26
Nov 10

Making eloquent mischief: Mencken, Murdoch and Dannythefink

Do you ever reach the end of the week gasping to read something counter-intuitive, counter to the trend or just mischevously subversive? I do. Writing stuff which takes you places that you don’t expect to go is one of journalism’s contributions to making better sense of the world and stuff.

Here are the pieces I read this week and which made me sit up.
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21
Oct 10

Conrad Black lets fly

I was about to write something deadly serious about digital media when I was

Conrad Black

stopped in my tracks by this: Conrad Black’s review of three books on American newspapers. The jailed Canadian tycoon is settling a few scores.

An example: Rupert Murdoch may have an interesting career and modus operandi but, as a person, he’s pretty boring. “He is generally not overly forthcoming, rather monosyllabic, an enigma whose banter is nondescript bourgeois filler delivered in a mid-Pacific accent,” says Black. Murdoch’s discretion in the company of this gigantic, convicted blowhard is perhaps understandable.

There is more (quite a lot more) in this vein. It’s like reading pornography or the Alan Clark Diaries: you know it’s not worth wasting tme with, but you go on reading all the same. Black reveals himself, without using the expression, to be a fan of Jay Rosen’s invention to describe the overblown pomposity of Washington correspondents, the Church of the Savvy.

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13
Oct 10

Since when was it an insult in the US to call someone “anti-colonial”?

“Anti-colonial” is now apparently a term of political abuse in the country born from a revolution against a colonial power.

Jamie Dettmer points out in this post how weird American political vocabulary is becoming under the strain of the mid-term campaign. Nothing is odder than the use of “anti-colonial” as a hostile description of Barack Obama. America has behaved like an imperial power for years, certainly, but few Americans are prepared to admit any similarity other empires in history and “anti-colonial” isn’t a remotely plausible explanation of Obama’s actions and policies.

There’s no sign in this backgrounder from the Atlantic Wire that anyone bandying the word around is aware of the irony.

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12
Oct 10

Andrew Marr and the inadequate, pimpled and single

It seems highly unlikely that Andrew Marr meant what he said very seriously when he laid into bloggers at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, describing them as “inadequate, pimpled and single.”

Marr can’t seriously believe that many people nowadays think that bloggers or “citizen journalists” (whatever they are) are going to “replace” journalism, even if they have already changed it.

He seems to be confusing people who comment online with bloggers. These categories overlap, but aren’t the same. Marr is on to something in drawing attention to the unreadability of long comment threads. They’re rarely rewarding, many comments overlap, the sequence is incoherent and quantity of rewarding reads very low. As Marr says, it’s the anger that makes them off-putting.

I’d predict that newspaper websites in particular will start to look ever harder for ways of reducing the prominence of comment strings, moderated or otherwise, despite having strained so hard to generate them only recently. You can see the trend already in “Editor’s picks” which function as a short-cut through the ranting. Surely there will before long be software which enables comment threads to reduce duplication, get the best to the top and actually distinguish by value added? Perhaps it’s already out there and I don’t know about it.

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21
Sep 10

Panorama/BIJ: data journalism is scoopy

Delighted to say that last night’s BBC TV Panorama on top public service salaries has caused plenty of ripples. The programme was a co-production with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, based at City University. (Declaration of interest: I’m a BIJ trustee). The programme can be seen for six days here, some of the coverage is here and here and commentary here.

There will be more high-profile work from the BIJ before long, but  this is probably the largest stone this new outfit has yet thrown in the pond. Its journalists only began work at the start of this year. Investigative reporting is never quick. The raw material for this inquiry is 38,000 lines of data and it was obtained by 2,400 freedom of information requests.

Much of the coverage has focussed on the BBC salaries – and it must have required some nerve for Panorama to have devoted so much airtime to yet more detail of how much top people at the Beeb earn. But the really interesting stuff seems to me to lie not with the outliers at the top, but with the mass in the middle. Leaving the special case of the BBC aside, does the public service really need thosee thousands of salaries lying somewhere between £100,ooo and £300,000? It’s hard to imagine that a ruthless audit would give them all a value-for-money clearance.

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12
Sep 10

Tony Blair’s millennium bug (and media studies)

The wittiest anecdote from Tony Blair’s memoirs about the media that I’ve yet come across is reproduced in a review of the book by Peter Stothard, editor of The Times for several years of Blair’s premiership and at the time of the Millennium celebrations on the evening of January 31st 1999. Stothard is recalling that evening’s fiasco.

“Media studies has long been one of Blair’s specialities – and there is much of it in this book, some nuanced and some not. Excessive examination of media rights and wrongs tends to make its participants mad. Blair focuses comically on one his favourite paradoxes in describing a moment when he admits himself to have been as maddened by media frustration as at any time in the book. The setting is the first night at the Millennium Dome, an early New Labour disaster in which, I should declare, I was involuntarily involved. On the last afternoon of the second millennium, the then Prime Minister, as he describes the scene, is dreading the formal opening of the third, just as is almost everyone else due to be present at Greenwich, including the Queen. In line with his lowest expectations, the big “River of Fire” fireworks go fut; the big “Millennium Wheel” does not turn. While he, his family, and the royal party are safely delivered to the £700 million plastic tent of fun on a new Tube line and in good time for midnight, the nation’s newspaper editors, of whom I was then one, were left queuing for hours at Stratford Station.

At this point of discovery Blair engages the minister in charge, his old friend and flatmate Lord “Charlie” Falconer, vigorously and by the lapels:

“Please, please, dear God, please tell me you didn’t have the media coming here by tube from Stratford just like ordinary members of the public.”

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11
Sep 10

Even in the Labour Party leadership race there is humour

The British Labour Party’s leadership contest, now coming to a close, has been on the most dour and feeble such runoffs in living memory. Nothing I had read about it was even intriguing, let alone exciting or funny.

Very unpromising material for a comedian, you might think. You’d be wrong. See this column by Mark Steel.

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03
Sep 10

Tony Blair and Northern Ireland: another version

In his masterfully choreographed world book tour selling his autobiography, Tony Blair has been reaping another round of credit for settling more than three decades of violent “troubles” in Northern Ireland.

Without doubt Blair deserves praise for the energy and patience he devoted to the negotiating end-game. But the fact that the long and bloody IRA campaign got to that point of closure at all was very largely down to other people. And they are a great deal less likely to end up on the international book publicity circuit. As I explain here.

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