[T]here is not much future in being a gatekeeper when the walls are down.
– the final words of this article by Jack Kelly about the travails of old school journalism
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From yesterday’s Telegraph comes this amazing story:
I missed this yesterday, but Norm Geras, linked to today by Instapundit because of another posting about Guardian foolishness, caught it, to whom thanks. I am sure that some time during the last few months I have blogged things which have at least suggested that blogging etc. is capable of replacing the existing media. If so, apologies, and if not, lucky me. This tsunami disaster has made clear what has long been obvious, that the old media and the new media complement and feed into each other, or at any rate they ought to. Bloggers in the right places at the right times can feed stories not just to other meta-bloggers, but to the mainstream media. A few of them were, after all, actually there. And then other bloggers, as I have just done, can point blog readers towards particularly choice mainstream media stories. I particularly admire the way that the Guardian, for all that it is easy for the likes of us to criticise it for all kinds of other reasons, has at least learned how blogging can actually help in times like these, not just by telling the terrible story, but by helping to make it less terrible. January 2nd, 2005 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Polly Toynbee gets her priorities right:
Few things in life are as reliable as the Guardian. December 31st, 2004 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
The England cricket team is doing really rather well just now. They are not the best. Australia are the best. But England are well on the way to establishing themselves as the best of the rest. Yesterday they completed a fine victory against South Africa, in the first of the series of five test matches they are playing down there, having earlier in the year, in England, beaten New Zealand in 3 games out of 3 and the West Indies in 4 games out of 4. Before that they toured the West Indies and beat them 3 games out of 4, with the last game drawn. In other words, England have won 8 out of their last 8 test matches (more than any England side has ever won consecutively before), and it would have 12 out of 12 had it not been for that final game draw in the West Indies. Recent England recruit Andrew Strauss, who batted superbly, both in the game against South Africa that finished yesterday morning and throughout last summer, has now played in just 8 test matches and has been on the winning side every time. This is amazing. All of which means that, what with England doing so well, now was a very good time for the England cricket authorities to be renegotiating the TV rights to cricket matches, and here is what they have done:
In other words, I and millions of other BBC License Fee payers will not be able to watch test cricket live on the telly without paying extra. → Continue reading: Who owns English cricket? December 22nd, 2004 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Washington Times has a blog called simply Politics Blog that fulfils the bare basics for blog-hood: Reverse chronological order and permalinks to individual articles. It is even written in a suitably bloggy informal style and takes an irreverent look at issues from an unabashedly partisan perspective. And yet Politics Blog is not really a good blog for quite technical reasons. Firstly it does not provide readers with useful sidebar links. Secondly and more crucially, it seems to studiously avoid external links in the blog articles themselves. This is a major failing as the whole point of journalistic blogging is to establish ‘accessible credibility’ and the way you do that is by linking to external sources relating to the things you write about. For example, in this article called Race Hypocrisy by John McCaslon, an organisation called Project 21 is mentioned as well as the fact that left-wing cartoonist Gary Trudeau referred to Condaleeza Rice as ‘Brown Sugar’. And yet Mr. McCaslon just seems to assume people will take his word that what he says about Project 21 and Gary Trudeau is correct because he does not add links to either Project 21 or the offending cartoon by Gary Trudeau. There! See how easy that was? If you link to the things you discuss, people actually have some basis for judging the merits of your words and in the on-line commentaries of tomorrow, to write a critical article without external links as citations will start alarm bells ringing as to the soundness of your views. It it not enough to have a blog, you need to know how to blog. December 17th, 2004 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Michael Bloomberg, founder and owner of the unlisted financial media firm bearing his name, is planning to sell up and transfer much of his assets to a charitable foundation on similar lines to that of Microsoft’s Bill Gates. As Mayor of New York, Bloomberg has not really been able to give much day-to-day attention to his media empire, preferring to spend his time on matters such as banning smoking in bars. I do not like much of what I hear about Bloomberg the politician, but I do greatly respect Bloomberg the businessman. The single-minded determination he has shown to challenge, and in some cases beat, rivals such as AP Dow Jones and Reuters has been impressive. In the space of little more than 15 years, Bloomberg has broken the near-duopoly on wholesale financial news and data once held by Reuters, the listed British firm which is more than 150 years old, though still bigger in terms of overall coverage of news. If Ayn Rand were still alive, I would wager a small bet that she would think of the fellow as a likely business hero. It is going to be interesting to see what happens to this segment of the news business over the next few months and years. December 6th, 2004 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am given to understand that the art of being a successful confidence trickster lies in the ability to identify what their victims really, really want and then plausibly appearing to offer it to them. This con artist knew exactly what his ‘mark’ wanted and he offered it up to them on a plate:
When the victims of con men recount their tales of woe, it nearly always results in the same charge: ‘How could you have fallen for that’? The answer is always the same: the victim believed what they were told because they wanted to believe it. On the face of it, a claim that a major global concern was going to fall on its collective sword is wholly implausible. At the very least it is the kind of claim that begs for verification; verification that could easily have been sought by means a quick and expedient telephone call to the company’s headquarters and which would have resulted in dismissal. But that telephone call was never made because the apparent admission of guilt by Dow Chemicals had set BBC hearts-a-flutter. In their minds, Dow Chemicals is guilty, regardless of any facts to do with the Bhopal disaster. Dow is guilty of profiteering, of raping the planet, of making evil chemicals, of being a multinational corporation, of being big. All of a sudden they get an iron-clad confession from the Beast itself: an unimpeachable confirmation and reinforcement of everything that BBC journos believe as Gospel. They sought no corroboration for the claim because they wanted it to be true. They needed it to be true and, like lovesick adolescent girls who swoon for the duplicitous declarations of love from disingenuous paramours, they gladly opened their legs. This grubby little incident is a snapshot of everything that is wrong with the Fourth Estate and the BBC bit of it in particular. It is not they are negligent or dishonest but neither are they objective and therein lies the problem. December 5th, 2004 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Like many libertarians I often attack the BBC. I doubt that it is actually more statist in the opinions it supports than ITV and C4, or, perhaps, than ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN in the United States – but with the licence fee (the tax on television owners that goes to the BBC) it hurts more to experience the endless blather about Welfare State spending being the ultimate good and the solution to every problem being another government regulation. However, the BBC does sometimes get things right. Yesterday, when reporting yet another Chinese coal mine accident, the BBC reporter said “and this makes 7,000 deaths over the last year in the state owned Chinese coal mining industry” and pointed out that there were claims that the Chinese government had cut corners on safety in order to boost production (shades of Stalin’s “war on the limiters”). In reporting the large numbers of deaths (i.e. that the accident was not an isolated incident) and that the industry was state owned (i.e. that the deaths were not caused by wicked businessmen), the BBC showed a depth of reporting and a fairness that should be praised. December 1st, 2004 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Tonight at midnight I am to be on the Richard Bacon debate show on Radio 5 Live, arguing about censorship. My job, and that of my pro-censorship opponent, will be to poke a stick into the wasps nest that is the Radio 5 phoning-in community, thereby ‘involving’ lots of people. They hope. If no one calls, we will no doubt talk amongst ourselves, although if I know these people they will have done some preliminary poking already, and lined up some callers of appropriate extremity and craziness, for if we two official debaters let the side down by talking too sensibly. Libertarianism, civil liberties, etc., is strictly stuff that they squeeze in when nothing real is happening (i.e. football). However, I take such chances when they are offered, and if they make it worth my while. They have promised me £80, which for me is not bad for an hour’s intermittent chit-chatting. Wish me luck. I keep trying to get these radio shows to introduce me as a Samizdata blogger, instead of just as “from the Libertarian Alliance“, but they still do not understand about this, or perhaps fear that their listeners will not understand. I suppose the problem with writing for the internet is that, you know, anyone can do this and it is very easy so therefore it is of no importance. I mean, what on earth could ‘blogging’ possibly have to do with a debate about the official control of and suppression of information? November 7th, 2004 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Glenn Reynolds has a good article in the Guardian about the election and expresses some interesting ideas about its lessons for the media.
But what is with that photo? I would not have recognised that as Glenn but for the context in which it was displayed. November 3rd, 2004 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
The European Court has dispelled any residual doubt that it is little more than a politically motivated tool of the European Commission and continues its slow but steady construction of the means to make investigative journalism impossible in Brussels by ruling that Belgian police could seize Hans-Martin Tillack‘s computers and records to identify his sources regarding reports on EU corruption. The Euro-court has made little attempt to hide that is has colluded with EU political interests in a judgement that cuts to the heart of journalists ability to report on wrong doing and corruption by politicians.
Whistleblowing will not be tolerated. The superstate is not your friend. October 18th, 2004 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
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:
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. October 12th, 2004 | 70 comments - (Comments are closed)
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