Director’s Blog

If you can only bring yourself to read a few pages of Tony Blair’s memoir, then make it the introduction. In it he expresses perfectly how different he is to other political giants of the last few decades.

People always compare Blair to Thatcher, putting him a neo-liberal tradition. Or they accuse him of being an opportunistic, pragmatist seeking only power. But as he says in the book’s introduction, “I began as one type of leader; I end as another”. I suspect he was, literally, exceptional.

He does believe in something called New Labour and calls himself a Moderniser. These are real terms for him but they don’t quite describe the degree to which he was an exception within his own party and in British modern politics. He says he is not a ‘retrospective’ person and indeed, there is no sense of historical context. He says he was not part of the traditional right or left, but neither is he a classic centrist.

Cameron may have taken on his own party, but he is still much more comfortable with it than Blair ever was. Even the Milibands are far more comfortable referring to more conventional political metaphors and positions.

So why was Blair different? In the end of this introduction he makes one of the most intriguing claims in the book, which might just provide an answer:

“my soul is and always will be that of a rebel”

For football fans, today will be a whirlwind of expectation and disappointment as the 6pm transfer window deadline approaches. Imagine a kind of sporting Christmas Day morning, only hyper-fuelled by astronomical wages and even more astronomically unrealistic hopes on the part of the fans. And for football journalists it is just as busy as for the players’ agents (but somewhat less profitable I suspect).

Go onto any of the live blogs and you will see a feast of multi-media including texts from fans claiming to have spotted superstars passing through airports or arriving in limos at training grounds. It’s all clearly marked as ‘gossip’ and I suspect that most readers/viewers take everything said with huge pinches of salt.

But it is also an extreme example of  how sports journalism, and perhaps news in general,  has now accepted that gossip and speculation are all part of reporting. It also reminds us that speed is of the essence. Actually calling things right is important, but in the hurly-burly of deadline day it is merely the end of the news process where to be first to a new rumour is as important as reporting a new fact.

As @markwoodward pointed out on Twitter in response to this post, one of the interesting factors is the clubs themselves. Increasingly, they seek to break transfer news first on their own social media platforms which leaves the journalists even more dependent on speculation much of which proves to be wrong at the most basic level.

Today Sky Sports News reported that West Ham’s Carlton Cole was not at their Chadwell Heath training ground with his colleagues as if this indicated that he was off negotiating a transfer. In fact, he is training with England. Doesn’t mean he’s not off, of course…

Milton - Pasteurised Lost

Milk Snatcher

Number 10′s decision to kill off the idea of taking free milk out of the mouths of poor children was as wise as it was quick.

What on earth possessed Anne Milton to try to emulate Mrs Thatcher’s ‘Milk Snatcher’ epithet?

In her letter she candidly admitted that this was cost-cutting measure and that it would hit the poorest and least well-nourished children. There is tons of evidence linking poor diet to all sorts of bad educational and developmental outcomes for low-income kids.

Perhaps it was all part of the ‘strategy’ of getting the bad news out of the way early in the parliament. There is always the temptation to float some really dodgy ideas so that you can appear moderate when you rein in errant ministers. But there is always a danger that you leave a sour taste in the mouths of voters. Read the rest of this entry »

FaithBook (geddit?)

This is a tiny snatch from the draft of a chapter I have written for a book on religion and journalism. (Declaration of interest: I am an atheist). I once presented a BBC documentary on the subject and last year spoke at a conference on religion and news. I have remained fascinated by it ever since. I welcome any comments, references, links or suggestions on the topic. Read the rest of this entry »

Who would have thought that a lumbering performance by New Labour’s unloved Witchfinder General would trap the Golden Boy of British politics? I doubt that it was all a cunning ploy by Jack Straw, but today’s Prime Minister’s Questions witnessed a masterclass in snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by Nick Clegg. Read the rest of this entry »

Essays

This is an edited version of an essay by Polis Summer School student Victoria Yates.

The idea of globalization is not new, despite many of the modern connotations attached to the term. The creation of the printing press created much the same revolution in communication, connecting people for the first time in a wide manner beyond traditional dialogical contact. Read the rest of this entry »

By Chrysostomos Agapitos (Polis Summer School student, 2010)

Some years ago, I came up with this naïve idea for a short story. The plot revolved around a group of people being locked up in a room whose walls consist of millions of distorting lenses. I never actually wrote that story down. But, thinking it over through the years, I kept asking the same question over and over again: Could our world be similar to this?

Over the years the globe has become smaller, forcing people like Marshal McLuhan admit that we are all living in a “global village”[1]. The new techniques that have emerged to serve the needs of market economy have affected our perception of two significant dimensions: Time and space compression, is, according to David Harvey, one of the major traits of this era[2].

Telecommunications and media played a major part in this outcome. In their attempt to facilitate capitalistic endeavors, it was media technologies that promoted the transition towards the overcoming of spatial barriers in the first place[3]. As history has shown, changes in technology might result in outcomes  no one could ever have predicted beforehand. Read the rest of this entry »

LSE

This is a paper submitted as part of the Polis Summer School

The limits on freedom of expression in journalism by Rebecca Hales

A western European, when questioned on the subject of freedom of expression, might wave his or her hand in a vague easterly direction and boldly claim the privilege of a comparatively free press and liberal broadcast organisations.

Formally, freedom of expression is considered a universal value but just 17% of world’s population enjoy what is widely considered to be a ‘free press’.[1] This essay will identify and explore the three levels of limitation on free speech that all journalists in the modern world have to negotiate, not just those working in countries historically perceived as being non-democratic or ‘not free’.  Read the rest of this entry »

LSE Summer School

This post is an essay from Polis Summer School student Steffen Horstmannshoff on the idea of objectivity in the age of new media.

Introduction

“If you use social networks for both professional and private activity then use separate accounts.”(1) Such can be read in a manual by the international news agency Reuters that was published on the 10^th of March 2010. For the ones asking “And why exactly should I do that?” Reuters has got an answer as well: “Put simply, we’re expecting you to apply standards to your professional use of social media that will probably differ to those you would use for your personal activity.” (2)

The authors of the manual aren’t clear about what standards exactly they are referring to but implicitly it is quite obvious: They are referring to impartiality and objectivity – two concepts of journalism that are getting increasingly contested in the New Media Environment. This case study sheds light to a rather heated discussion between “old” and “new” media. A discussion that centers around questions like: Read the rest of this entry »