The news that a blogger who filmed a meeting of a local council in Carmarthenshire was arrested for “breaching the peace” raises an interesting question that could have a slightly unfashionable answer.
Flip-cams: The sword of transperency or an engine for selective reporting?
My friend, David Allen Green, writing in the New Statesman has a supplied a detailed trawl of the legal evidence along with some good journalistic legwork to conclude that…
“…Carmarthenshire Council and Dyfed Powys Police have simply acted in an altogether hapless, illiberal, and alarming manner. A person, surely, should not be arrested and detained just for filming a public council meeting, and a council should not be able to prevent someone from doing so in this manner. In my opinion, all the councillors, officials, and police officers involved in this sad sequence of events really should be ashamed of themselves.”
I’m in two minds over whether the flip-cam will improve the quality of local democracy, and I think this highlights some of the tension between liberalism and the good practice of liberal democracy.
On the one hand, all of David’s arguments stand – and then some. Surely a good democracy should remove any barriers that stop people from viewing democratic proceedings? Transparency will result in less corruption, better decisions, a greater sense of participation, and so on.
On the other hand, there are a few snags. Firstly, if individuals are doing this selectively – on issues that they care about, we will naturally expect to see a bias towards issues that small groups of individuals care about. These may be (but not always will be) subjects that effect people who have more time/resources on their hands. If this becomes the main way that Council meetings are covered, it can expose councils to more pressure group politics.
This may be at the expense of the decisions that many of us – people with mild preferences and a need to see policy serve the interests of the whole community – would expect to see from local authorities. I know I trot it out a lot, but the example of a more direct democracy provided by California should be a shocking example to us all.
So, is a balanced view of proceedings going to be distributed by citizen journalists? Or will it inevitably result in selective reporting?
Another question: Does this drive up the quality of deliberation (i.e. do Councillors raise their game?) or does it result in either a more guarded approach or, conversely, a more soapboxy style?
We expect councillors to behave in a disinterested way and there must be some parallel here with the jury room: Would juries make better decisions if they were selectively recorded?
Then there’s the question of professional journalism. I know this is a moot point at the moment, given the headlong retreat from half-decent reporting among local newspapers. But we expect pro-journos to cover issues in an even-handed way, catering to mild preferences of a broad audience rather than the narrow views of a deeply interested one.
Will this kind of guerilla coverage drive this kind of reporting out? I posted here a couple of years ago about the negative impact that opening Parliamentary proceedings out had – the conclusion was that newspapers stopped covering it because anyone who was really interested could get the real thing on the radio or (later) TV. Will this apply to local authorities, or are we in a different ballgame with local politics?
In my experience, the answer may be that councils should routinely film all proceedings and index them professionally. This will reduce the scope for selective coverage and allow visitors who follow the links the option to hear all of the points (and the context provided by professional local government officers) to the proceedings. It will also allow people to drop randomly into a council meeting and see a broad range of issues being discussed responsibly (or not).
A firm in Brighton called Public i (declared interest: I’m personally friendly with a few of the team there) have been offering a web-casting service aimed at local authorities for some years – it indexes each speaker which saves you ploughing through whole meetings if you’re only there for a particular reason [random example here].
Surely councils need to pro-actively promote a public awareness of the whole of their work? Given the low interest in local politics, it will make it easier then for local journalists to report procedings and may result in more broad coverage. Unless they do this, we can expect selective reporting to dominate agendas more and more.
I’ve advised councils on this and found that their main concern is representation – they don’t want the words of councillors or officers taken out of context.
When I approached Lichfield District Council about filming their meetings for hyperlocal site Lichfield Live, they welcomed me with open arms on the condition that the video was not edited (something I hadn’t even contemplated).
In my discussions with councils I’ve told them that they need to allow filming but that they should provide their own recordings as a matter of record. Comms should be charged with the responsibility of making sure that video misrepresentations are countered with the official, unedited version.
I agree wholeheartedly that councils should – indeed, should be required to – broadcast all meetings and provide an accessible online archive; but wouldn’t audio suffice?
I come from the same neck of the woods as the lady who was arrested, and I can only speak for what happens here.
The local press does send reporters along to meetings of the full council and the executive board; less often to the other committees. Very little of their copy actually gets into the papers. In fact, there is almost no straight reporting of meetings. Instead what seems to happen is that a reporter will pick up on a couple of points and go to the press office to flesh them out, usually with a few quotes from senior councillors or officers.
There is next to no investigative reporting, and when we do get feature interviews, they tend to be of the 1930′s “do you have a message for the people, Sir?” variety (e.g. a recent interview with the new chair of the council glossed over a near-riot over the closure of a local school and concentrated on his “achievements”, including rising attendance at the annual sheep festival).
In common with a lot of other local authorities, Carmarthenshire produces its own “newspaper”, which is devoid of anything resembling bad news, problems, cuts, etc. It does not even have a letters page. A couple of years back, one of the main local papers ran a story saying that the Council had threatened to switch its advertising unless there was a change to more positive reporting. This story later mysteriously disappeared from the online archive.
So we are not exactly well-served, even before the floodgates are opened and the cameras are brought in. And I suspect that Carmarhenshire is not unique in this respect.
“they don’t want the words of councillors or officers taken out of context.”.
On that basis, surely they would ban the press altogether?
That’s a fair point Alun, and I should probably have enlarged the post to cover one extra argument:
We’ve not really coped with the withdrawal of the press from it’s civic duty over the past 20 years or so. The professional reporter was expeected to do just that – report – not editorialise. It just seems to me that we’re going from bad to worse – less reporting, more selective editorialising by papers, and then the editorialising being amplified by interest groups using free tools.
I’d still say that the best solution would be for councils to provide an ‘official’ stream that’s bookmarked for ease-of-use.