Posted in May 2009 …

May 30 2009
5 Comments
Culture, Politics, Print

The Bath Chronicle: even better news

Sam Holliday’s column in the Bath Chronicle this week is the shining opposite to the report that originally got me all exercised: it’s thoughtful, impassioned – and best of all, it’s drawn from a hustings meeting he attended and reported on himself. The BNP candidate appeared alongside representatives of the English Democrats Party, Libertas and the Christian Party, but protests outside the venue stopped most of the participants (and the audience) from getting inside.

Holliday’s reflections on how well the debate and protest served democracy are excellent on their own. But the last section is strong stuff:

As for the BNP, well, it just left me deeply depressed. Unlike many of the protesters, I did hear the debate (because I believe you have to hear what people say before judging them) and the moment the party’s spokesperson tried to claim he wasn’t a racist but called black people “Negroes” was the moment I realised this party is wedded to racism – despite the fact that many of them now wear nice suits. Negroes is the language of the American Civil War and not 21st century British politics – and I felt chilled and angry.

BNP? Beyond Normal Politics.

Newspapers can afford to be partisan about the politics of hate, just as Holliday is here. It’s impressive journalism, and it’s put me back in the paper’s circulation figures.

Update: Tristan Cork (the reporter who turned BNP ideology into editorial in the first place) has a column up on the website which I should have noticed before: it seems to begin with self-justification but ends by telling you everything he missed out first time around.

Tagged , , , , , , ,
May 29 2009
1 Comment
Culture, Politics, Print

No one likes to be called a racist

Not even the BNP. Which is why they’ve wrapped up their race hate message in a tissue-paper parcel of culture wars speak (with some BNP material aimed exploitatively at children) and done it so successfully that even some of their own candidates didn’t realise quite what they signed up for. Corinne Tovey-Jones, a BNP candidate in Worcester, says she was persuaded to join the BNP after her husband was made redundant, but after having her electoral statement rewritten to criticise the “anti-social behaviour” of “an unruly minority”, she has tried to withdraw her candidacy and is now asking people not to vote for her. She says:

I don’t want people thinking I’m racist when I’m not. My sister’s married to an Italian – how could I be? My mum and dad are religious – they don’t need the upset.

Of course, it’s a lot easier for people like Tovey-Jones to remain ignorant if the reporting they’re exposed to is the uninquisitive fluff I looked at last week rather than the sort of work the Manchester Evening News has been doing. MEN editor Peter Horrocks says:

We took the decision to expose more details on their policies and, when we tried to speak to the deputy leader, Simon Darby, to confirm the BNP’s manifesto in 2005, when it wanted all non-white Britons to leave the country, he essentially said ‘Yes’ but refused to talk about the issue any further. When you think about that, to try and suggest that in multi-cultural Britain we in effect ‘repatriate’ society, it’s just an outrage and we felt it right to bring details like that to our readers’ attention.

The BNP really don’t like having that sort of thing brought to anyone’s attention. In fact, they’re so unhappy with it, they’ve attempted to orchestrate a campaign against the  MEN’s advertisers. From the BNP’s email to supporters:

If enough people do this, the companies in question will moan and groan to the Manchester Evening News’ business directors, forcing a behavioural change vis-à-vis the editorial team and journalists. We are calling on all genuine British Nationalists to heed this call and complain to one of the companies.

The BNP knows that its views are unacceptable. They recognise that “racist” is one of the most dismally pejorative labels anyone can pick up, and they’ve made a distinct rhetorical choice to explicitly deny being racist while expounding policies based on tortuously-defined ethnic groupings. And in turn, that’s why it’s so important that journalists aren’t satisfied with the simplistic point and counterpoint journalism which lets falsehood glide through under cover of “balance”.

Obviously, I agree with the MEN’s stance – but more importantly than that, what they’re doing is good journalism because it gives their readers information they can’t get from the official source. Hopefully, the MEN’s advertiser’s will recognise the value of that, and the perfect worthlessness of bending to a marketplace of bitter bigots.

Tagged , , , , , ,
May 28 2009
8 Comments
Culture, Film, music

Picturehouse: Twilight

It’s quite hard to explain why I decided to watch Twilight without blaming it all on Rachel Penny or making myself sound like the kind of perv who watches High School Musical for libidinous kicks (actually, I just think Zac Efron is really talented and stuff). So let’s just accept that I had some really good reasons for watching a movie intended for people half my age.

Stephanie Meyer’s teenvamp romance is a cavalcade of glorious goth cliché, wish fulfilment and the ridiculous – if you’ve never had the creative nous to imagine a family of vampires playing baseball in matching kit in a thunderstorm (yes, yes they were), Twilight will be a revelation to you. The symbolism is engagingly unsubtle. When Edward (consumptively beautiful and undead) first meets Bella (unthreateningly pretty new-girl-in-town) sharing desks in a biology class, the camera pans around so that the wings of the stuffed owl appear to grow from Edward’s shoulders. Because he is A HUNTER and also LIKE AN ANGEL because he is SO BEAUTIFUL.

And what are Edward and Bella looking at under their shared microscope? A worm. A phallic little worm. Which is another clunking metaphor if you want to see it that way, because Twilight cuts the teen libido into grisly segments and sticks it on a slide for examination.

twilight biology

Twilight doesn’t add anything especially new to the lexicon of teen fantasy. (Except for the sparkling. That’s pretty new.) Dangerous, beautiful boys who appear repulsed by the heroine but are actually only keeping their distance because they are so overwhelmed by love for her – they’re everywhere in popular culture. (Subtext: however much he seems to be disgusted with you, keep cracking on because it’s all eternal love under the hostile exterior.)

When I was the right age to like Twilight, I was deeply obsessed with Gentlemen by the Afghan Whigs, Murder Ballads by Nick Cave (I still put out a mean Kylie on SingStar) and the works of Serge Gainsbourg. Jane Birkin described being in a relationship with Gainsbourg as being “like having a wonderful parrot who bites everyone else but you,” which is exactly the appeal: the imagined relationships you get in these songs have all the risk and glamour of hanging out with a man who loves and fucks and leaves for dead, but the fact that he seems to be confiding in you acts as a guarantee of safety.

And that’s what happens in Twilight. Edward Cullen is part of a vampire family that’s turned away from hunting humans and lives on animal blood (they call themselves “vegetarians”) but he wants to taste Bella more than anything. He tells her he wants to taste her. He demonstrates his hunting prowess in a weird scene of zipping up trees. He reminds her that he’s killed people. He appears uninvited in her bedroom to watch her sleeping. None of these seem like the qualities a teenager should go looking for in a bang-up boyfriend. But Bella trusts him, so that’s ok.

However, Twilight doesn’t take place in a mytho-poetic interior landscape like Dulli, Cavey and Serge: it’s set in a modern-day American highschool, and the characters have friends and families. And the friends and family also take the line that Bella trusts him, so that’s ok. Which leads to some moments of disarming parental casualness about Bella’s personal safety: after the climactic fight in which Edward saves Bella from a ‘hunter’ vampire insatiably drawn by her smell (it’s like a pantyliner ad, or the anti-Wetlands), she’s left with a bloodied thigh, a broken leg and an obvious bitmark in her arm. Edward explains that she “fell down the stairs”, after they were last seen having a massive row, and with that, Bella’s mum is totally cool with Edward just hanging out in Bella’s hotel room waiting for her to wake up. Buffy’s mum kicked Angel out the house, you know. That‘s highschool vampire narrative integrity for you.

Incidentally, it’s only Bella’s leg that gets broken. Definitely not her hyman – Twilight is furiously abstinent, meaning that just a peck on the lips between the two leads turns into a feverishly longed-for climax. Absolutely no sex here. Just the exchanging of bodily fluids. Lots of exchanging of bodily fluids between a troupe of vampires who all live as one family, and a father-figure who ‘initiates’ Edward in a sepia-coloured bliss of homoeroticism. Can I stop now? I feel a bit flustered.

And while I’m used to something like Buffy taking the sexual metaphor of the Dracula story and driving it hard through a realistically-assembled group of teens, what makes Twilight special is that it has no idea how unsuitable this all in. In the great tradition of saddlebacking, as long as it’s not penetrative vaginal sex, it’s probably ok – even if it does involve home invasion and a bit of a battering.

Tagged , , , , , , , ,
May 27 2009
1 Comment
Crafts, Culture, Politics, Print, Published, Writing

BNP reporting: the wrap-up at Liberal Conspiracy

Over at Liberal Conspiracy, I’ve wrapped up my recent adventures in local news:

The BNP is a repugnant, racist organisation that is somehow able to present itself as a legitimate political party despite having a leader with a conviction for distributing Holocast-denying literature, a London Assembly member who spouts made-up crime stories and a track-record of misogyny that could keep Jim Davidson in material for the rest of his life.

The BNP is detestable, and it knows as much – which is why the party has been making exerted attempts to rebrand itself, dressing up racism as a culture war and claiming to stand up for the white man on the street against political correctness, immigration, and all those other half-lit monsters that loom from the national press.

There’s a commonly-made argument that the BNP thrive on being ostracised, that presenting them as bigots is playing into their hands. This is rubbish, of course.

Read the rest at Liberal Conspiracy…

Tagged , , , , , , ,
May 26 2009
3 Comments
Culture, music

The mix-up

My dad is a king of mix-tapes. His great works have included “original versions of songs which are better known for a cover”, the Ian-Dury heavy “list songs” and the great, unending project to get every track in Dave Marsh’s Heart Of Rock And Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made onto cassette. And he made one for me this weekend, so I’ve been piecing together a reciprocal playlist. Jiggling stuff about on iPlayer isn’t quite as fun as working with a C90 – when you’ve finessed the track listing to the exact distance the tape has to unspool, everything has a feeling of rightness that can’t be found by any amount of matching up outros and intros. After the jump: the first seven tracks of my dadmix, seven songs I love because they come from the music my dad has always played me (and as Fleshisgrass asked me ages ago to name my seven songs of the spring – here they are).

Continue reading →

Tagged , , , ,
May 26 2009
Leave a comment
Culture, Politics, Print

Good news

Bad reporting is always regrettable for the good reporting it replaces. In the case of the Bath Chronicle and the Western Daily Press’ BNP family story, though, something much worse happened. Poor journalism led to the papers publishing editorial that obscured the politics of electoral candidates and presented three proponents of racist policies as “caring” individuals. The BNP candidate was so happy with the initial report that he celebrated its appearance on wire services: essentially, the reporter (Tristan Cork, who hasn’t replied to my email) has written the equivalent of a press release for the BNP, and done it at the WDP’s expense.

Anton Vowl explains just how indefensible this approach is:

Let me explain to this newspaper editor why the BNP thinks the press are against them. They think that not because they are paranoid fools – although that may well be true – but because it’s true. Why? Well the press are against the BNP because the press is composed of human beings, most of whom are intelligent and rational people, most of whom despise fascism, racism, prejudice and hatred. It’s not a liberal-left leaning of the local press; it’s not some New Labour plot to infiltrate newspapers with lefties. No, most right-wing people hate the BNP too, and quite rightly so.

I was really pleased that Sam Holliday, editor of the Bath Chronicle, turned up in the comments to my post about his paper to defend his work and debate journalism – and even more pleased when he went to and reported on a debate between council candidates (and managed to get all the quotes in quotation marks this time). The report is a strong example of what local news can do well: it involved going out to the meeting, breaching the protest to get inside, listening to the debate and (I would guess) taking shorthand notes as it went along. That’s an evening of the editor’s time at least, and the story the paper gets is only obvious after the work’s been put in.

That sort of reporting costs resources. I can’t comment specifically on the Chron, but in general resources are not that abundant on local papers. And the “Mum, dad and son to stand for BNP” story was cheap in comparison. The Chronicle acquired it from a sister paper (the Western Daily Press). Copy and picture arrived intact, and all it took was a little editing and a new headline to get it on page nine of the Chron. Even for the WDP, which sent a reporter and photographer to meet South-West Family Racism, this was bargain journalism: maybe an hour out of the office for Tristan Cork, and the piece to be written determined in advance with no requirement for additional reporting. The most budgetarily-constrained editor can probably justify that as a way to fill half a page.

But what Tristan Cork produced barely qualifies as reporting. It told me nothing I couldn’t have found out direct from the candidate’s own blog. It was empty puffery, without journalistic merit and without any value to the reader who wants to be better informed about their local area. In fact, the only group it served was the BNP, by haplessly reinforcing the “People like you” line from the BNP’s election literature and letting racists who don’t like to be called racists luxuriate in their bigotry.

Papers that print stories like the “Caring family” one are failing. Not just morally, but financially: in Media Week, Sue Unwin of MediaCom (a company which organises ad campaigns and places press spots) calls the Telegraph expenses scoop

magnificent evidence of the importance of newspapers and proper journalism. [...] It is clear that whatever the commercial outcomes of the transition from paid-for newsprint to free online content, we cannot expect to continue to live in a democracy without proper journalists dedicated to annoying the elected members of Parliament.

That’s a person who’s responsible for placing the ads that pay for the papers saying that journalists should be scrutinising politics. Not recycling press releases, and not inadvertantly writing them, but showing up and asking questions. I hope Sam Holliday’s hustings report is the beginning of more coverage like that – because it’s the sort of journalism I want to see, and because it’s the only sort of journalism that can justify the continued existence of the local press.

Tagged , , , , , , ,
May 21 2009
15 Comments
Culture, Politics, Print

Local churnalism and the BNP

Like Anne, I was very concerned about how the BNP family profile came to appear without a byline in the Bath Chronicle. As Anne said, the most obvious interpretation of the story being uncredited “is down to it coming from a press officer or agency of some kind.” Sam Holliday, the editor of the Chronicle, replied “This was not a PR written piece – believe it or not we don’t do that.” That seems to be true. However, the Chronicle does share content with its sister paper, the Western Daily Press. And that’s where this story originally appeared, written by Tristan Cork (edit 11 June 2009 to remove email as there is now no reason to contact Cork in light of further actions by the Chron) complete with the same photo and that horrible phrase “only lets white ethnic indigenous British people join as full members.” (I rang Laura Tremelling at the Chronicle to confirm this.)

Western Daily Press, BNP family

The copy has been partly rewritten – Cork’s original is even more extraordinarily uncritical, which caused great delight to the candidate on his blog, where he also noted that “Since then the story has been noticed by a press agency so expect to see it in a national paper next week.” This is churnalism in action, and it’s beautifully illustrative of the way that the repetition of stories without any additional reporting is destructive of political debate – and of how cheerfully political candidates will exploit that to avoid scrutiny.

Just a note: I’m not linking to the BNP candidate’s blog or naming him here, because I’m not personally up for hosting a debate with the BNP here on Paperhouse. I hope the comments will reflect that.

May 19 2009
72 Comments
Culture, Politics, Print

My local paper’s racist friends

Edit 11 June 2009: the Bath Chronicle has resolved this issue. Please see this post on the further reporting that has been done.

They shouldn’t take the BNP’s ads, but how should papers report on the BNP? They’re a legal political entity (inexplicably, but there you are) and a matter of interest to your readership – both good arguments for publishing stories about them, and that’s before you get into the idea that it’s better to address their arguments publicly than drive them underground. So, let’s say you’re an editor with news items about the BNP’s council election campaigns and the controversy among the mainstream parties about how to engage in debate with a racist organisation. What are you going to do?

Well, how about definitely not doing what this week’s Bath Chronicle did on page nine:

"Mum, dad and son to stand for BNP"

Top story: “Mum, dad and son to stand for BNP”. Bottom story: “Meeting change to avert MEP hopefuls’ walkout”. Not featured: any response to the BNP’s policies, although the top piece helpfully informs us that the party “only lets white ethnic indigenous people join” – a catagory so meaningless it’s surely come straight from the BNP handbook.

From this page of newsprint, you’d get the impression that the BNP is some sort of loveable family concern squaring up to the grey suits of mainstream politics with a bit of underdog spirit. If you’re going to read about the repatriation policy or Nick Griffin’s criminal record, it won’t be in The Bath Chronicle. Sam Holliday, editor of the Chronicle (edit 11 June 2009 to remove email, as Sam has resolved this issue) has decided that his readers need to be informed about the jolly face of the BNP and not their despicable principles. The writer of the “Meeting change” story, Laura Tremelling (edit 20 May 2009: Laura would prefer that her email not appear here, although it is published in her byline in the paper) has spoken to representatives of Labour, the Tories, the Lib Dems and the Greens and either not questioned them – or not quoted them – on the specific reasons they refused to share a stage with a BNP candidate.

That’s lousy journalism anyway, barely adequate to the coverage of a flower show. But when the subject is the BNP, it’s lousy, tacitly racist journalism. I don’t have a local paper anymore.

Edit 20 May 2009 to clarify that Tremelling is only responsible for the “Meeting change” story. The family profile is uncredited.

Tagged , , , , ,
May 18 2009
Leave a comment
Books, Crafts, Culture, Print, Published, Writing

[Guardian Books Blog] Can the newspaper novel survive in the internet age?

I’ve got my first piece up on the Guardian books blog:

In a world of declining newspapers, is there any future for the newspaper novel? I recently stormed through Michael Frayn’s satirical 1967 newspaper novel, Towards the End of the Morning, and Nick Davies’ scathing study of how reporting works now, Flat Earth News. For the press, dawn is closing time, when the final edition has been printed and the hacks can go to bed – so Frayn’s title is a reversal of the usual metaphor: the end of the morning implies more of a shutdown than a rebirth. The novel, with its warm satire of the gentlemanly dissolution of the newspaperman in the fading days of old Fleet Street, makes a tender record of a deeply flawed but somehow loveable industry – before colour printing, before Wapping, and back when TV had only just begun to threaten the papers’ ownership of the news and comment business.

Read the rest at The Guardian…

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,
May 18 2009
1 Comment
Culture, Politics, Print

British johns for British working girls

Local papers are in a bad way. The pressure to cut costs at the expense of editorial has gutted them of their local content, and driven away their readers. And while circulation has collapsed, advertising has headed the same way – eBay, Craigslist and Freecycle have swallowed the market in classifieds, and now there’s a recession, companies are hacking back their publicity budgets. So it takes a brave business to make a principled decision about what advertising they will accept, and Newsquest won lots of admiring comments when they announced that they would no longer accept ads from the sex trade:

Andy Parkes, group editor of Newsquest’s south London papers, is quoted: “Despite operating in accordance with industry guidelines, the company has taken a decision to no longer publish adult services advertisements, either in print or on its websites. Increasing concerns regarding the appalling issue of human trafficking has been significant in this decision, which is effective immediately.”

So what’s a brave company like that doing running banner ads for the BNP on their websites? Maybe it wasn’t the exploitation of the sex trade that got to them. Maybe they were actually taking a stand against the illegal immigrants offering five-quid oral and taking British johns from British workers.

The BNP is a racist party. They might be legal, but all their policies aim to restrict rights on the basis of ethnicity: Newsquest is associating with a brand whose main values are “viciousness”, “stupidity” and “hate-mongering”, and lending them the legitimacy of trusted local titles.

Such stupidity should create its own punishment by repelling readers who abhor the BNP, hurting circulation and pushing your reader profile downmarket where even fewer legitimate advertisers will want to buy a piece of your hopelessly damaged newspaper. But just in case the Newsquest management is too dim to figure out cause and effect, email them and let them know why you’ll never be taking one of their hate-friendly trash-rags again.

Tagged , , , , ,
← Older posts
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 2,770 other followers