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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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Here is an interesting effect of the Internet, I think you will agree.
The Telegraph declines to run this article, and Mark Steyn declines to change it until they would.
So, he just sticks it up at his website anyway. (Without the Internet, might he have been more pliable? Without the threat of the Internet, would Mark Steyn be such a good writer?)
Quote:
Paul Bigley can be forgiven his clumsiness: he’s a freelancer winging it. But the feelers put out by the Foreign Office to Ken Bigley’s captors are more disturbing: by definition, they confer respectability on the head-hackers and increase the likelihood that Britons and other infidels will be seized and decapitated in the future. The United Kingdom, like the government of the Philippines when it allegedly paid a ransom for the release of its Iraqi hostages, is thus assisting in the mainstreaming of jihad.
By contrast with the Fleet Street-Scouser-Whitehall fiasco of the last three weeks, consider Fabrizio Quattrocchi, murdered in Iraq on April 14th. In the moment before his death, he yanked off his hood and cried defiantly, “I will show you how an Italian dies!” He ruined the movie for his killers. As a snuff video and recruitment tool, it was all but useless, so much so that the Arabic TV stations declined to show it.
If the FCO wants to issue advice in this area, that’s the way to go: If you’re kidnapped, accept you’re unlikely to survive, say “I’ll show you how an Englishman dies”, and wreck the video. If they want you to confess you’re a spy, make a little mischief: there are jihadi from Britain, Italy, France, Canada and other western nations all over Iraq – so say yes, you’re an MI6 agent, and so are those Muslims from Tipton and Luton who recently joined the al-Qaeda cells in Samarra and Ramadi. As Churchill recommended in a less timorous Britain: You can always take one with you. If Mr Blair and other government officials were to make that plain, it would be, to use Mr Bigley’s word, “enough”. A war cannot be subordinate to the fate of any individual caught up in it.
That last sentence would make a fine Samizdata quote of the day, and I nearly posted it that way instead.
Commenters will no doubt have all kinds of things to say about Scousers, Italians, the FCO, Mr Blair, etc. But what interests me about this little circumstance is that it is yet one more straw in the wind, gently falling onto the back of the camel that is the Mainstream Media.
It just cannot be such fun being an MSM editor these days. You spike an article. But it gets ‘published’ anyway, with your spike marks on it as a badge of pride.
The Guardian, biased but, so far as I can tell after one skim-through, accurate:
For supporters of John Kerry, who have seen allegations about the Democratic candidate’s military record sap his campaign, it must have seemed like a case of just deserts.
The president, George Bush, was last week looking vulnerable on the same grounds after CBS’s flagship current affairs show, 60 Minutes, broadcast a report claiming he had been suspended from pilot duties for failing to meet the required standards. It was also claimed that a commanding officer had been put under pressure to ‘sugar coat’ Mr Bush’s performance reviews.
But while CBS stands by its story, allegations have now surfaced that 60 Minutes based a large part of the report on forged documents.
Now as in last Friday. Surfaced as in we have now heard about it other than just via the blogosphere, who have been all over this for some time. But, better late than never. Much better.
Later on in the same report:
60 Minutes does not have a reputation for irresponsible journalism – it was the show that first broadcast the now notorious photographs of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq – and it takes the reliability of its stories seriously.
The CBS news president, Andrew Heyward, told the Baltimore Sun he had confidence in the story and it was appropriately vetted, but conceded it was a “political hot potato”.
Indeed. CBS throws more chips on the table with every passing hour.
My one objection to this Guardian report (apart from the fact that I knew it all already) is that it refers to things like “a report on the Free Republic weblog“, while linking only to the Free Republic weblog in general, rather than actually linking to the particular post it refers to. But such links – there are others to the top of other weblogs (Little Green Footballs, Power Line) – are, again, far better than no links at all.
If you do want links, you can of course track all of this on Instapundit. Scroll down and, you know, find the postings for yourself. Unless you think that everything of importance has all been said here. Oh all right then, here is a good Insta-posting to start, with lots of links, to other actual postings.
Changing the subject completely, I have just been reading a very fine description in this book (Maritime Supremacy and the Opening of the West Mind by Peter Padfield) about the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Light, better armed, much more agile little English ships sporting cruelly with the stately galleons of Philip II of Spain, occasionally capturing one, and changing the course of history. An excerpt (about the country that gained most from the Armada’s defeat, Holland) from the book can be found here. Sorry. Flying off at a total red herring tangent. Must stop doing that.
Here, at last, is the truth that the US Government tried to suppress.
They did not want the world to know but, thanks to the painstaking forensic skill and integrity of the Fourth Estate, the skeleton is finally out of the closet!
“We stand by the authenticity of this document” – CBS
“…..the smoking gun” – Reuters
“…incontrovertible proof” – Guardian
“…a major setback for the Bush Whitehouse” – BBC
“What else are they trying to cover up?” – New York Times
Case closed.
One of my favourite scenes from the funniest ever Carry On film, Carry On Up The Khyber, comes right at the end when the villanous Khazi of Khalabar (Kenneth Williams) discourteously attacks the Residence while Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond (Sid James, of course) and his good lady wife (Joan Sims) are having a formal dinner.
In a gloriously demented show of stiff-upper-lippery the assembled diners refuse to admit that anything is happening. The musicians play on even while the ceiling falls in and the walls crumble. Change our ways because some dashed foreigners are set to slaughter us? By Gad, Sir, next you’ll be asking us to pass the port to the right!
Robert Fisk and the other staff of the Independent probably do not often think of themselves as Sons of the Empire. But I was rather struck by the headline an unknown sub-editor gave Fisk’s front-page Independent article yesterday. The article commemorated the third anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001 – when the crumbling walls and the slaughter were, alas, real rather than part of a movie. The headline said: “We should not have allowed 19 murderers to change our world.”*
* = full story archives here.
For an organization that boasts that it does not carry advertisements the BBC seems to carry rather a lot. There are the adverts for how wonderful the BBC is and for various books and other products that the BBC produces, and there are the endless trailers boasting of the wonders of various BBC shows.
Two recent trailers (both trailers were often repeated) on BBC Radio Four caught my attention. One was for a standard communist comic – not someone with any great grasp of Marxism of course, just someone who makes various anti-British comments (such as that Gibraltar should be under the control of Spain) to a standard BBC studio audience of Guardian reading scum – who hoot their agreement. The United States is (as always with such folk) an evil power that controls British policy (more hoots of agreement).
The other trailer was for a series on the history of the Arts Council (the government body that hands out art subsidies). This trailer declared that the creator of the Arts Council, J.M. Keynes, was a ‘brilliant economist’. Lord Keynes being the man who argued that the way to create prosperity was for the government to issue money and spend it (perhaps by giving it to the banks and borrowing it back – or perhaps directly). Any government spending (including having men dig holes and fill them up again) being “investment” and this ‘investment’ stimulating the economy via the magic of the ‘multiplier’ (a concept used by cranks long before Keynes).
We were also told that before the Arts Council the only thing people in Britain could do was ‘go down the pub’. The vast network of activity in the world of the arts before World War II (both supported by mutual aid – as in the literature to be found in Working Men’s Institutes, or the voluntary theatre groups) or by charitable giving (as with the art galleries to be found in every major British town) being totally ignored.
I do not know if the series is as bad as the trailer – such was the impact of the trailer that I could not bring myself to listen to the series. And such was the impact of the trailer for the communist comic that I could not bring myself to listen to his show (perhaps he has lots of witty lines that did not get into the adverts – I will never know).
Well it seems advertising does have some power. Due to the BBC adverts I will never listen to these programs.
On today’s morning news, a BBC presenter referred to the Chechen terrorists responsible for the Beslan massacre as zealots. I think zealots ought to be told…
Terry L. Heaton has a sound article on the realities of TV and internet as the news medium. The dynamics of local news reporting and news breaking have changed and the broadcast industry is in a situation where the first-mover can have the real advantage.
The “situation” is that the marketplace is ripe for a local station to have the balls to break stories online — when they have them — and not wait until their alloted broadcast time. If not, the local paper will do it, and if not them, then somebody else will. If yours is the “live, local, latebreaking” brand, you’d certainly better be adopting that same slogan online. Otherwise, you’re simply shooting yourself in the foot every time you wait until 6 o’clock to present the efforts of the day, because you’re not telling the truth.
And here comes the new, in the local newsrooms resisted medium:
Until we begin respecting the power of the immediacy offered by the Web — and especially RSS — we’ll be hopelessly left behind in the race to see who wins the local online news prize. Money follows eyeballs, and the eyeballs are abandoning broadcast in favor of the Internet at a speed that frightens every corporate broadcast executive on the planet. And yet, there isn’t a single station that will put the full weight of its news operation into feeding this explosive growth market. Why not? Because we think it would be self-destructive to spill our goodies online and that people wouldn’t watch our programs if we did. But is that really so?
- People already aren’t watching our programs.
- There is zero evidence to support this belief.
- It is actually self-destructive to NOT adopt such a strategy.
Moreover, and regardless of what’s going on around us, we seem to be the last to figure out that news is an ongoing conversation, not a program that appears when we say so. Old habits not only die hard; they can be dangerously deceptive.
Yes, news is a conversation. With those who are in the middle of it and those who are affected by it and those who have opinions on it. There have also been changes on the receiving end – the user (formerly known as consumer) is in charge.
Building an Internet strategy around this isn’t as difficult as it might seem, but it begins with fundamental changes in our attitudes and approaches to the Internet. The attitude adjustment is this: We meet the news and information needs of our community wherever they are, and meeting those needs is far more important than beating the competition.
The major media outlets have already adopted internet strategies that do not wait for the news hour. That is how it was possible for a group blog such as the Command Post to scour the breaking news from most of them and provide a useful one-stop information source about the Iraq conflict. It also starkly highlighted the different biases in the major media reporting that were embedded deeper than their reporters with the troops in Iraq.
The local news are closer to home and such inherent biases may be more obvious. So let them scoop the big media and each other beyond the box of the 6 o’clock news…
via Doc Searls
It will be found from the Foreign Prints, which from time to time, as Occaſion offers, will be mention’d in this Paper, that the Author has taken Care to be duly furnith’d with all that comes from Abroad in any Language. And for an Aſſurance that he will not, under Pretence of having Private Intelligence, impoſe any Additions of feign’d Circumſtances to an Action, but give his Extracts fairly and Impartially ; at the beginning of each Article he will quote the Foreign Paper from whence ’tis taken, that the Publick, ſeeing from what Country a piece of News comes with the Allowance of that Government, may be better able to Judge of the Credibility and Fairneſs of the Relation
– from the The Daily Courant of March 11, 1702. The Courant was probably the world’s first daily newspaper.
Bloggers might not like the next bit:
Nor will he take upon him to give any Comments or Conjectures of his own, but will relate only Matter of Fact ; suppoſing other People to have Senſe enough to make Reflections for themſelves.
Although Australia and the US have signed a free trade agreement, it is an imperfect document, with many exemptions on both sides. In Australia, there has been a loud campaign to have existing ‘local content’ rules for Australian television excluded, and this campaign has been successful.
The ‘local content’ rules mean that a certain proportion of television programmes that are broadcast on Australian television must be locally made. The scrapping of this rule was an American objective in the free trade negotiations, as it meant that US television companies were restricted in their access to the Australian television market by what in effect is a quota.
Australia resisted this; we should not have.
Australian television has had local content rules for a long time, they provide that at least 55% of the programming on Australian television between 6am and midnight must be locally produced. This creates a local internal market for television, which is actually quite a cut-throat industry. The economies of scale mean that Australian television products are not cost-competitive, but they do rate well. → Continue reading: Cultural protectionists win in Australia
…but not all the time. If you don’t look at the listings page and life’s busy schedule halts the urge towards the sofa, then television may take up two hours tops a week, unless Euro 2004 is on. The invasion of reality programming provides no real attractions. Big Brother, Survivor and the Sex Diaries of Ayia Napa don’t entice. (The last one is made up but the outline is on my desk, if there are any budding producers out there!)
The only time that couch potato indulgences come into play is on holiday. A recent vacation in Visby provided insights into the enthusiasm of Swedish tv for US sitcoms. Square eyes are developed after a couple of snifters before hitting the clubs (pre-season doubles of scotch are obligatory given Swedish beer prices). It was during these preparations that I came across the programme, Swag.
The series was first introduced on porn-lite, history heavy Channel Five in 2003, under the auspices of Guy Ritchie, and involves enticing the criminal element and potential lawbreakers to demonstrate their stupidity on camera. Some of the celebrity stunts are clearly staged but others demonstrate a naive verisimiltude that only chavs could provide. In the first series, one likely lad was so enraged at being trapped in the car, he stabbed a cameraman with a screwdriver.
Two examples of the programme will suffice: an open lorry with boxes of goodies, tempting for the greedy, and transforming into a cage which is driven around calling upon onlookers to look at the imprisoned thief; or the driver, who took a disabled spot, and returned to find her car encircled by a chain of wheelchairs.
Reality television has included a number of themes over the past decade: preying upon the self-indulgence of the would-be famous, manufacturing celebrities out of the public and wielding the intrinsic voyeurism of documentaries. Ritchie has demonstrated that this medium can also tap into other basic human reactions: the anger that people feel when they see a clear transgression such as theft, and a sense of justice at the comeuppance of a budding criminal.
I do not imagine that Samizdata readers spend a lot of their spare time reading Arena magazine (it does not appear to be available online). It is a chap’s monthly publication that fancies itself as being at the more intelligent end of the man’s magazine world, mixing glossy advertisements for insanely expensive wristwatches and fast cars, not to mention pictures of minor French actresses in a pleasing state of undress, with post-modernist ironic pieces on anger management, etc. I get the impression that it is the sort of publication that pitches to the sort of man who reads the Guardian or Observer but who wants to indulge his blokeish tendencies with a clean conscience – in short, to have his low-fat steak and eat it.
Occasionally the tension shows. In the August edition, for instance, we have a largely gushing and Bush-bashing film review of the latest Michael Moore propaganda effort, sorry, ‘documentary’, Fahrenheit 9/11, which contains a remarkable admission by the obviously pro-Moore reviewer that the filmaker had a “cavalier attitude to such niceties as facts” while stating what a swell film it is. Facts eh, who gives a damn about em?
But what really did it for me was an article (page 77) containing one of the nastiest attacks on a group of people in a magazine that I have read for some time: the overweight. The writer, Giles Coren, whom I have heard of before, rants against overweight people in terms of amazing verbal violence. Words such as “mountain-arsed”, “the great lumps”, “these pigs”, etc, are sprinkled around. Witty, no?
Now I accept that there is something dumb about those who are overweight trying to present themselves as victims. However, I also have nothing but contempt for the way in which the fast-food industry has been targeted for assault by an unsavoury mixture of ambulance-chasing lawyers, moral scolds and sundry bores who would legislate our pleasures out of existence rather than rely on our own self-restraint and personal responsibility. Coren’s article, in particular, seems to be steeped in a sort of fashionable puritanism and also draws on a deeply suppressed need to be able to hate a particular group. Let’s face it, hatred is out of style. There are laws against it. If our demented British Home Secretary, David Blunkett, gets his way, it will not be possible to express anything more than polite scepticism about the irrational superstitions known as official religions. But humans love to hate, or at least some of them do.
I very much fear that the overweight among us are in the cross-hairs of our fashionable haters. Of course, one should not make too much from a single article in a pretentious guy’s magazine, but Coren’s piece is all part of a trend.
To hell with him, I am sending out for pizza with extra cheese.
This post is one of my articles that explains how it is possible to screw an industry up beyond words with excessive regulation, and the consequences of doing so can occur in unexpected places. The story is in this case about how government attempted to protect the BBC and ended up giving enormous quasi-monopolistic powers to Rupert Murdoch. Next week, I shall post a similar history of the regulation or television in Australia, which explains how government attempted to give enormous quasi-monopolistic powers to Kerry Packer, and ended up giving enormous quasi-monopolistic powers to Kerry Packer.
Until a week and a half ago, British people were watching the European Championship football championship between the national teams of the best footballing countries of Europe, the English in the hope that England would win the tournament, and the Scottish in the hope that England would be eliminated early and embarassingly. Neither of these things happened: England played decently but not spectacularly and were eliminated on penalties in the quarter finals. If England had stayed in the tournament the number of cross of St George flags attached to people’s cars in this country would have steadily increased, it would have been impossible to go into a pub and had a discussion of anything else, national euphoria may have even broken out and, sady, there would have been a somewhat unpleasant yob element on the streets shortly after closing time. As an Australian, I think I would have found that (and the fact that the English would have been gloating for years if not decades) a bit much, so I am glad that it didn’t happen. Instead, I watched the rest of the tournament (which finished yesterday evening) with interest both on television at home and in pubs with much smaller crowds than would have been the case if England were still participating. The story of the tournament was that the large heavyweight countries of Europe were eliminated relatively early, and the teams from the smaller countries excelled themselves.
In yesterday’s final the host nation Portugal (regarded as a good side from before the start of the tournament, although not one of the extreme favourites to win it) took on Greece (who at the start of the tournament were absolute rank outsiders who most people would not have picked to win a match let alone the tournament). And as it happened, Greece won a perhaps a little dull and defensive (but with lots of heart) 1-0 victory, and a team that had never won a match in the finals of either the European Championship or the World Cup before are now champions of Europe. (The slightly desperate question of whether the Olympic stadium in Athens will be complete in time for the start of the Games in six weeks now has the added question of whether the Greeks will have stopped partying by then. I was in Sydney four years ago for the 2000 games, and at this point we were just coming to grips with the fact that the games were almost upon us. We didn’t really start partying until the games actually started.
It was not hard to find a place to watch yesterday’s final, because it was on two terrestrial television channels (licence fee funded BBC1 and advertising funded ITV1) simultaneously as well as satellite channel Eurosport. This followed what happened earlier in the tournament, which is that the matches have been divided evenly between the two broadcasters. Half the matches were on the BBC, and the other half on ITV, and who got to show which matches was decided more or less randomly. Neither network has been able to gain an advantage over the other by advertising itself as “The Euro 2004 channel” or anything like that.
This may seem curious. Why is what should be one of the biggest sporting events of the year on two television stations simultaneously? Given that lots and lots of people are likely to want to watch it (or would have if England were playing) would it not be of lots of value to advertisers and therefore wouldn’t the organisers of the tournament want to make huge amounts of money by auctioning the television rights to the highest bidder.
Well, actually no.
Well, actually probably yes, but this is not permitted. → Continue reading: How watching the European Championship football tells us a lot about the history of British television.
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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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