an immedia reaction

I have now finished the really excellent Flat Earth News by Nick Davies. And although my initial reaction was that I should find a handy gun and shoot myself in the head before I become a part of the corporate news factory that he so derides, I have since hit upon a more constructive course of action. Spreading the word.

One thing Davies points out is how news is created by PR companies for specific interest groups who generate events and then let newspapers know about them. The newspapers then report them. My feelings on this is that it can be malign or benign in impact, depending on the nature of the organisation being promoted. However, I think if people are to read news intelligently, the best question they can ask themselves when reading a story is: whose interests are served by this story?

From that starting point, a whole series of questions begins: Who is speaking? What are they saying and why? What are they not saying and why? Who is being denied a voice? Why? What would they say if they were speaking? These questions are not exhaustive and may not need to be answered to give a complete story in every case. But in any story with a political slant, any semi-intelligent person should be asking them from the word go. But always begin with “Who benefits?”

And look out for those PR-created stories, those manufactured events. Do you really need to know that a few weeks ago, it was National Childminding Week? As designated by the National Child Minders Association. Or local towns entered in the Great Britain Clean Town Awards by local councils. Even the council officers aren’t entirely sure why they’re taking place and chose towns to be entered for them. They were sent a request to enter towns. At the end of the competition, there’ll be some judging somewhere and then a big dinner hosted by The British Cleaning Council. Who call themselves the voice of the cleaning industry. To quote a playground insult, who died and made you king? I’m all for a more hospitable living environment, but really, who needs to know? Think about it. Do you?

I didn’t include these anecdotes in the last post, as it was growing rather unwieldy, but today I ran into two obstacles to my attempts to avoid the PR trap.

The first was when I couldn’t explore an unusual angle in a story I received two press releases about because this particular aspect was related to another story our paper had written, which had resulted in a complaint. The complaints procedure is still ongoing and though the story I had in mind could easily have been a positive one, it was safer just to leave out that angle altogether. So I did.

And the second was when I attempted to follow up a remark that had been made to me while I was out reporting something else. A local organisation has appointed someone to a community outreach position. The person has not signed any employment agreement yet. However, I had news of the appointment from the head of the organisation himself. But both his deputy and the appointee were not happy to go on record until everything was official. This is fair enough, but what really took my biscuit was that they said once everything was confirmed, they would issue a press release. So I’m stuck in limbo, knowing this is a practically a done deal but unable to write anything about it. It’s got to the stage where I have to wait for a press release before I can write anything. By the time the story is confirmed, my deadline will have passed, it will be stale news and everyone else will know about it as well. So much for originality.

A good few years ago, I remember listening to a report about a London prison on the Today programme. At the time, my mum worked in that prison and was able to point out several inaccuracies in the report. I remember thinking then, if there were that many mistakes and half-truths in that report, how many were there in everything else that was produce as “news”?

When I was a bit older and on work experience at newspapers during my school holidays, and even for periods of time during my newspaper training, I was often given press releases to re-write. On one occasion, at one of the country’s most respected national titles, I was given the previous day’s editions of all the other main titles and told to check through them for any stories the publication I was at might have missed that would fit in with its news agenda.

At the time, I accepted these tasks as the lot of the work-ex, handed down by the real journalists who were obviously important and busy finding the real stories. Only they never seemed to do much. They would be on the phone a fair bit, read news wires and occasionally, it seemed, write something. A lot of the time I was bored. And reading grainy computer screens to find out what was happening was not my idea of what journalism was. Surely, journalists went out to find out was happening? They didn’t sit around for it to be told to them by someone else.

What I was seeing was something that Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger mentioned in a lecture he gave my year of Cardiff University Journalism postgrads. That something has since been published as Flat Earth News by Nick Davies. Based on research carried out by colleagues of the tutors who taught me my trade, Davies has uncovered disturbing truths about the lack of original news published in some of the established beacons of the British national media. Using fairly conservative estimates, Davies suggests that only between 12% and 20% of news in The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, The Telegraph and The Daily Mail is original work. The rest is either of press releases re-produced verbatim or stories where the work of PRs is noticeable to varying degrees. He doesn’t go into detail, but Davies does not believe this problem is limited either to those five papers or to only the print industry.

At first, this wasn’t as shocking as it would have been if I hadn’t already had a sneak preview of some of the book’s conclusions. But still, when I started work as a “professional” in my chosen field, I was surprised by the amount of submitted copy, but the colleagues I joined at the time seemed to think it was the way our industry was moving. Both of them, generated large amounts of original copy as well, and it seems to me that small regional offices like the one I am in are some of the few places where you still have the opportunity to do that.

According to Davies, both national newspapers and the BBC take a very high percentage of their stories from the Press Association which aims to cover the entire country with a staff of only 70 reporters. These correspondents are frequently shuffled around and are not specialists in the areas to which they are posted. The papers and broadcasters recycle each other’s stories and leave vast tracts uncovered. I’m about a third of the way through the book and it is truly frightening the extent to which major news outlets rehash each other’s output, due to the pressures of time and space. That is, a lack of time in which to check facts and research stories and a vast surplus of space which needs filling.

Davies believes this malaise affects the whole industry, as the commercialisation of news has led to staff cuts to increase profits. This has been accompanied by an expansion in the amount of space to fill so adverts can be sold alongside it to maximise profit. The growth of the internet has also meant that reporters are now trying to produce enough copy to fill multiple platforms and have less time than ever to do it. The result is what he calls “churnalism”.

I try my hardest to find original stories, but I couldn’t tell you how much of my output is 100% completely original. And I had a realisation yesterday that I am about to become incredibly complicit in the problem. Because I have agreed to address a networking meeting of local charities and voluntary organisations on how to write better press releases to help improve their relations with local media. They have advertised this event, partly on the basis that I am going to be there, and I don’t see how I can now pull out, without making things awkward for them and, at the same time, inconveniencing some of my contacts.

We receive an enormous amount of submitted material from all sorts of people and organisations. A lot of it badly-written, uninteresting and frequently buries the most interesting angle of the story. This is not deliberate. The majority are not glossy releases produced by shiny, hyper-efficient PR outfits. And not everything we are sent makes it in to the paper. But when a well-written, concise and accurate press release drops into the inbox, it can be dispensed with quickly, leaving time to get on with other things. Yet looking at the story in the copywriter, I feel no sense of achievement because I have little role in producing it. When we receive a press release that is poorly-constructed, it can be an unwelcome effort to try to untangle what the hell it is actually talking about, but at least if I ring someone up to find out, I’m checking up on what I’ve received, but this takes time.

I have written before about my ideal journalistic world which would actually give people the chance to find proper stories free from commercial and time pressures. And I have come to the same conclusion as I did in a recent post about the state of the environment, as caused by free market capitalism. It doesn’t produce a healthy world in which to live. And I agree with Nick Davies, these commercial pressures do not produce healthy journalism.

So what can I do about it and about my own role in this system?

Well, I will be addressing this small gathering on Thursday and doing my best to stress the importance of face-to-face communication. And interviews rather than just releases. That takes some of the predictability out of the occasion and at least allows the journalist a chance of finding out something different, genuine and interesting. And I made a resolution at the end of my working day yesterday that I would find something to query in every press release I was sent. Some fact to check, some angle left unexplored. Something, anything, to add to or correct the wisdom I received over the e-mail… And I will make a conscious effort to take time out to investigate. For a start, the Freedom of Information Act is there, I should make a lot more use of it.

I can’t guarantee I’ll find all of the truth. But I’ll keep trying my best.

The title of this blog post is my attempt to capture some of the confused, nay schizophrenic, thinking about children in our society that seems to be pervading both the media and political climates right now.

The genesis of this post came while I was listening to PM on Radio 4 while making dinner this evening. A slightly different version of this story followed by a potted version of this broadcast got me thinking.

Rowan Williams has articulated something I very much agree with. Proposed changes in how the police deal with young people found with knives and new advisory guidelines suggesting children shouldn’t drink alcohol in their parents’ homes until aged 12 (an attempt to deal with binge drinking) are part of a raft of measures that increasingly narrow the perceptions of young people. I think the Archbishop is right here, we are methodically, even if not consciously, demonising younger people.

I’ve written before here and here about particular aspects of this problem and don’t want to repeat myself as that’s not the point of the post.

The point is that, on the one hand, we are increasingly terrified of our “young people” and on the other, increasingly terrified for them. The murder of an ex police-officer suspected of being a paedophile appalls and sickens me. Yes, he may have been guilty of gruesome offences, but that’s for the courts to decide, not a vigilante loner. This man was subjected to abuse and forced to move house, he was being hounded at his mother’s house, where he was eventually killed. Convicted paedophiles deserve help, not abuse, and this man wasn’t even a convicted offender. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?

As a society, we are keen to absolve ourselves of individual responsibilities and expect the police to do everything, including parenting. This is a dangerous mindset as it means we are willing to give up our freedoms piece by piece. A local police sergeant told me the other day the government were introducing legislation that would make it a criminal offence for “young people” to return to certain areas within in a certain time, having been moved on by police. He said it would be an arrestable offence. I said: “So you mean you’ll be able to arrest people for standing on particular areas of pavement?” His response was along the lines that such legislation would largely be irrelevant in Shropshire as “young people” round here are rather well-behaved when compared to places like London or Manchester. This did not re-assure me.

The thing is, the police shouldn’t need to be responsible for young people on the street at night. Parents need to accept that they have a responsibility to society to discipline their own children. A sensible parent would do their best to make sure their child wasn’t roaming the streets getting drunk or pulling knives on people. Likewise, a sensible parent would keep close tabs on their children if there was a suspected paedophile in their neighbourhood. But they wouldn’t kill this person.

I can’t currently think of a resolution that will marry these two attitudes towards children into some cohesive whole. Except that our society’s perception of children/young people/youngsters and the dangers from them and that they face is severely flawed and needs rethinking fast.

(Cross-posted to Pulpfact)

While my Christian credentials may be somewhat dubious, I am nothing if not a feminist, in the truest sense of the word. To me, feminism means simply this: that you believe in equality between men and women. Not subjugation of men by women, not compulsory castration of men by women, but a world of equal rights, equal pay and equal freedoms. Where women don’t ever have to be afraid of men and women’s behaviour is not limited by male expectation or prejudice.

That’s not an all-encompassing definition and could probably use a little work, but it’s the best I can come up with on the fly.

In the light of my feminist convictions, and my mother’s professional vocation as a chaplain, I would like to bring this to your attention. In a large part because of what she has achieved and had to put up with in her professional life, there is no one I have a higher regard for than my mum.

It’s a petition for lay members of the Church of England to be submitted to the House of Bishops asking that they appoint senior female clergy to bishoprics. In my view, the idea of women bishops was effectively sanctioned when they allowed the first women to be ordained. If you’re going to let them in at the lowest rung of the ladder and apply a meritocracy, it’s inevitable that some will eventually become suitably qualified for such positions.

I’m not saying you have to sign it and for some of you, it might not accord with your own religious beliefs, or lack of. But I thought I’d throw it out there and see what happened…

(cross-posted to Pulpfact)

The BBC Radio Listen Again service is amazing and wonderful and useful, but in this instance, it is frustrating, because although I can find the programme I want, the section of it I want to highlight is not available to be heard again. But this proves that Dr Elaine Storkey was the speaker on Thought for the Day on Thursday last week, and you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that what she was saying was broadly this:

In a time of global economic uncertainty, government policies are performing an about face. Up to now, our economic concern has been with expansion, acquisition and globalisation. It’s all about having more. Dr Storkey’s argument was that we need to learn to be satisfied with enough. She talked about “the economics of enough” saying that we had to change our economic model to one of contraction, rather than expansion and that this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

She didn’t go on to make what I think is the next logical point, that we have to change our entire lifestyle if we are to have any hope whatsoever of avoiding self-destruction. My boyfriend is an engineer who designs interior heating and air conditioning systems for the construction industry, while trying to make them as efficient and environmentally friendly as possible. He specialised in renewable technologies in the final year of his degree and tells me it’s impossible that all our current energy needs will be met by renewable energy alone. It will have to be nuclear or nothing, unless we’re prepared only to use computers when the sun is out or when it’s particularly windy.

Driving back from an assignment yesterday, I was listening to Jeremy Vine on Radio 2 and while I’ve noticed that Jeremy Vine doesn’t always go in for the most nuanced of discussions, it was hard not to listen to his studio guest who said most of the usable oil would be gone in 30 years and Vine’s own comment that he’d heard somewhere that the planet could actually only support 3 billion of the current global population of 8 billion.

If any of this can be accorded any significance, we need to start changing our lifestyles now. I know we’re all going to die anyway, but I’m feeling increasingly millenarian about the whole thing. One of my worst nightmares is that civilisation will collapse and I’ll be forced to eat those around me to survive. I honestly don’t think nuclear power is either a safe or sensible option given the current political tensions across the globe that show no sign of diminishing.

We should be building big wooden sailing ships so we can still travel when the only power we have is the wind. We should be slowing down our drive for economic growth and start doing things because they are the right thing rather than because they will make us money. We need to live in smaller communities with facilities close by so we can walk and cycle. We need to, as they do in Ludlow, collect all food waste separately from everything else and compost it and use it as biofuel. Locally, we also recycle cans, paper, cardboard and plastic. One of the best things about where I’m living at the moment is that practically everything is recycled. My flatmate and I get through one black binliner of waste that isn’t recyclabe or reusable a month. We need to get used to the idea that things will take longer, that travel takes time and the pace of life will have to change.

And then yesterday evening, I drove to my boyfriend’s house in Birmingham all alone in my diesel-powered, air-conditioned car. I felt guilty with every roll of the wheels. I still did it. I use energy saving lightbulbs, unplug everything when I’m not using it, walk to work and back, shop in the local butchers, grocers and bakers and avoid going to the supermarket at every opportunity. But I think we’re still doomed.

(cross-posted to Pulpfact)

It’s not quite as snappy as Voltaire’s original, but this is in essence what this post is trying to say about proposals to outlaw the possession of extreme pornography.

In the same way that players of violent video games do not all go on to become rapists and murderers, not all viewers of extreme pornography do not go on to enact their fantasies a la Graham Coutts. When such things happen, when the video game/porn made them do it, there are always other contributing factors. Daddy was in their head giving them instructions from beyond the grave, they hate the world because their car broke down or by social and medical standards they are mentally unbalanced and don’t function according to the same set of rules as the rest of us. As several commentators point out in various articles I have read on the subject, owning extreme porn will be an offence, but carrying out such things as contained in extreme porn in your own sex life will not be. How’s that going to prevent people from carrying out such murders ever again? Even people who watch porn have the power of imagination. Surely indulging in sado-masochist play is much closer to actually hurting someone than watching videos of it happening??

For some interesting discussion on the legislation, see this article from The Times a year or so ago.

As for my part, I can’t say that extreme porn, or indeed porn of any kind, floats my boat. It’s just something I’ve never been interested in. I’ve also yet to define where I stand on porn in general and the whole “but you’re a feminist! It exploits women!” issue. Can? Check! Worms? Check! Good. But, this whole topic was brought to my attention by Todger Talk, a most insightful and interesting group blog on male sexuality, and it threw up a lot of related thoughts I decided to share anyway.

In this post one of their regular contributors basically says he believes the importance of porn on male perceptions of women cannot be over-emphasised.

True as this may be, I think it’s obvious from the world around us that people viewing this kind of porn don’t all go off and commit murder. And there is obviously a vast selection of porn out there for people to choose from, should this be their primary method of learning about sex and sexuality. And even those who stick primarily to getting their kicks out of watching mock-asphyxiation aren’t all going to go out and put these ideas into practice. I think we’d have noticed the resultant death toll.

Now, I can’t presume to extrapolate, with any certainty, from myself on to the entire global population (it would take a lot more egotism than I currently possess as well), but as someone who was raised in a fairly liberal environment, I’ve always been fairly comfortable talking about sex and sexuality. And have never felt the urge to watch porn. If what their poster says is true, and most men don’t feel comfortable discussing sexuality and turn to porn for answers, clearly we need to bring about a change in the way we talk about sex and sexuality.

Collectively, we need more openness in our society about sex. The emotional side of sex needs to be discussed at school, alongside the practical. Clearly, I’m not holding my breath for this to happen over night. But if porn is unrealistic/degrading/unhealthy and that’s where people are getting their information then clearly we’re doing something wrong.

I believe, in many ways, our society is far too sexually repressed. And this repression always finds an outlet. Where? Porn, among other things. This outlet is not necessarily healthy, and in the case of Graham Coutts, proved fatal for one extremely unfortunate young woman. What does repression do? It makes things taboo and, therefore, attractive. I may be completely wrong (and hey, it’s happened before, at least once), but I believe that if we were more open and honest with each other and discussing sexual thoughts and desires on a regular basis was socially acceptable, the need for stuff like this would melt away. We don’t need more censorship of sexuality, but an embracing of it.

I mean, I don’t know how many, if any, BDSMers out there are reading this blog, but tell me, would the stuff you get up to be half so enjoyable if it wasn’t completely frowned upon, absolutely verboten and never, ever, ever discussed in polite society? I’m guessing no…?

But on the other hand, as I say, maybe I’m wrong and people will always have a divergence of sexual tastes as broad as the Nile delta. But even if that is the case, if such tastes were discussed more regularly in public, at least that might increase the chances of spotting potential Graham Couttses before they managed to made their fantasies a reality.

NB: I apologise if this is disjointed and rambling. It was written over the course of several hours while I tried to do several other things.

Somewhat surprisingly, I have been asked to contribute to a friend’s group blog, possibly to stop me hanging around bitching in the comment threads. So if you’re interested in ranting of a slightly different kidney (i.e. completely random), you can check out Pulpfact where I shall be occasionally posting and cross-posting depending on how well I think what I write for them fits in with the ethos of this site, and vice-versa.

I’m hoping that having two blogs to write for will generally encourage me to be more productive, rather than put me off doing so altogether. And hey. Practice makes perfect right?

As I was browsing through a discarded copy of The Sun on the train back from Shrewsbury this evening, I stopped to have a quick read of the extracts from Cherie Blair’s memoirs.

There was a box-out section on the left-hand page of a double page spread with a picture of an almost completely naked woman at the top. It turned out to be an account of how Alastair Campbell reacted to news that The Sun was going to publish topless pictures of Carole Caplin, Cherie’s lifestyle guru. Apart from thinking wow, she has really odd nipples, I was intensely amused not only by the brazenness of the paper in re-printing one of aforesaid photos which apparently caused dear Tone such a headache but mainly by the paper’s decision to star out the vowel in “t*ts”. I mean come on people, they’re right there, staring at you from the top of article. The damage is done. Have the courage of your convictions. Write the word “tits”. Is the effect of that particular, uncensored four-letter word really going to be any worse than a picture of a woman naked except for her knickers?

The main body of the extract dealt with dear Tone’s reaction to David Kelly’s death. Apparently it crushed him and he immediately ordered an investigation. Good for him. However, what struck me most was Cherie’s description of events leading up to this. She wrote about the BBC’s row with Downing Street, and how the allegations of dossier sex-upifying had been proved untrue by the Hutton Inquiry (Hannah’s inner monologue cuts in: “Yes Cherie, the Hutton Inquiry, that most unbiased of processes, which no one other than you is convinced by) and the issues surrounding the anonymity of Andrew Gilligan’s source. And then, as I recall, her words were: “Dr Kelly had been named.” She didn’t say who by.

I was powerfully reminded of myself as a small child, after having had a fight with my younger sister, being asked by my mother why the younger child was crying, saying: “She got hurt.” Got hurt by who was obvious, even if I could never bring myself to say it.

I’m tempted to infer from Cherie’s choice of phrase that the decision to release David Kelly’s name to the press, even if not a decision made by Blair himself, was a decision made by his administration that backfired horribly. It’s good of Cherie to let us know how contrite he was. Wasn’t he a nice man and a wonderful Prime Minister?

Ok this is just getting bizarre now. For whatever reason, the majority of spam comments on this blog are about medication of some kind usually to do with curing impotence. I have taken measures to try to reduce the number of such comments that are held in moderation, as I get sent an e-mail alert each time a comment is created, and the spam makes it hard to find the very few genuine comments I actually get.

These steps have worked, but I’m starting to suspect that whatever is spamming me is keeping track of whatever I’m blocking and is now directing different spam in my direction. I’ve recently had spam comments advertising office furniture and kitchens.

I logged in just now and there were only two comments. And all they said was
“Trucks” and “Mercedes Benz”. Double-you tee eff indeed…