Journalism

Martin Bright in the New StatesmanSpectator

bq. Incidentally, I now think the invasion was indeed an error: carried out at the wrong time, by the wrong coalition for the wrong reasons. But where I do agree with the “decents” is that those who opposed intervention in 2002/3 were arguing for the murderous Baathist regime to stay in power. This should remain on their conscience just as the murderous consequences of the invasion are on the conscience of those who supported the war.

(via comments at “Aaronovitch Watch”:http://aaronovitch.blogspot.com/ .)

I hardly ever buy newspapers these days, I just read their websites. The gains are probably greater than the losses: I used to take the Guardian and hardly ever see the others, now I get to read a range of British and foreign papers. The one exception I make is the weekend edition of the Financial Times. In fact, the FT, in its Saturday version is my nomination for the best English-language paper in the world. I love it, as every copy brings pleasurable reading. Today’s was a special treat as it contains “a conversation”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/cb8506f6-9e60-11de-b0aa-00144feabdc0.html between one of my favourite journalists (Lucy Kellaway) and Nick Hornby (about whom it is hard to avoid having warm, friendly feelings, even if he is an Arsenal fan). Also, check out “Simone Baribeau’s account”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/f64a9e36-9da3-11de-9f4a-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=a712eb94-dc2b-11da-890d-0000779e2340.html of working to sell overpriced houses to poor people during the bubble, whilst knowing that you are doing wrong but feeling unable to quit because of the need to fund dental treatment. I think I could post half a dozen more links to today’s edition, but just go and buy it (if in the UK) or browse away (especially the Arts and Leisure section).

A moment of silence for <a href=”http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2009/07/barefaced-goaway-bird.html”>Hilzoy</a>, who’s retiring from blogging this week.

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“Politico”:http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/24441.html

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post has offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, non-confrontational access to “those powerful few” — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and — at first — even the paper’s own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff.” …

“Underwriting Opportunity: An evening with the right people can alter the debate,” says the one-page flier. “Underwrite and participate in this intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth. … Bring your organization’s CEO or executive director literally to the table. Interact with key Obama administration and congressional leaders.” …

The flier says: “Spirited? Yes. Confrontational? No. The relaxed setting in the home of Katharine Weymouth assures it. What is guaranteed is a collegial evening, with Obama administration officials, Congress members, business leaders, advocacy leaders and other select minds typically on the guest list of 20 or less. …

“Offered at $25,000 per sponsor, per Salon. Maximum of two sponsors per Salon. Underwriters’ CEO or Executive Director participates in the discussion. Underwriters appreciatively acknowledged in printed invitations and at the dinner. Annual series sponsorship of 11 Salons offered at $250,000 … Hosts and Discussion Leaders … Health-care reporting and editorial staff members of The Washington Post … An exclusive opportunity to participate in the health-care reform debate among the select few who will actually get it done. … A Washington Post Salon … July 21, 2009 6:30 p.m. …

“Washington Post Salons are extensions of The Washington Post brand of journalistic inquiry into the issues, a unique opportunity for stakeholders to hear and be heard,” the flier says. “At the core is a critical topic of our day. Dinner and a volley of ideas unfold in an evening of intelligent, news-driven and off-the-record conversation. … By bringing together those powerful few in business and policy-making who are forwarding, legislating and reporting on the issues, Washington Post Salons give life to the debate. Be at this nexus of business and policy with your underwriting of Washington Post Salons.”

The Washington Post’s news division seems quite upset at the way that the event was described in the promotional materials, and has now said that it won’t be participating. But this kind of event is not unusual in Washington DC, even if the marketing isn’t usually quite as crass and direct.

The sacking of Dan Froomkin by the Washington Post reminds me of something attributed (IIRC) to Auberon Waugh on being told that Randolph Churchill had undergone the surgical removal of a tumour that turned out not to be malignant.

It is a marvel of medical science that they could first locate the one part of Randolph that was not malignant, and, having found it, immediately remove it

More from the ever-growing Wapo fan club.

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Rupert Murdoch thinks “he can charge people for reading The Times online”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/may/07/rupert-murdoch-charging-websites :

bq. Asked whether he envisaged fees at his British papers such as the Times, the Sunday Times, the Sun and the News of the World, he replied: “We’re absolutely looking at that.” Taking questions on a conference call with reporters and analysts, he said that moves could begin “within the next 12 months‚” adding: “The current days of the internet will soon be over.”

Hmm. On Tuesday I attended the Bristol Book Awards. Nick Davies walked off with the prize for his “Flat Earth News“:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0099512688/junius-21. The killer “findings”:http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=40123 :

bq. 80 per cent of news stories in the quality UK national newspapers are at least partly made up of recycled newswire or PR copy, according to new research. This was one of the findings of a study by Cardiff University’s journalism department which also claimed that fewer Fleet Street journalists now produce three times as many pages as they did 20 years ago. The research was carried out for a controversial new book investigating Fleet Street by Guardian journalist Nick Davies. It also claims that the majority of home news stories in national newspapers are mainly made up of PR and/or wire copy. The research claims that the proportions are: The Times, 69 per cent; The Daily Telegraph, 68 per cent; Daily Mail, 66 per cent; The Independent, 65 per cent and The Guardian, 52 per cent.

So why would people pay for that?

Martin Kelner’s “utterly cynical piece in the Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2009/apr/13/hillsborough-disaster-liverpool-martin-kelner-bbc rather sums up the attitude of metropolitan journalists. OK, so he focuses on the BBC rather than asking directly, “why don’t those mawkish Scousers shut up about their 96 dead?”, but the comparisons to Diana and Jade Goody are there for a purpose (there are some excellent comments by readers in response). Actually, I think the BBC’s coverage of the anniversary has been rather good, especially Kelly Dalglish’s fine radio programme (not mentioned by Kelner, but also featuring interviews with the parents of the Hicks sisters). There are lots of good reasons not to shut up after 20 years. Not only has there been no apology from the police for their actions, but many things haven’t changed. I was reminded of this whilst listening to the current Chief Constable of South Yorkshire explain how much the police have learnt and how it wouldn’t happen today. Oh really? Well as we know from the G20 protests (and other recent events such as the de Menezes shooting) the police still try to get their “blame the victim” story in early. They still represent themselves as helping the victim but being prevented by a hail of missiles that no-one else saw. Videotapes that might have provided evidence of police misconduct or ineptitude still disappear, or cameras “malfunction”. And the police still get to compare their notes after events involving deaths, just to make sure that their stories are consistent and supportive of the institutional stance. Yes, all good reasons not to shut up.

“The NYT”:http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/the-orphans-of-ireland/

the island of saints and scholars … The next parish over, they say … is Boston … the wellspring of poets and balladeers as advertised: those emerald fields, those ruddy-cheeked fishermen warming pub seats, a land of stone and cold wind that produced a lyrical people and a music embraced more than ever by the young. … Every village that had seen nary a rock wall or a cottage window unchanged suddenly had a cul de sac of insta-homes and a half-dozen O’Mansions. Anyone with a mortgage could get rich in little more time than it took for a head of Guinness to settle. … wonderfully brooding town, where David Lean filmed “Ryan’s Daughter,” the sod was peeled back for the worst kind of Southern California housing developments. … beer-soaked backwater … “I left a godly land of broke but merry alcoholics and came back to a place where people who used to dig potatoes were buying luxury apartments sight unseen and driving Porsches.” … marvel at a people burning peat to stay warm against blustery Atlantic winds. … empty new homes tell a story of greed.

Fill in the blanks yerself. In all fairness, a couple of the choicer phrases were quoted by the author from other people’s articles, but others weren’t. I suspect that the author of this piece was especially proud of ‘O’Mansions’ and the Guinness-head-settle as a unit of duration. He shouldn’t be.

(Reposted from my blog, so the examples are Australian, but readers from other countries can easily substitute)

In one sense, the blogosphere has reached a near-universal consensus on climate change. Everyone who follows the issue at all closely agrees that there is no real debate. Instead, it’s generally agreed, we have a situation where (1) a large body of people devoted to serious scientific research is confronted by (2) pushers of silly Internet talking points who are ideologically motivated, financially driven or just plain delusional . The only disagreement is which group is which. Is group (1):

* The Australian Academy of Science, all other similar organisations and the vast majority of active climate scientists;

or is it

* The 650 “sceptical scientists” identified by Marc Morano (aide to US Senator Inhofe) including such Australian luminaries as David Evans, Louis Hissink, Warwick Hughes and Jennifer Marohasy (Morano’s list includes numerous genuine scientists whose views he has misrepresented but he’s right to include all those I’ve mentioned )

Broadly speaking, for anyone from politically left or centrist blogs the first answer is correct, and for anyone from the political right, the second answer is correct. As far as the mainstream media is concerned, Fox News, the Australian and some other outlets know where they stand.

But for establishment outlets like the Washington Post, the idea that either (nearly) all scientists or (nearly) all right-of-centre politicans and commentators are liars/hacks/self-deluded is rather hard to accept. So we get episodes like this one. (via Tim Lambert)

John’s “post below”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/02/16/a-long-dated-call/ reminds me of one of the odder conventions of American journalism. Because US journalists aren’t supposed to express their own opinions, they often need other people to express those opinions (or the opinions that will ‘balance’ out their story) for them, so that they can use quotes from these people to spin the interpretation of the facts in the one way or another. This leads to some very peculiar interview techniques from journalists. About two out of every three calls I get from journalists have a strong line in directly leading questions of the ‘would you agree that _x_ ‘ variety.

This is of course a minor example of a much more general phenomenon. A very large part of the communications and public relations industry is devoted to what you might call ‘opinion laundering’ – the job of disguising the origins of self-interested or otherwise problematic policy positions by getting apparently legitimate third parties to validate and repeat them. Which is why I get nervous every time I see a “survey”:http://www.edelman.com/trust/2009/ that purports to tell us that academics are the most trusted interlocutors on this or that issue. While this may sound very nice, it increases the relative returns to using academics as flacks rather than some other profession, and hence “helps screw up further”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/12/16/ghostwritten/ a set of professional norms that are valuable ones to have.

I’ve been out of the blogosphere for the last week or so; one of the things that I would have written about if I had been around are the persistent and well sourced rumours (see e.g. “Scott’s post at _IHE_”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/blogs/intellectual_affairs_the_blog/shutting_down_the_washington_post_book_world ) that the _Washington Post_ is considering shutting down their weekly _Book World_ supplement. Editor Marcus Brauchli (whom, if rumor is to be believed, is pushing the change) has prominently failed to deny the reports, merely stating that “We are absolutely committed to book reviews and coverage of literature, publishing and ideas in The Post” (which I suspect, if decoded, translates to something like “we may still stick in the odd book review as filler when we’re running low on Paris Hilton stories”). The closure of _Book World_ is something I’d take personally; when I first came to DC in the 1990s, it was a surprise and a delight to see pieces that took, say, John Crowley seriously, interspersed with the more usual reviews of biographies, political books and so on. And Michael Dirda should be declared a Living Treasure. I understand that this decision isn’t set in stone – if you want to tell the Washington Post that this is a bad idea, you can do so “here”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/opinions/feedback/index.html#tellusBox. _WP_ subscribers are especially encouraged to make their feelings known.

So Foreign Policy has a new “frontpage”:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/, with lots and lots of blogs by a variety of international relations and journalists. I’m considerably more optimistic about this stable’s odds over the long run than I was about the last effort to create a quasi-academic superblog ( the now defunct ‘Open University’ at _The New Republic_ ) since they haven’t made the mistake of relying on famous or semi-famous people who have never blogged before, and have lots of other commitments and obligations that are likely to come first. Instead, there are a number of people (Dan Drezner, Marc Lynch, Laura Rozen) who are well known in their own right, but who also have an established track record in blogging. Nor (and again, I think this is a good thing), have they tossed a bunch of very disparate people into a single group blog, instead providing a mixture of some group blogging among people with similar ideological predilections, and some individual. The only disappointment that this leads to is that I’d been quite looking forward to seeing how Stephen Walt and Philip Zelikow handled being blogmates after this “little contretemps”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n10/letters.html (read letters 2 and 3) – it would have been entertaining to watch from a distance.

The “Irish Times”:http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2008/1219/1229523105576.html has the story, although it concentrates on his not-especially successful political career rather than his intellectual contribution. I found his later work (both books and newspaper journalism) to be very nearly unreadable, less because of its sometimes reactionary politics than because of how badly it was written. There was plenty of choler and spleen, but little real humour. But his earlier books – I’m especially fond of _States of Ireland_, which really remade the debate over Irish national identity – are still a joy and a delight to read. His best writing was liberal in the most expansive sense of that term, clearly thought through, open to its own contradictions, generous where generosity was warranted, and witheringly accurate where it wasn’t (he had a near Galbraithian facility for cutting through the bullshit with a pungent description).

A new web resource called Homeschooling Research and Scholarship has just come online, courtesy of Rob Kunzman of the Indiana University School of Education. He’s gathered together a vast array of academic resources concerning homeschooling because, as he says:

while many homeschool organizations and advocacy groups provide information and analysis, there are few places to go for a less partisan perspective.

Below the fold are the three key points he asks all journalists to read before starting to use the resource (I’ve cut some bits out, so its still worth reading his page). Can I suggest that responsible people might also link not to this post, but to Rob’s site, both to spread the word and to improve his google rating (if it really works that way) and, (very) eventually, public discourse about homeschooling.

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