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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Do the media ‘get it’ yet?
It was no doubt a coincidence that Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks were in court in relation to the charges against them over the phone hacking scandal on the same day that newspaper and magazine publishers were also in court seeking to prevent the granting of a Royal Charter on press regulation. Nonetheless, the former made a somewhat ironic backdrop to the latter.
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It's a feedback loop where the better one is the better the other will become, and of course the worse one is the worse the other will become.
BTW Is it me or are there quite a new faces popping up on PB in recent times?
Good innit. After a 'fallow' period before.
Perhaps it's the shrinking time until the 'big' day when we Tory boys/gals are forced to bow down before the messianic PBredsters and say they were right all along - Ed squared are best for Britain.
Now there's a thought.
Elements of our Press were stupid and deserve to be punished to the full extent of the existing law. But with the Charter in place we are now a much poorer country and will have to rely all the more on the unreliable internet for news of our political classes crimes and misdemeanors.
Welcome and keep posting.
@Foxy
"This is one of the least abusive political forums that i know of, perhaps because of the betting slant."
I agree. Anyway give me an abusive poster over a dull whiny one any day.
My objection to the site is the moderator whose user name we're not allowed to know (which is itself Kafkaesque). I understand an internet site can't afford a libel lawyer so erring on the side of caution is understandable.
Nonetheless the moderator on this site is so cautious and illogical that this site is often the only one on the internet not discussing subjects of the moment. It's NOT a difficult judgement call.
All they need to do is tap into the legal advice of bigger organs than Mike's such as any TV station or national newspaper and allow any comment that has appeared with a link.
Had this moderator existed at the time of Profumo we'd have been piling in on a Tory win in '64!
If OGH is not happy with the way a Moderator is performing I am sure he will adjust moderation policy but revealing who the Moderators are simply undermines the basic principle that this is Mike's site and Mike's rules. At times I, along with others, may not like them and may think they are being over-cautious but to try and claim there is something Kafkaesque about it all is simply daft.
I would be far more concerned if I were you about the idea that you can have a 'free' press which is neutered by the political classes.
Love 'em or loathe them they help to keep us entertained. Well, until the pub opens....
A charter won't stop the politicians being politicians or the press being the press any more than the old PCC did. The press barons are all happy enough to comply with the Irish press regulations as their many Irish editions prove. The charter is most certainly NOT what Leveson recommended. It was a compromise on even that.
If the charter is ignored then the press will continue to give themselves enough rope just as surely as the politicians will by watering down and attacking their regulator in IPSA.
Scandals will continue on both sides. Charter or no charter.
Unless the mindset changes then only the methods will change and there is absolutely no sign of the mindset changing on either side.
Yet.
This is a free site where one gets the latest political news from and it would be very disappointing to see it in difficulties,so no problems accepting the moderation policy!
If the press are going to be restrained it needs to be formally codified in law where everyone can see it rather than being worked out in a behind-the-scenes stitch-up or a bunch of vaguely understood gentlemen's agreements, which invariably means some kind of social enforcement mechanism to punish people who eat their soup with the wrong spoon. But I don't think the British press need to be restrained. If you don't want your voicemail listened into, try changing the default PIN number.
PS. What an outrageous sense of entitlement the Guardian have thinking there was a problem with the government using a law supposed to allow them to detain terrorists to take information from people practicing journalism.
This is a good piece by David as usual but I do think that he underestimates the importance of a free press. Whilst the conduct of the Guardian and the sanctimony of the BBC are indeed intensely irritating I remain of the view that, like democracy, it is the least worst of all the alternatives.
@Roger said:
I agree. Anyway give me an abusive poster over a dull whiny one any day.
My objection to the site is the moderator whose user name we're not allowed to know (which is itself Kafkaesque). I understand an internet site can't afford a libel lawyer so erring on the side of caution is understandable.
Nonetheless the moderator on this site is so cautious and illogical that this site is often the only one on the internet not discussing subjects of the moment. It's NOT a difficult judgement call.
All they need to do is tap into the legal advice of bigger organs than Mike's such as any TV station or national newspaper and allow any comment that has appeared in those with a link.
@Roger
As OGH would say if you are unhappy with his site then you can always take your custom elsewhere.
You ignore the fact that media organisations have lawyers on tap and usually in-house who can advise on the likelihood of being sued for libel - and even they get it wrong sometimes or the proprietor/editor chooses to ignore their advice.
Mike does not have such an expensive luxury and the legal costs of having to defend a libel charge in court would be ruinous to him and his family.
If he did allow a direct quote from a newspaper with the direct link, then no comment on that quote would be allowable as we all know that certain people who constantly inhabit this site are completely unable to control themselves and so get banned. So for Mike it cannot be worth the risk.
Of course, if you were to put up a personal guarantee of say £10m plus the associated disclaimer absolving Mike from all responsibility for what you may say, then things conceivably may be possible - but it is Mike's site. If you are not happy, start up your own and we all can comment on it.
I would like you to cast your mind back to a year ago.
The moderating team (yes, there's more than one moderator) made a decision not to allow posters to speculate on the identity of the senior Tory from the Thatcher era accused by Newsnight of abusing children.
You complained then about the Kafkaesque moderation then, ultimately we proved right, as Mike wasn't one of the people sued by Lord McAlpine or others (as others were erroneously suggested)
The phone hacking trial, because of the people involved ultimately descends into partisan point scoring, where some posters of all political persuasions don't give a damn how much trouble they may get Mike into.
You will struggle to find a major and reputable England based news organisation allowing comments below the line, on the phone hacking trials, even MPs have been asked not to comment on the trial.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/phone-hacking/10405763/Dont-comment-on-Andy-Coulson-and-Rebekah-Brooks-MPs-told.html
If MPs aren't allowed to comment on the trial, then what about us humble PBers?
Additionally the legal framework keeps on evolving.
Take what the former guardian reporter, and 2012 reporter of the year, David Hencke says about a recent European Court of Human Rights ruling on comments on a blog.
http://davidhencke.wordpress.com/2013/10/15/outrageous-european-court-ruling-that-bans-bloggers-free-speech/
EiT is right that informal agreements risk a sort of vague establishment stitch-up. But spelling out everytihng in statue is difficult and always subject to argument, as we see with the BBC. A bit of both is indeed.
If the news editors want me to believe that they can regulate themselves, then they should show some sign of actually being able to do so. The only thing that ever draws a line in their behaviour (such as with the Kate photos) is the threat of legal action.
Reports on Twitter that Quantum, the potential Lotus major sponsor, wants Hulkenberg. If that's true it could be very good news. The background music for a while has been that Maldonado will get the seat.
Edited extra bit: might have confused Quantum with Infinity, actually, but if so then Quantum is a current sponsor. So it's still good news.
Thank you again for a balanced review of a currently almost unsolvable problem, but I cannot agree with your conclusion.
I am probably one of the few PBers who has lived and worked under a totalitarian regime where even the faintest whisper and glance was monitored and people who criticised any part of the ruling regime just disappeared for ever.
Now we in the UK are far from that, but where politics (at all levels) receives a financial reward there is a real danger of corruption and secrecy for secrecy's sake. Why have councils refused to have their meetings visually recorded - something to hide???
There is one problem that nobody in the world has solved and that is electronic communication and how to handle it and control it. Most of us have (or should have) firewalls, which are totally inadequate, on our computers, servers, email, mobile phones etc. However it is very easy to punch a hole in any firewall if you are determined to do it.
We have three layers of firewall before anyone can reach any of our office computers, but regularly we are able to trace the identity of people/organisations who have tried to enter our system. - up to 100 per week from Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe.
The Data Protection Act was supposed to protect personal privacy and has been used as an excuse by public bodies to refuse FOI requests. However, those same public bodies have been quite happy to sell bundles of personal IDs to willing buyers.
I would prefer a free media that gets tested in a UK court regularly (and a UK media should be subject only to a UK court and not to any European ruling) and so finds its own level than any legal restriction that has been influenced by parties who want to control that media for their own privileges.
TV 30 Years Ago @tv30yearsago
ITV 6.35 Crossroads 7.00 Name That Tune 7.30 Corrie 8 This Is Your Life 8.30 Benny Hill 9 Reilly: Ace Of Spies 10 News 10.30 Midweek Sport
Do you consider that offering better or worse than that served up by the same station today? and did you watch any of those programmes? I do recall the 8.30 and 9pm ones.
The potential sponsorship deal should be sorted in a few weeks.
It's possible Hulkenberg will end up with no seat at all, or he could still go to Lotus, Force India (he apparently has a 2 year deal from them), stay at Sauber or go to Ferrari as a reserve driver.
"You ignore the fact that media organisations have lawyers on tap and usually in-house who can advise on the likelihood of being sued for libel -"
At least take the trouble to read a post you reply to
But to create this mechanism rather than just enforce the current laws is a power grab by those vested interests who hate the free press
Without the media how do I expose such hypocrisy?
The press are as self serving as any pressure group masquerading as moral judges.
If Financier's post had a like button, his post & others would have had ticks from me.
It is unfortunate, to put it mildly, that this illegal activity was not investigated properly when first uncovered in 2002 - we had the laws in place then to sort it out - but lacked the (political? police management? prosecutorial?) will to uncover it.
That's a real scandal too.
If the police had 'followed the evidence' then, this could have been shut down a lot sooner....
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/30/us/qaeda-plot-leak-has-undermined-us-intelligence.html?hp&_r=1&pagewanted=all&
Should journalists who carry leaks that are designed to make people inclined to support their intelligence agencies be subject to similar treatment, or should it be reserved for journalists who print unflattering information?
You really don't get it do you?
(Something like "First they came for The Daily Mail, and I was silent because I didn't harbour a deep-seated bigotry about gypsies".)
Please feel free to invest your hard-earned cash on this "ceretainty":
Betfair - Scotland Independence Referendum 2014
Yes 6
No 1.19
If you couple that with the European Arrest Warrant, the framework for mass-website-shakedowns is in place.
We have had news outlets in this Parliament trying to buy up photos which could cause damage to the government inorder to stop them being published.Would they have done so if an opposition politician was involved?
So the press just like MP`s,lawyers,doctors,businessmen,judges and everyone else who wields power needs some regulation to stop them misusing their power.But they have managed to avoid tougher regulation all these years precisely because of the power at their disposal and the fear of reprisals of annoying them.
I'm pretty sure that the media should be part of the coalition that holds a government to account (and a p!ss-poor job they make of it at times). If what you're saying is that the media shouldn't consider themselves the sole arbiter of that accountability, I'd certainly agree.
Off topic, UKIP (very unwisely imo) dabbling their toes in sectarian waters.
http://tinyurl.com/oqft9ja
'ethnic cleansing', 'cultural cleansing', 'glorifying terrorism' 'Irish Republican fascism'
Deary me.
Reilly Ace of Spies had the most wonderful theme - Gadfly, never a Benny Hill fan even as a kid though Ernie the Fastest Milkman was wonderful. Never watched more than a handful of Corrie, but Crossroads was so terrible it was good even when I was at primary school and watched it after the kids' progs finished!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8T2wHiQ5DQ
We all have an 'agenda' or 'perspective' - even organisations that by law should be 'neutral' (what ever that is!). The BBC is a case in point, while it strives for 'neutrality' (generally pretty successfully) it inevitably reflects the 'world view' of those who work there.
"I can't quite believe that I've just sat through ten minutes of BBC television in which British journalists Owen Jones and Zoe Williams have defended Karl Marx as the prophet of the End of Capitalism. Unbelievable because I had thought Marxism was over with the fall of the Berlin Wall – when we discovered that socialism was one part bloodshed, one part farce. But unbelievable also because you'd have to be a pretty lacking in moral sensitivity to defend a thinker whose work sent millions of people to an early grave.
I don't want to have to rehearse the numbers but, apparently, they're not being taught in schools anymore – so here goes. Sixty-five million were murdered in China – starved, hounded to suicide, shot as class traitors. Twenty million in the USSR, 2 million in North Korea, 1.7 million in Africa. The nightmare of Cambodia (2 million dead) is especially vivid. "Reactionaries" were sorted out from the base population on the grounds of being supporters of the old regime, having gone to school or just for wearing glasses. They were taken to the side of paddy fields and hacked to death by teenagers. > http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100244023/the-left-is-trying-to-rehabilitate-karl-marx-lets-remind-them-of-the-millions-who-died-in-his-name/
I have sympathy that the press shouldn`t be curtailed with this as they are competing with broadcasters for attention and they might become uncompetitive.
But when they are being repetitively unfair to groups,there is a case for some regulations to stop that.
Could somebody (anybody) give me an example of something that the press can do now that will be prevented under the new Charter. I am genuinely trying to assess where I stand on this as I can see it from different points of view.
All the same, whilst he argues his point very well, I think he is wrong. The question isn't whether the press should be above the law - no-one, and certainly not the press (with the possible exception of the Guardian in respect of the Snowden revelations) has suggested that they should be. The question is whether the pre-Leveson legal framework, which has given us a vigorous and free press for many years, was so inadequate that we need the more draconian direct regulation which the three main parties have put together, and whether the legal balance needs to be changed. I don't think this case has been made.
We already have some of the most strict libel laws in the the world; we already have laws against hacking and against bribing public officials; we have the concept of contempt of court. The abuses by the media which have come to light in the last three years or so were already illegal; this point is crucial, and seems to have been forgotten. The failure was a failure, by the police and by the CPS, to enforce the law. Worse than that, the police not only seem to include a disturbingly large number of rotten apples, but more generally seem to have interpreted their role, at a senior level, as being PR agents who need to cultivate contacts of dubious propriety with the press. This was a failure of police culture and leadership (and ultimately a political failure of the ministers overseeing them), not a flaw in the legal framework.
Given all this, do we also need bureaucratic, politician-decreed regulation of a free press, rather than better enforcement of existing laws? I'd be more sympathetic to the argument that we do if it didn't look as though it was driven by a combination of revenge for the expenses scandal, commercial jealousy of the Murdoch empire, petulance from Labour at the fact that Murdoch stopped supporting them, and celebrities being hacked off at the fact that the press won't give them publicity only of the sort they themselves stage-manage.
Actions speak louder than words.
There's only one point I would add to the many good points made from a variety of perspectives. It would be a lot easier to defend the Press from Government control if it actually did a better job of investigating in the public interest. As it is, Press investigation seems to focus primarily on trivia and tittilation. Ok, this is in response to public demand, but why should we maintain laws to defend the Press when its aims are so mind-numbingly trivial?
I recall from my youth that investigative journalism once did a pretty good job of exposing injustice and corruption. This is rarely the case these days.
I would disagree with David's conclusions if we were talking about the Press of my youth. The Press of today? It can go hang. My freedom owes little to it, fortunately.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index
No tips, as, despite about half a dozen betting ideas, the odds were bad for all of them.
Betfair's Winner Without Vettel market could be interesting on race day.
In my far distant youth, Edmund, both the Daily Mirror and Daily Express woud have qualified. They were both fine campaigning newspapers, with real clout and a loyal readership.
You wouldn't waste tuppence on either now. And I certaily wouldn't waste breath defending their 'freedoms'.
But I am not, so I won't.
But the real essence of Marxism as practised is riches and privileges for the few at the very top and favours dispensed to their near supporters and the rest are viewed as no better than slave labour.
I have been a guest at the lavish dachas used by members of the Praesidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the former USSR, listened to their private conversations and been whisked along in the limousine occupying that reserved central lane. It was (and still is Putin's objective) certainly power and riches for members of that very exclusive club and poverty for the rest, and certainly no press and media freedom, excepting a rapidly moving underground press who lived in fear of their lives.
Of course people like Williams and Jones would like to resurrect Marxism in the abject hope to become a member of the favoured few, but they would be among the first to be sent to the gulags.
The headline is the most intelligent thing about that article. Marx did nothing except write books. He went to his grave having killed no-one.
It's pretty obvious, when you think about it, that you can't do business with a group of people who only say No.
Publish what you like, if it's illegally obtained though whoever obtains it should feel the full force of the law.
Read this, Owen, please.
However I would change the libel laws: firstly, damages should be no more than an estimate of the actual cost of the lie plus a notional sum for hurt feelings which should not vary according the claimant's wealth.
Also: individuals who seek to promote themselves and earn money through the pursuit of celebrity - such as footballers - should have no right to privacy.
So as you can see, I think the press needs more freedom not less. But if they break the law - phone hacking, bribing public officials - then they should be pursued with the full force of the law.
I do find David's comment about "That deeply corrosive and undemocratic mind-set" deeply worrying, but then he is a Tory and presumably has a Conservative predilection for preserving institutions as they stand. The problem is our current politicians will not hold the Government to account, as the system is corrupt: will someone hold the Government to account if they want a Ministerial post and the enhanced retirement earnings that that brings?
In the end the only way we can hold Government to account is openness: every action of the Government should be deemed to be in the public domain. After all I am a taxpayer, a voter and a citizen: I own the Government, it acts in my name. It should have no right to privacy. The Press helps us to achieve this.
That said, I agree it's important that the press is able to expose public wrong-doing (and Financier, obviously even our present press is better than in North Korea or wherever it was that you were working). What part of the Charter prevents them from doing that?
"...the worst of the half dozen countries' press that I intermittently follow - axe-grinding, sensationalising, voyeuristic, prurient, hypocritical, selective, self-interested, self-congratulatory and a completely unreliable guide to what is actually happening at any moment."
Yeah, but apart from that, Nick? Tell us what you really think. ;-)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/us/politics/in-alabama-race-a-test-of-business-efforts-to-derail-tea-party.html?_r=0
The tea party are also using the big money backers as ammunition themselves by saying this proves the establishment GOP is in the pocket of big business and doesn't care about the base and the 'little guys'.
That rhetoric will go down well with their zealot activists but the big money still buys plenty of airtime for political ads which will likely see many of the non tea party wing in the GOP win in primary runoffs.
Problem is it certainly won't get rid of anywhere near all of the tea party influence in the GOP. This either gets to the point of a breakaway third party with one of the most amusing of the tea party big names in charge - or it will all come right back down to a GOP "crazy off" even more hilarious than the last time. Hard to believe though that is.
I don't see why we shouldn't change the laws to rein them in a bit. We would do so with other groups. There's nothing special about the Press. They do little to merit special treatment.
The acts of which they have been accused in recent years have been criminal offences, and already illegal. The modern tendency of politicians to try and legislate away bad things is juvenile and foolish.
I really do not get this snobbish attitude. I tried Thomas Hardy and found it dreary and unreadable - but that's *literature* ... and therefore *better*.
If people didn't value it - they wouldn't pay for it.
People can ofcourse wish the press to be free of all control but no reason to pretend that it`s always in the public interest to do so.
As @NickPalmer points out,the press act in their own interest at all times and on many occasions go against the public interest by refusing to publish material depending on what their political allegiances are.So perhaps they shouldn`t use the public interest defence to avoid regulation.
This became more interesting when I looked up the word "flâneur" on Wikipedia, which shows that it has a wider range of meaning than just what the dictionary says.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flâneur
All of which reminds me of SeanT. It also made me think that one would normally have to be a littérateur and probably a saloniste in order to know what a flâneur is anyway.