Samizdata.net often makes references to the importance of the ‘meta-context’ in explaining and determining events around us. A question to consider: What would happen if the mainstream media were somehow forced to refer to Saddam’s old regime by its own official title, which is The Arab National Socialist Party or Arab NAZI Party? What a thought…
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I have just heard a reporter on the BBC ‘Newsnight’ show describe the European Common Agricultural Policy as an expensive ‘boondoggle’. I cannot recall ever having heard that term used in the mainstream British press before. Is that a first? September 22nd, 2003 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
 There’s an article in today’s New York Times, an article about another article, in Homes & Gardens. But follow that Homes & Gardens link and you won’t find any mention of this article, because it was published in 1938 and was about Adolf Hitler’s “Bavarian retreat”.
Now this episode could be turned into yet another intellectual property comment fest, and if that’s what people want, fine, go ahead. But what interests me is the ineptness of the commercial Homes & Gardens response, their woeful neglect of a major business opportunity. An honest response from them about their reluctance to get involved in political judgements of the many and varied political people whose houses they have featured in their pages over the decades, and about all the other famous (and infamous) people whose homes they’ve written about over the years, together with a website pointing us all to their archives, might surely have served their commercial purposes far better, I would have thought. This might have morphed into a discussion of the comparably fabulous pads occupied by other famous monster-criminal-dictators (including some featured in Homes & Gardens, of the exact degree of opulence/disgustingness of the homes of the Russian and Chinese Communist apparatchiks, but of their far greater reluctance (when compared to openly inegalitarian despots like Hitler) to reveal their living arrangements to the world, in the pages of such publications as Homes & Gardens. There might also have been some quite admiring further thoughts on the nice way that Hitler had arranged matters for himself, from the domestic point of view, the way the design of the house made maximum use of the view of the mountains, etc., etc. It does sound like a really nice place. Such a discussion could surely have been combined with a robust defence by Homes & Gardens of their intellectual property rights under existing law, and in a way that might have been to their further commercial advantage. They might have simply reprinted the entire piece in a current issue, together with their current comments about it. But no. Down go the shutters. And an opportunity to bring Homes & Gardens to the non-contemptuous attention of a whole new generation of readers, instead of to its contemptuous attention, is missed. Or is about to be missed. → Continue reading: Hitler’s home in Homes & Gardens September 21st, 2003 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Given the trademark timorousness of the British Conservative Party, I must grudgingly concede that this is something of a brave pronouncement by their standards:
Why ‘halved’? Who does that help? What does that achieve? Why not scrap the iniquitous television tax altogether? ‘Half’ indeed. Pah! Presumably they don’t feel quite bold enough to go the whole hog. I see an upside and a downside here. The upside is that I think this is the first time that the BBC’s looting rights have been publicly challenged in the mainstream. That’s a start. But it is only a start. The downside is that the Conservatives cannot be entirely trusted to see through even this lily-livered compromise. All it takes is a Guardian op-ed denouncing them as rabid fascists for them to drop the idea like a hot brick and run away. Even if that were not the case, the Conservatives actually have to be back in power in order to effect their semi-decent idea and the prospects of that happening are looking dimmer by the day. ‘Auntie’ is still a long way from threatened. September 21st, 2003 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
The latest Free Life Commentary is the occasional essay series written and e-published by the Libertarian Alliance’s Sean Gabb. In the latest, number 112, he descibes how he yesterday spent An Afternoon with Tony Martin:
And so should you, by reading the whole thing. Sean took photographs of the event, or persuaded others to take photos in those cases where he was a photographee. Sean, to those who have known him at all long, looks impressively slim, while Tony Martin looks pleasingly plump despite his ordeal by injustice, and subsequently by celebrity. The piece may be about a rather doleful subject, namely injustice and official stupidity. Nevertheless I found that reading it made me feel quite cheerful – cheerful that such men as Tony Martin exist, cheerful that I have a friend like Sean Gabb who is prepared to go to all that trouble just to lend him moral support and then to write about it, and cheerful that I now have the chance to give the whole event another little boost, thanks to Samizdata. September 19th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Peter Hitchens, the arch-conservative (small-c) journalist and detester of Blairite Britain, might be thought on the surface to have a few things in common with the scribes at this blog. Well, this article in The Spectator in which he defends the British Broadcasting Corporation, should nail that idea in short order. Hitchens – brother of maverick left-liberal fellow journalist Christopher – shares with many people a widespread loathing of the BBC, the trashiness of its downmarket programmes, the bias of its news service, and so forth. And yet he is fiercely opposed to abolishing the BBC’s licence fee, the tax which is imposed on all current purchasers of television sets to fund that organisation. Indeed, Hitchens seems to bemoan the rise of commercial television, cable and satellite outlets, as having created pressures on the BBC to dumb down. He yearns for the days before the mid-1950s when the BBC had a total monopoly on broadcasting. He seems to be saying that the BBC is okay so long as it is run in the way he likes. It is totally outside his frame of mental reference to imagine how quality television, however defined, can thrive in a market where consumers pay out of their own free will. To be fair, he says the BBC should openly allow its broadcasters to admit their political biases in full rather than cover them up under a pretence of impartiality, but also ensure that for each avowed leftwing journalist, there should be a counterpart of a conservative. This may sound quite an improvement, but it is entirely unrealistic to suppose that the programme makers who run the BBC in its present privileged state would concede such ground. The beast cannot be tamed. It must be consigned to the abbatoir. There is a broader point. Even if the BBC was a genuine paragon of truth, objectivity and high culture, its licence fee would still be unjustified. It is a tax and increasingly hard to justify in a world of diverse broadcasting channels, not to mention the Internet. In his great book, The Constitution of Liberty, the late FA Hayek wrote in his final chapter, “Why I am Not a conservative.” Hitchens’ article is a good reminder to me why I am of the same view as the great Austrian economist. September 19th, 2003 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Chief Wiggles is is on the warpath. I wouldn’t approach him too closely today if I were a reporter. He’s absolutely right. The correspondents in Iraq are lying to us by choosing to report only the negatively spectacular. It’s an inherently false view and doesn’t help anyone understand what is actually going on. I personally saw the same thing happen here in Belfast. I can remember more than one lovely peaceful day on which I found out from the international news there had been rioting a mile away from where I live. From what I have heard, there were times when reporters outnumbered rioters. You can do wonders with the right camera angle. You see, reporters are like flies. The entire forest can be full of sunlight through leaves and the smell of spring flowers… but they will manage to find and congregate on that pile the bear left behind in the back of its’ dark den. September 19th, 2003 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Sweden’s broadcasting watchdog was censuring an Oprah Winfrey talk show for showing bias toward a U.S. military attack on Iraq. The censure means Swedish television network TV4, which broadcast the show in February, must publish the decision but there are no legal or financial penalties. Annelie Ulfhielm, an official of Sweden’s Broadcasting Commission, said:
The Swedish government strongly opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, saying it lacked a U.N. Security Council mandate. A TV4 spokesman said the Oprah Winfrey show usually drew an audience of about 100,000-140,000 Swedes, making it one of Sweden’s more popular day-time television programs. Just as people were getting carried away with the NO result of the Swedish referendum on the euro, the above news items is a timely reminder of the fact that the Swedes are even further down the statist route than most of Europe. A frightening thought indeed. Obviously, the Swedish ‘authorities’ felt that they had to ‘protect’ the country from the US imperialism as perpetrated by the one and only Oprah. Something’s rotten in the state of…er… Sweden? September 17th, 2003 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Posting looks as if it may be thin here today, so a quick comment on the economics of the internet. The usual story is that the big, bad, old organisations could be in trouble now as the internet whistles into existence a million new nimble players to run rings around the big, bad, etc. … blah blah. But how about this for a train of thought? Selling text on the internet is working, okay, sort of, but it hasn’t really taken off. There’s too much free stuff, and anyway, people don’t want to pay. Maybe they’re scared that if they start surrendering £30 here and £30 there, it will never stop and they’ll be bankrupt. Maybe they just reckon the prices will come down, and they’re waiting. But what if you are a huge, globally celebrated organisation which wants to be able to swank even more than you do now about how much beneficial impact you are having on the world, to your donors, charitable or political, and would actually quite welcome the simplicity of not having to be too businesslike about it all, and to have to chase every last cent for every bit of virtual stuff that you part with? What if you are the BBC? Despite all that our bit of the blogosphere may say, the BBC still counts for a hell of a lot in the world; that’s why our bit of the blogosphere complains about it so much. Or what if you are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology? → Continue reading: Big brands getting even bigger by giving it away September 12th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
This must have happened before, but it’s the first big example of it that I’ve heard about at all recently. Tomorrow’s British press is apparently full of reports of what Mr Blair “said” to a bunch of trade unionists. In other words, the press printed the stuff that they had been given by Downing Street beforehand. They printed a whole load of stuff that he was going to say. The trouble is, BBC2 TV’s Newsnight has just reported, several trade union leaders who were present at the meeting at which all this was going to be said are adamant that Blair didn’t actually say it. There must have been occasions where the print media have written reports in the past tense about events that had yet to occur, only for them not to happen as scripted, but it is somewhat unusual for our Prime Minister to be directly involved in such a mess-up. Why didn’t Blair follow his own script? Did he chicken out? Did he set the papers up on purpose? Did he think the whole thing would remain permanently in two separate compartments, with the trade unionists getting one message, and the rest of us getting another, without anyone comparing notes? Maybe this sort of nonsense happens every day, and the government has (had) a gentleman’s agreement with the BBC that what it says it is going to say is what it said, regardless of what it really said. And if the newspapers print a load of bollocks they are too embarrassed to admit it, and it all dies the death without any embarrassment to anyone. Except, that – maybe, could be, I don’t know, I’m guessing – the government forgot that the BBC now hates it. → Continue reading: And the news is that … the news we just said may not have actually happened September 10th, 2003 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
You know, I’m beginning to suspect that Rod Liddle is on the same journey I took, albeit in a higher plane, from New Labour placard-waver, to semi-rabid libertarian back-street raver. There have been several excellent articles in The Spectator, recently, topped off I think by his latest piece on the travails of the Reverend Tony. I did have Rod pegged as being a straightforward leading member of the liberal elite, with his column in The Guardian, and his editorship of the Today program. But ever since the BBC let him go I’ve really begun to welcome his regular appearances on Channel4 News, his pieces on the stupidity of over-regulation, and his devastating broadsides against the Spin-Meisters of the champagne socialist lie machine. So is the end in sight for Boris’s demise as editor of the Speccy? As a South Oxfordshire resident, an occasional bag-man for Boris, and a one-time writer for his magazine, my opinion is torn in two opposing directions. But if Boris is happy to give up the mantle, to concentrate better on his task of becoming a serious politician in the mould of Lord Salisbury, then is there a better potential editor around than Rod Liddle? I’m becoming ever more confident that Lord Black doesn’t think so. And following Jonathan Pearce’s earlier article, on the matter, would a change be a good thing anyway, for one of my favourite magazines? One thing though, Rod, if you’re reading. Gonna have to give up that Guardian column. Sorry. August 29th, 2003 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
I cannot recall hearing of such a petulant outburst from the normally stately and dignified BBC:
Sounds like my kind of guy.
Methinks the executives of the BBC sense that they are in trouble. They realise that ‘Auntie’ no longer enjoys an exalted status as a national treasure and, hence, is vulnerable. The time-honoured and global reputation for fairness, accuracy and objectivity is something they have dined out on, abused and terminally tarnished. And, even if this were not the case, in an era when the market provides so many choices, it is impossible to stem the growing discontent with the arcane and punitive television tax that funds the BBC. But it’s all the fault of Rupert Murdoch and his band of evil capitalists. (Oh, and George Bush of course). August 25th, 2003 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
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