These complaints ignore what is a very novel book by a recent Prime Minister. And it raises some interesting issues for journalists.

It is utterly in the voice of Tony Blair and although it has no great revelations or earth-shattering fresh thesis, it does give a very frank insight into a critical contemporary political figure  (and just because he’s gone doesn’t mean the questions he raises aren’t still relevant – the idea that Mandelson, Brown, Blair et al should somehow keep schtum at a moment when Labour is debating its future is preposterous).

I will leave the grand politics to others, but I was struck by the psychological openness, the emotionalism and the odd humour. In that classic “y’know” Blair bloke-ism, he speaks with what passes for honesty these days. Much of the narrative sections are dull and predictable, but the moments when he speaks with feeling are revealing. It is clear for example, that his mother’s death was critical and that his relationship with women was vital to his well-being. Paradoxically, it was the proximity to two somewhat emotionally violent men that dominated his period of political dominance.

But enough of the bar-room pyscho-analysis. Looking at it from a political communications point of view (and that’s what I am paid to do), what struck me was:

1. How instinctive  much of his communications were

2. How many policy and communications mistakes he admits

3. How modern political communications places a crushing pressure upon leaders

Instinctive?

That sounds odd because everyone thinks of New Labour as the ultimate public relations confection, a marketing machine with pagers, grids and spin doctors planning every event and speech to the last details. Well, yes, Blair makes it clear that they did try to do that. But at the key moments he and many of his team would respond to events at a very emotional level. Reading this book (and Alastair Campbell’s Diaries) Government appears as a whirlwind of unexpected events and surprising upsets, blown faster by the storm-makers in parliament and the media.

He had great speech writers like Phil Collins and masterful advocates such as Alastair Campbell, but it was often Blair’s own personal feelings that produced a phrase or a stance in the heat of the moment. Compare his track record on this with Gordon Brown and you can see the difference between a naturally Great Communicator and someone who simply did not enjoy public interaction.

Mistakes?

Put aside the Big One, (Ir*q) and the book is still littered with political communications errors that Blair freely admits, with hindsight. Take his descriptions of his handling of the many personal scandals that his team got embroiled in. His response is invariably emotional and instinctive rather than cold and calculating. Hence the dragging out of the various Mandelson sagas, for example.

Crushing?

This is the most important issue that arises out of this book from a media perspective. It is clear from A Journey that Blair felt constrained as a leader. Of course, all leaders are supposed to be constrained. That’s how democracy stops itself from becoming dictatorship. He himself recognises that this can be seen as ‘whining’.

The ‘brakes’ on his desire for reform were mainly (he says) the forces of conservatism, much of them in his own party and often rallied by Gordon. In other words, other politicians (and civil servants or interest groups). But he also cites the constant barrage of what he sees as biased and destructive media scrutiny as ultimately the greatest barrier to progressive or rational politic discourse around government.

This is back to the Feral Beasts speech which he admits in the book was written in a rush at 4am at the end of his premiership and so possibly a bit too heart-felt in its loathing of British journalists. Yet he also says that political communications is “50% of the battle in the information age”. So what can we learn about this apparent impasse from this book?

First of all, we learn that to be a good political communicator you must say what you believe. Blair  is always accused of being a dissembler. But again, put aside the Ir*q issue on which no-one will ever agree, and the fact is that he really meant what he said. All that ‘right-wing’ stuff about law and order, for example, was deeply felt, not an electoral trick:

“At the top, the scrutiny is microscopic. It is soul-penetrating…If you don’t have core beliefs as a politician…you will never be a good communicator because…the best communication comes from the heart”

To be fair, he seems to blame the whole political culture for turning democracy into a dog-fight, not just journalists:

“You think you’ve come to a debating society but suddenly find you’re in a cage with a bare-knuckle fighter and a howling mob outside laying bets on how long you’ll last”

But does he see his own part in this? He only mentions Alastair Campbell to offer high praise (quite rightly) for his journalistic acumen, political nous and commitment to the cause. Blair correctly cites the Brown team’s destructive and cynical spinning. But A Journey tell a story where his own office was innocent of any such short-term, selfish media manipulation. Hmmm…

Likewise, he tried to woo Murdoch and Dacre  but ended up bitten by the press-hounds he sought to tame.

Throw in some genuine controversies (hunting, Ir*q, Asylum, ASBOs, terrorism, Academies, NHS Reforms etc) and you have plenty of reasons for febrile public debate. He knew he was trying to reform entrenched interests and was then surprised when they fought back through the media.

In A Journey Blair accepts with remarkable honesty the polling evidence that by the end he was no longer able to carry the British public with him.

“At first people felt an abnormally close bond [with me as a leader]…I stopped caring about them…I became arrogant…now I just sounded irritated that they wouldn’t go along with me”

He blames the ‘inevitable distancing’ of leadership. The public gets bored with leaders if they stay around too long in the media limelight. He also accepts that he was becoming uncompromising. The solution? To attempt a new relationship with his party and voters:

“New technology and new forms of campaigning gave us tools to do it. My vision was to discard the conventional notions of party membership and structure, to treat supporters as members for key decisions and to use the new technology not merely to build out into new support but also to interact wit h supporters and to campaign in a different manner.”

This is an agenda that has much in common with one set out in a book written by Blair’s polling guru, Philip Gould. Unfinished Revolution, published back in 1999 when New Labour was at its peak spoke with huge prescience about the gulf between party politics and the public. It was a celebration of the reform of the Labour Party but it’s title made the point that real democracy in political communications is a deeper and more thorough-going project.

Paradoxically, achieving power may actually hinder the process. As we are hearing from the candidates in the current Labour leadership race, greater engagement is something that politicians call for before becoming leaders. And as A Journey makes clear, it also something they realise would have been a good idea just after they leave office.

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”

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…

You can get the full report on paper by emailing polis@lse.ac.uk and online here but this is an extract from the Introduction.

Networked Journalism Has Arrived

The British General Election of 2010 has made it absolutely clear that networked journalism has arrived. The journalism about the campaign, the result and its consequences has been a remarkable combination of online and mainstream media. On Friday May 7th the BBC website alone had more than 11.5 million unique users and 100 million page views. The Internet did not just add to the coverage, it changed it.

We now have a political news media that has audience interactivity, participation and connectivity built into every aspect. And it works. This was a uniquely exciting and interesting election for political reasons, but news media helped drive the increased engagement. The question now is whether that added value can be produced in the future and in other areas of journalism.

This report is published at the Polis/BBC College of Journalism Value of Journalism conference on June 11th. It is based on four years of activity at Polis, the journalism think-tank in the Media and Communications Department at the London School of Economics. In addition, Polis researchers have also interviewed a range of networked journalists specially for this report. It follows up on my book about ‘networked journalism’: SuperMedia: Saving Journalism So It Can Save The World (Blackwell 2008).

By ‘Networked Journalism’ I mean a synthesis of traditional news journalism and the emerging forms of participatory media enabled by Web 2.0 technologies such as mobile phones, email, websites, blogs, micro-blogging, and social networks. Networked Journalism allows the public to be involved in every aspect of journalism production through crowd-sourcing, interactivity, hyper-linking, user generated content and forums.

It changes the creation of news from being linear and top-down to a collaborative process. Not all news production will be particularly networked. Not many citizens want to be journalists for much of their time. But the principles of networking are increasingly practiced in all forms of news media.

The TV debates were the big ‘new’ media story of the UK 2010 campaign. They reminded us that television is still the dominant channel for political information and the biggest media platform in general. Live event television is probably the media format that delivers most impact as it happens. However, the TV election debates in 2010 partly had appeal because of their novelty and also because they were different to conventional broadcast news: they were a direct channel to the voter, in comparison with the spin, packaging and partisan bias of so much traditional political media.

Those debates were just the tip of an iceberg of networked journalism which helped create a vastly increased space of political conversation between voters, often reacting to and with mainstream media. Across the sectors we saw traditional journalism becoming networked.

This report does not pretend to be a comprehensive survey. The examples are not supposed to be the only or best instances of networked journalism. They are a selection that we hope shows the increasing effectiveness and diversity of the new forms of news production. When I wrote about networked journalism in SuperMedia it was still a relatively fresh concept, but within two years it has become ubiquitous.

Valuable?

This report is designed to stimulate discussion about the state of journalism and to encourage investment in the future of new forms of news production. Above all, it is an attempt to get journalists, citizens and policy-makers to think about what journalism is for. What is its use to society, the economy and the individual? What is its value?

This report and our conference is an attempt to move the debate on. We are in the middle of sustained crisis for journalism. The global recession has accentuated the business problems for journalism in the UK, much of Europe and America. Of course, the news industry is booming in many parts of the world such as India and China and even Africa. However, underpinning the financial problems for journalism is the transformation wrought by digital technologies and the Internet.

These will effect the news media everywhere eventually. They provide unprecedented opportunities to create and reach new markets and to enhance production. However, these same technologies have created destructive competition and drastically reduced certain revenue streams.

This report does not deal directly with the business model. It does not seek to revisit the well-worn debates such as the ‘Future of Newspapers’. Instead of asking how we preserve journalism or sustain the journalism business it will ask what the product is and who wants it? Then we can ask what is the best way to produce it.  If we know how the new journalism is valued then we can persuade people to fund it.

Technological and other deep social shifts mean there is no way that journalism can avoid radical change. They are deeply threatening. Much of what was there will disappear. Emily Bell’s prediction of ‘carnage’ is being realised. The  opportunities, however, are much greater.

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.

Back in 1971 it was actually local authorities who led opposition to Mrs Thatcher’s decision to cancel deliveries of all those luke-warm little bottles. This time it was trending on Twitter within minutes of breaking on broadcast news. As @PaulWaugh pointed out, Number 10′s quashing of the idea came too late for Education Minister David Willets who was already being grilled upon it on the BBC’s morning politics show.

It seems to be a good example of how the coalition PR machinery is still relatively relaxed compared to the pager culture of early New Labour. Milton obviously felt it was fine to float such a toxic idea in an honest and open way without running it past Cameron’s spin-doctors or even the advisers within her own department. Either that or the SPADS and spin doctors were a)  incompetent or b) very brave. The speed with which the idea was killed off reminds us that the Prime Minister’s early career was in public relations. He also is enough of a career Conservative wonk to know how damaged Thatcher was by what appeared to be a callous and small-minded cut.

Of course, Milton may  have been right. The health benefit of feeding frothing fat suspended in water to the nation’s bairns is at least debatable. And certainly the delivery mechanism of such a universal benefit will always be questioned at a time of fiscal stringency. But that rational debate has been swept aside in the wake of this small, but perfectly-formed PR own-goal.

It makes you wonder how they will play the much tougher decisions that are still to come.

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.

“People of faith who want better mediation of their lives and beliefs need to be part of that sort of networked journalism – and not just with Religion Correspondents. Those within the religious institutions need to make their communications just as transparent, participatory and connected.

This is a practical and an ethical imperative.

This is a wonderful time for people who think media can promote understanding. There has never been more media and much of it has global reach thanks to the Internet. People are more educated and equipped to engage if given the opportunity and incentive.

But this is a dreadful time for people who think the media is there to promote only what they think.

There is more competition for people’s attention than ever before. So if you want to be heard you have to be where people are talking, rather than expect them to come to you. That is what networked journalists like Ruth Gledhill have learnt.

As a priest recently told me, this is what Jesus did when he took his message (the Good News) out to where ordinary people lived. The rabbinical tradition is also very much one of interactive dialogue rather than one-way sermonizing.”

Rhetorically he was all over Straw, taunting him as if it were the Lib Dems in Government with an unfettered mandate to end ‘illegal wars’ and set a precise date for British withdrawal from Afghanistan. But then onlookers remembered that this was the coalition government dispatch box not a pre-election Lib Dem party conference podium. These are policy issues of the highest importance and Clegg does not seem master of his brief, let alone in line with his coalition partners.

As Paul Waugh writes, Clegg was not alone in his tactical errors which may indeed add up to the ‘worst day’ for the coalition so far.

I am not an opponent of coalition government and I have written about how the UK media has to adapt it’s usual destructive approach in the face of the variable geometry of partnership politics.

But today reminds us that Government is about policy and it is politicians that set the agenda for the media, not the other way around. In this case Clegg has done us all a favour by reminding us of the real divisions within the marriage of convenience. I am sure the relationship will survive once Father gets home from his trip abroad. But it is clear that this is not an entirely happy family.

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.

Benedict Anderson described this “commoditization of the printed word”[4] as “[making] it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to recognize that there were people much like themselves beyond the face-to-face community. That is, the leap out of the local was made by way of one media technology; or at least that technology in combination with the market”[5].

Since then media technologies have only gone further to connect people at even greater distances and in ever more ‘personal’ ways (first introducing voice, and then visual imagery). What this has done is altered the nature of media to consumer communication. In its foundations it was a dialogical but essentially one-way process.

As technology has evolved the consumer is constantly drawn further into the process of discussion. A major impact therefore of the globalization of news stems from this, in that diversity of news sources now available to the consumer is greater than ever before, affording a wide variety of voices.

A key example of this would be the growth of al-Jazeera. Initially serving as a platform for an Arab perspective on regional news, an attempt to counter-act the “Anglo-American domination of news and current affairs in one of the world’s most geopolitically sensitive areas”[6], al-Jazeera has since expanded to other areas of the world, taking its unique ‘specialist, local’ approach along with it. Hugh Miles predicted that, “in the decades ahead we can expect only more al-Jazeeras, adding to an ever greater torrent of information, as regional ideas spread around the world and become global”[7].

With growth of both alternative and ‘mainstream’ media onto a global stage the consumer has the potential to engage with, and form opinions on, the media’s content in a way never before experienced. It is this empowered populace that is reveling in the growing diversity of media that is placing not only content, but journalistic norms in competition.

Some critics argue that what we are experiencing is the plurality of news sources but not the diversity, the key distinction being that for some the voices and perspectives are the same but available from a wider number of outlets.

For some what we are experiencing is a new form of Western Imperialism on a different stage “given the concentration of international communication hardware and software power among a few dominant actors in the global arena who want an ‘open’ international order created by their own national power and by the power of transnational media and communication corporations”[8].

From this perspective the consumers, far from finding a greater voice, find themselves at the mercy of a new colonial power seeking to control and manipulate the media environment.

In both instances the existence of groups such as al-Jazeera seem to form a counterfoil to the negative interpretations of media as ethnocentrically driven by a ‘Western’ agenda. Even the British group BBC have, arguably, proven both adaptable and impartial in their work, expanding their operations to other countries and proving both popular and well received in varying localities.

Another impact on the citizen that is attached to ideas of globalization in the media is that of value clashes. Each state has their own set of values and ideals that are intensely variable at times. Even amongst countries often grouped together by other social factors, such as “the West”, show a great deal of diversity.

As with any widespread change globalization of news media impacts in differing ways on the citizen, and as it is relatively young in its time, the whole moral and ethical landscape has not yet been fully defined, nor has its impact been understood in its entirety yet. However, I feel that despite the clashes and the difficulties created by in a sense ‘armchair voyeurism’ of other cultures the globalization of media is creating a market for more voices, more connectivity, and ultimately, hopefully a better informed populace.

Bibliography

Giddens, A “Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age” (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1991) pp.21-25

Hafez, K “Chapter 6 International Broadcasting” in The Myth of Media Globalization (Cambridge: Polity, 2006) pp.118-27

Hannerz, U Transnational Connections (London: Routledge, 1996) pp.17-29, 102-111

Silverstone, R “Chapter 6 Hospitality and Justice” in Media and Morality: on the rise of the mediapolis (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), pp.136-143

Thussu, D.K International Communication: Continuity and Change (London: Hodder Headline Group, 2000), pp.60-65, 130-134, 166-175,  190-192

Websites

http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/- Last Visited 10/7/10 14.30pm

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/24/opinion/24iht-edrojan.html- Last Visited 10/7/10 15.01pm

Other Sources

Cammaerts, B Presentation “Freedom of Speech Contested” 9/7/10

Orgad, S Presentation “Media, News, and Globalization” 12/7/10

Orgad, S Presentation “What’s new about new media?” 7/7/10

Perrin, W Presentation “Talk about Local” 8/7/10

[2] Giddens, A, p.21

[3] Giddens, A, p.22

[4] Hannerz, U Transnational Connections (London: Routledge, 1996) p.20

[5] Hannerz, U, p.20

[6] Thussu, D.K International Communication: Continuity and Change (London: Hodder Headline Group, 2000), p.190

[7] Thussu, D.K p.192

[8] Thussu, D.K p.61

[9] Thussu, D.K p.166

[10] Cammaerts, B Presentation “Freedom of Speech Contested” 9/7/10

[11] http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/- Last Visited 10/7/10 14.30pm

[12] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/24/opinion/24iht-edrojan.html- Last Visited 10/7/10 15.01pm

[13] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/24/opinion/24iht-edrojan.html- Last Visited 10/7/10 15.01pm

[14] Perrin, W Presentation “Talk about Local” 8/7/10

[15] Hafez, K “Chapter 6 International Broadcasting” in The Myth of Media Globalization (Cambridge: Polity, 2006) p.123

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.

Hey Mr Postman

Back in the golden years of television’s reign, Neil Postman created a genealogy of news’ mediums in America. Based on McLuhan’s idea that “the medium is the message”, he tried to prove that changes in media formats can actually affect the content of public discourse itself.  Years and years before television or the web , he argued, it was the widespread use of the telegraph that dictated the shift towards what we call international news today.

The age of telegraphy meant that a bigger amount of information could be shared faster and cheaper, surpassing the difficulties posed by distance. If space was no longer defining the ways through which news were being distributed, why was it necessary for space to define news’ content? The shift from “local” to “global” content was the aftermath of this change. News stories’ no longer needed to be functional. Information input no longer intended to motivate the reader towards an output of action[4]. The events featured on a daily newspaper could be taking place in various corners of the world, and rarely could the reader do anything, other than to consume the stories, until the very following day, when the paperboy would knock on their door again.

This new media reality of massive loads of news being quickly consumed just for the sake of doing so, introduced journalism into the reality of fragmentation, bold headlines and striking pictures.

The It Thing

And here we are, dozens of years after telegraphy ceased to be the “it” thing, witnessing the same patterns repeating themselves over and over again through different means of communication. From the 24-hour televised news of the 90’s to the 140 character tweets of the 10’s, consumption of fragmented global news is the contemporary manifesto.

But what are the repercussions of this news media frenzy on the citizen? Let’s face it; democracies need their participants to be well informed.  Choice-making is demanded of citizens, but choosing without knowledge can be detrimental for both a community and an individual. The concept of being well informed is based on one’s capability of relying on an array of well analyzed sources. Apparently, in a reality of fragmentation and incoherence, news sources might be failing to accomplish their democratic goals, due to a lack of basic intellectual nutrients.  Briefness may be efficient, but sometimes, it comes with a price.

Sea Of Irrelevance

The quantity of information to which a human is exposed nowadays is equally alarming. Postman is fierce, when he wonders whether our world has turned into a true version of Aldous Huxley’s imagination “Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance”.[5] As destructive and monolithic as relying on one sole source of  information can be, this vast ocean of information one is asked to swim through is equally dangerous for the citizen, since it simply blocks him from forming an opinion.

But, still, some people manage to deal with the waves. If objectivity is just an urban myth, as many people argue, sticking to the “sanctity and impartiality of some analytical sources might be useless, even dangerous for citizens.  That is where the participatory alternative media step into the scene. Their purpose is not only to multiply the plurality of voices heard across the media spectrum, but to also enhance their diversity.

It is true that the rise of the so-called “new media” or “next media”, as some prefer calling them[6], is resulting into the proliferation of participatory media models[7]. By enhancing alternative media with new and less expensive tools, as Dan Gilmore argues, the capabilities given to people by new media appliances and applications are remarkable, contributing to attempts of sharing within (online) communities. We have to embrace the idea that people of a globalized background are both consumers and producers of the news, as this new situation might be the gear for a significant shift: “the trend towards media transparency is inevitable”[8], Gilmore admits. And since media is heavily intertwined with politics, maybe there is a chance for citizens and democracies too.

Tourists And Vagabonds

In his book concerning Globalization, Zygmunt Bauman claims there are two types of people today: Tourists and Vagabonds[9]. The first category consists of people who are capable of moving from place to place based on their free will, being welcomed wherever they arrive. The second category consists of people who are unintentionally forced to move and whose presence is never welcome wherever they arrive. In short, Tourists travel because they can. Vagabonds travel because they can’t do otherwise.

I cannot help but wonder whether this paradigm could be applied to globalised media as well. Could it be that some people are willingly participating in this global celebration of news’ consumption and production, while others, are “allowed” access to this system only as objects of observation? And, in addition, what would such a situation imply for the “citizen”?

According to Lilie Chouliaraki, there is undoubtedly a distance between the viewers and those who are being viewed. People enter the so-called “global village” (if such a thing really exists) from different positions: Some will be watching the news from the comfort of their own homes, while others will be suffering suffer enough to be the news for the rest to consume[10]. This relationship, which is often characterized by pity, produces a certain division and hierarchy by creating the Identities of “we” (the lucky westerners) and “ the others” (the sufferers).

The question is whether, under such conditions, we can still speak of the existence of a true “cosmopolitanism”, a form of global citizenship. Chouliaraki argues that a true form of cosmopolitanism is feasible, if this sense of pity is combined with an “emphasis on detached reflection, on the question of why this suffering is important and what we can do about it.”[11]

Now, let’s return to the heroes of our short story. Through the distorting lenses, all they can see is a bizarre world of monstrous figures, a world of ugliness and pity. But, if such a thing as an intellectual earthquake is possible, they would be able to see something new. Through the cracks, they might have been able to discern that the people on the other side might not be really different from themselves. Maybe my story has not much to do with the issue at hand. But it surely provided me with some food for thought.

By Chrysostomos Agapitos (Polis Summer School student, 2010)

[2] Harvey, D., 1997, The Condition of Postmodernity, Blackwell, p. 285

[3] Bauman, Z., 2000, Liquid Modernity, Polity Press, p. 117

[4] Postman, N., p. 70

[5] Ibid., p. vii

[6] Armitage, T., (July 31 2006), ‘2007 and the “next” big media thing’, New Statesman, p. 2 of 2

[7] Bailey, O., Cammaerts, B.,  and  Carpentier, N., 2008, Understanding Alternative Media, Maidenhead: Open University Press, p. 4

[8] Gilmore, D., 2005, We The Media, Sebastopol, CA: O’ Rilley Media, p. 64

[9] Baman, Z., 2000, Globalization – The Human Consequences, Polity Press, p. 77

[10] Chouliaraki, L.,  2006,  The Spectatorship of Suffering,  London: Sage, p.4

[11] Ibid., p. 13

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’. 

Restrictions exist on three distinct levels:  firstly, The Personal (which relates to self-limitation set by the individual journalist); secondly, The Professional (editorial constraints and regulatory frameworks observed by the employer); and, lastly, The Political (limitations prescribed by the state and the legal system).  A potential news story will start buried beneath these strata.  In order to emerge as an acceptable piece of journalism, it is forced up through these layers: shaped and re-imagined at every stage.

Market Pressures

The Personal Level is home to a key limit on free speech that is commonplace in the news media today: self-censorship.[2] Market pressures – manifested when newsworthy stories are avoided because they are complex or lack audience appeal – are a factor, as are the pressures of competition in a fast-paced news environment where stories break online some time before they reach the newsstand or the 6pm bulletin.  As a result of these pressures good stories may not be pursued or, if followed-up, are censored pre-emptively to fit with the expectations of the editor and consumer.  George Orwell, in his essay ‘The Freedom of the Press’, laments this veiled censorship:

Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines — being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact.[3]

The reason self-censorship is such an effective limitation on freedom of expression rests on the idea of responsibility.  If a journalist’s personal standards fail to meet those set by the employer or the audience, then there is only one person who can take responsibility for that shortfall and only one person who suffers the consequences.  With this in mind, taking steps to limit freedom of expression on The Personal Level becomes an important self-preservation strategy for journalists around the world.

The Nasr CNN Case

For example, in July 2010 CNN International sacked one of its senior editors, Octavia Nasr, after she published a Twitter message expressing regret at the death of Lebanese Shi’ite cleric Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah who was closely involved with the Hezbollah political and paramilitary organisation.  The tweet caused anger amongst certain supporters of Israel who contacted the broadcaster with their concerns.

A CNN spokesman said: ‘CNN regrets any offence her Twitter message caused. It did not meet CNN’s editorial standards’[4] and Nasr, writing on CNN’s blog, expressed her deep regret at reducing the complex life of a ‘terrorist’ figure to a brief tweet. She explained:

Reaction to my tweet was immediate, overwhelming and provides a good lesson on why 140 characters should not be used to comment on controversial or sensitive issues, especially those dealing with the Middle East.[5]

It could be argued that Nasr was entitled to express her opinion on the death of Fadlallah.  However, CNN clearly felt that, when tweeting under the name @OctaviaNasrCnn, Octavia Nasr’s views should align with its own.   Nasr’s failure to self-impose limitations based on an awareness of both her audience and her employer’s position was her downfall.

The Pesonal Level

It is not unreasonable to suggest that a journalist wishing to remain in employment would be willing self-censor and, thus, actively limit their freedom of expression at The Personal Level.

The limitations on freedom of expression that exist on The Professional Level are less reliant on individual judgement and are largely practical in their nature.  The voice of the traditional journalist – which he has already restricted of his own accord – faces the further constraints of professional standards; deontology; and access to skills and resources.

News media in the United Kingdom – and, indeed, most other European countries – are subject to regulation and the journalist, as an employee, has his freedom of expression limited by such regulatory framework.

The Harm Principle

Certain systems of regulation have, at their core, an awareness of John Stewart Mill’s Harm Principle which proposes that the only justification for preventing freedom of speech is the prevention of harm to an individual.[6]

For example, the Editors’ Code of Practice in the UK is designed, not to prevent the press publishing varied and robust opinions, but to protect vulnerable individuals from genuine harm (be that through misrepresentation, intrusion or discrimination by newspapers or magazines).[7]

This form of regulation is based on Mill’s premise that ‘the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others’[8] and, provided his employer is actively observing the regulatory rules, the newspaper journalist will find his freedom of expression limited to this effect.

The Offence Principle

The Offence Principle, introduced in 1985 by Joel Feinberg,  goes somewhat further than the Harm Principle in limiting freedom of expression.  Whereas the Harm Principle refers to the interests of the individual affected by the journalist’s conduct, the Offence Principle refers to the moral position or feelings of his audience, arguing that preventing serious offence is necessary and in the general interest of the community at large.[9]

The rules laid down by Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code – which applies to all television and radio in the UK – appear to take the Offence Principle into greater account than the Editors’ Code.  Ofcom’s Code states:

To ensure that generally accepted standards are applied to the content of television and radio services so as to provide adequate protection for members of the public from the inclusion in such services of harmful and/or offensive material.[10]

It could be said that, as a result of the above, UK broadcast journalists encounter more limitations on their freedom than print reporters on The Professional Level.

The Political Level contains numerous obstacles that limit freedom of expression for journalists.  Reporters have to battle with the conflict between Article 8 and Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights[11]; libel law; Government secrecy on a local and central scale; laws preventing hate speech, court orders and restrictions; notions of social responsibility; and, in Britain at least, the Official Secrets Act.

The Political Level

Perhaps one of the strongest recent examples of limiting freedom of expression on The Political Level involved a global commodities company, a British national newspaper, a few thousand social networkers and an ambitious law firm.

In October 2009, The Guardian newspaper reported that a legal injunction applied for by libel lawyers Carter Ruck prevented it from covering a question put forward in Parliament (contrary to the long-established right of newspapers to act as the Fourth Estate and hold a mirror up to politicians).  The newspaper complied with this injunction and neither named the questioner nor published the question.

Various bloggers speculated that the blocked question was likely to be linked to Trafigura’s role in dumping toxic waste in Africa, and as the story was shared across the online community, ‘Trafigura’ became a trending topic on Twitter.  When the order was lifted the following day, the newspaper confirmed that Trafigura was the source of the injunction.

Fantastic Own Goal

Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, described the injunction as “a fantastic own goal”[12] as, while it initially looked as if the injunction would protect Trafigura and keep its actions from public scrutiny, its mere existence piqued the interest of so many networked individuals that within a short space of time the relevant information was freely available in the public domain.  The injunction became, to all intents and purposes, defunct.

However, the key point to remember is this: a legal order was put in place and the newspaper had no choice but to comply (albeit grudgingly).  Without the persistence of citizen journalists and the immediacy of the internet, it could be argued that the injunction would not have been lifted just a matter of days after its existence came to light as was the case.  Roger Silverstone reminds us:

It should not be forgotten that the media in many states in the world are still subject to the kind of political and cultural controls with inevitably, and by design, restrict, sometimes to the point of nullity, the possibilities of judgement and the freedom of speech.[13]

The fact remains that in any country – non-democratic or otherwise – The Political Level, in particular the law, has the potential to limit – or, indeed, remove altogether – a journalist’s freedom to report what he wants, in the manner of his choosing.

There are many limitations on freedom of expression and every traditional journalist (as opposed to citizen journalists) around the world will see his output affected by at least one limiting factor at each of the three levels: Personal; Professional; and Political.

There is no doubt that completely free expression in the media is an ideal, rather than a reality, and precisely what is meant by a ‘free press’ is a matter that demands careful scrutiny.  However, the real question is whether the acceptable journalism that emerges, having traversed the three layers of limitations that affect freedom of expression, accurately represents the original story.

By Rebecca Hales Polis Summer School, 2010

Bibliography

Feinberg, J.  The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, Vol 2: Offense to Others.  Oxford University Press, New York. 1985.

Mill, J.S.  On Liberty.  Yale University Press, London.  2003.

Open Society Institute EU Monitoring and Advocacy Program. Television across Europe: regulation, policy and independence 2005 Report.  Open Society Institute, Hungary.  2005.

Orwell, G.  The Freedom of the Press.  (Excerpt from the suppressed preface to Animal Farm; published 1972 in the Times Literary Supplement, also 1993, in the Everyman’s Library edition of Animal Farm)

Silverstone, R.  Media and Morality: On the rise of the Mediapolis.  Polity Press, Cambridge.  2007. p 49

White, A.  The Ethical Journalism Initiative.  International Federation of Journalists, Brussels. 2008.

Electronic Resources

Editors’ Code Committee.  Code of Practice.  Press Complaints Commission, 2009.  See URL (accessed 15 July 2010) http://www.pcc.org.uk/assets/111/Code_A4_version_2009.pdf
Freedom House. Freedom of the Press Index.  2010.  See URL (accessed 15 July 2010) http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=16

Greenslade, R.  CNN fires journalist for tweeting her praise for Islamic cleric.  The Guardian, 8 July 2010.  See URL (accessed 14 July 2010) http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2010/jul/08/cnn-twitter

Nasr, O.  Nasr explains controversial tweet on Lebanese cleric.  CNN, 6 July 2010.  See URL (accessed 14 July 2010) http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/07/06/nasr-explains-controversial-tweet-on-lebanese-cleric/
Ofcom.  The Ofcom Broadcasting Code (revised edn 2009).  See URL (accessed 14 July 2010) http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/broadcast/code09/bcode.pdf
Pew Research Centre and the Columbia Journalism Review.  Self Censorship: How Often and Why. The Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press, 30 April 2000.  See URL (accessed 14 July 2010) http://people-press.org/report/?pageid=219

Rusbridger. A.  The Trafigura fiasco tears up the textbook.  The Guardian, 14 October 2009.  See URL (accessed 14 July 2010) http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/oct/14/trafigura-fiasco-tears-up-textbook

Words – 1455

[2] In a survey of nearly 300 US journalists and news executives by the Pew Research Centre and the Columbia Journalism Review one-quarter of the local and national journalists claimed to have purposely avoided newsworthy stories.  See URL (accessed 14 July 2010) http://people-press.org/report/?pageid=219

[3] Orwell, G.  The Freedom of the Press. (Excerpt from the suppressed preface to Animal Farm; published 1972 in the Times Literary Supplement, also 1993, in the Everyman’s Library edition of Animal Farm)

[4] Greenslade, R.  CNN fires journalist for tweeting her praise for Islamic cleric. The Guardian, 8 July 2010.  See URL (accessed 14 July 2010) http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2010/jul/08/cnn-twitter

[5] Nasr, O.  Nasr explains controversial tweet on Lebanese cleric. CNN, 6 July 2010.  See URL (accessed 14 July 2010) http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/07/06/nasr-explains-controversial-tweet-on-lebanese-cleric/

[6] Mill, J.S.  On Liberty. Yale University Press, London.  2003.

[7] Editors’ Code Committee.  Code of Practice. Press Complaints Commission, 2009.  See URL (accessed 15 July 2010) http://www.pcc.org.uk/assets/111/Code_A4_version_2009.pdf

[8] Mill, p 22

[9] Feinberg, J.  The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, Vol 2: Offense to Others. Oxford University Press, New York. 1985.

[10] Ofcom.  The Ofcom Broadcasting Code (revised edn 2009). See URL (accessed 14 July 2010) http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/broadcast/code09/bcode.pdf

11 Article 8 provides a right to respect for one’s ‘private and family life, his home and his correspondence’, subject to certain restrictions that are ‘in accordance with law’ and ‘necessary in a democratic society’.  Article 10, of course, relates to freedom of expression.

[12] Rusbridger. A.  The Trafigura fiasco tears up the textbook.  The Guardian, 14 October 2009.  See URL (accessed 14 July 2010) http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/oct/14/trafigura-fiasco-tears-up-textbook

[13] Silverstone, R.  Media and Morality: On the rise of the Mediapolis. Polity Press, Cambridge.  2007. p 49