20
Feb 11   

The fast-finger Twitter dilemma: a small confession

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I did something yesterday that I probably shouldn’t have. I yielded to the temptation of what the people at lolcats.com call “ease of do”.

I retweeted a short tweet from the Libyan expatriate novelist Hisham Matar about what has been happening in Benghazi. On Saturday afternoon, fragments of fact were starting to seep from the city on the eastern Libyan coast suggesting that something very bad was happening there. I happened to be looking at Twitter. I saw and retweeted this short message from @hishamjmatar:

Doctor in Benghazi hospital puts the death toll at 120. A massacre is taking place in Benghazi. Please spread the news. #Feb17 #Libya

While I still feel uneasy about having relayed it, I don’t think I’ve done any harm. Everything we’ve heard or seen since tells us that the Libyan authorities have been killing protesters in Benghazi; the death toll may well be higher than 120. I gave Matar’s message a modest extra push because I admire his fine novel In The Country of Men, which is based on his own childhood and gives a chilling child’s-eye picture of what Ghaddafi’s regime feels like if you dare to oppose it.

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18
Feb 11   

Schifferes: too much information, too much specialisation

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A great deal of recent backchat, panel burble and analysis of journalism lately has focussed on diagnosing spectacular “failures”. Why did the news media so easily swallow the idea that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Why did the news media fail to foresee the financial meltdown in 2008?

My colleague Steve Schifferes, who directs the MA in Financial Journalism at City University, pondered on the financial failure in his inaugural lecture yesterday. (Full text here). There is a great deal to enjoy and appreciate in his look backwards and forwards over business and economic journalism, but two points in particular seem worth drawing out.
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12
Feb 11   

Wikileaks and Assange: two books

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I’ve reviewed the first two books of what will be a literary cascade on Wikileaks in today’s Times (£): the account of Julian Assange’s collaboration with The Guardian by David Leigh and Luke Harding and the inside account from Daniel Domscheit-Berg of his time as Assange’s lieutenant.

The former is largely devoted to the clinching and subsequent collapse of the cooperation between Assange and The Guardian. Domscheit-Berg’s book, driven mostly by pique, is a lengthy complaint about Assange’s dictatorial methods. Both books include useful background on the early origins of Wikileaks. Both books underline that Wikileaks is Julian Assange, no more and no less.

I have discovered that writing blogposts (or reviews) about Julian Assange puts you in the line of fire from his passionate devotees if not from Assange himself. I’ve already been called a “supercilious weasel” and there’s probably worse to come. So if you’re new to this blog you’ll find earlier posts by entering “Assange” in the search box to the right of this post, including my reflections on his two appearances at City University last year. The first of those, much the more intriguing of the two, was before the major leaks of 2010 began.

A few offcuts from the books that couldn’t be squeezed into the review: Continue reading –>

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08
Feb 11   

In defence of party leaders’ TV debates in elections

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Interesting arguments and data last night from Professor Stephen Coleman, giving the first David Butler lecture, supporting the case for continued televised leaders debates in general elections, begun last year. (You have had these already for a long time in other countries? We are a little behind here).

Coleman was taking aim at the grumbling which attested to the success of the debates. Gordon Brown, who was going to lose the election irrespective of what happened in the debates and who did not perform well in them, complained that the televised jousting “clouded” the issues. Jon Snow of Channel 4 News (who was not invited to moderate one of the debates) kvetched that the British system was turning presidential and spoiling the campaign.

These were transparently silly arguments when they were made, but Coleman demolished them with a handful of arguments and figures from some research just out from the Reuters Institute in Oxford. A selection:
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04
Feb 11   

A different angle on the proposed News Corp takeover of BSkyB

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At a seminar on media plurality held in City University today, two knowledgeable commentators aired opinions on the vexed issue of News Corp’s bid to own 100% of BSkyB that were so different from the usual lines of argument that they deserve a wider hearing.

David Elstein, who has worked for most British broadcasting channels (including BSkyB), pointed out that the debate over the takeover was now entirely confined to Sky News, the least valuable part of the company and losing somewhere between £30m and £50m a year. The BSkyB board, he said, had already made clear that it was prepared to sacrifice – to sell or to close – the news division in order to get the rest of the deal through. In those circumstances, Elstein suggested, Rupert Murdoch could happily allow Ofcom, the regulator, to appoint the team of news executives at Sky News and make several other similar concessions to erect barriers against his interference in news. In that case, Murdoch would have no more or less influence on the editorial output than he does now, but would have secured the profit stream from the company at that relatively small price.

Elstein went one stage further and reminded his audience that news organisations are not the same as broadcasters: Independent Television News, for example, doesn’t broadcast but supplies other broadcasters. Sky News could find itself in the same position as a contract supplier of news, perhaps in Britain and certainly in continental Europe.

This got me thinking. People have talked about the possible closure of Sky News, particularly if a deal stops the cross-subsidy from BSkyB. But tens of millions of pounds have also been invested in the Sky News website. The site is one of the best of its kind in the world – often giving the larger BBC a run for its money – with a sizeable team of its own journalists, including video reporters. The chances of this being shut down, even if Sky News wasn’t broadcasting any more, are small. Almost certainly zero.

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01
Feb 11   

Lionel Barber on the risk of political blowback from phone-hacking

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A quick plug for the full text of the Cudlipp memorial lecture given last night at the London College of Communication by the Financial Times editor Lionel Barber.

The headline on his talk was, unsurprisingly, drawn from Barber’s warning that politicians, bruised and resentful over the parliamentary expenses scandal, are liable to use the phone-hacking scandal to limit journalism’s freedom to manoeuvre. He’s dead right about that. A lot of journalism sails close to the wind and to the limits of the law, but the lies and the silence over phone-hacking are doing more damage than just lowering credibility and reputation. They are courting the risk of bad new law.

In a lecture last year I said that “editors might profitably concentrate on the moral behaviour of their own journalists for the simple reason that they should fear other agencies doing so.” I had in mind there judges and their current practice of assembling a privacy law by cumulative court judgements. But Lionel Barber is almost certainly right that political blowback is a greater risk still.

There are other reasons to celebrate the good sense of this lecture: Continue reading –>

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28
Jan 11   

Egypt: what the autocrats didn’t quite get

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Yesterday saw a significant moment in the rolling changes brought about by digital communications. An entire country, which until that moment had cheerfully embraced satellite TV, mobile phones and the world wide web, was cut off from the internet by the authorities in Egypt. Today, they followed that by shutting mobile phone networks.

It isn’t possible to predict what will happen: the state may get the streets and opposition under control, it may lose its nerve or the army may tip the balance for or against change. As I write, hackers all over the planet are sending advice to Egypt about how to get round the shutdown.

But one forecast can be made. The autocrats in charge in Cairo may buy themselves some breathing space by shutting communications networks, but they cannot turn the clock back to the pre-digital age. They will eventually discover that they have to deal with a wired society as it is. That wiring offers them plenty of opportunities for manipulation and control, but no way back to the era of terrestrial television, typewriters and printed news.

It’s worth underlining again why this issue is so particularly important in the Arab world. What is cracking apart is the paternalist assumption that governments should shape what people know. This belief runs across both monarchies and republics and is put in practice in varied ways in different states. But what it has produced in almost every country in the Middle East and Maghreb (bar Israel) is a two-tier knowledge system.

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26
Jan 11   

Facebook and Twitter targeted by Egyptian authorities

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Evgeny Morozov, author of the recently-published The Net Delusion, tweeted the other day that he felt sick having to restart discussions for Egypt about whether the country was starting a Twitter or Facebook revolt.

I know how he feels and social networks aren’t the same as the courage required to get onto the streets in these countries. So I just mention quietly that Twitter stopped working in Egypt yesterday; both Twitter and Facebook seem to be blocked today. It’s worth noting what the authorities think is a threat: the enhanced ability to connect and mobilise. (Readers new to this theme start here or here).

While on the subject of Morozov, if you are looking for a single piece which sums up his contra-suggestive thinking, I’d recommend this. Coming from a quite different, and more constructive, direction on the same theme are two pieces which both examine how journalism needs to adapt to verify the information that flies at us on the web. The first is from the Online Journalism Blog of my City University colleague Paul Bradshaw and lays out basic methods of verification on the web. The second is by the BBC journalist Matthew Eltringham (via Charlie Beckett) and reflects on the practical problems of sifting the truth in new circumstances and something called the “line of validation”. These are both creative ways of extending the idea of “verification” which I listed when trying to pin down the definition of journalism in the digital age.

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