We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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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: → Continue reading: Bill Moyers embraces libertarianism
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.
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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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