Samizdata

Overheard on Newsnight last night, from the anchor-lady person, presiding over a discussion of the recent travails of the US mainstream media. It was in connection with the Valerie Plame story, whatever exactly that is. I have not been following that, and I missed the beginning of the Newsnight report about it.

Anyway, here is what Ms. Paxman said about the US mainstream media, word for word:

The reputation of the reputable media has sunk to a new low.

This is what I love about the BBC. They have their biases, of course they do. But they also genuinely try to report the truth.

Their biases mostly impinge by determining which truths they go after in the first place, and who they then have commenting on them (to discuss this matter they had Daniel Ellsberg balanced by a guy from the New York Times), rather than in the form of pure lying. After all, when the BBC features some grotesque report put out by some grotesque gang of health fascists, or some such, rather than proper news, it is true that the health fascists did indeed say whatever it was they said. It was stupid and repellent, but they did say it, just as the BBC said they said it.

The BBC prejudice is that the mainstream US media are indeed the reputable media, and that all those pyjama-clad right wing nasties sitting at their nasty computers agreeing with President Bush are disreputable. Yet these same pyjama wearers are the ones who have caused the reputation of those same reputable media to sink to a new low. That was the story here. So, that is what popped out of her mouth.

This is definitely different to living in the USSR and I greatly prefer it to that, not least because it is so much more entertaining.

I am a news-junkie, so facing this morning without the Today programme on the BBC is a gruelling prospect. For BBC staff are on strike, so most live news programmes are not running today.

I was highly amused, however, that the first replacement programme on Radio 4 at six o’clock (when Today is due to start) was an In Business documentary on podcasting. Can this be entirely coincidental?

“There’s plenty of competition out there, boys. And it’s free.” Is the pretty clear message.

There can surely be no more conclusive evidence of market success than the trademark name of a particular company becoming the commonly used verb to describe the activity for which said company provides its products. Have you ‘googled’ anyone today? Have you ever been ‘googled’ yourself?

As someone who ‘googles’ on pretty much a daily basis, I can find no material fault with this richly-deserved and glowing tribute in the UK Times:

Google is the modern Oracle, the all-knowing mechanical sage we consult to find, if not the answers to life’s questions, then at least a comfortable, reasonably priced hotel in Torquay. But is Google God?

I cannot recall such a mystical (and, for some, blasphemous) suggestion ever crossing my mind but, like the author, I am only too ready to wax lyrical about the benefits of Google’s simple and effective information gathering machine.

Google may have all the answers but, unlike God, lots of Google’s answers tend to be wrong, loopy postings from lonely people typing late at night in their underwear. Google moves in mysterious ways all right, but some of those ways are downright weird.

To whom could he possibly be referring? → Continue reading: Stick to what you don’t know

The Economist (the link, alas, leads to their premium content) has an interesting little article about fake news – ‘news’ broadcasts put out by the government via local television networks. Bogus reporting (or, more kindly, a video equivalent of issuing a press release) they call it:

The televised interview with John Walters, the White House drug tsar, ran on hundreeds of local stations before the 2004 Super Bowl. “Many parents admit they’re still not taking the drug [marijuana] seriously,” explained the news anchor. “Mike Morris has more.” It ended with the usual sign-off: “This is Mke Morris reporting.” It looked like a new report, and quaked like a news report. but it was not one. The segment had been produced by Mr Walters’s Office of National Drug Control Policy. The apparently independent Mr Morris was on contract to the government.

As the Economist points out the government should not be in the business of advocacy, but it may use public money to provide information. The question is which is which? Regardless of the formality of the decision and which watchdog or arm of the administration has the final say about the legality of such “news management”, the issue here is transparency. Both the government agency and the news programmes should identify the originator of the material they are running.

The most interesting point of the article is not even that – it is highlighting that this administration does not think that the press has “a check-and-balance function” and that this is a fundamental change of attitude compared with previous administrations and makes this one’s use of fake news different.

If there is nothing special about the press, then there is nothing special about what it does. News can be anything – including dress-up government video footage. And anyone can provide it, including the White House, which through local networks, can become a news distributor in its own right. Given the proliferation of media outlets and the eroding of boundaries between news, comment and punditry, someone will use government provided information as news. In short, the traditional notion that the media play a special role in informing people is breaking down.

The conclusion is one that many bloggers have been trying to break to the traditional media and journalists.

Behind all this lies a shift in the balance of power in the new business. Power is moving away from old-fashioned networks and newspapers; it is swinging towards, on the one hand, smaller news providers (in the case of blogs, towards individuals) and, on the other, to the institutions of government, which have got into the business of providing news more or less directly. Eventually, perhaps, the new world of blogs will provide as much public scrutiny as newspapers and broadcasters once did.

For myself, I am not too worried about “covert propaganda” in government broadcasts provided there is an individual somewhere in the process who will simply blog about it on his blog…

I would like to start this posting with a long-windedness warning. Basically I have only recently thought of the notions that follow. The separate bits of these ideas have mostly been present in my mind for quite a while, but the bundling of them is, for me, new. And stuff you are still excited by on account of its extreme recentness is generally the stuff you write least well. Apologies, but there you go, that is blogging for you.

Anyway… here it is. Cough, all sitting comfortably, begin. (Or skip, of course.)

Much is made, and quite rightly, of the empowering effect of the Internet for the little guy. We can all have our blogs and our say.

Recently I have begun to wonder if a similar Internet impact might be about to become unmistakably clear at the very top end of society, the bit where Great Men (as opposed to us little guys) try to have their say.

Great Men trying to have their say?!? But do they not do this already, all the time? Well, yes they do, but they are often either misunderstood or just plain ignored, and often relentlessly so.

I have lost count of the number of times when a Great Man has given what he hoped would be a Big Speech, laying out a major strategy for the months and years to come, only for all the questions from the assembled mob of hacks to ask only about the latest scandal that they have either observed or invented, concerning the petty details of the life of the Great Man. So, what about your wife’s astrologer? What about those crazy daughters of yours? About this intern. About your mortgage. This dodgy land deal you and your wife did ten years ago. How about this National Guard skiving then?

In a kind of hybrid category are the scandals that are less personal but equally demeaning and diminishing, like the scandal of Blair and Bush invading Iraq in pursuit of weapons they knew were not there, or Reagan doing whatever wicked thing he did with the Nicaraguan Contras.

Now I certainly would not want the hacks to neglect such questions. The idea that they should be compelled to ask only about the high and mighty abstractions laid before them in the Big Speech, is repellent not to say totalitarian. But one of my many complaints about our mainstream media is that they have a tendency only to ask the embarrassing questions. The attitude of the mainstream media when reporting a speech given by a Great Man is to look only for clay at the bottom end of his body, rather than to pay any attention to the noises emerging from the top end. → Continue reading: The smartening up of the culture: thoughts on some recent speeches by President Bush