points I am making here, but I am told that Gordon Brown is some kind of enemy of Home Secretary John Reid, and that Brown's various fixers and screamers encouraged the Sun to question John Reid's brain functions in the way they did with that front page last week. Brown wants to be quite sure that John Reid cannot become the next Prime Minister rather than him, at no matter what cost in terms of the general sense that this is a Labour government is in an advanced state of collapse. To him this may seem cunning. To me it just seems totally bone-headed and cloth-eared.)

This government has been hated for a long time, and especially by media people, who really do not like being screamed at by foul-mouthed government bullies. They have also always hated the Iraq War. What is new is that now, because of the concentrated Fleet Street assault of the last few months, we have a government that is not just hated, but despised. Think: the switch from Thatcher to Major. Let them hate provided that they fear, etc. This government's henchmen have been unapologetically barbaric and disgusting from the word go. But now that spin doctoring has degenerated into the art of failing even to flood the newspapers and TV screens with the government's second worst clutch of embarrassments, the government's fixers are becoming progressively worse at fixing anything at all.

It is not merely that these creatures are incapable of making the public sector work properly. They have never been any good at that, because nobody can ever do that - unless, like Mrs Thatcher, you threaten to shut the public sector down if it does not behave itself. No, far worse than the inability of the Blairites and the Brownites to govern the mere country adequately, these people can no longer now even manipulate the media satisfactorily. When governmental creatures now scream threats at insubordinate journos who are asking about the latest lot of cock-ups, it no longer matters. Their screams of rage just become part of the story.

David Cameron did not himself do any of this directly, but he did contrive the changed circumstances which enabled it to happen so completely. What he has done is to allow the media people to launch themselves at the Labour Party in all its various forms and factions. Just as Blair created a world in which the average Conservatives supporter no longer cared if the Conservatives were the government or not, now Cameron has achieved the equal and opposite effect. Simply, this Labour government is now a ruin. And the voters can see it.

For remember, media people used to be Labour supporters almost to a man, whatever the mere owners of the media might think about things. When media people turn on this Labour government like wolves, that is like Middle England saying that William Hague is ridiculous or Iain Duncan Smith an oily creep or Michael Howard some kind of ghoul from beyond the grave.

None of which in any way contradicts the Perry de Havilland line on Cameron. But it does go some way to explaining what on earth he has been up to.

Sex Dispute Ends In Tractor Rampage

Hot diggety dog. Don't they always?

(Via Drunkablog)

I seem to recall someone, maybe even Iain Dale himself, saying to me some weeks back that what 18 Doughty Street TV needs is for someone important to say something newsworthily scandalous on it. The world, and in particular the Mainstream Media, would then start to pay attention to it.

So, could this be the breakthrough?

Iain Dale is surely hoping so:

In an interview on 18 Doughty Street's One to One programme last night, Lance Price, former Downing Street spin doctor, has sensationally claimed that Tony Blair himself was the source of quotes describing Gordon Brown as having "psychological flaws".

Price continues to say he was told by a figure very close to the Chancellor that Alastair Campbell "took the rap" to allow the Prime Minister to escape blame.

Judging by the email that I (and presumably the rest of the world) just got, in the small hours of this Wednesday morning, I get the feeling that Iain Dale reckons that this just might be the media ruckus he has been waiting for.

Now do not misunderstand me. I care very little for the fortunes of the Blair government, nor for the fortunes of whichever political gang – Brownies? Cameronics? - gets to replace these people for the next few years. 18 Doughty Street TV would like it be Mr Cameron and his friends, but I really do not care. I consider them all to be as psychologically flawed as each other. Whoever wins the next spasm of electioneering, we already pretty much know what will win, and it is unlikely to be nice.

What I am interested in, and do feel entitled to be optimistic about, is seeing the British broadcasting media go the way of the British print media and of the internet itself. I want British broadcasting – in particular British broadcasting about politics, and about what politics is and what politics should be - to lose its air of cosily unanimous religiosity, in which the only competition is in who can present the same centre-to-left news agenda and the same stale centre-to-left editorialising about it with the greatest earnestness and piety, and to become instead a bedlam of biases, biased in all imaginable directions, with no meta-contextual assumption left unchallenged. 18 Doughty Street TV has been a small step in that direction, not so much because of what has actually been said on it, but because of the example it has set to others concerning the viability of non-majoritarian broadcasting, and about the possibility that truly different things could start getting broadcast.

Although I do not know or care who Lance Price is, lots of others do, and I am accordingly still intrigued by the possibilities opened up by what he has said. Because of it, a whole lot more people are liable to hear, not just about 18 Doughty Street, but about "internet broadcasting" in general.

British print media people have always been quite diverse in their tone, so although the internet has been a technical and professional challenge to these people, it has not been that much of an ideological jolt for them. British broadcasters, on the other hand, have tended to understand the new 'social' media rather better, in the purely technical sense. The BBC web operation has had a huge impact. But ideologically, British mainstream broadcasting people are far more uniform in their ideological outlook, and potentially therefore face far more of an ideological upheaval at the hands of the new media.

So, I hope that neither Iain Dale nor I are making a fuss about nothing. I hope that this proves to be a fuss about something.

In conection with the above, this BBC report (credit where it is due) about Skype offering internet TV services, also makes interesting reading.

Recently I have been reading gadget blogs a lot, and it would seem that I am not the only one who likes to do this. This week, all the gadget blogs,along with the rest of the world, have been screaming, in among their regular stuff about incomprehensible boxes: iPhone iPhone iPhone. Which is understandable. Either the iPhone is a truly remarkable thing, or the hype surrounding this unremarkable thing is all the more remarkable.

Now hats off to Apple and all that, especially for keeping it all so secret for so long, although, they do rather seem to have screwed up the calling it the iPhone side of things. But the iPhone, for all its various innovatory features, is just another mobile phone with some add-ons. It is the embodiment of the claim that mobile phones are destined to swallow up all the other mobile objects people like to travel around with, such as music machines and digital cameras (the camera is the only iPhone add-on that really gets my attention), but this notion has been rattling around for some years now. The iPhone looks like being a smash hit precisely because so many people already understand why they want one.

However, of all the things I have read about on the gadget blogs this week, this item was the one that I found the most striking. This, for me, has the look and feel of a life changer:

In a patent filing Google has revealed that it is looking into entering the physical advertising industry. The patent filing itself alludes to placing adverts on billboards, with the primary innovation being that they're interactive and connected to the internet - what, you didn't really believe that Google would go in for static ads did you? The system apparently works by only advertising products that are available and in stock within stores in the local area. Stores will be able to buy advertising on these local electronic billboards through a similar system to how AdSense currently works: by logging into a computer and buying them. One of the key positive developments - at least for busy consumers -- is that once stock of the product has run out, the advertised project on display automatically switches onto the next one that's in stock. This whole project relies greatly on there being adequate infrastructure for Google to make a return (which obviously isn't a problem when it comes to the internet), so this patent is far from an assurance that you'll be seeing "Ads by Goooooogle" reminding you to pick up some milk from your local 7-Eleven any time soon.

Now once again, this is something that the sort of people who saw this coming saw coming. But, to me, when adverts change moment by moment in a semi-intelligent way, perhaps even in response to their understanding of who is in the area that they are pointing at, then that will be a very different world to the one I have become used to. It will look different and it will feel different.

I got a small pre-echo of that look and that feeling recently when I first saw adverts on London tube escalators that changed from moment to moment. But that is just using flat screen technology to ring the changes with the posters, like they also do with mechanical rollers at bus stops or with bright lights at Piccadilly Circus, or in those adverts with long horizontal rotating Toblerone bars built into them, or with those big, single rotating Toblerone bars next to football games on the telly. What this Google notions signifies, I suppose, is that from now on, every billboard will start to behave like a giant computer screen.

And not just any old computer screen. I mean, suppose you put a camera in the billboard, and get someone - anyone in the world, anywhere in the world - to watch who is looking at the advert, and tell that person to change the advert accordingly. Add a microphone, so the bloke looking at the advert can bellow questions and complaints at the advert. And suppose the guy looking out of the advert can then fling up answers, perhaps funny answers. A whole new kind of virtuoso high achiever suddenly springs to life, like those eighties people in red braces who used to scream down the giant predecessors of the iPhone, and presumably still do, into little stick things next to their faces, or like the many new stars who are presumably even now being born on the world many new TV shopping channels.

Maybe I especially noticed this development because I like to wander about photo-ing architecture, and maybe, on my future wanderings, I will not like it very much. But it will be a whole new world, if only because it will, unlike, now, with those ever tinier mobile phones, be so very, very visible.

As one of engadget's commenters says:

AHHHH 404 ERRORS IN REAL LIFE!!

Quickly followed, no doubt, with a big "BUGGER" from the operator, greeted with a round of applause. On second thoughts, it might all be rather good fun.

Signs of technical advancement from Britain's own constitutional monarchy.

Frank Johnson (journalist, editor, columnist and all round newspaper man) has died at the age of 63.

Mr Johnson was of working class origins in the East End of London and left school at 16. However, he never viewed any of this as a reason why he should be hostile to high culture and from his boyhood was a great admirer of opera and ballet. Indeed Frank Johnson was fond of pointing out that many individuals among the working classes were once a lot more cultured than their self declared friends of more fortunate birth gave them credit for, with (for example) the biggest sales among early recordings of music being for serious works, and many men whose hands were hard often being also very well read.

Mr Johnson was no friend of the left - either in the Labour party, or of those in the Conservative party who were patronising statists (always out to 'help' the poor with more government spending, taxes and regulations).

Nor was Mr Johnson afraid to write unpopular things. For example he pointed out that for working men in the south of England and in the Midlands, the 1930's were not a time of collapse, indeed that Britain did better in terms of the rise of real incomes in the 1930's than National Socialist Germany - and vastly better than FDR's vaunted 'New Deal' United States.

As for the sacred cow of British politics - the Welfare State, Frank Johnson pointed out that it is not a matter of it being "something designed in the 1940's which must be adapted for changing times" (as cowardly people on the conservative side of British politics used to like to put it), but something that had a powerful negative side from day one, both collectivising hospitals that had been provided free for the poor by charitable effort and helping to destroy the tradition of self help and mutual aid that had once been the greatest aspect of the working classes (of course such things as the Friendly Society movement had been undermined by government activities all the way back to the early schemes of the 'New Liberal' government that was elected in 1906).

Even the supposed higher living standards of the 1940's being an illusion - the war time "prosperity" (boasted of by upper class leftists like A.W. Benn) being a matter of American aid and eating our overseas investments. And the post war time being a matter of rigged stats (claiming that wages were higher than the 1930's whilst ignoring real inflation - i.e. the black market price of rationed goods) and neglecting future investment. Although it is worth remembering that government spending on the Welfare State started off in a very small way (the real economic harm of the late 1940's being nationalization, general high taxes and high government spending and the vast web of regulations by which the "educated" men in Whitehall told everyone else what to do and what to do). The real growth of the Welfare State and, more imporantly the changes it was making in the British character (as opposed to such things as the decline of the Friendly Societies and other voluntary associations), did not really even start to be seen till the 1960's

Mr Johnson remembered the "stoicism of the London working class" (of course he accepted it was more than the London working class - but he was a Londoner), as to what there is now it is best to say nothing.

I will miss Frank Johnson.

I do not buy the Financial Times because, whilst there are some decent people on its staff, its employees are mostly European Union supporting New Labour types.

However, I do make a point of checking it from time to time. I have been amused by its relative lack of coverage of the KGB/FSB activities in London and Italy (in connection to the recent murder in London). It celebrated the sacking of three top Italian intelligence chiefs (in the same issue that it demanded that Donald Rumsfeld be put on trial for the "torture" of poor innocent Muslim head hackers) as these men were too close to the evil CIA and had made charges against the noble Italian Prime Minister (and ex-head of the European Union) Mr Prodi.

What these charges were was not mentioned, the Financial Times (due to some of its staff over the years - the old Soviet Union liked to have links with the newspaper of 'Finance Capital') tends to get a bit nervous when KGB links are mentioned.

The Financial Times did invite an expert on Russia to write an article for them - Mr Putin himself (it was like "a word from our sponsor"... as Richard Littlejohn would say "you could not make it up").

However, there was a Russian story right on the front page of the weekend edition of the Financial Times: The Russian state gas company has ordered new offices to be built - there was an artists impression of the new offices all over the page.

No doubt for its next Russian story the Financial Times will inform its readers that the PLAN has been over-fulfilled by X per cent.

Last Monday morning I did what I think was probably my best recorded conversation yet, with a man named Leon Louw. Here is the conversation we had, and here is the publication that Leon Louw was talking about. I recommend both with enthusiasm. Here is my bloggage about it all. Anyone even slightly interested in what distinguishes successful governments from failing governments, nice countries from nasty ones, will profit from following at least one of those links.

A few days before that, I did another recorded conversation, about the Libertarian Alliance and its workings, with Tim Evans, (pictured on the right here), who is now its President. Bloggage about that from me here.

And then last Tuesday, I had another of the regular conversations I have with Antoine Clarke about elections and related matters around the world, this time about the recent US midterms.

These conversations, especially the one with Leon Louw, have stirred me into setting up another of these things, with someone I have long wanted to talk with in this way, namely Samizdata's own Perry de Havilland. I have just spoken on the phone with Perry and he has no objections to me flagging this up beforehand here nor to me asking the Samizdata commentariat if they have any questions that they would particularly like me to put to Perry. I do not promise to use every such suggestion, but all suggestions that do materialise will be considered.

This conversation will be happening this coming Saturday afternoon. Perry and I will be talking about what Perry did before Samizdata, what made him start it, about what it has been like doing it for the last five years, and about what effects it may or may not have had, during that time and in the future. That kind of thing.

I am going to start whatever preparatory reading I manage to do here.

There are quite a few fans of Sean Gabb who read this blog, so they might like to be told, if they have not been already, that Sean will be on 18 Doughty Street TV this evening between 9 and 10pm, discussing libertarianism. Sean is a fluent and experienced media performer and should be well worth seeing and hearing.

Here is a picture of him that I took last weekend, hatching who knows what plots with fellow Libertarian Alliance supremo Dr Tim Evans, at the LA's Conference in the resplendent National Liberal Club.

Captions anyone? Mine goes: "One day all this will be ours! Ours I tell you!"

I was on 18 Doughty Street intertelly last night, and I really enjoyed myself, not least because Iain Dale, presiding, also seemed satisfied with the efforts of me and my fellow late night chatterers. I was also on 18 Doughty Street on only its second night in action, and it was a mild relief to get asked back. That is the only compliment that really matters after you've been on something.

Many intriguing things got alluded to, but the basic message I want to put across here, now, is that, basically, 18 Doughty Street is doing very well. When I was first on, there was a palpable air of panic, with people saying things like "I can only do one thing at a time" through clenched teeth and with that terrifying evenness that people do just before they explode. This time, things were working more smoothly. Which is just what you would expect.

I want 18 Doughty Street to do really well, even though I'm a libertarian rather than a conservative, and certainly am not a Conservative Party activist. This is because I want to see lots of unregulated, totally biased TV, of all kinds. This is the true answer to the problem of the biased BBC, not merely moaning away about how biased the BBC is. 18DSTV will have a far more profound influence on the BBC than any mere anti-BBC bitching possibly could, because as it finds a new audience, it will not only prove that there is a new audience, but it will also smoke out new talent to address this audience. The BBC will either use some of this talent, or ignore it and jeopardise its licence fee. Guess which it will do.

The commenter who complained about us talking about football was, I believe, missing at least one of the points that we were using football to highlight, which is how very much more interested in football most people are than in politics. (I waved the Sun newspaper about to emphasise the point.) There was general agreement amongst us all that the main political parties are losing touch with their potential voters. My fellow chatterers, Arleen Ouzounian [incorrectly spelt at first - apologies Arleen] and Dave Hill, both in their different ways said: well, politicians have got to get back into touch again. Arleen Ouzounian is part of an operation to get Christians to take more interest in politics. And, after being told by me that "grass roots" is a vacuous cliché, Dave Hill (here is his blog) responded by speaking eloquently about the joys of getting involved in local issue politics. A horrible nightclub near where he lives, outside of which several murders had apparently been committed, was eventually closed, by combined local efforts. Hurrah. Well, I can see how a ruckus like that would be more fun to be part of if you are also able to blog about it. Maybe blogs will revitalise local politics.

I preferred to push the globalising impact of the new media. Just as our current politicians are still largely the creatures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century national print media, so too will the new global media create new political opportunities. (It is no accident that 18 Doughty Street has a high proportion of Americans among its first audiences, which was something I learned on my first visit.) One reason why the vitality of big national political parties in the rich world is draining away is that so much of politics has already gone global, and people sense that voting for this or that national party will make less and less difference.

Arleen Ouzounian is a tax lawyer. But we were able to get her to distinguish between being a tax lawyer and wanting taxes to be even more burdensome than they already are. After all, if you're an expert on infectious diseases, that doesn't make you automatically in favour of them. She is only twenty and this was her first time on telly of any sort, apparently. You wouldn't have known. As I think Iain Dale said, she has A List written all over her. Metaphorically speaking.

Like I say, lots was talked about, but one thing in particular stands out for me, which is that Iain Dale, being himself an effective and experienced blogger, has none of the Mainstream Media's reluctance to acknowledge the existence of the blogosphere, or to trawl around in it for people to be on his shows. I was made to feel very much at home, by Iain, and especially by his fellow presenter Rena Valeh, who made it clear that she knew not just my name, but that she had read quite a number of my recent blog postings. This is the first broadcasting I have ever done where I was allowed not just to be a Libertarian Alliance supporter, which I certainly am, but also a blogger. I've done quite a few spots on various other Mainstream Media shows in recent years. Sometimes I mentioned my blogging activities to them beforehand, Samizdata in particular. But on the show, only the 'organisation', the Libertarian Alliance, was deemed worthy of mention.

The Mainstream Media, in other words, treat the blogosphere as a mysterious and threatening rival, which they try as hard as they can to ignore, except when they blog themselves, perhaps because they also suppose that 'ordinary people' are similarly frightened of it, as I daresay many are. 18 Doughty Street treats the blogosphere as a welcome partner and as a valuable resource.

I normally have to get into my office in London's docklands financial centre of Canary Wharf at some ungodly hour in the morning, so I rarely get the chance to browse the news headlines on television or radio before rushing off for the Tube. But laid low with a nasty headcold this morning, I watched the BBC Breakfast television show for about 30 minutes. This is what I saw:

Item: The local council in Richmond, west London, is proposing to slap heavy parking taxes on people who own cars that are deemed ecologically incorrect (SUVs, etc). The programme interviewed a few bedraggled locals moaning about this, a retired TV personality who said it was a jolly good idea, and left it at that.

Item: A group of MPs want to ban sale of fireworks to ordinary citizens because loud bangs emitted by such things frighten animals and the elderly. We had a brief "debate" in the studio between a puritanical MP and an elderly lady who said what a shame it would be if fireworks were banned. No clear defence was made of the right for law-abiding people to have their fun. The safety-trumps-liberty issue was taken as a given.

Item: The pop star Madonna, who is trying to adopt a baby boy from the African nation of Malawi, has spoken of her anguish about this bureaucracy involved on the Opra Winfrey TV show in the US. This was deemed to be a news item worthy of the BBC's attention.

Item: recycling of baby's diapers.

Item: Litigation continues between ITN, the British television network, and the US authorities, over the death of ITN veteran broadcaster Terry Lloyd in Iraq about three years ago.

Item: BBC business journalist discusses how to avoid back injuries in the workplace. It is taken as given that companies must be forced to spend more money to ensure their staff are comfortable.

Now I think a trend is at work here. Many of the "news" items are pretty minor stuff, compared to the ongoing crackup in the Middle East, etc. They are relatively minor stories, what I would call "consumer journalism" stuff that typically used to be confined to daytime television and the dumber ends of the tabloid press. Maybe the producers figure that viewers are unable to digest anything more substantial at 7 in the morning and maybe they are right (but radio news and current affairs seems to have more gravitas, or at least it used to). However, the choice of subjects also reflect the current liberal/left intelligentsia's obsession with bossing us around in order to protect the environment; they reflect a distinct strain of neo-puritanism (such as Richmond's persecution of owners of big cars and bashing of fireworks), and an assumption that the child custody arrangements of a person, even a famous one like Madonna, are any of the State's business.

Bring on Guy Fawke's Night, is all I can say.

The occasions where I am prepared to wade in on the side of a bunch of a civil servants are as rare as hen's teeth but this one is truly no contest:

THE Ministry of Defence has banned Britain’s biggest commercial news broadcaster from frontline access to the nation’s forces, The Times has learnt.

In an unprecedented move that risks accusations of censorship, the Government has withdrawn co-operation from ITV News in warzones after accusing it of inaccurate and intrusive reports about the fate of wounded soldiers...

“As bad a hatchet-job as I’ve seen in years. Cheap shots all over the place, no context, no reasonable explanation..."

In other words, the standard operating procedure of the MSM. The stink is now so bad that it is finally getting in to some very lofty nostrils.

My friend Russ Willey has written the London Gazetteer, a brilliant book which explores all of the lesser known nooks and crannies of this city. Russ is a life-long obsessive about 'Hidden London', and if ever someone was born to write a book like this, he was.

On October 12, Will Self wrote the following in his Evening Standard column:

HOW COULD THEY FORGET TOKYNGTON? IT IS with sadness that I censure the London Gazetteer. This handylooking tome was sent to me by its publisher, Chambers. It claims to be "An A-Z guide to the famous and hidden quarters of Britain's capital". However, the very first quarter I looked up, Tokyngton, wasn't in it.

I myself have never actually been to Tokyngton but I've often noted its peculiar name while perusing my bog-ordinary A-Z map. Now it's been so unjustly neglected by Chambers I feel an almost insuperable urge to travel to what a website describes as "the most populated part of Harrow", albeit in the medieval era. The "farm of the sons of Toca" was first mentioned in 1171, so it seems rather shabby that it doesn't make it into Chambers's Gazetteer 900-odd years later.

Except that, er, Tokyngton is actually right there in the book, and fills nearly half a page between the entries for Three Mills and Tollington. Perhaps Will Self is alphabetically-challenged, but you would think he and an editor would have double-checked this claim before slamming a book whose success depends on being viewed as comprehensive and authoritative. Having had the error pointed out, no correction has been issued by Self or the Evening Standard.

Sadly, it is not likely that as many people will read any correction as have read the original, prominent damning column - even if Self does the right thing and makes the correction in his next column.

I have just done a posting on my personal blog about Sierra Leone, where a British Army friend of mine is now working. He is back in London just now, and passed on some photos of Sierra Leone that he and one of his friends had taken, and I picked out my favourites to put on my blog.

They illustrate an idea I have had for a while now that maybe one of the nice little things that digital photography, in combination with the internet, will do for the world is to present to it a slightly more balanced notion of what life in Africa is like just now. On rich country TV we only ever get slaughter and catastrophe from Africa, because only slaughter and catastrophe is news. But now, in addition to superbly photographed famine and mayhem, we get less well photographed ... well, just stuff. Photos that a generation ago would (a) have been far less numerous, and would (b) have merely languished in the photo albums of a certain sort of expat, are now being displayed to the anyone in the world who cares to glance at them.

I do not claim that the slaughter and catastrophe is not happening. Sierra Leone itself had a horrific civil war less than a decade ago. "Worse than you can possibly imagine", my friend said. But now, touch wood, things are going better.

Mobile phones have been a particular success, apparently, mostly because regular landline phones, such as rich countries have long had, have been such an abject failure, but perhaps also because mobiles enable Africans to cooperate much more effectively while still not having to commit to something days in advance. My friend says that Africans, just as Western stereotypes have always said, at any rate the Africans in Sierra Leone, are still very bad at doing this.

That is a mobile phone top-up and recharging booth. Mobile phone companies are now making lots of money in Africa. Good for them.

While reading the October 14th issue of New Scientist I came across the following statement in an article titled "Nuke test sends shock waves round the world":

It may even have been only half a kiloton - the same explosive power as the terrorist bomb in Oklahoma City in 1995

Do you see something wrong with this sentence?

A kiloton is a measure of nuclear explosive power. It is equivalent to one thousand tons of trinitrotoluene (TNT). Let us see if the above passes a test of reasonableness.

A half kiloton is 500 tons or 1,000,000 pounds of TNT. Now TNT is a 'high explosive', and the Oklahoma City bomb (and those of which I am quite familiar with from Belfast many years ago) are almost always made from nitrate fertilizer. While rather potent, they pack perhaps a fraction of the power per pound of a high explosive. So let us be conservative and give it a factor of two.

The quoted statement is therefor claiming a small truck pulled in front of the Murrah building loaded with about two million pounds of fertilizer.

How on Earth did the editors of a well known science magazine miss a hooter of this magnitude?

I wish these guys all the very best of luck in breaking the lock of the mainstream media on broadcast television in Britain and political coverage in particular. I am not sure if this outfit is going to feature a lot in my viewing habits, though. Given that I have to look at current affairs news quite a bit as part of my day job in London's financial centre, I actually deliberately avoid too much of the same when I get home, preferring to read a book, go to the gym, see a movie or just hang out with my lovely wife. But for the political trainspotters out there, this sort of venture should be a boon.

My only carp at this stage is why choose such a dull name? Maybe there is some sort of perverse appeal about it.

As I type these words, Britain's Channel 4 is airing a major piece of breath-taking propoganda.

This two-hour prime-time 'documentary' is called 'The Doomsday Code' and purports to be a ciritical examination of the violent, apocolyptic, end-of-the-world ideology of (wait for it)...American Christians!

The story so far:

• American Christians and Israelis are conspiring to bring about a global nuclear holocaust and this is why they are attacking Islam
• Americans are deliberately causing global warming as a part of their monstrous plot to realise 'End Times'
• The only hope for mankind lies with the UN but its effectiveness is being undermined by the "corrosive hostility" of the fundamentalist Christian Americans

I cannot find any specific programme website to which to link but there is a link to the website of the production company which is somehwat illuminating:

The Doomsday Code is produced by Fozia Khan and directed by James Quinn. It was commissioned by Aaquil Ahmed, Commissioning Editor for History, Science, Religion and Arts at Channel 4.

It is still broadcasting and has now moved on to Africa which, allegedly, is proving to be a fertile recruiting ground for the insanely violent American Evangelicals who are (among other things) doing their best to facilitate the spread of AIDS in accordance with the Book of Revelation.

I am not making this up.

Robert Bidinotto has an interesting article up discussing the admission in the Washington Post that their reporting on the matter of former CIA agent Valerie Plame and former US ambassador Joe Wilson was completely wrong.

Buried in this editorial is the fact with the most far-reaching implications: that Joe Wilson falsely claimed that he had "debunked" White House charges that Saddam had been trying to buy uranium in Niger. It turns out that Saddam had been trying to buy uranium, so that Iraq could build nuclear weapons.

Thus, it turns out that the White House stands vindicated on one of its key arguments for going to war against Saddam: that this thug and his regime were actively pursuing a WMD program. So...where are all the headlines about this? Except for this editorial admission by the Post (which implies that the newspaper had been taken in, rather than played a key roll in disseminating the lies), where are the media mea culpas, retractions, and apologies for many months of false, anti-Bush "conspiracy" stories? Don't hold your breath.

I must confess when I quickly zipped through the specific WaPo article mentioned earlier today, I paid more attention to the Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson aspects of this saga and not really pick up on what I now realise was the 'bombshell' aspect to all of this: it seems that Saddam really was shopping for uranium in Niger.

Interesting.

Please read this article. I will leave you to your own conclusions.

(h/t: Tim Blair)

The spoof post below about how the wretched Tory leader 'Dave' Cameron might react to the case for abolishing inheritance tax - a thoroughly good idea - prompted some commentators to wonder about the UK media. It reminded me of an old quote attributed to the late British broadcaster, Brian Redhead, who is supposed to have said (I paraphrase):

"The Times is read by people who run the country. The Daily Telegraph is read by people who fear we are being run by the French; the Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country, while the Daily Mirror is read by people who delusionally think they run the country. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Sun is read by people who do not care who runs the country so long as she has very large tits."

Julie Burchill is a person about whom I oscillate between revulsion and admiration but she is in good form at the moment. In an article called Bleeding-heart ignoramuses, she ridicules the British media establishments anti-Jewish diatribes and the plain stupidity of some people's analysis of the region. In the later category she points at an article by Matthew Parris that could well be the most poorly thought out "what Israel must do" article by someone who presumably does not want the extermination of all Jews in that country. The money quote being where he suggests that in order to be 'loved' by international opinion, Israel must return to its pre-1967 borders... and this at a time when the existing borders scant enough protection from long range attack. Parris writes:

That settlement has to be a return to her pre-1967 boundaries. Precisely because Israel is by no means forced to make so generous a move, the international support (even love) this would generate would secure her future permanently. It would bring her back within the pale.

So presumably if only Israel would place itself at the mercy of its sworn enemies, that magnificent body of strength and moral rectitude 'the international community' would make everything alright... after all, what is the value of mere survival if Kofi Anan, Jacques Chirac and several thousand Guardian readers in Islington think poorly of you? To which Burchill aptly replies:

Personally, I'd far prefer the Jews to be angry, aggressive and alive than meek, mild and dead - and that's what makes me and a minority like me feel so much like strangers in our own country, now more than ever. I've always loved being a hack, but now even that feels weird, as though I'm living among a bunch of snatched-body zombies who look like journalists but believe and say the most inhuman, evil things.

Indeed. When Burchill is right, damn is she right.

There have already been a couple of Samizdata quotes of the day, the first officially labelled thus, and the second an SQOTD in all but title. Had there been no such copying and pasting postings so far today, then I would have put up a quote from this ("MSM sacrifices itself for Hezbollah"), such as, for instance, this:

The MSM usually claims that it is better than the blogosphere because it can filter and detect fraud. The Lebanon conflict shows that claim to be a flat out lie. The MSM may possibly speak truth to power but it seems keen to speak falsehood to the rest of us and to support the terrorists. I assume MSM support of the terrorists is based on the idea that idividual journalists may die or lose access to "scoops" unless they uncritically regurgitate terrorist propaganda, whereas they see no downside to criticising Israel or the USA becuase these countries have a tradition of press freedom. Unfortunately that analysis seems to be at the usual level of MSM strategic thought - poor. In the short term they are correct. In the long term they are as wrong as it is possible to be. Aside from state supported outlets such as the BBC the MSM depends on advertising revenue to survive and that revenue is roughly proportional to the audience size. If the MSM are shown to be puppets and liars then they will lose audience (which they are) and hence lose money. Eventually they will be out of a job. And even the BBC will feel the chill wind of financial cuts if it loses credibility - there is no reason to assume that the next UK government will not force the BBC to wean itself from the license fee and even less reason to assume that once weaned it will not see a drastic downsizing.

Meryl Yourish thinks this means that the terrorists are winning the propaganda war, to me it seems more likely that they are helping the MSM destroy itself. It really seems to me that Lebanon is going to be the place where the MSM collectively martyred itself, fighting for the cause of an Iranian backed terror group that seeks the utter destruction of Israel and the imposition of Sharia law and press censorship that would be antithetical to the MSM itself.

My thanks to Nigel Sedgwick (who urls himself as something to do with this) who flagged up this piece in a comment on this posting here yesterday.

For me, one of the the biggest bullshit pretence who-the-fuck-do-they-think-they're-kidding come-off-it-sunshine lie that the blogosphere and related social media are finally nailing now is the Myth of the Non-Existent Camera. Time and time again, on the telly (and it is just as ridiculous with documentaries about lone travellers intrepidly trudging through deserts and forests, accompanied by nobody and nothing . . . other than several vanloads of camera people and helicopter drivers and helicopter chartering experts, as it is with news gatherers and news creators), you see what looks like a certain particular thing. But it is actually, if you give this certain particular thing a further moment's thought, something quite different, namely that one thing, plus all the palaver involved in that one thing being filmed or being photographed.

The MSM collude with one another to deny this, by deftly editing out any sight of the cameramen. It's part of their professional ethos. Yet the presence of cameras profoundly impinges upon the events themselves, often completely altering the behaviour of those being photoed, and giving local power-seekers something to perform in front of, often in a deeply misleading or outright mendacious way. All this is now coming out, thanks to the blogosphere, and no thanks to the MSM to whom it is all a terrible embarrassment. Us, the story? Perish the thought. We don't do navel gazing. Reality is reality, and we just photo it, is their line. We just, you know, heard about it and happened to be there. Sometimes, no doubt, this is exactly how it is. But anyone who has watched these processes close-up, or better, been part of such processes, knows that when they photograph it they are at least liable to change it, and that often it goes far beyond a mere bit of alteration, the reality being that the 'reality' they are photo-ing is a lie, told either by some local, or by the MSM themselves.

I had my first close-up look at this kind of thing when I was an architecture undergraduate at Cambridge University in the early seventies. I and a gang of lefty acquaintances (one of them was an fellow architect) were sitting around doing nothing in a lefty mate's room. Suddenly, a dwarfish individual who identified himself as a cameraman working for The Daily Telegraph popped his head round the door and told the assembled throng that the notorious Enoch Powell was visiting Cambridge that afternoon, and that he had been sent to Cambridge to photograph the resulting riot. So, please would they oblige with a riot.

He got his photos. In a sense these photos were accurate. He didn't doctor them or anything. But they were also a complete lie. The lefty rioters did not organise the riot, the way the photos said. The photographer organised the riot. He was the ringleader. But try writing a letter to the editor of the Telegraph about a thing like that. Forget it. If there had been blogs then, I would have been a blogger then and I would have been all over this. And if I had had a digital camera then, I would have photographed the photographer, and nailed him for the liar that he was. Or so I like to think. Now, this is what is actually happening.

Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, which is the great comic novel about the lying, manipulative intrusiveness of the foreign correspondent industry, is now being written and published in real time.

The German magazine ZAPP has a video of Green Helmet, whose name has been revealed as Salam Daher, taken in Qana when it was bombed ten years ago. He oversees a dead boy being put into an ambulance. The sequence is not good enough. He gives stage directions. The boy is taken out again, transferred pointlessly to another stretcher, put back in the ambulance. Daher makes sure there is a clear field of view for the camera and the blanket over the boy is pulled back so that his face can be seen.

The video is on You Tube.

EU Referendum promises to provide an analysis soon. This should be worth reading, as it was EU Referendum's Richard North who first noted Daher's surprising prominence If you care to you can also read a translation of an article from Stern magazine saying that the whole thing is just a bizarre conspiracy theory.

The picture from 1996 briefly shown on the left of the Zapp footage shows Daher holding up a dead baby dressed in blue. The baby's head is blurred, and that is not surprising. Zapp's picture was taken within minutes of this one showing that the baby's head had been blown up. (Needless to say, this is a disturbing image.) That picture is fairly famous - for instance it appears as the fourth picture down in this series of pictures from the "Main Gallery Of Zionist Massacres" of a website called "Resistance." It was also, I seem to recall, at one time the cover picture for Warblogger Watch (http://warbloggerwatch.blogspot.com, although if you try the link it is immediately covered up by sex adverts.) Daher has had a successful career.

The dead children from both 1996 and 2006 were really dead. Almost certainly they were really killed by Israeli munitions - although I have no doubt Hizb'Allah reassigns casualties from "friendly fire" whenever it gets the chance, let us not pretend that in what I take to be a worldwide war our side will not also kill innocents. The much mocked defence that an image is "fake but accurate" does have some validity.

However from now on it will be impossible to forget that these famous images tell not one but at least three stories. The dead child. The man holding him. The man behind the camera.

Take a look here, all you punk ass photoshop dweebs sending your Lebanon pictures to Reuters, and see how a professional does things!

It may take a minute for the flash 'tutorial' to load when you get to the page.

In her ill-judged attack on global capitalism, Naomi Klein decried the phenomenon of the corporate logo. One of the sillinesses of this is that logos and brands are essentially bound up with the reputation of a firm. A firm that has a strong brand, a strong reputation for honesty, quality and high service may have taken years, decades even, to aquire it. It can take only days to lose such a reputation through stupidity or dishonesty. That is why reputation is a protection for the consumer. Statists who imagine that we need all manner of regulations to protect consumers against shysters routinely forget this point. A firm that wants to make a whacking great profit is unlikely to deliberately harm or even kill, its customers. Self-interest dictates that a firm that wants to make money over the long term will work like hell to ensure its reputation is deserved. (It may be debateable whether limited liability either enhances or weakens this process, but I have not the time to explore that here).

I got thinking along these lines following the recent mess that has unfolded at Reuters, thanks entirely to sharp-eyed bloggers spotting something funny about photographs. Reuters is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, news service in the world. It both provides information directly to clients such as traders via its screens, offering real-time news alerts, and also wholesale news, providing text and photographs to newspapers and broadcasters. The company - founded by central European aristocrat Baron Julius Reuter - has employed some of the bravest and sharpest journalists in the business, not to mention folk who went on to forge careers in television like Sandy Gall or even thriller writers like Frederick Forsyth and Ian Fleming.

So what has happened over the photo scandal has the whiff of tragedy as well as farce. Its reputation has been badly damaged by the photo scandal. My sources at the firm realise that the situation cannot be shrugged off and it appears this will not happen. Good. The organisation deserves credit for immediately axing the jerk who doctored photographs to make a situation look more exciting and therefore marketable than it was. The whole back-catalogue of this person's work has been taken down. Reuter's head of editorial, David Schlesinger - no stranger to speaking his mind about matters - is certainly like to crack the whip, although I am not yet aware that senior managers' heads may roll because of what has happened. (Stay tuned).

It is a shame in some ways since the company has been recovering financially over the past couple of years. Reuters' profitability was hammered after the end of the dotcom boom in 2000. Bloated and complacent after the boom years in foreign exchange and equity markets during the 80s and 90s, Reuters' lost ground to firms like Bloomberg. Bloomberg's snazzy news and bond-dealing boxes and add-on features enticed away thousands of clients. And yet under new CEO Tom Glocer, the company started to fight back, halting the exodus of clients, simplifying its product range. It left its old HQ in Fleet Street and moved to a gleaming new office in Canary Wharf.

To fight back from this, senior management must show no mercy if there are further signs of this sort of nonsense. If they do not take a hard line, one can be sure business rivals like Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal will be ready to pounce.

Accompanying earlier posts here and here, another example of some Reuters truthmaking has been exposed by the blogosphere - and guess which side of the conflict is being targeted by Reuters' dodgy Adobe warriors? The shot and caption in question can be found here. The caption reads

An Israeli F-16 warplane fires missiles during an air strike on Nabatiyeh in southern Lebanon, August 2, 2006.

Looks plausible enough to an untrained eye such as my own, however Reuters again underestimates the superior intellectual firepower ranged against it in the Blogosphere, which has exposed the "missiles" as the guided-missile countermeasure known as chaff. The fact that two of the three rounds visible are copies of the single chaff release adds to the visual fiction. The link posted above debunking the Reuters image has a lot more detail.

We are starting to see the full extent of entrenched dishonesty in the Reuters newsroom, and it is astonishing that the people working for this once-venerable institution think they can get away with such crude deception. Did they think people with far, far greater expertise than these hacks would not notice? Reuters needs to get its house in order expeditiously, otherwise its supersession is assured.

(Via LGF)

Drinking from Home posts two Reuters pictures (CORRECTION: one Reuters picture and one AP) of a woman lamenting the destruction of her home by the Israelis. Different dates, different homes, same woman.

Over on Media Influencer, Adriana has an article called Wikiality, discussing both the rise and rise of Wikipedia and just how badly some commentators misunderstand what Wikipedia is and is not. The issue is not "can bogus content end up on Wikipedia?" (yes, it can) but rather "does it get discovered and corrected?"

Just as bloggers can write any old cobblers they want about some subject, does that mean nothing on blogs can be trusted? No, because not only are blogs generally quite open about where they are coming from (i.e. their 'biases'), unlike MSM with their untenable claims to be 'unbiased', when a blog makes some questionable assertion it is subject to an army of peer reviewers who will pull apart inconsistencies and errors. Moreover the more influential the blog, the quicker and harder errors or fanciful interpretations of events are pounced on in the comments and (more importantly) on other blogs.

The rapid retraction of a photoshopped image of 'Beirut burning' being offered for sale by Reuters just a few hours ago indicates that the era of the deference for the purveyors of The News is well and truly over. Peer review, it is not just for blogs and wikis anymore.

A modest contribution to the debate between the media and bloggers... Thanks to Jon Stewart for pointing out yet another way in which the credibility and professionalism are the flavour of the day. Obviously.

My favourite phrase: arbitrarily terrifying.

via BuzzMachine

The astonishingly skewed reportage relating to the Middle East, and the reactions to it on the internet, reminds me of the reportage in the aftermath of 9/11 and how that changed the way a great many people understood how news is reported. The reaction to ideologically or commercially motivated massaging of facts in the mainstream media, which claimed to be objective reporting, is what more or less created the pundit blogosphere as we know it today.

The spotlight is once again on the reporters and networks who accept staged 'photo-opportunities' and rebroadcast them as factual 'news' (suitably edited). It is on the journalists who report every single Lebanese casually as 'civilian' even if they are members of Hezbollah (true but completely misleading). It is on the reporters operating within Lebanon under close Hezbollah direction and yet not adding a disclaimer to their reports pointing out this. It is on major western news agencies selling obviously photoshopped images of the aftermath of Israeli bombing.

Of course not every journalist allows themselves to be used in return for a 'sexy' story, as this July 30th article shows...

THIS is the picture that damns Hezbollah. It is one of several, smuggled from behind Lebanon's battle lines, showing that Hezbollah is waging war amid suburbia. The images, obtained exclusively by the Sunday Herald Sun, show Hezbollah using high-density residential areas as launch pads for rockets and heavy-calibre weapons. Dressed in civilian clothing so they can quickly disappear, the militants carrying automatic assault rifles and ride in on trucks mounted with cannon. The photographs, from the Christian area of Wadi Chahrour in the east of Beirut, were taken by a visiting journalist and smuggled out by a friend.

So why is that not 'front page' news on the BBC or the hilariously named 'Independent'? Could it be because it suggests that what the 'Zionist entity' has been claiming all along might actually be true?

To quote the movie Network, "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it any more". We can fact-check your ass.

For those who missed this in the Samizdata comment section a few days ago, take a look at this and make of it what you will.

Horray for Hollywood Pallywood. Truth is all in the editing it would seem.

Update: And that applies to still images as well. Reuter's has its 'Dan Rather moment' as a picture of the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike is proven to be a Photoshop 'enhancement'

In accordance with their ongoing commitment to the principles of constant development and change and to show that the organisation remains determined to accurately reflect the ever-changing social and cultural landscape, the BBC today unveiled its new corporate logo:

(Courtesy of Prodicus)

There is an article in the National Review by former Sunday Telegraph journalist Tom Gross what lifts the lid on what the British taxpayers who fund the BBC gets for their appropriated money... not that CNN et al are much better:

CNN senior international correspondent Nic Robertson admitted that his anti-Israel report from Beirut on July 18 about civilian casualties in Lebanon was stage-managed from start to finish by Hezbollah. He revealed that his story was heavily influenced by Hezbollah's "press officer" and that Hezbollah have "very, very sophisticated and slick media operations".

[...]

Yet Reliable Sources, hosted by Washington Post writer Howard Kurtz, is broadcast only on the American version of CNN. So CNN International viewers around the world will not have had the opportunity to learn from CNN's "Senior international correspondent" that the pictures they saw from Beirut were carefully selected for them by Hezbollah.

[...]

First the BBC gave the impression that Israel had flattened the greater part of Beirut. Then to follow up its lop-sided coverage, its website helpfully carried full details of the assembly points for an anti-Israel march due to take place in London, but did not give any details for a rally in support of Israel also held in London a short time later.

Without the internet to fact-check and contextualize what the media shows us, our ability to form opinions about what is happening in the world would be totally at the mercy of organisations whose reportage comes filtered through world views that are perhaps no more or less distorted than any other but which claim, without any justification, to be 'objective'. Blogs like Samizdata do not claim to be 'objective' as we do not hesitate to say who we think that the 'good guys' and 'bad guys' or 'less-worse-guys' (we do try to be truthful however) as we take the view that as long as our biases are transparent, the reader can make his own mind up about the things we say. Bias + Transparency = Credibility. You make not agree with our conclusions but we will not intentionally lie to you.

However when organisations like CNN or the BBC claim to be 'unbiased', they are quite simply lying. I recall that pool reporters during the last Gulf War often said words to the effect "we are reporting under the restrictions imposed on us by the US military" before delivering their reports, which is fair enough as a disclaimer. I have yet to hear anything similar said by a reporter in Beirut reporting under Hezbollah restrictions (although I did hear one in Israel mutter that he was being prevented from saying exactly where Hezbollah rockets had struck), which in effect makes them a willing participant to Hezbollah's propaganda efforts. In short, you are being deceived.

The Spectator is, and has been for many years, the leading conservative magazine in the United Kingdom. By 'conservative' I do not mean that it always supports the Conservative party (it has often had articles that have attacked the certain aspects of the Conservative party), but that the magazine opposes the socialist-social democratic forces that have dominated the United Kingdom for many decades (and it must be remembered that the basic cultural institutions of the United Kingdom remained under socialist-social democratic control even when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister).

However, it has long been a open secret in conservative and libertarian circles that The Spectator is often somewhat half hearted in its opposition to the "left" (for want of a better word). So one has to be careful about buying it. Under a poor editor, or even on a bad week in the time of a good editor, it may be little better than the BBC.

Last week I bought a copy of The Spectator. I wanted a change from the death-to-Israel, death-to-America line of all the television and radio stations and much of the print media in Britain (not that they have guts to just say 'death-to-the-Jews' of course - outlets like the BBC on the Daily Mail claim not to be anti Jewish in the slightest, it is just a matter of opposing the bad things that Israel does and opposing the backing of the United States gives to Israel).

The editor of The Spectator (Matthew d'Acona) may be a friend of the unprincipled David Cameron (present leader of the Conservative party), but he (like, to be fair, many of the people around Mr Cameron) is known to be pro-America and pro-Israel.

Also on the front cover of The Spectator it was advertised that Norman Tebbit had written an article. Tebbit was Chairman of the Conservative party when Margaret Thatcher was leader. He was always an independent man willing to argue with Mrs T. if need be, but always a loyal and honourable and was badly wounded by an IRA bomb (the same bomb left his wife paralysed and many other people dead) which led to his semi withdrawal from politics, thus leaving Margaret Thatcher exposed to the plots of her enemies. The Tebbit article was good (a polite demolition of Mr Cameron's line of policy - too polite for my taste, but that is the way Norman Tebbit writes).

And there were other good articles in the magazine, however two very bad articles were present.

The first was by the ex Labour 'minister for Europe' (i.e. minister for the EU) Denis MacShane...

Why an ex-Labour minister (who has not changed his beliefs) should be invited to write an article in a 'conservative' magazine is not clear. After all such opinions have many other outlets and people buy a conservative magazine in order to have a rest from such opinions. In this article Mr MacShane argued that Britain should have supported the Communists in the Spanish Civil War - although the words 'Communists' and 'Communism' were not present in the article. It was all about supporting 'democracy' you see. Even though it was perfectly clear that 1936 was to be the last time that anti-socialist candidates were going to be allowed to stand.

The armed revolt against the elected non-socialist government of Spain in 1934 was described as a "strike", but the armed revolt against the elected Popular Front government of Spain in 1936 was very wicked - so wicked that Britain should have invaded Spain in order to defeat it. The fact that Winston Churchill supported Franco was mentioned, but the fact that this was because Churchill, correctly, believed that the new government of Spain was a tool of the Communists was left out.

The fact that Franco's men killed lots of people was duly mentioned, but the fact that even 'moderate' leftist leaders wished to exterminate any owners of land or capital who resisted being robbed (and the people who really controlled the government wished to exterminate the owners of land or capital whether they resisted or not) was not mentioned. In fact a 'Republican' victory in the Spanish Civil War would have meant the extermination of all non-Reds (whether they owned property or not) - the 'democratic' leaders of the Popular Front government were a joke (as Churchill and others pointed out). Also a Red Spain would have (under the alliance between Stalin and Hitler - 1939-1941) have taken Gibraltar and closed the Med to Britain - thus handing over the Middle East (with its oil) to the totalitarian powers.

Instead Nationalist Spain (under Franco) made all sorts of excuses as to why it could not help Hitler just now. Just as Franco both smashed the various Red parties in Spain and castrated the Spanish Falangists - by making both the Falangists, the Carlists (and others) part of his 'movement'. Franco may have often done the straight armed salute, but he saved more Jewish lives (by allowing refuge in Spain) than any other war time leader.

A Marxist Spain would not only have murdered many millions of Spanish people, it would also have led to the defeat of Britain in World War II - and the creation of what is called a 'United Europe' (many of the plans for European Economic and Monetary Union were drawn up by the National Socialists).

I do not know whether Mr MacShane is one of the many ex-communists who are in the present Labour government or not, but I do know that many ex-communists reacted to the fall of the Soviet Union by pinning their hopes on the European Union. What had failed on grand scale (collectivism), might succeed if done gradually - bit by bit, regulation by regulation.

A fantasy perhaps, but a popular one in certain leftist circles.

The other bad article was by Ron Liddle - and ex B.B.C. man who was sacrificed by that organization when the government got angry over B.B.C. over coverage of Iraq war related matters (specifically "Today" programme, the show Mr Liddle was in control of, coverage on Radio 4). Mr Liddle informs his readers that the United States fought a war against North Vietnam which was "supposedly communist".

In fact Uncle Ho and the rest were communists (no "supposedly") and the war was fought to defend the Republic of Vietnam ('South Vietnam') - if the US military had been ordered to overturn the regime in the north they would have done so. But President Johnson and associates favoured 'limited war' blood soaked games instead. 'Victory' was a dirty idea that was not to be countenanced. Like so many media and academia types Mr Liddle has forgotten about the 'boat people' and all the other things that happened in the late 1970's (which in my innocent youth I thought might make even the elite reconsider their anti-Americanism).

Mr Liddle regards the "obsessive and wicked machinations" of the British Prime Minister in 1956 (Anthony Eden) against Nasser (dictator of Egypt) as even worse than Vietnam. The fact that Nasser had violated the agreement he had made with Britain (indeed with Eden personally) in 1954 (the agreement that led to Britain removing troops from the Suez Canal Zone) by taking over the Suez canal is not wicked, the fact that Nasser was brutal dictator who nationalized everything in sight (not just things owned by evil Europeans) and financed anti-Western violence all over the Middle East - that is not wicked either. But resisting Nasser (as Eden tried to do) that is what Mr. Liddle thinks is wicked. A standard 'death to Britain', 'death to the West' line that one expect from a leftist (which is sad in the case of Mr Liddle as he has shown in the past signs of dissent from a standard leftist line). Ally with anyone who is anti-British - even Nasser.

Mr Liddle also repeats the old myth that it was the United States that caused the Anglo-French (and Israeli) operation against Nasser to fail. There was a lack of support in the United States (the 1956 election was coming up - and 'anti-colonialists' like Nasser were still popular with a lot of morons) and there were indeed anti-British people in some parts of the government (such as Herbert Hoover Jr in the State Department). But neither Ike nor John Foster Dulles really wanted the operation to fail. The choice not to prop up the Pound would have made no difference (after all the British cabinet already knew that fixed exchange rates were not the only option - Rab Butler had told them some time before). It was really Harold Macmillan (not an American) who caused the failure of the Suez operation.

Macmillan had given strong support to the operation (one of the supposedly strongest supporters in cabinet), but at the key moment he (as Chancellor of the Exchequer) exaggerated Britain's economic problems - Macmillan being both a brave man and a man to whom morality was a alien concept (both features that he shared with his henchman Edward Heath - although I think even 'Super Mac' would have drawn the line at Heath's later support for Mao, the greatest mass murderer of all time.) had seen his chance to destroy and replace Eden - and had taken the chance with great skill.

Mr Liddle goes on to complain of United States lack of support for Britain in the Falklands war - citing Jeane Kirkpatrick's support for the 'fascist junta'. Leaving aside that the bunch of military drunks that made up the government of Argentina would have been rather unlikely to be able to define what 'fascism' is (I rather doubt that Mr Liddle knows much about the principles of Mussolini and the other Fascist writers either), in reality the United States did support Britain in the war - and American military support was vital. Overall Mr Liddle's case is that the United States has no 'special relationship' with Britain and acts in its own interests.

The trouble with this case is that it is not true.

For example, the support that President Wilson showed for Britain in the First World War (for example complaining about German submarines, but not really about British mines and the hunger blockage Britain imposed on Germany) was not in the interests of the United States - on the contrary this one sided policy led to war with Imperial Germany (a country that was no threat to the United States) and the loss of over one hundred thousand American lives (to leave aside the financial losses).

Nor can FDR's support for Britain in World War II be explained as somehow a matter of American 'self interest'. National Socialist Germany (evil though it was) was, even if had forced Britain to make peace in 1940-41, in no position to invade the United States. The story (beloved of Daily Mail writers) that America opposed Nazi Germany for selfish reasons (and therefore British people have nothing to be grateful for) is simply not true.

Then there are little things like the support the Federal Reserve Board gave to the Bank of England in the 1920's - support for the delusion that the Pound was still worth the same (in terms of Dollars) as it had been before the First World War. This support - the Fed's support for an expansion of the American money supply in order to prop up the Pound's exchange rate to the Dollar - led to the boom-bust cycle that ended in the Great Depression. The support was indeed based on the special relationship between Britain and the United States - specifically between key people in Britain and the United States (such as the Governor of the Bank of England and the Governor of Federal Reserve System in New York - B. Strong and M. Norman).

I am not saying that Mr Liddle is a dishonest man like Denis MacShane. But Mr Liddle has chosen to write an article about a subject (Anglo-American political history) which he does not know very much about.

And no one on the staff of The Spectator seems to know enough to spot the errors

Reuters journalist Paul Hughes chose to spend a holiday with his wife in Beirut. just as the violence broke out. Here's his vivid take on what it is like in that city at the moment. When it comes to covering events in Lebanon with a salty mixture of black humour, PJ O' Rourke, of course, remains the master.

There is an example in the Telegraph that demonstrates yet again that we are all prisoners to the meta-context (frames of reference) within which we understand things and explain ourselves to others.

Bush turns back on science to veto stem cell Bill

... is the title of a piece by Francis Harris, reporting from Washington. And what is he writing about? Bush has vetoed a bill increasing government-funded research using human embryo cells. So Bush is not turning his back on 'science' at all, but rather is turning his back on providing tax money for activities that some taxpayers regard as murder. Personally I am all for stem-cell research and I do not any moral problems with the use of human embryos for research, but I fail to see why people who take a very different view should be forced to fund something they regard as child-killing... but then I would rather see no scientific research whatsoever funded with taxpayer's money.

But within the meta-context that constrains Francis Harris' views, to oppose tax-funding for certain types of research on moral grounds is to turn your back on 'science' rather than turning your back on what you may regard as 'murder'. Just as a thought experiment, ponder this: if Bush managed to get a law enacted that allowed for the testing of dangerous experimental drugs on the inmates in Guantanamo Bay, would the title of Francis Harris' article be "Bush backs laws supporting the advancement of science"?

Somehow I do not think so, yet logically it should be.

I was just watching a BBC Two special on the TV on political youth movements in Putin's increasingly repressive Russia. During the programme a member of Yabloko was interviewed, the voice-over describing it as a 'liberal' (in the British sense of the word) opposition group, which according to its stated platform it sort of is (at least by local standards).

And on the wall behind the Yabloko spokesman being interview was a large picture of... Che Guevara.

So let me get this straight, some of their activists have a fondness for a mass murdering communist whose 'philosophy of the wall' was to simply execute 'class enemies', but they are 'liberal'? Really? How liberal exactly? It reminded me of the commentary during the attempted military coup d'etat against Boris Yeltsin in August 1991 in which a CNN reporter described the orthodox communists in the military attempting to roll back the collapse of the Soviet Empire as 'right wing'. Well what constitutes 'left wing' if being a communist does not? I would say that CNN reporter was just using the term to mean 'the bad guys'.

Last night, at my own personal blog, I found myself getting really quite exercised about this utterly banal and ignorable headline...

...which I snapped yesterday afternoon. And in a very Samizdata-ish manner, a style that has been eluding me somewhat, of late. So, here is a link to my rant from Samizdata.

I got up at 6 am yesterday, which would be early for most people, and is about the day before yesterday for me, and I spent all of the morning and half the afternoon working extremely hard. Now it is 6 am today. I am up again, and face a similar day. So maybe my rant resistance is, just now, lower than usual. Maybe now, unlike usually, I am angry.

But it was not all rant. I also found myself weaving in my favourite cock-up of the World Cup so far, which was committed last night by an English referee, during the game which saw the Aussies going through to the last sixteen of the competition.

Jim Henson banged out these rather bizarre commercials - featuring a murdering psychopathic Kermit The Frog lookalike and a Cookie Monsteresque grump - before sharpening his act up and creating The Muppets.

See (a lot) more of the series here, and ponder why Wilkins Coffee is not a household name.

(Hat tip - Larvatus Prodeo)

I have come across an allegation I am unable to verify because I am a linguistic curmudgeon, unable to read (or even speak!) Swedish or Danish. Sorry, everyone. A late night trawling through a comments thread over at Tim Blair's unearthed this very interesting comment from reader "TOGITV" :

I have just read that the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten is about to republish the Mohammed cartoons!

I can’t find any reference to it in any English language press. But here is the link to the article in the Swedish press

TOGITV later posts :

I just read the Swedish article a bit closer. It isn’t the same newspaper (Jyllands Posten) that will re-publish the cartoons, it will be another Danish newspaper called Politiken.

I can’t read Danish quite as well as Swedish, but I think the article in Politiken says that Harpers Magazine will also publish the cartoons in their June edition also accompanying an article on Art Spiegelman.

Interesting, if true. Perhaps someone versed in Swedish or Danish could enlighten the rest of us as to the articles' content. If it is true, and the cartoons are published again in another Danish magazine, the seemingly obvious consequence would be another explosion of fundamentalist Islamic vitriol against Denmark, freedom of speech, the West and Western values, you name it. However, the furore over the Jyllands-Posten cartoons occurred several months after publishing, and was certainly incited by a few conspiring Islamic leaders, who provided the nexus between a liberal European paper and the protesting Middle Eastern mobs. On reflection, it is hard to see what good the rabble-rousing has done for the Islamic cause. In response to the disgusting behaviour of the Islamist mob, the silencing veil of political correctness was blown off various issues surrounding Islam in quite remarkable time. I've noticed that the educated middle class - possibly the social group most conscious of PC mores - are these days far more likely to openly discuss and criticise the ugly sides of Islam and its (in)compatibility with modern Western society. I'd go so far to say that, post cartoon-rage, even tracts of the left are less willing to defend Islam's excesses.

I rather think that those who scurrilously incited the cartoon rage did not expect the mob to claw and bay with such intensity. Certainly, the hideous scenes we witnessed on our televisions at the time turned many erstwhile allies in the West away from the Islamic cause. More importantly, an enormous number who had no opinion one way or the other regarding Islam now see it in a negative light. It is most evident that the individuals who all-too-successfully activated the mob dealt themselves an almighty propaganda defeat - possibly one of the more spectacular tactical backfires we've seen in recent times. Surely, even the most benighted, zealous Islamic leader has the limited perspicacity required to concede that point. Hence, if the cartoons are soon published in another Danish newspaper, we may hear nothing more of it.

City Journal, the New York-based magazine, is rapidly turning into one of my favourite reads (many of its articles are now on-line). It carries writers of wit and grace on all manner of issues, many on education, urban life and business. It is now, in my view, streets ahead ('scuse the pun) of the Spectator, which lost the plot under the editorship of Boris Johnson, whom I now regard frankly as a twerp. City Journal ranks alongside the rejuvinated Atlantic Monthly and Prospect magazine as a place to go for having one's views challenged and stretched.

I strongly recommend the latest issue, which has an appreciation of the late writer, Jane Jacobs, who helped take apart the case for centralised planning of towns, and a review of the life of Robspierre, and a must-read piece on Iran by Mark Steyn, who happily is still churning out great material despite parting ways with the Telegraph Group.

Sorry to keep banging on about J K Galbraith, but I just had to drag a gem of a BBC Radio 4 radio interview out of this comment thread - thanks to commenter John K (not Galbraith, one assumes) for bringing it to light. The Radio 4 producers were no doubt expecting hushed reverence for a crusty Keynesian warrior like Galbraith - much beloved by most BBC types - so I think they received rather a rude shock when the interviewee, Meghnad Desai, got into his free marketeering stride. My favourite part :

"So Galbraith was very much a 1950s man. And he still has fans, because lots of people are still stuck in the 1950s. You know, quite a lot of them in the Labour Party."

I also particularly enjoyed the shocked pause before the interviewer, Greg Wood, thanked the eminent Professor for his heresy.

Now recent British history is changing.

Last week we heard that the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, had offered to resign but that the Prime Minister refused to accept his resignation. The PM subsequently told the House that he did not know the details when he rejected that resignation.

Yesterday the PM told the News of the World that he might have to sack Clarke, depending on what happened. This morning it emerges in The Sun, the News of the World's stable-mate, that, "BUNGLING Home Secretary Charles Clarke did NOT offer to quit last week over the freed foreign convicts scandal. He told the BBC he had offered to go — which infuriated Prime Minister Tony Blair."

Those of us who have been seized by the strange idea that the reason a PM might reject a resignation without asking for more details could only be in order to be able to deny knowledge later, can take comfort. It never happened.

That the serious press, read by a tiny proportion of the public, may have carried stories in which Blair supported his Home Secretary, and that he told the House of Commons something similar, carries no weight. Many millions of tabloid readers are subvocalising the much simpler truth: that Tony has been badly let down, and investigations are going on to discover how badly.

And as to the Battle of the Cowshed, I believe the time will come when we shall find that Snowball's part in it was much exaggerated. Discipline, comrades, iron discipline! That is the watchword for today. One false step, and our enemies would be upon us. Surely, comrades, you do not want Jones back?

David Miliband, Minister of Communities and Local Government, is happy for (undisclosed) government employees to post comments full of praise for him on the taxpayer-owned blog he uses to promote himself and his department. When a taxpayer - in this case, journalist David Tebbutt - asks if the fawning comment is indeed from a government employee, Miliband will not even publish the query, let alone answer it.

This, in a blog discussion about how MPs and ministers can prove to us through blogging that they do listen to taxpayers and ar