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This story has suddenly hit the attention of the Big Media – there were several reports about in the weekend – and it is true that the outbreak of a disease that kills ash trees is alarming. As a reminder of how virulent such diseases are, the UK was once full of elm trees and then the Dutch Elm Disease outbreak wiped them out, although some species of elm can, it is hoped, be bred to resist it. (Elm is a wood once used in things such as rudders and keels of boats). Ash has considerable uses in the furniture trades; the prospect of thousands of trees being wiped out is alarming enough.
Charles Moore, writing in one of his regular berths, the Spectator, makes a point about what he sees as the ineffectual performance of Britain’s state-owned Forestry Commission. (The UK government tried to privatise it, but caved in when the FC and its supporters claimed this would bring the End of Civilisation as We Know It a bit nearer.) He has a point, and this quote caught my eye: “A friend of mine who owns an extremely rare ash forest in Scotland (a fraction of one which the Forestry Commission destroyed in the 1950s) tells he has received no alert at all from the Commission before or during the present crisis.” Moore says his own efforts to research the ash issue on the FC website has carried very little useful data on it. When I click on it, there is an item on the disease.
By coincidence, the Forestry Commission’s performance comes under separate attack, in the same edition of the Spectator, by Matt Ridley. He blames it for spending more time on AGW alarmism than in dealing with the issue of imported bugs and diseases.
This leads me to a broader point. These last few weeks have provided plenty of evidence that state-run organisations tend to be jealous of their own privileges to the detriment of the public interest they are supposed to serve. The BBC, allegedly, has employed a sexual predator against young children (Jimmy Savile) for decades, and when this was pointed out after the man died, the BBC pulled a documentary about this fact and chose to air some crummy “tribute” to the old creep instead. Then there is the National Health Service, that symbol of 1940s infatuation with central planning and anti-market prejudice. It allowed Savile to roam around at least one hospital, for many years. By a strange twist, it appears one reason why the whole issue was tamely covered were fears, so it is said, by journalists that their industry could be regulated if the UK government accepts recommendations by Lord Leveson, who has carried out an enormous and expensive enquiry into the phone hacking scandal. And in the same edition of the Spectator, the actor Hugh Grant comes out with this piece of statist-leaning rubbish:
“We don’t know what Leveson will -recommend. But let’s assume he won’t back yet another helping of self-regulation (the so-called Hunt/Black plan). Let’s say he proposes a new regulator, independent both of the industry and of government, and with the minimum statutory underpinning to make it effective. According to a recent YouGov poll, that would be supported by 77 per cent of the UK population. Many of the national newspapers, on the other hand, say it will be the end of freedom of the press. But will it really?”
It won’t end it, but it will be a step in the wrong direction. The fact that 77 per cent of the UK population want X is no more proof of the wisdom of state regulation than it would have been proof of the existence of witches or intelligent life on Mars.
“It’s similar to how the judiciary, lawyers and doctors are regulated in this country. And none wanted to be regulated, but they’re fine with it now. In terms of regulation it would be nothing in comparison to how Ofcom or the BBC Trust regulate the broadcasting industries, and it’s hard to find a broadcast journalist who complains of being chilled or constrained.”
Oh great. Just what we need. So how does Mr Grant imagine that, say, an internet-based blogger, or chatshow host, or whatever, is going to be regulated? If only qualified journalists (qualified where, and in what ways, and by whom?) are allowed, then a lot of people who have jobs in the media are going to either retrain, at cost and inconvenience, or leave. And does Mr Grant not imagine that the whole world of non-mainstream media is going to be affected by this? (Also, it is nonsense to suggest that broadcasters are not feeling constrained: the people who made the abandoned Savile documentary certainly were, and I believe, were constrained to an extent by what the BBC is.)
Anyway, the reason why I don’t want the media to be regulated in the way that Grant wants is to avoid yet more parts of this country’s affairs succumbing to the same smug, inward-looking mentality that we see at the BBC, the NHS, a state forestry organisation, or whatever. The sins of the British media, such as the newspapers, are well known. What Grant does not seem to mention is that the UK also operates some of the most ferocious libel laws; this country does not have anything like the US First Amendment; and if there are serious wrongs (and hacking phones is wrong), there are already plenty of laws to prevent that from happening, or punishing those when caught.
From dead ash trees to a British actor. We cover a lot of ground on this blog.
You may have heard that the Yanks are having some sort of election.
You may have even heard that a minor celebrity called Lena Dunham made a political advertisement in support of the candidacy of Mr Obama. This production gave rise to hostile comment from Mr Romney’s supporters, which the Democrats claim was motivated by prudery but the Republicans claim was motivated by disquiet at Ms Dunham’s apparent assumption that the main hope of American maidens is to receive their lord’s seigneurial favour and be kept by him thereafter.
Admit it, though, the ad is funny. She has great comic timing, and the way she rattles out her spiel at speed while still managing to do recognizable parodies of the way people really talk shows she has all the observational skills one would expect from a talented scriptwriter. That is an aspect of the ad which has received less attention than it should. Ms Dunham’s particular gift is meant to be that she can write a script that reflects how women live today, on the understanding that ‘women’ means urban American women of her own class and race.
So Lena Dunham the great observer went out and observed this. Listen from 0:30 for the next five seconds:
It’s a fun game to say, “who are you voting for?” and they say, “I don’t want to tell you,” and you say, “No, who are you voting for?” and they go, “Guess.”
So even among the sort of people who Lena talks to there are enough Romney voters who don’t want to say so for her to find that coy response worth parodying? That could explain certain oddities in the polls.
From an auctioneers’ website:
lot details
lot no 305
description
A silver rectangular medallion, London 1977, applied with ‘WE FIX’D IT FOR JIM’ and ‘NATIONAL VALA 1977’, 4.2cm high, with a suspension loop, on a belcher link chain, the ring catch stamped ‘STER’
The National Viewers’ And Listeners’ Association (National VALA) was founded by Mary Whitehouse, CBE (1910-2001) in 1965.
Provenance: From the estate of Sir Jimmy Savile. OBE, KCSG, LLD (1926-2011)
It would be ridiculous to attempt to extract some moral from the existence of a medallion apparently issued by the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, 1970s campaigners against obscenity, particularly obscenity on the BBC, and the late Jimmy Savile, 1970s BBC DJ and TV host, now alleged (credibly alleged, despite the inevitable swarm of bandwagoneers) to have been a sexual predator with no regard for gender, age, vulnerability or consent. Any competent hack could whip up two think-pieces with mutually exclusive morals in one hour flat and bank his cheques from the Mail and the Guardian in the morning.
It was just an odd thing I found on the internet.
Just to add to the oddity, the auction was held in Saviles Hall. It is no longer possible to Google for the origin of that name.
The medallion went for £220, somewhat below the estimate. Wonder what it’s worth now?
Yes, I think I am avoiding talking about the Savile case. You can remedy that below. The case, as opposed to the medallion, throws up so many questions and points for discussion that I was hard put to keep the number of categories for this post under half a dozen. Please bear the laws of libel in mind if referring to living persons.
We here all have our opinions about the relative merits of President Obama and Would-Be President Romney. Last night, I stayed up (again very late) to watch Debate Two between Obama and Romney, and that being so, I might as well say something about that here.
As I commented here in connection with that earlier event, the TV Umpire Lady in the Biden Ryan debate did Biden no favours by allowing Biden to behave like a graceless fool. The result of that media error of omission was an internet buzzing with compilation video of Biden behaving like a graceless fool.
Last night, or so it seemed to me, and more to the point to many others, the graceless fool was the TV Umpire Lady herself, a person by the name of Candy Crowley. She was the one interrupting, and telling Romney what was what and generally getting way, way above herself. The compilation videos in the next few days will be of her, rather than of either of the candidates saying or doing anything embarrassing, because last night neither of them did say or do anything embarrassing – well, not a lot and no more than usual. Both did their thing as best they could, so far as I could tell, Obama in particular being a great improvement on his performance in Debate One. Yes, Obama probably overdid his equivocating about exactly when he got around to calling the embassy attack pre-planned “terrorism”, rather than spontaneous film-criticism. But what jumped out at me was how Candy Crowley joined in on Obama’s side in such a big way, like some kind of tag-wrestler.
Like her predecessor in the Biden Ryan debate, Candy Crowley did the candidate she clearly favoured no favours whatsoever. Obama, despite himself doing okay, was made by Candy Crowley to look more like the geeky kid in the playground who needed protecting from one of the older kids, rather than any sort of President. Worse, Obama was being protected by a girl.
I was half watching the BBC, again, afterwards, to see what they would make of all this, and this time they seemed to have a total blind spot, perhaps because not having a blind spot would have involved noticing that the biggest loser this time around was one of their own. As I earlier reported, the BBC called the Biden Ryan debate fairly accurately and almost immediately. This time? Well, unkind phrases like “elephant in the room” spring to mind.
Because, when it comes to Candy Crowley, I really do mean big loser. I’m not running for electoral office and I can be as graceless as I like. Other unkind commenters on various Instapundit-linked blogs I read last night talked of “Jabba The Hut” being the moderator. That a woman used to be young and cute, but has now become rather fat, hence not so cute, and consequently revealed as never having been all that verbally fluent in the first place, ought not to matter that much. But as I have been emailing my as-of-now super-cute god-daughter, in connection with photos of herself that she has recently been sending me, such things do matter. Cruel but true. Candy Crowley made the US mainstream media look, last night, like a frumpy old has-been.
During the presidential election four years ago, US mainstream media bias was not nearly so obvious, because the US mainstream media, that time around, were telling a story with widespread appeal to regular Americans. Don’t vote for the doddery old coot! Vote for the cool black dude! But now, the times have become far scarier, and the US mainstream media are backing a President who has spent four years saddling himself with a record that he is entirely unable to boast about, against an opponent who looks and sounds like he was created in Hollywood by Hollywood’s finest bio-engineers to look and sound exactly like the perfect American President. And their bias is really showing. Politics, it has famously been said, is show business for ugly people. This does not now apply to Romney. Give him four years in the White House, and he will probably turn very ugly, especially when you consider how ugly the economic facts he will have to grapple with are now and are about to get. But as of now, Romney is pretty enough not merely to be President, but to be President in a movie.
So, the first debate was lost by Obama, the second one was lost by Biden, and the one last night, I reckon, was lost by The Media. 3-0 to Romney with one to go, or so I reckon. Because of all this, I continue to reckon that Romney is going to win big
But, what I reckon is only what I reckon, and what does it matter what I reckon? What actually matters is what the USA’s voters make of things. I want the result that I want in this election because I think that I want Romney to win, because I know that I want Obama to lose, and because I really want the US mainstream media to get a right old kicking. Will the voters oblige?
Last night, I watched the Biden/Ryan debate on my television, courtesy of the BBC. Mostly I only watched it. I kept switching the sound on, being disgusted by the disgustingness of what was being said and of how it was being said, and silencing it again. All I wanted to know was the score. Who won, and by how much? Thanks to the internet, I could see immediate reactions, while it was happening and as soon as it ended, many of them via Instapundit.
I agree with those who say that Ryan won, for all the reasons they are saying. Biden squirted forced merriment on matters that required solemnity and gravitas rather than grinning and interrupting. Ryan looked like a Vice President, Biden like his failing and flailing challenger, and not merely to me. If you want to learn more of my opinions about this debate, I blogged about it last night, here. I didn’t put that here because I was very tired and feared putting something very silly. I stayed up very late.
I did note one circumstance of mild general interest, and particularly, perhaps, of American interest, which I have not noticed anyone else noticing. The BBC lady who was present at the debate and who commented on it as soon as it had finished scored it a narrow win for Ryan. She started by calling it a tie, but then said that since Biden needed to win (to get some momentum back for Obama following his Debate One fiasco) but did not win, that alone meant that Biden had lost. For Biden, it was mission not accomplished. Then she mentioned Biden’s grinning and interrupting, and said that many would probably not have cared for that. So, a Ryan win then.
What other BBC people are now saying about this debate, I do not know. But I think it mildly interesting that their instant verdict on the debate was in favour of Ryan, albeit narrowly.
Incoming from Jamie Whyte:
I have made a programme for Analysis on BBC Radio 4 which will be broadcast on Monday at 8.30pm. It concerns the Conservatives’ wrong headed abandonment of free markets following the financial crisis. You won’t learn anything you don’t already know — but then you are not the target audience! Nevertheless, you may be amazed to hear these things said on the BBC.
Relevant bit of the Radio Times (Monday October 8th):
Internet info from the BBC:
The financial crisis has made many on the political right question their faith in free market capitalism. Jamie Whyte is unaffected by such doubts. The financial crisis, he argues, was caused by too much state interference and an unhealthy collusion between government and corporate power.
Indeed.
David Leigh thinks that broadband needs to be taxed to keep him in his job at The Guardian:
A £2-a-month levy on broadband could save our newspapers. Proceeds could be distributed based on UK online readership and reinvested to protect great journalism
In case you do not know (and why should you in this age of a multiplicity of news sources?), The Guardian is a very pro-statist dead tree newspaper. I was going to explain what I thought of this notion but I will instead just quote the first commenter I saw who replied, someone calling themselves ‘romandavid’:
A £2-a-month levy on automobiles could save our horse and cart business.
Quite. Moreover I have looked over some articles by David Leigh and it is unclear where this ‘great journalism’ is that so desperately needs protection. It is bad enough we have to pay for the crap on the BBC whether we watch it or not.
What Frank J. Fleming says here, to the effect that America has let President Obama down, is, I think, both very funny and nail-on-the-head accurate in describing the sort of man President Obama does indeed seem to be.
The other night I had dinner with a friend and I heard myself saying a couple of things about what might soon be happening in the US presidential election campaign.
First, I speculated that, any week or month now, the mainstream USA media might turn against Obama. All it will take is them deciding that he is going to lose and that nothing they can say will change that, and at that point they’ll stop publicly worshipping him and start reporting on what he says and does and on what people are making of it, almost like he was some kind of Republican or something. Their purpose will not be honesty. Their purpose will be to make the dishonesties they later unleash, upon President Romney in particular and upon the world in general, seem slightly more believable.
And when I got home, I found that something like this was already starting to happen.
Oh, they haven’t all given up on their guy yet, by no means. But they are surely starting to fret quite seriously that just shovelling out nothing but propaganda for him is making them look ever so slightly silly.
And the other thing I said was that if Obama himself decides that he is going to lose, no matter what he says (not least because of all the damn media people selling him out like so many rats running down a ship’s gangplank), he might, at some point between now and election day, say to hell with this, and give America a piece of his mind, rather than just smiling and taking it all on the chin.
He might say things like this, now only the mocking words of Frank J, only for real (here‘s the link to the second page of Frank J’s piece where this is to be found):
These past four years have just proven there is no reasoning with you hillbillies. Obama has given speech after speech after speech explaining things to you, but you never get it. Obama is a fragile flower you oafs keep trampling beneath your feet. You just babble things at him like, “You cain’t make peepul buy health inshuranse! It’s unconstitooshunal!” And then you whine about the national debt, when it’s none of your concern anyway – that’s the government’s business. What is it with you people questioning and ruining everything Obama is trying to do?
For “Obama” read “I”. Also, that “fragile flower” bit would have be changed to something more self-admiring. But otherwise, just like that.
As for my two guesses, the media turning against Obama, and Obama turning against the voters, well, I do admit that the first is a whole lot more likely than the second.
And both are matters of degree rather than absolutes. Some members of the mainstream USA media may change their grovellingly pro-Obama tune a bit, even as others carry right on singing the same old songs like it was 2008. And Obama will probably let his annoyance with the damn voters show a bit, just now and again, but then he’ll rein himself in. There is, after all, a whole big global ruling class out there, and Obama is going to carry on functioning within it just fine and very lucratively, provided he behaves himself reasonably well in the meantime. So a total Obama melt-down is probably too much to hope for. But I would love to hear him say at least some things along Frank J’s lines.
As might quite a few of Obama’s long-suffering supporters, who have surely been saying exactly these kinds of things amongst themselves, and to friendly reporters whose discretion the Obama campaign has, so far, been able to rely on.
Let us salute the heroic secret agent at the Guardian who subverted this quietly sinister article by giving it a brazenly sinister title and undid most of its power to persuade at a stroke: Don’t give climate change heretics an easy ride.
Fun as it is to play Galileo, the author, an Oxford academic called Jay Griffiths, is not calling for the Holy Office to resume work against climate “deniers”. Oh no, she’s far too nice and British for that sort of thing. She reveres democracy:
One more thing is required of academia: to play its role right at the heart of democracy. Being adequately informed is a democratic duty, just as the vote is a democratic right. A misinformed electorate, voting without knowledge, is not a true democracy. Society needs the expertise of academics in the most important issues: climate science above all.
And
I would propose a system of certification for media articles in which there is a clear issue of social responsibility – a kitemark of quality assurance. It would be awarded by teams of academics, and be given to the article, not the journalist, recognising the facts, not the sometimes spurious credibility of being a “personality”. It would be awarded when the article is accurate, using reliable sources and peer reviewed studies. There already exists the Climate Science Rapid Response Team, which answers journalists’ questions to help them achieve accuracy. A misinformed electorate, voting without knowledge, is not a true democracy.Accuracy must not only be achieved, but be seen to have been achieved.
The certification should be voluntary.
I am relieved that she saw fit to add that it should be voluntary, but even with that, there is a whiff of early Dolores Umbridge here. “A misinformed electorate, voting without knowledge, is not a true democracy.” The modern tendency to make a god of democracy has its own dangers, but it is still the least worst form of government – and a democracy is not denatured by a misinformed electorate, or any other sort of wrong electorate. That’s the point of democracy, actually.
In so far as Jay Griffiths’ proposal is not merely the class interest of an academic talking, I suspect that it is another eddy in the same current of opinion that has led Michael Mann to sue Mark Steyn for libel.
I was tempted to make this, by Peter Mandelson, today’s SQotD, but I might be misunderstood as agreeing with it. As it is, of course, I share the glee that Guido (to whom thanks) feels about it.
Mandelson:
The bigger question is how the domestic media market can be made economic and subject to any form of regulation in an era when, a click away, there is access to information that respects no national boundaries and the laws of no single national parliament or the basic standards of conventional journalism. It is hard to see how some of the best-known sources of quality English-language journalism – the Times, New York Times, the Guardian spring to mind – will ever make money again. We come to grips with the fact that the internet is giving public access to uncorroborated, undigested and unmediated news, all in the name of free speech, is becoming one of the defining issues of the 21st century.
Indeed it is.
And I love the idea of “information that respects no national boundaries”. In the old days information used to be far more respectful.
The world has become a pretty grim place of late. This Mandy moan cheered me up no end.
“People who do otherwise commendable work are capable of rape and other crimes. If presented with rape allegations, they must face them like anybody else, however otherwise worthy their past contributions. Now, these statements should be so self-evidently obvious, it is ludicrous that they need to be said. But the furore over WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sadly makes it necessary. Although now granted political asylum by Ecuador, Assange is a rape suspect who skipped bail. Yet some of his supporters have ended up making arguments that they would never dream of making about anybody else.”
– Owen Jones, writing in the Independent. He is, by the way, a big fan of Wikileaks. I am not so keen, as I have explained here before at Samizdata, such as when Wikileaks affected private bank details.
Here is also a good article on the impact of Wikileaks’ activity on investigative journalism, by Nick Cohen.
Update: George Galloway has, er, tried to defend Assange. With friends like Galloway, Assange doesn’t need enemies.
This item at the Harry’s Place blog, concerning the Guardian newspaper’s coverage of issues such as Israel and Islamists, needs to get the widest possible attention:
“If Guardian journalists are twitchy about what is happening to their newspaper, they have only themselves to blame. The Jews were, as always, the canary in the coal mine. When those journalists stayed silent, either because they didn’t think they could say anything, or because they didn’t care, or even because they partly agreed, they allowed a culture of zaniness and extremism to take root at the newspaper. Now, the guns have been turned on them, over Syria and Middle East reporting generally, and it may well be too late for them to stop it. The Indymediaisation of The Guardian is likely spread further, across its other departments, as experts leave and are replaced by “Open Journalism” monomaniacs.”
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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