I attended a Civil Society event where I spoke with representatives from human rights organizations, the union/labor movement, and NGOs working to address some of the hardest problems in society. I had a lunch with a university president talking about the role of technology in higher ed. I had dinner with an esteemed physicist, an author I admire, and a network scientist where we talked about how to engender and support creativity. I gave advice to a group of women trying to combat the societal valuation of consumption. I brainstormed with a group of young attendees who had done amazing work in the education sector around the globe. I attended a dinner with complexity analysts, newspaper executives, and brain scientists where we talked about how fear functions in society.

I share these things not to brag, but because my conversations in Davos were inspiring, creative, and stimulating. I came out of the event feeling as though I was able to contribute to discussions among people who were truly working to make the world a better place.

Dana Boyd, Apophenia

Some participants went to Davos simply intent on defending and forwarding their own, predetermined positions. Yet I was surprised at times at how freewheeling the conversations actually were.

Michael Schuman, TIME

It is pleasant to spend a few days in snowy Davos eating fondue, skiing and talking up creative examples of social entrepreneurship. It can even be fun to muse on one of the big questions the World Economic Forum has designated for collective cogitation: how to ‘‘redesign’’ capitalism.

But the hard part is embracing higher taxes or a lower salary.

Chrystia Freeland, Reuters

Here’s the truth about Davos: not a single person I’ve met who’s been to the event say that it’s worthwhile in the way the Forum has intended it.

Do people learn about global warming, famine in Africa, joblessness in Europe? Yes.

Does the WEF help the world in substantial ways? It does.

The not-for-profit group hosts more than 200 working sessions in Davos, and nine regional meetings around the globe that are less publicized and more focused.

But if attendees really cared about any of that, they’d have done something about it.

No, Davos is a place to be seen, to feel special, to cut a deal. It’s the global system’s way of telling the citizens of the globe that everything’s working.

David Weidner, Marketwatch

[A]midst the dealmaking, partying, networking, and status-mongering, there lurks a fair amount of empathy and striving for action to help the world’s needy. I spent time listening to and strategizing with Karen Tse, a friend I have made over years at Davos. Tse’s organization, International Bridges to Justice, works to expose and stop routine non-political investigative torture in countries all over the world. Until I met her here I didn’t even know such torture is routine. Whatever its faults, Davos is a place where such conversations happen, where the dialogue for progress continues, slowly, inexorably.

David Kirkpatrick, Forbes

[F]or all the talk of inequality and the need to demonstrate the benefits of globalisation, I heard little to suggest that “Davos man” is equipped to fend off a populist assault. The idea that “structural reform”, plus austerity, plus better job training will do the trick is – well – pious baloney.

Gideon Rachman, Financial Times

There’s been a striking effort on the part of the world’s largest for-profit enterprises to seek out and define the “shared value” playing field, with non-profits and the public sector. The “for-benefit enterprise” … seems to be on the minds of many participants here at Davos.

Frankly, neither my non-profit side of this conversation, nor the for-profit side, really knows exactly how this will look and work in practice. We should not fool ourselves that this is an easy area of collaboration and mutual benefit in which to operate. Satisfying shareholders while also achieving measurable social outcomes at scale is a promising field that’s been studied and experimented with by many great thinkers, and doers. But I doubt it’s ever been as front-and-center in the conversations of global leaders who gather here in the Swiss Alps as it is this year.

Karl Roberts, Washington Post

Davos continues to have its merits. As the event was drawing to a close, a Nobel laureate told me that at “first I thought this is a party for the ultra-rich and the glorification of [WEF founder Prof Klaus] Schwab, but now I believe they really listen, and actually do things.”

Tim Weber, BBC News

There was a lot of talk about jobs in Davos, in a way which was directly related to the talk of inequality. The assembled plutocrats had their party line on the latter — that the best way to address inequality is to make poor people richer rather than rich people poorer … And clearly, the best way to make poor people richer is to give the unemployed jobs.

But beyond that, things got very fuzzy very quickly, and more than a little depressing. LSE economist Christopher Pissarides, for instance, basically said that it was delusional to hope for significant job growth from the technology sector or from manufacturing, and that if employment is going to go up, it’s going to be from people basically acting as servants to the rich — whether it’s looking after their children, giving them personal-fitness sessions, or making them coffee.

The sad thing is that I think he’s probably right.

Felix Salmon, Reuters

[A]s the masters of finance and heads of government filter out of this ski resort in the Swiss Alps, the anxiety gnawing at the global economy continues unchecked. The damage could run beyond an economic slowdown, further undermining public faith in the institutions that now govern modern life.

For decades, as crises have assailed developing countries from Indonesia to Argentina, the powers-that-be in the United States and Europe have counseled orthodox advice: Get your fiscal house in order; live within your means; act decisively and resolutely. Yet now that crisis is hitting the wealthy world, leaders are avoiding the hardest decisions and hoping to muddle through — all while exporting their afflictions to multiple shores.

Peter Goodman, Huffington Post

One thing that’s becoming clear at Davos is that the core idea of the Enlightenment — that capitalism and democracy go hand in hand to create the best society — is under fire. And the struggle to create a new model may well pit nation against nation, corporations against government, poor against rich. The world, it turns out, isn’t flat – and it’s becoming bumpier all the time.

Rana Faroohar, TIME

Mr. Schmidt of Google said, “At Davos the conversation is really about economic growth and the reality is that technological advancement benefits those who are educated but endangers jobs that are routine and automatable.”

“This has been true for two hundred years with technologies,” he added.

Nick Bilton, New York Times

The random encounters can be just as telling as the formal arrangements. A couple of nights ago, I took a designated WEF van back to my hotel. At the next stop, we picked up a Nobel-prize winning economist well-known for his progressive outlook. In stepped another man with a South Asian accent. Ah, this time it’s a Nobel Peace Prize winner. He was in a great rush to talk to the current head of the G20 at one of the fancy hotels. He had a proposal to expand the G20 to make it into a G25, with representation from the five poorest countries from five different continents. The aim, he explained, is to give greater voice to the poor in global fora and to sensitize the leaders of the wealthiest countries to the needs and interests of people in the poorest countries. We wished him luck. I do not know if he will succeed, but Davos can get the ball rolling.

Daniel Bell, Huffington Post

Inequality was also a surprisingly hot topic at last week’s World Economic Forum in Davos. You wouldn’t expect a gathering of plutocrats, oligarchs, and C-suite supremos to shed much light on the subject, least of all between tastings of vintage Bordeaux and excursions to the finest pistes in Switzerland. And yet one night in Davos taught me more about the true meaning of inequality than anything I’ve read or heard in the United States since the launch of Occupy Wall Street.

Niall Ferguson, Daily Beast

So what is the Forum? I can’t pretend to give you the definitive answer, but I can tell you how I make sense of it, having spent my working life in television news and higher education. It might be helpful to start by saying what it isn’t.

It is not a lobbying or advocacy group. The world’s biggest companies have little difficulty in securing private meetings with whomsoever they choose. Politicians have good reasons to meet with companies who might be employers, and financiers who might be investors. Trade associations, employers’ groups and national chambers of commerce all host such meetings and campaign on behalf of their members. This is not the role of the World Economic Forum.

It is not a networking association. The British prime minister’s country residence at Chequers has long played host to eclectic gatherings where journalists, bankers and celebrities are encouraged to rub shoulders. Doubtless there are interesting conversations over the marmalade, but that’s not the role of the World Economic Forum either.

So, what is the Forum’s reason for being? There is a German part to the explanation and a Swiss part. For the German part, you have to step back to the country post-World War 2: destroyed by extreme nationalism; divided by communism; its Western leaders seeking to rebuild their industry on a model that could also rebuild their society.

That process meant re-imagining industrial politics. At its heart was the idea that business did not exist simply to serve shareholders. Instead, an enterprise should recognize its place within a constellation that includes employees, suppliers, consumers, neighbours and beyond – its “stakeholders”. For a firm to be accountable only to shareholders was too narrow. Corporations needed to embrace their broader responsibilities as social, political, intellectual, cultural and even artistic or spiritual actors. And understanding those responsibilities required interaction.

The idea doesn’t have an easy English label, and it is hardly in common currency. The Forum calls it the “multistakeholder” principle, and that principle extrapolated to a global level is what gathers Members of the World Economic Forum with other global stakeholders.

The World Economic Forum has one simple motivation in bringing people together – “convening” in the jargon of international organizations. It believes that its Members can only truly understand their interests by encountering the interests of others.

Then there is the Swiss part: participation. Perhaps it reflects the tradition of mountain communities that responsibility be shared, that every view must be integrated, that one cannot simply abrogate one’s membership in a community. It is an old idea. It was probably old when it was articulated by one of Geneva’s most famous sons, the political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For the Swiss, it is a principle of their democracy – the Konkordanzsystem.

That democracy at federal, cantonal and town level is consulted in the preparations for the Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos. Davos is an independently-minded mountain community, steeped in Switzerland’s direct democratic tradition. Its altitude and an enterprising doctor, Alexander Spengler, made it a destination for well-heeled tuberculosis sufferers. Thomas Mann set his comedy of ennervation, The Magic Mountain, in one of its sanatoria. Albert Einstein helped kick-start its reputation as an intellectual retreat (video).

Davos today is a working alpine town. The town’s tourism is a functional contrast to the chocolate box world of Villars, Zermatt and St Moritz. The Forum’s Annual Meeting boosts the local economy, but not its winter sports. Barely one-fifth of those participating can be accommodated in a five-star hotel. The local ski-lift company has contemplated shutting the lifts during the Meeting. When I’m there, as a member of the Forum, I sleep on a single bed and share a bathroom. Hardship? Not really, but it is work.

And that suits the Forum, because it deals with the world as it is, not as it would prefer it to be. It is not a decision-making body. Nor is it a conspiracy in which the horological components of global governance and industry are wound together to frustrate the rest of the world.

For the businesses and organizations and individuals who come together in Davos, the opportunity simply to meet with one another, to think outside their usual entourage of attendant counsel and advisers, and to have no predetermined outcome assigned to every encounter is both a relief and an opportunity. It brings together competitors and colleagues, protagonists and antagonists, the well respected and the heartily reviled, without requiring all who enter to adhere to its precepts or accept its principles.

It is an incrementalist organization. It moves slowly, and a diverse funding base means that it is not a hostage to any interest. Much negotiation and planning is required simply to arrive at a consensus around which debate can take place. But when that consensus is achieved, movement can be profound.

Fabians would recognize the benefits of a platform from which Nelson Mandela could announce his economic policy for the post-apartheid era in South Africa. It can inspire extraordinary acts of philanthropy, like those of Bill and Melinda Gates. It can provide a global microphone to someone like Aung San Suu Kyi. Like any platform, its power comes from the people who stand upon it, and their power in turn derives from the strength of their organizations, their office or their ideas.

At any gathering of the powerful, most often power remains frustratingly unwielded. Swords stay planted in stones. And so there is frustration. Why doesn’t the Forum DO something? Why does it take in country X, leader Y? Why does it nudge gently rather than poke aggressively? How can it let things stay the same?

Everyone who works for a complex organization makes compromises. Sometimes those compromises come off, and the reward is progress. Sometimes they don’t. Encouraging power to accept responsibility can be a cover for expediency, but it can also prompt change. Organizational cultures are self-reinforcing. If enough people within an organization judge their own contribution by its mission “to improve the state of the world”, it puts a value to their work and gives them meaning.

The world remains a complex and dysfunctional place. Yet it is a bigger and better place than the world I grew up in, in the world’s first industrial economy. In the early 1970s, women like my grandmother wore headscarves to go to market; heat and water came from coal scraped from scuttles; and a job meant simply work for men – labour that was fuelled by tinned food and forgotten with weak beer, the wireless and the football pools. And this life was the best on offer for the most-favoured millions. This was the world in which the Forum was created.

I am convinced that economic progress can drive social and political progress. Later this month, the World Economic Forum, under the rubric of the theme of its Annual Meeting – The Great Transformation: Shaping New Models – will ask participants in Davos to think again about how the world works. The Forum too recognizes that even its own model needs to be questioned. Often and regularly.

Crossposted from Forum:Blog.

By using controversialists like Oborne, and an ex-journalist Lambert, as a proxy for opinion, the programme does no one a service.

Instead of being edgy and informative, Oborne is allowed to simply hijack the studio floor.

A properly briefed Paxman could have taken on a real official forensically — and actually “held someone to account”. Isn’t that what Newsnight was supposed to do?

Instead Paxman is asked to ringmaster a largely powerless array of opinion peddlers. Meanwhile, if you’ve never seen a snake charmer bitten by a cobra…

When we follow through the history of particular industries and see new skills arise as old ones decline, it is possible to forget that the old skill and the new almost always were the perquisite of different people… Even where an old skill was replaced by a new process requiring equal or greater skill, we rarely find the same workers transferred from one to another… The rewards of the “march of progress” always seemed to be gathered by someone else.

E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class

More than thirty years have passed since my father was visited by the first of several stretches of unemployment that were to haunt his life, and the lives of those who loved him.

He was a travelling timber salesman — the Willy Loman of a workshop world that still ran on thick and tight-grained boards, fragile and exotic veneers, the seasoned planks and beams that were his stock in trade.

Self-educated, his bookshelf held the novels of Alistair McLean and Isaac Asimov alongside Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, J.A.C. Brown’s Techniques of Persuasion, Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People.

His psychology of selling would be shared with me on long drives between boat yards and building sites, the workshops of the customers for whom he was also listener and entertainer.

But changes in the psychology of selling did not destroy his livelihood. The makers of reproduction furniture folded. Fibreglass replaced well-varnished timbers in the boatyards. The economics of business consolidation eliminated the need for competing sales teams. Technology, competition, and demography made him redundant.

My father’s experience of unemployment in the early 1980s was hardly unique, but it was singular.

Laid off timber reps were not heroic enough to mythologised as labourers, nor skilled enough to write their own legend and embalm their misfortune with sentimentality and social significance.

But when we talk about the creative destruction of creative industries like journalism, there is a human cost, and — like my father — it’s lonely and easily forgotten.

Mr. Monck,

I just purchased a copy of your book Can You Trust the Media? I found your discussion of the 1940s Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press on p. 165 particularly interesting. You write:

“The report, A Free and Responsible Press, was published in 1947 and was an astute, articulate and impassioned indictment of the mass media. It asserted that the press is free for the purpose of serving democracy and that a press that shirks its democratic duties will lose its freedom. The report calls on the press to improve itself in the name of morality, democracy and self-preservation.… Over the half-century since Hutchins, the report has shaped academic thinking about journalism, but the practice of journalism carries on untouched. A flawed success as an analysis, A Free and Responsible Press has proved, as a call to action, a magnificent failure.”

In my 1995 monograph on the Hutchins Commission, published by Northwestern University’s Annenberg Washington Program and available online, I wrote:

“A Free and Responsible Press offers an astute, literate, and impassioned indictment of the nation’s mass media. The 133-page report contends that the press is free for the purpose of serving democracy; a press that shirks its democratic duties will lose its freedom. The report calls on the press to improve itself in the name of morality, democracy, and self-preservation.… Over the half-century since, the report has appreciably influenced academic thinking about journalism, but not journalism itself. A flawed success as an analysis, A Free and Responsible Press has proved, as a call to action, a magnificent failure.”

Any comments?

Stephen Bates

Yup. It should be a quote. Simple as that. Instead it’s an attempt, not even completed, to rewrite something that someone else had succinctly expressed. Lazy and dumb. In the process of shuffling text between Sydney and London without exercising due care and attention I recklessly trampled on Stephen Bates’ work.

His original piece is here:

http://www.annenberg.northwestern.edu/pubs/hutchins/hutch01.htm

The Hutchins Commission Report is here: http://www.archive.org/stream/freeandresponsib029216mbp#page/n17/mode/2up

The most serious aspect of this inquiry is what it says about the British police service, its culture of collusion and media “relationship management”.

Consider this line on Dick Fedorcio, the Met’s head of media relations, buried in a Nick Davies report about attempts allegedly linked to the News of the World to intimidate a senior police officer:

Scotland Yard took no further action, apparently reflecting the desire of Fedorcio, who has had a close working relationship with Brooks, to avoid unnecessary friction with the News of the World.

Note the “close working relationship”.

This scandal of goes beyond people like the police, of course, to Whitehall and its marketing of public service.

The toxic interdependencies which these “relationships” foster could easily have been bypassed at any time by governments brave or determined enough to address the issue of how the public should be informed of what is done in its name and on its taxes. In the case of the Met — Boris Johnson take note.

Instead government, and local government, press offices have outgrown newsrooms. Communication is not on the basis of information but on ‘quid pro quos’. It is the culture of embed, access and favour.

Let’s have a debate that goes beyond it, and that asks how we can put information provision and not spin control at the heart of public service. Ed Miliband claims the public want a “frank, free and fearless press”. Let the public sort the press out.

If politicians sorted out the way public bodies communicated they might reduce the incentives for journalists to pay public servants for information and the trading in what is effectively “inside information”.

In the meantime let us hear from the likes of Mr Fedorcio on his relationships, and how he manages them. In the interests of public service.

Mesopotamian ziggurats and Mayan pyramids may have been abandoned to jungle and desert but the church and the English county town allowed cathedrals their continuance. There were no longer cowls in the cloisters, nave walls were scrubbed of paint, brasses lifted from the family tombs, and now dead dukes and earls interred themselves by preference in chapels on their grand estates.

But the church, like ivy, covered up the ambulatory and transepts, its ritual curled along the grave stone paving, up to the great wooden doors that would no longer open to a crowd.

Into the mouth of this godless cavern, divorced from its estates, its wealth, and its power, I came, aged six years old, clutching my father’s hand. Together we walked alone to the song school, down the dark arcade separated from the nave by the worn black tombs of bishops. How like an Angel came I down! How bright are all things here! When first among His works I did appear. O how their glory me did crown!

The church wanted unhappy little boys to sing for god and, in return, it would educate them. My father did not realize that I was Isaac in this bargain. God provided no alternatives. Closer than my hand, he held his own unhappiness and disappointment. And what, after all, do little boys know of sacrifice?

Bullying was worn with the same resignation as the surplice and the ruff. The kick and the rabbit punch on blind corners in procession, the swinging of the heavy silver medals of choral office ensured that the very youngest would arrive swallowing their tears, swearing during the gospel reading to carry forward the punishment to the next arrivals. Bullying was only the background noise of boyhood, the 32′ pipe in our incessant, futile fugue.

This was my education: to stand in a building abandoned by its ideology, kept alive by shadow priests and shadow congregations, and wonder.

ALMIGHTY God we confess that we have sinned against Thee and against our fellow men, in thought and word and deed, in the evil we have done and in the good we have not done, through ignorance, through weakness, through our own deliberate fault.

“The good we have not done.” Every good act precluded a host of better acts. Even to contemplate the order of actions and their goodness was to risk being plunged into a cycle of evaluation and procrastination: the opportunity cost of goodness. The impossibility of goodness. The requirement for worship.

We knew the psalms by length and dreaded day 15. The longest. Every prayer, every liturgy, every lesson passed before us. Lent. Easter. Whitsun. Pentecost. The long weeks of Trinity. Advent. Christmas. Epiphany. Saints days and Sundays.

For an hour each evening, anyone with a mind to could have come to listen to the anthemic counterpoint of Palestrina or Byrd, or the mags and nuncs from England’s age of empire — Stanford in G, Bairstow in D, Sumsion in A.

But in the evenings, nobody came. The green-bound, fine-leaved pages of the English Hymnal were left unthumbed. The kneelers — boldly patterned and strongly stitched — were unneeded. We sang for a few small matrons in sensible shoes who strode to their stations. They positioned themselves like chess pieces, Staunton queens, always leaving enough space between to avoid capture.

The choir filled the stalls, dec and can. We would still have been obliged to sing for no one. These were the rites. Our songs were the sands engulfing the colossal wreck. Nothing beside remained.

This then was my education, conscripted into choral servitude, to serve a church that clung to a building whose stone triforium dwarfed its influence, and mocked its ministry. The curriculum was decline: the sudden ending of a high ascent; progress and its reversal. The lessons were in drowned polyphony; the inescapable punishment of being made to be present, to practise and perform and witness every night the same. I am poured out like water. My country.

Here’s a reading list:

Journalism was long ago seen as a fourth estate, an extra-parliamentary representative cohort.

In 19C political theory, the press is seen as a necessary element in a representative democracy.

In the ancient world, though there might be, and often was, great individual or local independence, there could be nothing like a regulated popular government beyond the bounds of a single city-community; because there did not exist the physical conditions for the formation and propagation of a public opinion, except among those who could be brought together to discuss public matters in the same agora. This obstacle is generally thought to have ceased by the adoption of the representative system. But to surmount it completely, required the press, and even the newspaper press, the real equivalent, though not in all respects an adequate one, of the Pnyx and the Forum. (John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, 1861)

The press is no good in the role having been captured by corporate interests, UK edition (Julian Petley, Fourth Rate Estate).

The press could never fulfill the role since citizens can never play the role demanded of them by democractic theory (Jorn Henrik Petersen, Lippmann Revisited, 2003).

The “informed citizen” (i.e. the consumer of journalism) is not a requirement of democracy (Michael Schudson America’s Ignorant Voters, 2000)

The decline in the journalism industry is not a crisis for democracy.

Journalism’s role is important and worthy of public funding.

Please add any interesting links in the comments.

As a journalist with CBS News, I was deported from Bahrain back in 1992 so I was a little wary of their enthusiasm. (The Information Minister Dr Tariq Alomoayyed summoned me to his office and asked why I had entered Bahrain on a tourist visa: “No one comes to Bahrain as a tourist, Mr Monck.”)

But in the mid-2000s, the small kingdom seemed to be slowly opening up. The old king and his ministers were gone. Exiles had been recalled.

One of the more encouraging signs was a tolerance of digital dissent, embodied by bloggers like Ali Abdulemam, who ran bahrainonline.org . The Wall Street Journal (article here) noted Abdulemam’s blog as a pointer to progress in the Gulf. He was part of the Global Voices network.

The conversation about journalism education carried on for a year or two, went up the official chain of command, and eventually went cold. The promise of a more robust political culture cooled too. That chill brought not only silence, it also brought arrest and imprisonment for some.

Today Ali Abdulemam is on trial, having been arrested for “diffusing fabricated and malicious news on Bahrain’s internal situation to spread rumours and subvert the Kingdom’s security and stability.” (http://english.bna.bh/?ID=89532 ). I know the progressive and enlightened people I met in Bahrain’s government will be embarrassed and saddened by this trial, and that their public silence will not reflect their private views. They will also know that their efforts to promote Bahrain as a modern and business friendly state risk being undermined by the actions of the security apparatus. In building a better future for Bahrain enabling dissent — and integrating it — is as important as international advertising campaigns.

You can read more about Ali Abdulemam in the WSJ, The Atlantic and on Global Voices.

Ali Abdulemam’s trial is scheduled for today (Thursday 28, October). His case is but one of many, yet it stands for what many people hoped blogs and the digital revolution might achieve, and his imprisonment is testimony to another broken tech-topian promise. And he deserves better.

The BBC commands radio, online, magazines (Top Gear, Gardener’s World) and mainstream TV viewing. Sky and Newscorp command subscription TV and print.

They are — natch — deadly rivals. Newscorp thinks of the BBC as a patrician and parasitic not-for-profit, leeching money off those who reap no benefit from the licence fee whilst simultaneously punishing any free enterprise (think News 24 removing the commercial base for Sky News). The BBC for its part has replaced the Church of England in the lives of the nation, and its combination of sanctimony, saintliness and soap.

The Guardian is — of course — squeezed by both.

Such is the power of the duopoly that one is obliged to take sides. As BBC loyalists will tell you with the air of sympathetic, but impatient teachers: to criticize is to undermine; to question the licence fee effectively heresy. As News’ people will tell you — the BBC &**ç%!!

But this misses the point. The BBC is effectively apolitical, unable to campaign to change the establishment on which it reports. Newscorp is a weapon unsheathed in defence of its own quixotic interests. One has the artistry and affectations of decadence, the other the vitality and viciousness of barbarism.

Neither option in the duopoly offers plurality. But it has, until recently, mirrored rather well Britain’s political system. Of course, coalition government has interrupted that…