Remember all that blogging about Free I was doing earlier this year? My review of Chris Anderson’s guide to something-for-nothing is in Tribune this week (26 September-1 October 2009) or you can read it in full below: Continue reading
Sarah Ditum
Freelance writer and journalist
Posted in September 2009 …
“I do not think it means what you think it means”: valuing comments
Google’s Sidewiki project shows that commenting is a valuable part of the online environment – but do the people who invite comment always understand how they should interpret this sort of feedback? A pseudonymous local freesheet editor (blogging as “Blunt”) puts on a triumphant display of error as he abuses his readers for commenting on all the wrong pages (the “chod” he refers to is an earlier assault on PRs):
I am both upset and disturbed for the fact my chod got more comments than a recent tale on my newspaper’s website (unique users = many 1,000s a month) about a scrote getting just three years for kicking someone to death outside a pub.
It got more comments than a story about a kid getting run over by a drink driver who walked free from court on a technicality.
More comments than a council’s decision to evict five OAPs from the homes their families grew up in. The homes they thought they would live in until they died.
More reaction than our campaign to save a kid dying from leukaemia.
In the last two days more than a quarter of the total readership of my blog has come on to read and comment on what is, in essence, a load of made-up shit written by a self righteous, opinionated idiot.
Is this what really gets us riled? Is this the future of news? Why do you really give a shit? You don’t even know who I am.
Welcome to the internet’s world of meaningless shat [sic] and massive indifference.
The comments on the PR piece continue the argument that Blunt comes out with: some come from offended PRs, some from sympathetic hacks, others from people who agree with the sentiment but take issue with the extremity. It’s a discussion, in which each participant is addressing an individual – the author of the original post.
A news story doesn’t offer the same incentive for response. The reader might feel appalled, outraged or supportive – but none of those emotions are likely to inspire a debate about the piece of reporting. They all come under the category of “reinforcing” in Tom Ewing’s taxonomy of reactions to information: “praising it without adding to it, sharing it, ‘liking’ it on Facebook or Tumblr, recommending it, etc.”
The opinions on the PR blog post are generally “refining” or “rejecting” Blunt’s characterisation of the journo/PR condition. And the preference for commenters to contribute to an argumentative blog post rather than a news story is explained by Ewing, in a summary of what he considers the best vehicle for the different types of reaction he describes:
“If pushed I’d say that you should reinforce via networks (sharing stuff), refine at the original site of the information (commenting), and reject by creating a new site of information (your own blog post).”
In other words, it would be inappropriate for the readers of Blunt’s newspaper to comment when they have the option of sharing this information instead.
What’s slightly alarming is that this shows the way in which a newspaper editor can mistake both the nature of the information he’s supplying through his paper, and the reactions of his audience – whom he apparently holds in contempt on the basis of his own confusion. If he doesn’t understand online communications, how can he make his product work for online consumers? And is Blunt representative of editors generally assuming that comments on a story are a good measure of its value to readers? Given the eagerness of news portals to encourage people to have their say – he’s probably not alone.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009. Photo by suburbanslice, used under Creative Commons.
Jon Snow: bring in privacy law, finish off the tabs
Channel 4 news anchor Jon Snow comes out in favour of privacy restrictions on reporting in this Guardian interview with Ann Widdecombe. And strongly in favour, too, even disallowing the public interest defence in cases of hypocrisy:
AW Would you welcome a privacy act, Jon Snow?
JS I would welcome a privacy act, yes.
AW We have the scoop! Jon Snow says, “Bring in a privacy act.”
JS I believe that the tabloid media, in particular, have so intruded into the private lives of public people that they have brought it upon themselves that there should indeed be a privacy act.
AW I think that is absolutely right. I think…
JS Damn me, Ann Widdecombe, I didn’t think we’d have to sit here and agree.
AW And I consider that quite a coup, to have got Jon Snow to agree with me that we need to curtail the rights of the media. Thank you, Jon Snow…
JS I am totally opposed to, and would go to the gallows to prevent, censorship. But needless intrusion into the private lives of anybody…
AW Let me ask you this. Let’s imagine a politician – I don’t care whether it’s male or female, Jon, but let’s imagine a politician. You’ve got a politician who has never made any pronouncements about morality, who has a mistress. Is that the public’s business?
JS Not at all.
AW You’ve just put a lot of the tabloids out of business.
JS Well, they’re going out of business anyway, so that won’t mean much…
The Guardian, “Politicians interview pundits: Ann Widdecombe and Jon Snow”
I think the hypocrisy exemption is valid, if only because in those cases the private behaviour becomes the counter-argument to the political statements of the public figure (it’s possible that this is only a sop to my own prurience). But I approve very much of what I see as the logical extension of Snow’s statement: the hope for a culture where private, consensual actions are off-limits for both the state and the press.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009
Jeremy Hunt and the BBC: your ballot or your job
The BBC should be more right-wing, says shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt. And to counter what he sees as the organisation’s “innate liberal bias” he wants the BBC to start actively recruiting Tories:
“I wish they would go and actively look for some Conservatives to be part of their newsgathering team, because they have acknowledged that one of their problems is that people who want to work at the BBC tend to be from the centre-left.
“That’s why they have this issue with what Andrew Marr called an innate liberal bias. I think the important thing with the BBC is that it belongs to all of us.”
Let’s skip over the obviously questionable assumptions in Hunt’s comments – like, what constitutes a “liberal bias”, and how does he know the BBC has one? (Personally, I think there’s merit in Medhi Hassan’s contention of right-wing bias in the corporation, while Greg Philo’s statistical analysis of the BBC’s Israel-Palestine coverage has shown the Beeb to be strikingly distant from any supposed liberal consensus on the Middle East. But then, perhaps any interest in or adherence to external evidence would be interpreted as a genuflection to reality’s well-known liberal bias.)
Leaving all that aside, we can look directly to what Hunt is asking for – a quota system based, not on externally visible risk factors for discrimination like gender and race, but on the internal and private quality of political affiliation. When Cameron moved to introduce the priority list system, with the intention of engineering an increase in the number of female Conservative MPs, the grass-roots party was hostile; presumably, Hunt has calculated that positive discrimination in favour of media Tories will be welcomed more sympathetically.
There are some cases where membership of a particular political party is genuinely counter to someone’s suitability for a job. I’m supportive of the ban on police and prison officers joining the BNP, because the BNP is a party with openly racist beliefs that would plausibly compromise an individual’s fitness for those roles.
But Hunt is suggesting something else: he’s asking for a cobbled-together parody of proportional representation, in which the publicly-funded broadcaster is forced to become a constitutional mirror of a parliament which is itself a grossly distorted representation of the electorate. It’s absurd, it’s impractical (what if an employee was recruited as a Conservative only to become a late-blooming advocate of Marx?) and – what should make the Toriest of Tories despise it – it’s a supremely state-meddling approach.
But logical failings probably can’t hold back ascendant political will: choose the bits of the BBC you love, and get ready to fight for them when the next government comes in.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009
Reality Checking Device
The relationship between fear and risk is notoriously wonky. Artist and designer Susanna Hertrich has devised a way to visualise the proportion of outrage to hazard – so the next time you’re consoling yourself with the unlikelihood of your plane crashing, you can see that unlikelihood rendered as a beautiful circle.
Especially lovely is her idea for portable software based on the RCD: “The Reality Checking Device could be working as an ambient alarm system. Whenever a threshold of public attention for the one specific scenario is overridden, the user would receive a subtle alert. Making use of a GPS function would enable the Reality Checking Device to respond to location based risks and fears.” Meaning that, wherever you were, you’d always know exactly what you should – and shouldn’t – be scared of.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009
The language of hate
Express columnist Jimmy Young praised the BBC’s decision to invite Nick Griffin onto Question Time:
The BNP is not going to quietly fold its tents and disappear, so surely it is better to allow it to subject its policies to open debate and questioning after which, as the BBC rightly says: “Our audiences, and the electorate, will make up their own minds about the different policies offered by elected politicians.”
The Express, “Jimmy Young: Why BBC’s decision to include BNP will be judged as wise”
Funnily enough, Young managed to write the whole of that column without slipping in a reference to how despicable he considers the BNP to be – leaving readers to draw the conclusion that the BBC will appear “courageous and wise” not because it has contributed to the undermining of far-right politics, but because it has given a platform to a rising moment.
The latter explanation requires the reader to accept that a national newspaper is willing to espouse racist extremism, which seems implausible unless you’re actually looking at a copy of the Express, where today’s headline (“KEEP OUT, BRITAIN IS FULL UP”) is a BNP slogan. Tabloid news feeds public appetite for racist politics, and the language of racist politics feeds back into the news.
Earlier today, I was reading Sarah Hartley on applying the “socially useless” test to journalism, but a front page like the Express’ is not anodyne uselessness. It’s pure harm, driving hatred and dehumanisation. And its existence undermines any arguments that newspapers may make for their own indispensability.
**Edit** This post wasn’t really supposed to be about the QT issue, but as the comments have swarmed on that point, I might as well quote Chris Dillow on why Question Time isn’t going to provide the crushing scrutiny some of the commenters below seem to be hoping for:
But this runs into Paul Sagar’s objection – that QT is not a platform for debate but merely a zoo in which soundbites are vomited into an audience who clap like hyperactive seals. There’s a danger that Nick Griffin could actually emerge well from such a show. His imbecile beliefs lend themselves better to cheap slogans than do arguments in favour of immigration – especially as viewers have been primed by the trash media to give credence to such beliefs, and as his opponents are likely to be discredited ministers who lack the courage to make the case for immigration. Indeed, as Bart Cammaerts notes, Belgian experience suggests the far right does gain votes as it gets media coverage.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009
“What f***ing papers you reading?”
Another reason to hate on the tabs: they’re not just inspiring the English Defence League, they’re also acting as a muse to Danny Dyer and Nick Love. Even if the press don’t care about being fair or accurate, at least they could save us from another Outlaw:
“You know the maddest thing – they [the critics] thought it was about a country that doesn’t exist. The press was saying, ‘Oh, how can you f***ing say that about this film, how can you say we live in a lawless country and there’s nonces running around and people running around stabbing each other?’ It’s like, what f***ing papers you reading, you dozy c***s?”
Via the delightful Graham Linehan. Read the abridged version of Danny’s biography at Bilge Pump.
Condemning misogyny in Standpoint
Feminists, you are opposing misogyny all wrong according to Nick Cohen and Clive James in the latest issue of Standpoint. Screw the demos: you want to spend a bit more time criticising each other for not being sufficiently anti-Islam. Obviously, shouting “WHERE ARE THE WESTERN FEMINISTS?” is unlikely to have any direct positive effect on the lives of women suffering horrible privations and attacks – but then, Cohen and James don’t seem to self-identify as “Western feminists”, so apparently they don’t feel any personal impulse to help women living in repressive theocracies.
As both articles come with representations of burqa-ed women to illustrate the essays’ headline concepts of “blindness” and “silence”, it seems that neither James nor Cohen object to piling negative connotations onto the women apparently being betrayed by their Western sisters. I’m not massively keen on the burqa, but a picture of a black-clad head with a bloodied knife for an eyeslit is maybe overstating things to the point of being a little bit inflammatory.
And while James and Cohen eagerly enumerate all the forms of harm to which women are subjected in the strange collation of states they decide to look at (Iran, Somalia and Afghanistan are all lumped together, despite being very different countries with peculiar circumstances contributing to cultural misogyny) the two men are less good at naming the strategies that Western feminists should be following. “What is to be done about this worldwide victimisation of women? What else but to condemn it?” asks and answers James, for whom condemnation is apparently as useful an approach as offering education, medical assistance or asylum.
James seems to think that casual references to women’s attractiveness is consistent with feminist polemic – check out the beauty race he sets up between Aung Sann Suu Kyi and Neda Agha-Soltan (neither of whom seem very relevant to his argument, since both women have been victimised for specifically political reasons not directly related to gender). And Cohen’s awkward demands for an “uncompromisingly militant feminist movement” are just slightly undermined by his tendency elsewhere to dismiss women as irrational. It’s unsurprising that neither seems to experience any sympathy with either the oppressed women of the world or a feminist movement.
But then, as Standpoint’s mission statement is to “celebrate our civilization, its arts and its values”, the professed interest of these features in women’s rights is strictly cosmetic, intended purely as an illuminating contrast to the beauties of liberal democracy. And that’s why the only action they advocate is the strictly cosmetic one of condemning what they don’t like. Obviously, condemnation is a pretty weak force when it comes to changing the material conditions of women’s lives – but it’s awfully powerfully when you want to stroke your sense of culture into a spurt of self-congratulation.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009
Some books deserve to be remaindered
This might not be one of them, of course. I might actually go back and buy it. But there’s a tidy bit of symmetry in seeing Some Writers Deserve To Stave: 31 Brutal Truths About The Publishing Industry sitting in a discount bookshop window, remaindered to less than a third of its list price.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009
The wrong kind of intelligence
Editorial Intelligence uses “intelligence” more in the sense of “things we have on the editorial” than “the intelligence of the editorial”. It’s a sort of introductions bureau, brokering relationships between the “commentariat” and corporate clients – so when it comes to their Comment Awards nominations, the selection criteria veer towards writers who are prominent enough to be useful, rather than writers who are particularly insightful and brilliant. The few good commentators on there (Chris Dillow and Peter Preston are among the obviously exceptional, and there are a couple of others I rate besides) feel almost accidental, surrounded as they are by thought-shy ranters (Guido and Littlejohn) and flapping purveyors of illogic (Aaro and Hari). Many of the nominees are the sort of supremely hobbyhorsical writers whose “controversial” offerings supposedly spark “debate” – when actually, the sound of fact-free opinion knocking into fact-free opinion is less “worlds meeting”, and more “two bollocks colliding in a soggy ballsack”.
Related: “Making the difference in reporting”
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009
