Director’s Blog

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’.  (more…)

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: (more…)

I asked the Polis Summer School students to finish their 12 day course by giving me a code for the road. Tell me, I said, what should be the guiding principles for journalism about people who are suffering or are from other countries. Here are the ideas from different groups of students  for some ethical guidelines. For what it’s worth, my suggestion was that ‘there must always be a local narrator of any story’. (more…)

Polis Summer School

If people feel that mainstream media is ignoring alternative politics, then they can now create their own media. But how should traditional journalism respond? Should it change its ideas of impartiality to reflect the real diversity of contemporary politics? This is Polis Summer School student Steven Linett’s course paper that tackles this complex problem, citing media around the rise of US Militia movement.

How impartiality and objectivity in journalism changes in the New Media environment by Steven Linett

The new media environment has helped level the playing field for those outside the mainstream media to publish and disseminate their views to the world.  This environment appears to be a godsend for the participatory models of democracy, which “emphasize the importance of ‘real’ citizens’ participation and their more active involvement in democracy (Barber 1984).  As such, they criticize the radical separation of citizens from power, the elites and democratic institutions through representation” (Bailey, et al. 2008). (more…)

Thinking Space

The following is by POLIS summer school student Emil Stigsgaard Fuglsang. In his first-ever blog he gives his thoughts after a lecture on the media’s portrayal of war and  human suffering. It is a critique of the media professional’s promise of impartiality and objectivity. Fuglsang does not believe anyone to be objective. Emil says he has written the following as an open letter to modern, commercial media professionals. He says he has tried to write the blog to entertain and provoke, not to inform.

Goddamn, bloody immorality – please! by Emil Stigsgaard Fuglsang

Dear media professionals: Who are You? Academic articles tell me You are perceived to be impartial and objective truth-tellers, and lecturers dub you gate-keepers and openers of information from the world that surrounds us, the normal people. From my cliché-cache, I hear You are supposed to be the fourth power of the state. (more…)

“My son was nearly nineteen years old,” Mohammed said. “He wanted to be a doctor. There’s a photograph of him”-he waved his hand vaguely-“somewhere, wearing a stethoscope.” He made no move to get it, as though already discouraged by the effort. His wife begun to cry again.

“Mysterious are the ways of God,” he said. There had been no warning that his son would join the militants. “He willed it. He did it. That is all. He was a good, silent, obedient boy. He was my son, but, more than that, he was my friend. He was here, dawn to dusk, every day, day and night.”

(The New Yorker, Letter from Kashmir: Between the Mountains, March 11 2002)

This sort of story is sadly not a novel one in journalistic discourse. It is the sort of vivid and humanising picture that the best journalists strive to create. Yet, in all its familiarity, if we are honest with ourselves it can be hard to truly recognise that this prose was written about someone. Nor do most genuinely connect with the idea that it was written by a reporter who sat looking into the eyes of grieving parents in a way none of the consumers ever do. (more…)

LSE Summer School

Kevin Anderson (@KevGlobal) gave a positive history of the virtues of new media journalism in a talk to the Polis Summer School that captivated most students. But as Summer School student Joanna McNurlen reports, social media at its most un-mediated can create profound problems. Do we really want total freedom of digital expression?

When Documentation Becomes Reality

by Joanna McNurlen

Let us begin with a typical college party: music blaring, Solo cups everywhere, drunk people falling over one another… and don’t forget the cameras, capturing it all. You can’t go to a college party without seeing people (usually girls) snapping off rounds of photos to document their presences in the social scene. The next morning (or later that night), these young women upload their photos to Facebook and broadcast their social achievements to their friends and compatriots on Facebook. Comments pour in as users cheer the evening’s tidings or lament their failures to attend. For the picture-takers (who are, in the sense of new media, photojournalists), the purpose of attending the party soon becomes not to interact with people but to document their interactions with people: the documentation of reality becomes reality. (more…)

India Knight

Should politicians’ love lives be exposed in public? Times columnist India Knight doesn’t think that they should. So when Chris Huhne’s marriage break-up and new affair was made into headline news by a Sunday tabloid she expressed her disgust, in public, on Twitter:

“Poor Chris Huhne. In what conceivable universe is this anyone else’s business? God’s sake. Also, who gives a toss?”

I agree with her, as do many other people. Many of them said as much on Twitter.

Of course, the point about this is that by Tweeting about Huhne  we are drawing even more attention to the story and possibly increasing the discomfort for the Minister, his wife and probably the new lover, too. And this blog just adds to it all. (more…)

David Aaronovitch and Jenni Russell are two of my favourite commentators: intelligent, moral, liberal. So I have much sympathy with their recent assaults on the news media’s tendency to attack first and think later. But I wonder  if they are missing the point about daily news journalism from their Olympian Op Ed heights?

Aaronovitch suggests that journalists should look at their own salaries before questioning the pay of public servants, something I raised here.  On Twitter David notes:

Brave of the Telegraph go for all these semi-public figures over pay. Braver if we were to be shown the full earnings of Telegraph folk.

Meanwhile, Jenni Russell writing in the Guardian takes on the broader culture of criticism in British media: (more…)

Salary The Size of Wales

The British Prime Minister has one of the toughest jobs in the world but is not particularly well-paid. To deploy another journalistic cliche, the salary is about the size of a football pitch when it should be the size of Wales.

Like those well-worn comparators of geographic size, the PM’s pay packet has now become an over-used measure of public rewards. In the wake of the MPs’ expenses scandal we  are now turning our attention to well-paid civil servants. (more…)