Monthly Archives: June 2007

Anything new under the sun?

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We’re often berat­ing ourselves in the media for over­look­ing import­ant social and his­tor­ical devel­op­ments. Take the rise of Waha­bism in Islam, for example. It appeared by stealth, you might ima­gine. And now read Amer­ican journ­al­ist Charles Dud­ley Warner from 1881, on the impact of the wires on news­pa­pers.

…con­sider how much space is taken up with mere tri­vi­al­it­ies and vul­gar­it­ies under the name of news.

And this evil is likely to con­tinue and increase until news-gatherers learn that more import­ant than the reports of acci­dents and cas­u­al­ties is the intel­li­gence of opin­ions and thoughts, the moral and intel­lec­tual move­ments of mod­ern life.

A hor­rible assas­sin­a­tion in India is instantly tele­graphed; but the pro­gress of such a vast move­ment as that of the Waha­bee revival in Islam, which may change the des­tiny of great provinces, never gets itself put upon the wires.

The recur­rence of themes in inform­a­tion is a famil­iar topic on this blog (my his­tory obses­sion). In case you think that obses­sion is itself just a lazy way of repeat­ing the line from Eccle­si­astes that there is noth­ing new under the sun, here are the head­lines of my thoughts.

Whilst in math­em­at­ics and the phys­ical sci­ences we’ve seen a grow­ing soph­ist­ic­a­tion over time, I think we long ago reached a devel­op­mental dead-end in spoken and writ­ten lan­guage as a tool for describ­ing the world in which we live. Iron­ic­ally, because lan­guage func­tions as a social tool.

The dis­cov­er­ies of sci­ence (atomic, multi-dimensionality, geo­lo­gical time) all chal­lenge our every­day sense of things being as they appear — the com­mon­sense, intu­it­ive under­stand­ing that we use so suc­cess­fully to nav­ig­ate the world of people and ‘nor­mal’ life. Sci­ence chal­lenges it, but can’t change it, because lan­guage sup­ports us emo­tion­ally and sus­tains us spir­itu­ally. Its rational and intel­lec­tual short­com­ings are secondary.

So lan­guage is the dead sea in which we com­fort­ably float. Just don’t expect to find any­thing excit­ing in it.

A little bit of money…

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“What if, at the Journal, we spent $100 mil­lion a year hir­ing all the best busi­ness journ­al­ists in the world? Say 200 of them. And spent some money on estab­lish­ing the brand but went global — a great, great news­pa­per with big, iconic names, out­stand­ing writers, report­ers, experts. And then you make it free, online only. No print­ing plants, no paper, no trucks. How long would it take for the advert­ising to come? It would be suc­cess­ful, it would work and you’d make … a little bit of money.”

Rupert Mur­doch

Facts and opinion

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The fam­ous line of C.P.Scott, editor and the pro­pri­etor of the Guard­ian — “com­ment is free, but facts are sac­red” — is immor­tal­ised not just in the Guard­ian’s op-ed, but also in Sac­red­Facts, Richard Sam­brook’s blog.

Scott was in his sev­en­ties when he wrote the essay from which the line is taken, back in 1921. But the divi­sion between fact and opin­ion wasn’t accep­ted by every­one at the Guard­ian.

George Dibblee was for many years the busi­ness man­ager of the Guard­ian, whilst Scott edited it. In 1905, on the death of its then pro­pri­etor Edward Taylor, Dibblee was appoin­ted one of the paper’s trust­ees. Taylor had recom­men­ded the Guard­ian be sold to Scott for £10,000. Dibblee and his fel­low trust­ees shif­ted that price to £242,000. Per­haps not sur­pris­ingly, Dibblee left the Guard­ian when Scott bought it. Per­haps more sur­pris­ingly, he took a fel­low­ship at All Souls.

Dibblee used his time as an aca­demic to write a book on the press called simply The News­pa­per (1913). He argued that news and opin­ion were all but insep­ar­able, because opin­ion shaped a newspaper’s edit­or­ial agenda and pri­or­it­ies:

As far as the pub­lic is con­cerned, there is very little dis­tinc­tion made between the func­tion of news­pa­pers as news­gather­ers and their duties as pur­vey­ors of opin­ion. This arises from a very simple case. While news is nom­in­ally an imper­sonal thing, as a mat­ter of prac­tice it is far from being so. In obtain­ing it the fac­ulty of selec­tion is required in the highest degree by the news­gatherer or ‘story writer.’ Selec­tion again is strenu­ously required in determ­in­ing the com­pet­i­tion between one item of news and another. Finally the present­a­tion of news in words and para­graphs leaves a wide open­ing for indi­vidual pref­er­ences and inclin­a­tions. Thus it comes about, nat­ur­ally enough, that the same series of habits, which gov­ern the con­duct of avowed opin­ion in a news­pa­per, habits summed up briefly in the term, the policy of a news­pa­per, express them­selves, not so con­sciously but even more effect­ively, in its news columns.

The decline of political reporting

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If you’re one of those people, like the former prime min­is­ter (how strange it is to write that) who wor­ries about the future of polit­ical report­ing and the qual­ity of debate in the House of Com­mons — fear not. You’re in good company.

If you want to see who shares your opin­ions, read on.

If a states­man now wants to impress the nation, the last place in the world where he will make his speech is in Par­lia­ment, because in no place will it be worse repor­ted. Epoch-making speeches are nowadays all delivered on the stump. The pub­lic only cares for what it hears. No one knows what goes on after twelve o’clock in Par­lia­ment, and no one cares. Why? Because the news­pa­pers do not report late sittings.

W.T. Stead, “Gov­ern­ment by Journ­al­ism” (1886)

For years it was the proud ‘boast’ of the great Lon­don dailies in com­pet­i­tion to give the longest, which means the fullest reports of the debates in Par­lia­ment. They main­tained large staff for the pur­pose. It was also a tri­umph of beauty to set the report in close type, so that the delighted reader looked upon a broad page of dead black lead, broke only by the spaces required for the names of the suc­cess­ive speak­ers. That is all now changed. Where we sat down to six or seven columns of polit­ical rhet­oric, we now sit down to two, and the story, moreover, is broken into para­graphs, head­lines and notes of exclamation…Readers of the busi­ness class or the loz­enge intel­li­gence prefer to take their legis­la­tion and polit­ics first in the homeo­pathic doses of a ten line summary.

Alfred Kin­near, “Par­lia­ment­ary Report­ing” (1905)

What has changed is the way Par­lia­ment is repor­ted or rather not repor­ted. Tell me how many maiden speeches are listened to; how many excel­lent second read­ing speeches or com­mit­tee speeches are covered. Except when they gen­er­ate major con­tro­versy, they aren’t.

If you are a back­bench MP today, you learn to give a press release first and a good Par­lia­ment­ary speech second.

Tony Blair, “On Pub­lic Life” (2007)

As you were saying…

Social mobility

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John Humphrys’ reports on social mobil­ity are a styl­ish les­son in radio journ­al­ism. His deliv­ery, script­ing and ques­tion­ing are a joy.

The reports offer a great oppor­tun­ity to hear from voices routinely denied access to the Today pro­gramme — the undeserving poor.

So where did this morning’s piece come off the rails?

In allow­ing Alan Mil­burn to spout his full employ­ment, ‘deal with scroun­gers’ man­tra? Or in recyc­ling a little of Robert Put­nam’s Bowl­ing Alone baloney.

There are two types of social mobil­ity — intra and intergenerational.

Intra gen­er­a­tional mobil­ity is the kind of boot-strapping that sends shop-floor toil­ers up to the board room in the space of one career. What’s killing this? Erm…education. In edu­ca­tion­al­ising pro­fes­sional train­ing, chil­dren of the better-off vault effort­lessly over the boot-strappers.

Intergen­er­a­tional social mobil­ity is the kind we see in immig­rant fam­il­ies who’ve had to trade down socially in mov­ing coun­try — they set great store in edu­ca­tion as a means of get­ting back on track.

Of course, the flip side of social mobil­ity is abandon­ing your friends, fam­ily and com­munity for the mater­ial dis­trac­tions of root­less con­sumer­ism. As Jonathan Pryce so effort­lessly declares in The Ploughman’s Lunch — “My par­ents are dead.”

Richard Hog­gart described the exper­i­ence rather more poignantly in an essay ‘Unbent Springs: A Note on the Uprooted and Anxious’ in The Uses of Lit­er­acy. He begins the sec­tion entitled ‘Schol­ar­ship Boy’ with this quote from George Eliot’s Middle­march

For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spec­tacle of life and never to be lib­er­ated from a small hungry shiv­er­ing self.

Eliot was writ­ing at the begin­ning of the 1870s. Hoggart’s book was writ­ten in 1957. Half a cen­tury on it might have offered a rather bet­ter plat­form than Mr Milburn…

The politics of Al Jazeera…

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Wadah Khan­far’s appar­ent oust­ing from the board of Al Jaz­eera came after inter­ven­tion by Mah­mud Abbas and an Arab intel­li­gence ser­vice. At least that’s the story that ran earlier this month in Jord­anian magazine Al-Majd.

The Jord­anian weekly’s sources have this to say:

…the removal of Khan­far from the Al-Jazeera board of dir­ect­ors was the first step towards remov­ing him from his pos­i­tion as dir­ector gen­eral of the net­work … his removal came in response to out­side US and Palestinian pres­sure … the Amer­ic­ans and the Palestini­ans accused Khan­far of empath­iz­ing with the Muslim Broth­er­hood in gen­eral and with the Palestinian Hamas Move­ment in particular.

An offi­cial close to Palestinian Pres­id­ent Mah­mud Abbas vis­ited Doha recently and handed Qatari offi­cials a secur­ity dossier on Wadah Khanfar…an Arab intel­li­gence ser­vice delivered to Qatar a sim­ilar dossier that proves Khanfar’s asso­ci­ation with the Muslim Broth­er­hood and Hamas.

Khan­far had been cri­ti­cized in the local, state-controlled Qatari media for refus­ing to appoint Qataris to key roles. One of the new dir­ect­ors is a former editor of Al Jazeera’s web­site, who Khan­far appar­ently moved from the post.

Al-Majd claimed Al Jaz­eera cov­er­age has shif­ted recently to a more pro-Fatah stance.

The board shake-up came in mid-May. Danny Schechter had the Al-Majd story on 12 June.

Pos­sible Khan­far replace­ments? Some people appar­ently got to work early. On 19 May this story ran on Algerian web­site Echor­ouk Online:

Accord­ing to well-informed sources, the Algerian presenter Khadija Ben Guena is among the can­did­ates for repla­cing Wadah Khan­far, the gen­eral man­ager of Al Jaz­eera TV channel…

Accord­ing to reli­able sources, Sheikha Moza the Qatari prince’s wife is intent on appoint­ing Khadija Ben Guena as the new gen­eral man­ager of Al Jaz­eera TV channel.

It’s worth recall­ing that Khadija Ben Guena inter­viewed Sheikha Moza, a few days ago in a talk-show broad­cast by Al Jaz­eera channel.

There’s more blo­go­spheric spec­u­la­tion about Khan­far here, this time in respect of Iran.