Political blogging

It seemed a good idea at the time. Now I'm not so sure. Next Thursday, I'm at the frontline club with Ben Hammersley - one of my favourite gurus and blogger - and Richard Gizbert - of the al Jazeera 'Listening Post'. Blogger Ethan Zuckermann - co-founder of Global Voices and blogger Alaa Abd El-Fattah will join by phone.

We'll be talking about political blogging. An uneven contest, especially since I'm the - alleged - sceptic in the line-up. And even more especially since I'm not in the least sceptical about blogging ... whatever that would mean.

What I am sceptical about is that blogging or any other form of social networking can fix what's bust about our politics and our political journalism. In fact, it's more likely to make them both worse.

Each new alliance of social media and politics has one or more of these claims made about it;

• it's an attempt to bridge the gap between politicians and the public
• it brings a voice to the conversation that's been marginalised by conventional politics and political journalism
• it enables direct communication between politician and elector without the mediation of broken political journalism

Each of which is fine in itself. But while all of these contribute to the civic conversation, they aren't the problem. I can see little evidence that blogging or any other form of social networking increases the trust - still at floor level - that voters have in politicians or in those who report their doings to them. I can't see how a blogging politician is any closer to his/her constituency than one who holds surgeries, makes speeches at prize-givings and knocks on the occasional door.

From what I see of the successful political blogs - let's take Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes for instance - they replicate the inward looking, metropolitan chumminess of the Westminster village that many in the audience find repellent in both politics and political journalism. Similarly, I'm left wondering what it is or might be that Benedict Brogan, say, or Daniel Hannan (political journalists both, politician the latter) might say in their blogs that they might not say in their columns, leaders or - in Daniel Hannan's case - addresses to the European Parliament.
It's inevitable, too, that - as Joe Trippi told Jeff Jarvis - politics on social networking sites will become dominated by 'makaka moment' videos ... accentuating rather than countering a similar trend in political reporting.

Crucially, though, no form of social networking bridges the gap that has to be bridged. And that's the one that used to be filled by party organisation that joined the civic conversation to political action - formally in the case of Labour and the Liberal Democrats, informally in the case of the Conservatives. It's fine to have a robust and energetic civic conversation ... but a conversation is exactly what it says it is; talk.

I can see how blogging enables that conversation; I can't see how ideologies are derived from it nor how political judgement and action are derived except in a nervy, fractured obedience to some assessment of 'the public mood'. Which is precisely the problem in the three way relationship between people, politicians and political journalism.

Let's see how Thursday goes.

Is the British press the worst in the west?

As almost everyone predicted, the stories of the 15 marines - or at least those who sold/were allowed to sell their stories - morphed instantly into a commentary on the British press.

Unseasonally, Martin Moore at the Media Standards Trust, likened the whole affair to a pantomime before pondering just what it was that the Press Complaints Commission were up to in their reported offer of help. As Martin points out:

"The PCC, as it repeatedly states, reacts to complaints – it does not pre-empt them. This was one of the reasons it gave last year for not taking action against the 305 journalists exposed by the Information Commission for illegally gathering personal private information (and breaking clause 10 of the code)."

Charlie Beckett, over at the LSE's POLIS, wants us to "lighten up and save (our) moral outrage for something truly horrible." While Professor Adrian Monck at City University found himself "thinking about the moral problems of military service".

Melanie Phillips - who writes for the Daily Mail, one of the losers in the bidding war - thought the whole affair was a debacle of the first order – "a grim parable of the degraded state to which Britain has now descended and an alarming portent for the free world in its fight to survive." So, no sign of sour grapes there then ... though you are left wondering what she might have written if the Mail had got one or more of the marines to talk.

Andrew Grant Adamson at Wordblog is bemused at the world in which military personnel are allowed - enabled - to break their code of omerta .... but not parents, desperate to tell the story of their "nightmare" at the hands of a family court.

But it was Polly Toynbee's column - and blog at the Guardian's comment is free - that really piled the ordure on the head of the British press.

"Our press, the worst in the west, demoralises us all"

... ran the headline. And after trotting through the various tabloid hypocrisies, her column/blog concludes:

"What is so squalid about these newspapers is their use of figleaf sermons to cover their real business, done with corrupting chequebook, threat, intimidation, invasion of privacy, paparazzi aggression and vicious cruelty.
Labour should use this disgrace to reign in chequebook tell-all by public servants, from those at the top such as Christopher Meyer to those at the bottom such as these sailors. It's time to look again at privacy legislation, a quid pro quo for the Freedom of Information Act the press abuses with petty assaults on government.
The media is in danger of making government by any party impossible."

The real meat, though, is in the comments - long, but worth spending some time on ... if only for the way in which the debate ("if X agrees with Y that Polly's motivations are Z ... then though I agree with her I have to disagree ...") slides though meta-debate into a form of rhetorical calculus that's, possibly, beyond mathematical expression.

In defence of the "citizen journalist"

Martin Moore of the Media Standards Trust has posted a plea – “please stop calling us ‘citizen journalists’”

Martin’s argument is of the Holy Roman Empire variety – neither citizens (in the overtly active sense of the word) nor journalists.
“How many bloggers / vloggers etc. would even call themselves journalists let alone citizen journalists?”he asks.

“What we're really talking about is a bunch of different phenomenon lumped together as 'citizen journalism'. There's the virtual stringers - people who happen to be somewhere that news is happening and record it (like at the 7/7 bombings). People who just reflect on or react to the news (like this blog). And people who write / photograph / video things which they don't consider 'news' but publish online and then gets picked up by others who consider it newsworthy. Maybe we should call them 'virtual stringers', 'demablogs', and plain old 'bloggers' until we develop a new vocabulary.”

Whether bloggers can ever call themselves journalists – in the sense of going out there and getting stories, standing them up, checking them etc … as opposed to happening to be there when stories happen or having ripe and robust views on something happening somewhere else – is a question Robert Niles takes on over at the Online Journalism Review.

“Are blogs a parasitic medium” bluntly. And Robert Niles goes on:
“I hear the frustration behind the comment. You bust your rear to get stories in the paper, then watch bloggers grab traffic talking about your work. All the while your bosses are laying off other reporters, citing circulation declines, as analysts talk about newspapers losing audience to the Web. It's not hard to understand why many newspaper journalists would come to view blogs as parasites, sucking the life from their newsrooms.
Still, the charge riles me every time I hear it.”

Robert Niles’ posting – written while “riled” – nonetheless seems aimed at whittling out a consensus … though some of the bloggers he consults use words like “baloney” while also pointing out that there are blogs that address topics the mainstream media ignore; that even derivative blogs “animate” the stories they reference; and anyway, there’s nothing new about journalists referencing each others’ work so why shouldn’t bloggers.

Oh and Lisa Stone, co-founder of BlogHer.org makes the obvious observation that:
"An opinion editorialist doesn't have to break news herself to provide amazing, fresh perspective on world events -- whether she's published on the New York Times Op-Ed page or on her own blog.”

Robert Niles’ consensual tendencies can be read here; The silliest, and most destructive, debate in journalism in which he pleads:
“Let's quit arguing the merits of "mainstream" versus "citizen" journalism and instead work together on "better" journalism.”

And there’s something of that in buzzmachine’s Jeff Jarvis who posted this unremittingly optimistic account – most of which, for what it’s worth, I happen to agree with – of a term teaching journalists (first filed for Guardian Media on Monday.)

On the key question, the BBC has more or less dumped the term “citizen journalism”, preferring however reluctantly “user generated content.”

But the phrase “citizen journalism” seems to contain something really rather subtle that Martin Moore’s – and others’ – rejection of it misses ... though it’s certainly the case that “citizen journalism” means/meant something different depending on where you used it from.

For Big Journalism, it had a patronising tang that almost equated to “less than a … journalist”. For citizen journalists, though, it emphasised the truth of both citizenship and journalism (ok, I know we’re all subjects and not citizens in the UK … but rest-up for a moment); that you needed to be qualified for neither and that journalists were citizens, citizens journalists.

Oh… and that the rights and responsibilities of both were identical. Try the phrase “non-citizen journalist”. Doesn’t quite work, does it?

OK – vloggers/bloggers/networkers/shares are a pretty diverse group; they’re also – the few studies that there are suggest – a pretty parasitic lot. But Lisa Stone is right – so are journalists.

Whatever we call them/us, the people formerly known as citizen journalists have never just dumped a load of raw newsgathering into the news stream. They’ve also established a pretty high level of media critique that means any and every form of journalism is now forced to look over its shoulder at the strident cries of foul from those who formerly fumed (quietly) in the audience.

Which is where Robert Niles’ ‘destructive debate’ posting comes in. Whatever you call them, “citizen journalists” are an essential component of better journalism.

And hurrah for that. I still like the term “citizen journalist” – not that it describes what anyone does. But for the simple existential reason that it describes what they are.

Hell, apparently ...

… hath no fury like a conspiracist scorned.

The series producer of The Conspiracy Files, Mike Rudin acknowledged in his BBC Editors’ blog on 22 February that “it had to happen”. And it has.

Sites hosting 9/11 conspiracy theories – like this one – must by now be threatening pornography’s premier position on the web, if the scale of the blogging around The Conspiracy Files’ 9/11 programme is anything to go by. They’ve even camped on David Cameron’s website.

Blogger Mark Belam – a former BBC IT specialist – neatly brings the story up to date -- in brief, the new twist in the 9/11 conspiracy theory is that the BBC was in on it.

Evidence? A Jane Standley 2-way on BBC World – which didn’t ‘come to light’ until 26 February 2007 – in which, the conspiracists say, she and anchor Phillip Hayton announced that a building on the World Trade Centre site – the Salomon Brothers Building or WTC7 – had collapsed before it actually had.

Indeed, the conspiracists say, the Salomon Brothers building can be seen in the background, still standing as Jane Standley was reporting its collapse … and continued to stand for a further 23 minutes.

This, conspiracy sites like this one, say is a “smoking gun” – proof that 9/11 was a Bush administration inside job, planned and executed meticulously even down to the preparation of press-releases setting out the intended sequence of events. By pre-empting the collapse of WTC7, the conspiracists say, the BBC blew the gaffe, showing at the same time that it was part of the conspiracy.

Adding to the conspiracy theory is the fact that the BBC hasn’t kept time-coded tapes of World output on that day.

News 24 tapes, which do have a time code, have been kept and extracts have now been posted on YouTube. Therse show that the news of the Salomon Brothers building collapse was reported on News 24 at 1655 New York time – a full 12 minutes before BBC World reported the same event and 25 minutes before the actual collapse.

I have a hunch – no more than that – that this might be where BBC World got the story from.

Poor quality grabs and recordings of BBC World output for the period in question – between 1657 and 1720 New York Time – have been posted on YouTube (though in line with all good conspiracy theories, Google have been accused of pulling them … which just isn’t true as you can see here, here, here ... etc; over forty posts in all. Though presumably, today’s announcement of a new partnership between BBC World and YouTube is more grist to the conspiracists’ mill)

By the end of February, the BBC’s inside knowledge was accepted as fact both on conspiracy websites but also in the responses on the BBC Editors’ blog and as random posts on other blogging sites about journalism and the BBC.

Doubtless BBC World Head of News, Richard Porter, knew he was on a hiding for nothing when he set out – about as frankly and openly as it gets – what was really happening in the BBC World newsroom and bureaux on that day; 209 responses and rising.

Unfortunately, saying “we’re not part of a conspiracy” as Richard Porter does, is proof positive of the opposite in the eyes of any conspiracist.

Which puts me well and truly in the frame. I was responsible for special 9/11 programmes on that day (I was Editor of WATO and PM then) and if there was a conspiracy that the BBC was part of, they’d forgotten to tell me.

I was in Canary Wharf when the attacks happened/conspiracy got under way – maybe I had been told but got the wrong high buildings on the wrong continent – and was first alerted by ever more agitated voicemail messages from my deputy.

Bit of a serious oversight, don’t you think? If we were all working to a script, the first thing you’d make sure of was that a) the people who mattered knew what it was and b) they didn’t go off it – and as every broadcast journalist knows from the event coverage that we do rehearse, no amount of preparation prevents the actual day being what is known in the trade as a “kick-bollock scramble”. Technical term.

Things go wrong in newsrooms. Journalists make mistakes. It happens. We’re not proud of it – but journalism, on a day like 9/11 is a rough, blunt, messy trade. Rumour gets hardened into fact before it vanishes without trace. Live and continuous news shares its verification processes with its audience, live and on-screen. Reporting a rumour as fact - often taken from wire services who are 99.99% reliable or from eye-witnesses whose view and understanding of events was, it turns out, less than perfect - isn't ideal ... but it would be a fool who thought it could always be wholly avoided on a day like 9/11.

The alternative explanation – that someone told journalists the script in advance – is utterly risible. Leading a team of BBC journalists, any journalists, is – to use the cliché – an exercise in herding cats. Their personal and professional pride resides in their wilful, cussed, cantankerous determination to find ways of not doing what their editor wants. Of proving him/her wrong.

As an Editor, I’m always hugely disappointed if at least one person in the team doesn’t tell me to push off with my rubbish ideas. I wouldn’t want it any other way nor to work with any journalist who could be told what to say. I never have. It’s BBC journalism’s greatest strength and protection against the thought control that the conspiracists assume in any organisation they don’t understand.

But here’s another unexplained mystery the conspiracists should be having a go at.

If you look back at the footage of the News 24 live coverage of 9/11, round about 1403 UK time – 0903 New York time – you can see the second plane approaching the towers. It’s a clear steady, shot … though a distant one. And yet, the female studio anchor can be heard saying that the approaching aircraft is a rescue helicopter.

I’d always thought she’d just made a mistake – though mistaking an inbound Boeing 767 for a helicopter isn’t that easy – under the pressure of trying to keep both a live 2-way going and live commentary on the pictures coming in, while reading the wires, sorting scripts and taking studio directions from the gallery.

But now I realise that a shady operative from BBC Conspiracy Central had, in fact, accidentally handed her a script from the pile marked Second Hour instead of the one marked First Hour.

An easy mistake to make and the real smoking gun that has now blown open this conspiracy which, apparently, involved thousands of people worldwide … not one of whom, curiously, has swapped their story for the, doubtless, millions of pounds/dollars that would be on offer for it

Whose side are THEY on?

Is journalism – including BBC journalism – ‘on the side of’ civil liberties? Or at least, on the side of free speech?
A question worth putting after the Sun twice asked last week “whose side are these guys on?” ... meaning, the BBC. Their question was first prompted by a 10 o’clock News report on the Birmingham terror arrests that reminded viewers – Forest Gate? Jean Charles de Menezes? – "this is an intelligence-led operation. Intelligence can be wrong".
And secondly by the appearance of one of the men arrested - and after seven days released - on Radio 4's Today programme. In that second editorial, the Sun mused:"It sometimes seems the BBC would prefer terrorists to succeed than for an innocent man to be briefly held without charge. In their politically correct bubble, intelligence is always flawed and anti-terror action is inevitably heavy-handed. So the release of two suspects held over the alleged plot to behead a British Muslim soldier was a gift from heaven."
Over at the Mail, the former Sun commentator Richard ‘you couldn’t make it up’ Littlejohn (sadly, his two employers of choice have done just that) mused similarly, objecting to Abu Bakr's freedom to say on Today that Britain was ‘a police state for Muslims’.
Littlejohn’s' logic was tortured – mind, it was in the same column in which he appeared to support, or certainly not condemn, bomb attacks on government offices ... so long as not too many people weren’t too badly hurt.
I quote:“Be honest, until you heard that a woman had been injured, how many of you suppressed a cheer at the news someone had sent a letter bomb to the company which runs London's congestion charge? …Even after we learnt that two men were treated for blast injuries, I'll bet that there were still plenty of motorists who thought: serves the bastards right. “
Two things made Abu Bakr a bit ‘dodge’ apparently; one, that he seemed ‘very well briefed’ and two – and this bangs him to rights, squire – he was represented by one of Britain’s best known civil liberties lawyers. He should have made it a fair fight and engaged a copyright lawyer.
Littlejohn is, of course, wrong footed by the inconvenience that, in the eyes of the law if not a Mail columnist, Abu Bakr is as innocent as anyone … perhaps even more innocent than someone with an ambiguous stance on blowing up government offices.
It would, he argues, have been ok to interview Abu Bakr if the BBC had a record of interviewing, let’s say, the (innocent) associates of gangsters.
Or perhaps the BBC and the police were taken in by a plot to inflame Muslim opinion which “doesn’t take very much inflaming at the best of times”. That’ll be unlike the level headed people who send letter bombs to the DVLA, then.
BBC Head of TV News, Peter Horrocks, wrote in Monday’s BBC Editors’ Blog – in response to the Sun’s first attack – that it’s “not the BBC’s job to take sides”.
Sort of.
If journalism is about anything it is about free speech. Even without the constitutional protection here that free speech has in the US, few would question the right of Sun leader writers and Mail columnists to speak freely. If predictably.
It’s the same right that allows the pub bigot to void his spleen in the snug … or an innocent bookshop employee like Abu Bakr to tell Today whether he thinks he and his fellow Muslims enjoy the same civil liberties that, say, Richard Littlejohn enjoys. However offensively well-briefed he seems about his arrest(?!).
The Mail and the Sun are in that great tradition of punchy, gobby, misguided, opinionated, rabble-rousing journalism in this country – and long may it survive. Long may they keep their right to be wrong.
But they couldn’t do that without the rights of the individual to speak, to be treated fairly and according to the law and to be free to live a life unburdened by prejudice (‘Muslim opinion doesn’t take much inflaming at the best of times.”)
There’ll always be forces pressing to take those liberties away; there’s always a new ‘crisis’ that means this age is different from all that went before, the pieces will always be in flux …
But when journalists write leaders and columns against freedom of speech … you really do have to wonder whose side they’re on.