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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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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). → Continue reading: What is the point of Sky News
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. → Continue reading: How Cameron turned the media loose on the government
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.
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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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