Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 25 April 2008
Unlike dozens of 40-something lefties I know, I'm not going to be wandering around the Love Music, Hate Racism carnival in Victoria Park this Sunday reminiscing fondly about the day 30 years ago when the very same place was the site of the first Anti-Nazi League carnival with the Clash, the Tom Robinson Band, Steel Pulse and others.
Don't get me wrong: I've got nothing against Love Music, Hate Racism and I'd be there if I could, but I'm working. And even though I can't make it, I shall pause during my shift to indulge in a little misty-eyed nostalgia for the 1978 carnival.
I hitch-hiked down from Ipswich for it with a posh girl from Colchester called Gabriel whose parents would have gone bananas if they'd known where we were going and how. And it was one of the two best days of many good ones I remember from that spring. (The other best was Ipswich beating Arsenal 1-0 in the FA Cup final a week later.) Victoria Park was heaving with people – something between 80,000 and 100,000 showed up – and the gig was brilliant. On the way home Gabriel kissed me... I wonder what she's doing now?
But enough of that Miss J Hunter Dunn moment. I hope everyone has as good a time on Sunday as I had 30 years ago – and that no one spends too long thinking seriously about historical parallels between 1978 and 2008, because that could all too easily spoil the party.
The context for the 1978 carnival was of course the rise of a xenophobic far-right gang in electoral politics, the National Front – and obviously there is a contemporary equivalent in the shape of the British National Party. If Sunday does anything to galvanise opposition to the BNP in the run-up to next week's London elections, it will have performed an extraordinarily useful function.
Yet, unpleasant as the prospect is of the BNP sitting in the London Assembly, the rise of the far right in London is not the most disturbing similarity between 1978 and now. That distinction goes to the national political scene, where now as then a deeply unpopular Labour government seems to be stumbling towards oblivion in the face of a Tory revival.
I know there are differences. The Labour governments of the 1970s had bigger problems than Gordon Brown has today - runaway inflation, growing unemployment, dire industrial relations, a currency crisis - and from 1977 Labour had to rely on a pact with the Liberals for a majority in the House of Commons. By contrast, Brown has (on most things) a comfortable parliamentary majority, growth has been continuous for a record period, inflation is relatively low and unemployment is falling. The unions – teachers' days off aside – are supine.
But Labour's economic prospects today look much less rosy than its recent record – and the Brown government shares with the Callaghan government of the late 1970s an aura of aimlessness and exhaustion that augurs very badly.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the crisis over the abolition of the 10p starting rate of income tax. The measure was announced in Brown's final budget as chancellor of the exchequer last year as part of a package that included reduction of the basic rate of income tax from 22p to 20p – and at the time nearly everyone heralded it as a master stroke. (I demurred but so limply it is embarrassing.) The very few critics who asked how it would affect people on low incomes were reassured that any ill-effects would be minimal as tax credits would compensate.
This was simply not true - as Labour backbenchers came to realise long after they had voted the tax changes through parliament. In fact, abolition of the 10p rate means that some 5 million low-paid people will be worse-off, some of them by nearly £4 a week.
It's difficult to fathom what was going on in Brown's head when he hit on these tax reforms. If he did not realise what their impact would be he was stupendously careless – and if he did realise but thought no one would notice he was plain stupid.
Not that the MPs who were this week threatening to rebel over the issue have much to be proud about. It should not have taken Labour backbenchers the best part of nine months to discover that rather a lot of people would be hit hard by Brown's changes. To mix metaphorical clichés, the threatened backbench rebellion was one of headless chickens trying to shut the door after the horse has bolted. They got Brown to U-turn, in the end, but at a massive price to not only his but their party's credibility.
Will Brown survive this fiasco? I think so, but whether he does or doesn't I'm starting to get a feeling in my bones that the next prime minister will be David Cameron. It would take a massive swing for the Tories to win the next general election. But on the evidence of the past few weeks, I have a hunch they could do it. Right now, Labour isn't working – as the famous 1978 Tory poster had it.
24 April 2008
19 April 2008
SINKING IN THE SWAMP
I was in a great mood this morning until I read this pernicious nonsense from the playwright David Edgar in the Guardian – the point of which is that Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, Andrew Anthony and others who have objected to the left getting into bed with reactionary Islamists are defectors from the “progressive” cause who have abandoned any commitment to defending the most exploited people in our society. Edgar fails to explain how Hitchens, Cohen et al have "defected" – he simply takes it as read – and does not engage with any of the supposed defectors' arguments. But he does claim, on the basis of the scantiest of evidence, that Islamists are getting more “progressive” on homosexuality and women’s rights as a result of their engagement with the left intelligentsia. I'm used to reading utter bollocks in the Guardian, but this really takes the biscuit.
18 April 2008
WAS I RIGHT OR WAS I RIGHT?
I've been doing some saddo cleaning up and indexing on this blog – OK, I'm so 1999 HTML – and found this.
OBITUARIES - 18: AIMÉ CÉSAIRE
I had no idea that Aimé Césaire, the Martinique poet, playwright, political intellectual and politician, was until yesterday still alive, when he died at the age of 94. I have never been an uncritical admirer, but his 1939 poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (translated as Return to my Native Land) is one of the most stunning works of 20th-century Modernist poetry – up there with the best of T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, the Surrealists and the Futurists. The Times has an obituary here.
17 April 2008
13 April 2008
8 April 2008
3 April 2008
SUBS' SOLIDARITY
Members of Suffolk National Union of Journalists braved the wrath of a major hotel chain to protest against plans by Ipswich's daily papers to axe sub-editors' jobs.
They distributed leaflets opposing the cuts to members of the Suffolk Chamber of Commerce, which was holding a meeting at the Ipswich Novotel where senior executives of Archant, owner of the East Anglian Daily Times and the Evening Star, were speaking.
The two activists were asked to leave the hotel carpark by a Novotel employee but refused to go until they spoke to a senior manager. The delay this caused allowed them to hand out more than five extra leaflets.
Suffolk NUJ member Paul Anderson said: "It's mad to think you can produce newspapers or websites or anything else without subs. We are essential if publishers are going to avoid major libel actions and serious embarrassment over inaccuracies."
Archant recently announced that it would be replacing sub-editors on its Ipswich titles with advertising layout production staff.
They distributed leaflets opposing the cuts to members of the Suffolk Chamber of Commerce, which was holding a meeting at the Ipswich Novotel where senior executives of Archant, owner of the East Anglian Daily Times and the Evening Star, were speaking.
The two activists were asked to leave the hotel carpark by a Novotel employee but refused to go until they spoke to a senior manager. The delay this caused allowed them to hand out more than five extra leaflets.
Suffolk NUJ member Paul Anderson said: "It's mad to think you can produce newspapers or websites or anything else without subs. We are essential if publishers are going to avoid major libel actions and serious embarrassment over inaccuracies."
Archant recently announced that it would be replacing sub-editors on its Ipswich titles with advertising layout production staff.
25 March 2008
THOSE WERE THE DAYS?
There are some great archive clips here that catch the spizz-energy of the anarchist group Class War in its pomp in the mid-1980s.
I was there at the foundation, believe it or not. Class War started in 1983 after Ian Bone -- one of the two geezers ranting in the clips (the other is Martin Wright, the genius who invented the anarcho class-hatred thing) -- walked out of a meeting of the London Workers Group.
The London Workers Group was the early-1980s forum for class-struggle anarchists, autonomists and council communists that met every week in the upstairs room of the Metropolitan pub in Farringdon Road. I was a regular: the week before Bone came along I'd delivered a talk on the legacy of the council communist tradition at which two ancient militants, as the French call them, had nearly come to blows.
Whatever, Bone arrived in an attempt to recruit us to his new project for an in-your-face tabloid anarchist newspaper, and when he got a lukewarm response he flounced out, denouncing us as a bunch of fucking wankers. Fucking wanker.
I was there at the foundation, believe it or not. Class War started in 1983 after Ian Bone -- one of the two geezers ranting in the clips (the other is Martin Wright, the genius who invented the anarcho class-hatred thing) -- walked out of a meeting of the London Workers Group.
The London Workers Group was the early-1980s forum for class-struggle anarchists, autonomists and council communists that met every week in the upstairs room of the Metropolitan pub in Farringdon Road. I was a regular: the week before Bone came along I'd delivered a talk on the legacy of the council communist tradition at which two ancient militants, as the French call them, had nearly come to blows.
Whatever, Bone arrived in an attempt to recruit us to his new project for an in-your-face tabloid anarchist newspaper, and when he got a lukewarm response he flounced out, denouncing us as a bunch of fucking wankers. Fucking wanker.
24 March 2008
AND ANOTHER ANOTHER THING ...
UK Polling Report is awesome for all sorts of stuff on British electoral politics and I've been meaning to give it a plug for ages.
AND ANOTHER THING ...
I was planning to have a go later at the BBC4 programme on the Turin Shroud, shown on Saturday and fronted by Rageh Omar, that gave completely unjustifiable credibility to flakey "new research" that supposedly places in doubt the evidence that it is a fake. But there's no need for me to bother. Heresy Corner has done it for me. (Hat tip: Oliver Kamm.)
AN ALTERNATIVE WE COULD DO WITHOUT
The Guardian leads today with news that the government is set to propose the introduction of the alternative vote for elections to the House of Commons – which, if true, would be deeply depressing.
Under AV, single-member constituencies are retained from the current first-past-the-post system, but voters mark their ballot papers not with a single "x" but by numbering their preferences. If no candidate gets more than 50 per cent of first preferences, the bottom-placed candidate is eliminated and his or her second preferences are added to the other candidates' totals, and so on until one candidate tops 50 per cent.
In practice, its main effect would be to ensure that results in marginal seats were determined in most instances by the second preference votes of supporters of third- or fourth-placed candidates. In nearly all the Labour-Tory marginals that decide British general elections, that would mean Lib Dem supporters deciding whether they'd rather keep Labour or the Tories out.
On one hand, this would reinforce the already stifling trend in British politics towards lowest-common-denominator populist politics. And on the other, as Lib Dem supporters' second preferences piled on the agony for whichever of the major parties they disliked more, it would also exacerbate the in-built tendency of FPTP to yield landslide election results.
Although in 1997, 2001 and 2005 this would probably have benefited Labour, throughout the 1980s, when Liberal and Social Democratic Party voters generally saw the Tories as less bad than Labour, it would almost certainly have given Margaret Thatcher even more commanding majorities than she actually won.
Under the present electoral system, Labour is in danger of losing its overall majority at the next election on a very small swing to the Tories (as the document referred to in this story from the Sunday Times yesterday makes clear). Labour supporters of AV, believing that Lib Dem voters would be more likely to make Labour rather than the Tories their second choice in 2009 or 2010, think that AV would be a neat way of saving those imperilled seats. But if their assumption about Lib Dem voters is wrong – as it could be – a change to AV could easily deliver a Tory landslide.
The problem, put simply, is that, far from yielding a House of Commons that more accurately reflects the spread of party support across the country – which should surely be the goal of any change to the electoral system – AV could make the Commons less representative. It is not a step towards proportional representation but a step away from it - and as such deserves nothing but contempt from democrats across the political spectrum.
Under AV, single-member constituencies are retained from the current first-past-the-post system, but voters mark their ballot papers not with a single "x" but by numbering their preferences. If no candidate gets more than 50 per cent of first preferences, the bottom-placed candidate is eliminated and his or her second preferences are added to the other candidates' totals, and so on until one candidate tops 50 per cent.
In practice, its main effect would be to ensure that results in marginal seats were determined in most instances by the second preference votes of supporters of third- or fourth-placed candidates. In nearly all the Labour-Tory marginals that decide British general elections, that would mean Lib Dem supporters deciding whether they'd rather keep Labour or the Tories out.
On one hand, this would reinforce the already stifling trend in British politics towards lowest-common-denominator populist politics. And on the other, as Lib Dem supporters' second preferences piled on the agony for whichever of the major parties they disliked more, it would also exacerbate the in-built tendency of FPTP to yield landslide election results.
Although in 1997, 2001 and 2005 this would probably have benefited Labour, throughout the 1980s, when Liberal and Social Democratic Party voters generally saw the Tories as less bad than Labour, it would almost certainly have given Margaret Thatcher even more commanding majorities than she actually won.
Under the present electoral system, Labour is in danger of losing its overall majority at the next election on a very small swing to the Tories (as the document referred to in this story from the Sunday Times yesterday makes clear). Labour supporters of AV, believing that Lib Dem voters would be more likely to make Labour rather than the Tories their second choice in 2009 or 2010, think that AV would be a neat way of saving those imperilled seats. But if their assumption about Lib Dem voters is wrong – as it could be – a change to AV could easily deliver a Tory landslide.
The problem, put simply, is that, far from yielding a House of Commons that more accurately reflects the spread of party support across the country – which should surely be the goal of any change to the electoral system – AV could make the Commons less representative. It is not a step towards proportional representation but a step away from it - and as such deserves nothing but contempt from democrats across the political spectrum.
21 March 2008
CAPITALISM AND COMMUNITY - 2
I might be missing something here, but since when has a post office been the key to the survival or cohesion of any community? OK, if it's also a village store or a pub, I accept, and it's important that old folk can pick up their pensions in a relaxed and reassuring setting. But most post offices have no social function whatsoever. They are shops where you can buy all sorts of stuff you can buy anywhere else. What exactly is the rationale for massive public subsidy?
19 March 2008
NO REASON TO BE CHEERFUL
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 21 March 2008
Events, dear boy, events... It's a cliché - but Harold Macmillan's famous line about what's most likely to blow a government off-course remains as apposite as when he is supposed to have uttered it.
And doesn't Gordon Brown know it this week. Amid an international financial crisis that sober experts say could be the worst for the world economy since the Wall Street crash of 1929, the opinion polls appear to have turned irrevocably against Labour. According to YouGov and ICM, Alistair Darling's attempt at reassurance in his first Budget last week has gone down with the punters like a bucket of dodgy oysters.
OK, it's not all over by any means. Precisely what the collapse of the US investment bank Bear Stearns signifies for Britain or indeed anywhere else is not yet clear - and there are always good reasons to resist the temptation to predict the imminent breakdown of the capitalist system. A dull Budget that enthuses no one is not necessarily an omen of electoral disaster. There are still two years before Brown has to go to the polls, and mid-term unpopularity is something governments should treat as the norm rather than the exception (contrary to Labour's experience since 1997). And the Tories are still a long way short of being a shoo-in.
But it doesn't look good at all. The panic in the stock markets might not last for long - indeed it might be over as I write - but the credit crunch is for real, and it's difficult to see how it won't at very least bring the British housing bubble to an end.
UK house prices have been ludicrously inflated for at least five years, and we Brits - or rather those of us who consider ourselves home-owners, though in fact we're not because we've borrowed to buy - have been binge-consuming on the back of more borrowing against our equity.
Now that is all grinding to a halt, it seems. If banks won't lend money to one another because they're worried about their competitors' US sub-prime exposure, they certainly won't lend to any but the least-risky Brit consumers. The scenario every Labour politician fears is that everyone who has lived the high life on equity-based credit tightens his or her belt, the bottom falls out of the housing market, repossessions rocket, businesses of all kinds go bust - and in six months we're into a recession deeper than that of the early 1990s.
Will it happen? I don't know any more than anyone else, but right now I'm not optimistic. And the thought that we might be facing recession makes me gloomier than I have ever been about Labour's chances at the next general election.
Governments do sometimes survive recessions: the Tories won in 1992, remember. It's not impossible to imagine public opinion rallying to dull, dependable Labour if times really were to get tough. Hunch tells me, however, that it wouldn't be like that. Voters would want to punish Labour for bringing the housing bonanza to an end - and the Tories would reap the benefit. Not a pleasant prospect, but has anyone got a more realistic one?
* * *
On a different matter entirely, I spent Tuesday evening at a meeting of the Suffolk branch of the National Union of Journalists. It was unusually full - in part, no doubt, because of the pulling power of the main speaker, Jeremy Dear, NUJ general secretary and fellow Tribune columnist, but also because of the subject of discussion: the announcement by Archant, the publisher of the Ipswich East Anglian Daily Times and Evening Star, that it was going to replace many of its sub-editors with non-journalist (and worse-paid) page-designers.
You might think this an arcane matter of obvious interest to those whose jobs are threatened but of little wider importance. But it's not. It's yet another example of aggressive newspaper management sacrificing quality journalism in pursuit of greater profits - part of the culture of "churnalism" attacked with such verve by the Guardian's Nick Davies in his book Flat Earth News. Getting rid of subs might save Archant several thousand pounds a year - but it would also inevitably mean stories being published full of grammatical, spelling and factual mistakes.
And that's not because the reporters and feature-writers on the Anglian and the Star are incompetent - just that they're human and fallible. I've been working as a sub at least part of the time for nearly 25 years now, and I have never come across a writer whose work has not been improved by subbing. Even the most elegant stylist will now and again misspell a proper name or attribute a quotation to the wrong person - and many of the best reporters do not write very well. It's true that technology has changed the sub's job out of all recognition since I started, but it hasn't rendered it obsolete - and never will.
Events, dear boy, events... It's a cliché - but Harold Macmillan's famous line about what's most likely to blow a government off-course remains as apposite as when he is supposed to have uttered it.
And doesn't Gordon Brown know it this week. Amid an international financial crisis that sober experts say could be the worst for the world economy since the Wall Street crash of 1929, the opinion polls appear to have turned irrevocably against Labour. According to YouGov and ICM, Alistair Darling's attempt at reassurance in his first Budget last week has gone down with the punters like a bucket of dodgy oysters.
OK, it's not all over by any means. Precisely what the collapse of the US investment bank Bear Stearns signifies for Britain or indeed anywhere else is not yet clear - and there are always good reasons to resist the temptation to predict the imminent breakdown of the capitalist system. A dull Budget that enthuses no one is not necessarily an omen of electoral disaster. There are still two years before Brown has to go to the polls, and mid-term unpopularity is something governments should treat as the norm rather than the exception (contrary to Labour's experience since 1997). And the Tories are still a long way short of being a shoo-in.
But it doesn't look good at all. The panic in the stock markets might not last for long - indeed it might be over as I write - but the credit crunch is for real, and it's difficult to see how it won't at very least bring the British housing bubble to an end.
UK house prices have been ludicrously inflated for at least five years, and we Brits - or rather those of us who consider ourselves home-owners, though in fact we're not because we've borrowed to buy - have been binge-consuming on the back of more borrowing against our equity.
Now that is all grinding to a halt, it seems. If banks won't lend money to one another because they're worried about their competitors' US sub-prime exposure, they certainly won't lend to any but the least-risky Brit consumers. The scenario every Labour politician fears is that everyone who has lived the high life on equity-based credit tightens his or her belt, the bottom falls out of the housing market, repossessions rocket, businesses of all kinds go bust - and in six months we're into a recession deeper than that of the early 1990s.
Will it happen? I don't know any more than anyone else, but right now I'm not optimistic. And the thought that we might be facing recession makes me gloomier than I have ever been about Labour's chances at the next general election.
Governments do sometimes survive recessions: the Tories won in 1992, remember. It's not impossible to imagine public opinion rallying to dull, dependable Labour if times really were to get tough. Hunch tells me, however, that it wouldn't be like that. Voters would want to punish Labour for bringing the housing bonanza to an end - and the Tories would reap the benefit. Not a pleasant prospect, but has anyone got a more realistic one?
* * *
On a different matter entirely, I spent Tuesday evening at a meeting of the Suffolk branch of the National Union of Journalists. It was unusually full - in part, no doubt, because of the pulling power of the main speaker, Jeremy Dear, NUJ general secretary and fellow Tribune columnist, but also because of the subject of discussion: the announcement by Archant, the publisher of the Ipswich East Anglian Daily Times and Evening Star, that it was going to replace many of its sub-editors with non-journalist (and worse-paid) page-designers.
You might think this an arcane matter of obvious interest to those whose jobs are threatened but of little wider importance. But it's not. It's yet another example of aggressive newspaper management sacrificing quality journalism in pursuit of greater profits - part of the culture of "churnalism" attacked with such verve by the Guardian's Nick Davies in his book Flat Earth News. Getting rid of subs might save Archant several thousand pounds a year - but it would also inevitably mean stories being published full of grammatical, spelling and factual mistakes.
And that's not because the reporters and feature-writers on the Anglian and the Star are incompetent - just that they're human and fallible. I've been working as a sub at least part of the time for nearly 25 years now, and I have never come across a writer whose work has not been improved by subbing. Even the most elegant stylist will now and again misspell a proper name or attribute a quotation to the wrong person - and many of the best reporters do not write very well. It's true that technology has changed the sub's job out of all recognition since I started, but it hasn't rendered it obsolete - and never will.
10 March 2008
PODER OBRERO
Congratulations to our comrades in the PSOE. Much more important than anything in Venezuela or Cuba; hardly reported.
6 March 2008
THEY'D NONE OF THEM BE MISSED...
The 29 Europhobe Labour MPs who voted with the Tories for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty:
Colin Burgon (Elmet), Ronnie Campbell (Blyth Valley), Frank Cook (Stockton North), Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North), John Cummings (Easington), Ian Davidson (Glasgow South West), David Drew (Stroud), Gwyneth Dunwoody (Crewe & Nantwich), Frank Field (Birkenhead), Mark Fisher (Stoke-on-Trent Central), Roger Godsiff (Birmingham Sparkbrook & Small Heath), Kate Hoey (Vauxhall), Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North), Lindsay Hoyle (Chorley), Lynne Jones (Birmingham Selly Oak), John McDonnell (Hayes & Harlington), David Marshall (Glasgow East), Austin Mitchell (Great Grimsby), Anne Moffat (East Lothian), George Mudie (Leeds East), Denis Murphy (Wansbeck), Alan Simpson (Nottingham South), Dennis Skinner (Bolsover), Graham Stringer (Manchester Blackley), Gisela Stuart (Birmingham Edgbaston), David Taylor (Leicestershire North West), Paul Truswell (Pudsey), Robert Wareing (Liverpool West Derby), Mike Wood (Batley & Spen)
Colin Burgon (Elmet), Ronnie Campbell (Blyth Valley), Frank Cook (Stockton North), Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North), John Cummings (Easington), Ian Davidson (Glasgow South West), David Drew (Stroud), Gwyneth Dunwoody (Crewe & Nantwich), Frank Field (Birkenhead), Mark Fisher (Stoke-on-Trent Central), Roger Godsiff (Birmingham Sparkbrook & Small Heath), Kate Hoey (Vauxhall), Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North), Lindsay Hoyle (Chorley), Lynne Jones (Birmingham Selly Oak), John McDonnell (Hayes & Harlington), David Marshall (Glasgow East), Austin Mitchell (Great Grimsby), Anne Moffat (East Lothian), George Mudie (Leeds East), Denis Murphy (Wansbeck), Alan Simpson (Nottingham South), Dennis Skinner (Bolsover), Graham Stringer (Manchester Blackley), Gisela Stuart (Birmingham Edgbaston), David Taylor (Leicestershire North West), Paul Truswell (Pudsey), Robert Wareing (Liverpool West Derby), Mike Wood (Batley & Spen)
27 February 2008
DID THE EARTH MOVE FOR YOU?
I thought it was a big lorry that shouldn't have been out so late. But in Market Rasen it was something else, according to the BBC:
At the offices of the town's local newspaper, the Market Rasen Mail, the earthquake broke the usual daily news agenda.
Michael Steed, one of the paper's two reporters, said the earthquake had happened too late to make this week's edition, but it was likely to be the front page story next week.
22 February 2008
UP TO A POINT ...
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 22 February 2008
Few books have caused quite such a stir of late as the Guardian journalist Nick Davies’s excoriating expose of British journalism, Flat Earth News. It has been reviewed at length in every quality national, discussed in columns and on radio and TV, excerpted by four different newspapers and magazines.
And it’s not hard to see why there is such interest. Davies breaks the journalistic convention that “dog doesn’t eat dog” – in other words, that journalists don’t attack one another in public – and he does it with panache. No newspaper or broadcaster is spared in his assault on what he calls “churnalism”, “journalists failing to perform the basic functions of their profession; quite unable to tell the reader the truth about what is happening on their patch”.
But is he right? On quite a lot, yes. Journalists too often fail to question received wisdom of all kinds. They are too often bamboozled by spin doctors, corporate public relations companies, axe-grinding pressure groups and disinformation specialists from the spook world. Too many journalists – particularly on local newspapers – are so overworked that they spend nearly all their time recycling press releases, interview only over the phone (never face-to-face) and rarely leave the office. In many news organisations, pressure of time means that facts aren’t checked. Many newspapers and broadcasting outlets have cut back on investigative journalism because it’s too expensive. Some journalists use extraordinarily dubious methods to dig up information; some get too close to their sources. There’s a deeply unpleasant culture of bullying in some national newspapers; others are utterly cynical about running any story that will boost circulation even though they know it to be untrue.
All the same, Davies over-eggs the pudding. He started work on Flat Earth News, he says, because of “a single, notorious story – the long and twisting saga of the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq”: “As the sand settled after the invasion in March 2003 and the weaponless reality slowly began to emerge, journalists across the world started looking for the truth and yet almost all of them wrote about it as though this were a screw-up generated only by intelligence agencies and governments, invariably failing to expose their own profession’s global contribution.”
Yet the chapter of the book that focuses most directly on WMD andIraq
The chapter starts well: its first part is about the reporter David Rose, who ran a series of articles in the wake of 9/11 based on dubious sources: Iraqi exiles and US and British intelligence officials. Rose swallowed the story that there was an Iraqi connection to 9/11, used ropey evidence to question the credibility of Scott Ritter (the American former-weapons-inspector who questioned whether Saddam had WMD) and generally got caught up in what he later described as “a calculated set-up, devised to foster the propaganda for war”. It’s an amazing tale of journalistic misjudgment and Davies tells it well, though I’m unconvinced by his assumption that Rose’s work had a massive impact on the minds of Observer readers: I remember his stories well, and like everyone I know took them with a very large pinch of salt.
What has got them talking in Farringdon Road, though, are Davies’s allegations about the relationship between the Observer and the British government in 2002-03. He has it that the Observer’s editor, Roger Alton, and its political editor, Kamal Ahmed, were manipulated by Alastair Campbell into becoming mouthpieces for No 10 Downing Street – and it’s here that I start to get really sceptical.
Davies suggests that Alton and Ahmed were tricked into supporting the toppling of Saddam and then themselves used underhand means to ensure that the Observer, in defiance of its liberal traditions, backed the government. But a much more plausible explanation of their actions is the simplest: that they came independently to the conclusion that Saddam was a vile dictator who should be overthrown, and so backed the war. They might have been wrong, but there is insufficient evidence to impugn their integrity as Davies does.
I also think he exaggerates both the reliance of the quality national press on news agencies and the unreliability of agency copy – and there are plenty of counter-examples that undermine his claim that investigative journalism is disappearing, not least from his own paper (though you can also find it on occasion even in the Daily Mail). In other words, most journalism in Britain is pretty good, and the best of it is excellent.
But Flat Earth News provides a salutary warning about where things are wrong and what could happen in a worst-case projection of current trends. And you know what? Dog eating dog is horribly watchable.
Few books have caused quite such a stir of late as the Guardian journalist Nick Davies’s excoriating expose of British journalism, Flat Earth News. It has been reviewed at length in every quality national, discussed in columns and on radio and TV, excerpted by four different newspapers and magazines.
And it’s not hard to see why there is such interest. Davies breaks the journalistic convention that “dog doesn’t eat dog” – in other words, that journalists don’t attack one another in public – and he does it with panache. No newspaper or broadcaster is spared in his assault on what he calls “churnalism”, “journalists failing to perform the basic functions of their profession; quite unable to tell the reader the truth about what is happening on their patch”.
But is he right? On quite a lot, yes. Journalists too often fail to question received wisdom of all kinds. They are too often bamboozled by spin doctors, corporate public relations companies, axe-grinding pressure groups and disinformation specialists from the spook world. Too many journalists – particularly on local newspapers – are so overworked that they spend nearly all their time recycling press releases, interview only over the phone (never face-to-face) and rarely leave the office. In many news organisations, pressure of time means that facts aren’t checked. Many newspapers and broadcasting outlets have cut back on investigative journalism because it’s too expensive. Some journalists use extraordinarily dubious methods to dig up information; some get too close to their sources. There’s a deeply unpleasant culture of bullying in some national newspapers; others are utterly cynical about running any story that will boost circulation even though they know it to be untrue.
All the same, Davies over-eggs the pudding. He started work on Flat Earth News, he says, because of “a single, notorious story – the long and twisting saga of the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq”: “As the sand settled after the invasion in March 2003 and the weaponless reality slowly began to emerge, journalists across the world started looking for the truth and yet almost all of them wrote about it as though this were a screw-up generated only by intelligence agencies and governments, invariably failing to expose their own profession’s global contribution.”
Yet the chapter of the book that focuses most directly on WMD and
The chapter starts well: its first part is about the reporter David Rose, who ran a series of articles in the wake of 9/11 based on dubious sources: Iraqi exiles and US and British intelligence officials. Rose swallowed the story that there was an Iraqi connection to 9/11, used ropey evidence to question the credibility of Scott Ritter (the American former-weapons-inspector who questioned whether Saddam had WMD) and generally got caught up in what he later described as “a calculated set-up, devised to foster the propaganda for war”. It’s an amazing tale of journalistic misjudgment and Davies tells it well, though I’m unconvinced by his assumption that Rose’s work had a massive impact on the minds of Observer readers: I remember his stories well, and like everyone I know took them with a very large pinch of salt.
What has got them talking in Farringdon Road, though, are Davies’s allegations about the relationship between the Observer and the British government in 2002-03. He has it that the Observer’s editor, Roger Alton, and its political editor, Kamal Ahmed, were manipulated by Alastair Campbell into becoming mouthpieces for No 10 Downing Street – and it’s here that I start to get really sceptical.
Davies suggests that Alton and Ahmed were tricked into supporting the toppling of Saddam and then themselves used underhand means to ensure that the Observer, in defiance of its liberal traditions, backed the government. But a much more plausible explanation of their actions is the simplest: that they came independently to the conclusion that Saddam was a vile dictator who should be overthrown, and so backed the war. They might have been wrong, but there is insufficient evidence to impugn their integrity as Davies does.
I also think he exaggerates both the reliance of the quality national press on news agencies and the unreliability of agency copy – and there are plenty of counter-examples that undermine his claim that investigative journalism is disappearing, not least from his own paper (though you can also find it on occasion even in the Daily Mail). In other words, most journalism in Britain is pretty good, and the best of it is excellent.
But Flat Earth News provides a salutary warning about where things are wrong and what could happen in a worst-case projection of current trends. And you know what? Dog eating dog is horribly watchable.
18 February 2008
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