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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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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 are not as out of touch as we silly people imagine.
The state is not your friend and politicians certainly do not work for you, no matter whose propaganda (theirs or the taxpayers’ rights’ groups) you have bought into. Taking your money under threat of violence and actually working for you are not the same thing. David Miliband is one of many who take your money and work on their own agendas, on which self-promotion is paramount. This is an obvious fact, and David Miliband’s abuse of his taxpayer-owned blog is just one more piece of evidence which proves it.
I submitted the following comment to the David Miliband promotional blog:
Dennis Howlett – who I know personally and like – misses the point about the difference between other blogs and this one: This blog is not the private property of David Miliband. It is being financed by the taxpayer and is using government (taxpayer-funded) resources.
Which makes it all the more disgraceful that David Miliband refuses to publish comments that might make readers realise his ‘integrity’ is not quite what it seems. (I do not expect this comment to be published, either, but only hope it imbues David Miliband with some degree of shame when he reads it, if he is capable of feeling such a thing.)
Quite apart from this abuse of a taxpayer-funded blog, this is a sterling example of abhorrent customer service. Then again, when the customers don’t actually choose your ’service,’ and are forced under threat of violence to pay for it, you have the freedom to be endlessly selective about which ones you pay any mind. Right, Minister Miliband?
Jeff Jarvis is consulting the BBC, and is excited over the Beeb’s claims that it wants to “reinvent” itself. Here is what I said to Jeff:
Jeff, the point is that the BBC doesn’t want to ‘reinvent’ the very worst element of itself: the funding via shakedown of Joe Public. We’re not talking about a situation where a small percentage of the income tax or sales tax a person pays over a year is diverted to the BBC. One cannot own a radio or television without paying a ‘protection fee’ – Mafia-style – to the BBC. Don’t pay? You get a huge fine, and if you don’t or can’t pay it, you are thrown in prison.
The BBC is not going to ‘reinvent’ the threat of violence under which they operate. It’s not even a remote possibility. Ask some of your contacts there what the odds are, and I assure you they’ll laugh in your face.
The facts are inconvenient and chilling, but they are facts. Isn’t that what journalism is supposed to be about?
I really do not understand how people – not just Jeff, because there are a hell of a lot of them – who would be outraged over being shaken down by corporate interests can be so qualm-free about being shaken down by politicians and bureaucrats. Then again, these are often the same people who fully realise how incompetent and corrupt politicians and bureaucrats are, yet want to give them more and more responsibility for running a big chunk of our lives (healthcare, education, you name it). Cognitive dissonance, anyone?
This morning I was on SkyNews on the Saturday live programme debating blogging. It was one of those discussions the media in the UK has started to have, as in… these bloggers are not going away, so let’s make them sound a bit ridiculous and question whatever it is they do. Yawn.
I was in the studio with Bobbie Johnson, a blogger and technology correspondent of the Guardian, and Iain Dale, a former Conservative party candidate, political commentator and.. wait for it.. a blogger. We had fifteen minutes to argue with the presenter about what is a blog, are they any good, shouldn’t blogs be like journalism, what is the bloggers’ responsibility, is it good or bad that they are undermining and stretching the current rules and frameworks etc. So three years ago, dahling…
The questions were extremely basic and there was no time really to answer anything other than try to get a sound-bite in. Perhaps that is why I could not take the whole thing too seriously. Both Bobbie and Iain were good and made the experience rather enjoyable…
The best thing about this morning was an excellent tip from the studio make-up person – she recommended a smudge-proof eyeliner that will do what I want from it, i.e. stay put and make my eyes look smokey. For those interested it is MAC fluidline eye-liner gel. Perhaps the traditional media has something going for it…
And here is a gratuitous pictures of me, with the make-up on.
And yes, it was rather sunny today.
Cross-posted from Media Influencer
Update: Tim Worstall actually watched it! I wish he had been there too but flying all the way from Portugal for the sake of a few silly questions about blogging just does not seem worth it.
The Economist magazine, about which James Waterton wrote a few days ago (it is getting a new editor), has an interesting cover article ‘Soft Paternalism’, chronicling the growing trend of governments to devise ways to make people behave in certain ways, usually in order to meet some supposedly desirable objective, such as losing weight, saving for a pension and so forth. I do not think the Economist hits the issue nearly hard enough but I absolutely love the picture associated with the article.
I rather like this quotation in the final paragraph:
Private virtues such as these are as likely to wither as to flourish when public bodies take charge of them. And life would be duller if every reckless spirit could outsource self-discipline to the state.
Some people, including libertarians, are a bit hard on the Economist, which often veers away from its historical attachment to free markets, liberty and limited government. I occasionally find its tone condescending but on the whole that magazine is a force for good. Let us hope that under its new editor, the Economist continues to beat the drum for classical liberalism in an era when liberty is all too often on the back foot.
Hopefully the new boss is not the same as the old boss, who, in the last few years, edited a magazine that has increasingly moved away from its liberal tradition, perceptibly found more faith in government action and embraced a whole plethora of questionable agenda – most notably, global warming. I cancelled my subscription some time ago. Here’s hoping the new editor gives cause to take it up again.
This story from the BBC is beyond parody:
Television viewers will have a say in the price of the licence fee, with the government conducting research before it sets the cost for the next decade.
Each licence will go up to £131.50 on Saturday, and the BBC has requested future rises of 2.3% above inflation.
The public’s views would have “a material impact” on the final sums, Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell said.
How jolly nice of our political equivalent of a head girl at school to let us unwashed plebs have some input into how much we get to pay for a service that, er, ahem, we have to pay for regardless of whether we watch it or not.
Seriously, though, this is the sort of thing one might expect of life in the former Soviet Union, where workers at the local tractor plant were urged to suggest ways to make the machines work even better down at the local collective farm.
Well, Ms Jowell might as well know what my preferred size of a licence fee is: zero.
The New Individualist magazine has put one of the Jyllands-Posten ‘Mohammed Cartoons’ on its cover. If any other US publication has published them at all, I am not aware of that (hopefully the commentariat will let me know if I have missed one). In the UK, as far as I know only The Blanket have done the same. As a commenter has pointed out, anyone with an internet connection can see them on a thousand sites, so the point of publishing now in hard copy is to make a statement rather than facilitate people seeing the cartoons themselves.
The media in Britain and America have hardly covered themselves in glory on this issue, leaving European editors to make most of the running in standing up to those who howl for legislated intolerance (and I am not just talking about Islamo-fascists), so credit to Robert Bidinotto for sticking his head over the parapet and pouring some hot oil on the barbarians below.
At a recent speech, Rupert Murdoch noted:
“It is difficult, indeed dangerous, to underestimate the huge changes this revolution will bring or the power of developing technologies to build and destroy — not just companies but whole countries,” said Murdoch, in a speech for the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers.
He mentioned bloggers as one of those forces so I guess we are doing something right.
It seems we will be reading Mark Steyn mostly on-line now in the UK. If the irascible New Hampshire based Canadian has indeed been axed from two UK media syndication outlets (The Telegraph and The Spectator), does anyone have any information on what caused this? Lionel Shriver of the Guardian ponders that it might be a case of ‘political self-censorship’.
As it happens Steyn was one of the few reasons I look at either of those sadly diminished publications (particularly the Spectator, which I find almost unreadable these days). Any industry insiders out there have any scandal they want to share on what happened? Leave a comments or drop us an e-mail, you know you want to…
Melody Bartlett is deputy editor of the CBI’s magazine Business Voice, unpicking government’s relationship with big business. She writes at The Business Editors blog:
Why is it that any journalist who wants to speak to the relevant person in government about proposals or policy must first confront a wall of PR obfuscation? Government offices are manned with armies of PR staff who refuse to deal with queries, claim ignorance of the most mundane issues and would have you believe that all government staff are permanently on holiday.
The title of your publication and the nature of your story are all too important in determining whether your enquiry will receive a response.
Surely this is not the way it should be. Government staff work for us all, and have a public duty to deal with questions about their doings. The preferred method of communication seems to be ‘placed’ copy, to which end government departments appear to employ consultancies with huge budgets. What a waste of taxpayers’ money.
That this shocks someone who works for the CBI – and someone who explores on a daily basis the state of government’s relationship with commerce – is rather more shocking to me than Ms Bartlett’s own complaint.
If ever developments heralded the demise of the television licence fee, it is the ubiquitous spread of the digital media. Now that televisions have spread to the mobile phone, the BBC is not far behind. Whether it be on your PC or your phone, you must pay the pirates for the privilege of not watching them:
As the mobile industry debates the future of television on phones and other portable devices at its convention in Barcelona, there’s a warning closer to home that the new technology will still be subject to licensing regulations laid down in the 1904 Wireless Telegraphy Act.
TV Licensing, the body charged with collecting the £126.50 fee (rising to £131.50 on April 1), said that it doesn’t matter whether you are watching television on a PC, mobile phone or old fashioned cathode ray tube, you must be covered by a TV licence or face a fine of up to £1000.
“There is no difference between a mobile phone or a television or any other piece of electronic equipment used to watch live or as-live programming. You will need to be covered by a TV licence,” a spokesman for the body confirmed.
It can not be long now before even politicians see the abolition or curtailment of the BBC licence fee as a no-brainer.
The European Union is making soothing clucking sounds to try and calm the outraged Muslim masses with plans of a ‘media code of conduct’ designed to prevent a repeat of the Jyllands-Posten incident with the ‘Satanic Cartoons’.
EU Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini said the charter would encourage the media to show “prudence” when covering religion.
“The press will give the Muslim world the message: We are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression,” he told the newspaper. “We can and we are ready to self-regulate that right.”
Who is this “we”? Does Frattini think he is speaking for the British and European on-line community? If so then perhaps I can spell out the “consequences of exercising the right of free expression” that “we” are aware of… it makes us free, that is the consequence of free expression. Are “we” clear now? These non-enforcible guidelines are just a worthless sop to people who need to be confronted, not treated as though they have a legitimate argument.
And yet later he seems to take a strangely different stance…
The chairman of World Islamic Call Society, Mohamed Ahmed Sherif told a press conference in Brussels on Thursday (9 February) that the cartoons of Mohammed published first in Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, fuelled extremism.
“Nobody should blame the muslims if they are unhappy about the images of the prophet Mohammed,” Sherif said coming out from a meeting with EU justice commissioner Franco Frattini in Brussels. “It’s forbidden to create a hate programme to show that the prophet is a terrorist while he’s not,” he stated, “Don’t ask us to try to make people understand that this is not a campaign of hate.”
EU justice commissioner Franco Frattini repeatedly nodded and mumbled “yes” in front of cameras and microphones during Mr Sherif’s statement.
Mr Frattini also denied wanting to create a code of conduct for journalists reporting on religious matters, as indicated by earlier media reports.
“There have never been, nor will there be any plans by the European Commission to have some sort of EU regulation, nor is there any legal basis for doing so,” the commissioner stated.
So in the space of two days, Frattini seems to have done a U-turn and stated his commitment to freedom of expression whilst simultaneously looking like an appeaser. That takes some doing!
Let’s hear it for ‘nuanced’ European diplomacy! 
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