Can you trust the author?

Posted on by
Reply

Appar­ently not. And I owe Stephen Bates an apology.

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

News of the World: victim and villain in the poisonous communication of public service

Posted on by
Reply

Most aspects of the News of the World’s demise have been picked over. But this is not, for all the head­lines, a scan­dal of journ­al­ism, or pro­pri­et­ors, or mer­gers and acquis­i­tions. Journ­al­ists are journ­al­ists, pro­pri­et­ors are busi­ness­men and deals are what they do. This is a scan­dal of pub­lic ser­vice and pub­lic information.

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.

 

 

 

Education by evensong

Posted on by
3

Noth­ing enshrines so com­pletely the idea of decline as an Eng­lish cathed­ral. Mil­len­nial in age, monu­mental in scale, metic­u­lous in dec­or­a­tion, the cathed­ral is ded­ic­ated to a medi­eval deity. A god of build­ings, wor­shipped through spires and fly­ing but­tresses and arches, feared through plaster paint­ings of dev­ils and awed in roof bosses carved with angels and apostles. A god built by masons and mor­tar. A god now gone.

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.

Democracy after journalism

Posted on by
6

I sup­pose the title reveals my con­cerns, which are more about the former than the lat­ter. We’ll be talk­ing about it in Per­u­gia this week at the Inter­na­tional Journ­al­ism Fest­ival.

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.