Local Democracy Notepad

Two stories – both from Roy Greenslade in recent days – that give cause to

ponder the responsibility that the media bear.

Pic: Click for credit

The first one is the old chestnut about the big lie splashed over the early pages followed by the retraction hidden under the Darts results.

Given the fuss earlier this year canadian discount viagra online around academics in East Anglia and the way they were making their data available, it’s quite astonishing that the deliberately misleading way that journalists handle the same issue isn’t a bigger issue.

The second one – surely one that merits a great deal more coverage than it got – covers the moves by Icelandic authorities to acknowledge the upsides of strong guarantees and support for press freedom. These guarantees are being offered as a direct response to the perceived failure of journalists to challenge the political consensus prior to that nation’s bankruptcy last year.

George Monbiot is here writing about the Tea Party movement in the US. He argues that the European left could learn a thing or two from the US right.

It’s an odd article. viagra super active It contains this sentence….

“They have been promoted by Fox News – owned

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by that champion of the underdog Rupert Murdoch – and lavishly funded by other billionaires.”

… yet if you were to delete that sentence and then read the rest of the article, there’s no evidence that he understands that the Tea Party movement have been…

“…promoted by Fox News – owned by that champion of the underdog Rupert Murdoch – and lavishly funded by other billionaires.”

… or ‘we get the politicians we deserve, pt1′:

Via Mick, this is worth a look over at the Daily Mail for people who recycle The Independent.

Pic: Click for credit

“Academics …. found that “not giving straight answers to questions” scored an average of 8.45 when people were asked how much of x.php/generic-viagra-us/’ title=’generic viagra us’>generic viagra us a problem it was on a scale of zero to 10. “Making promises they know they can’t keep” scored 8.13, the same rating as “misusing official expenses and allowances”, while “accepting bribes” scored 6.43.”

I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry about this. It ignores the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance in a way that no-one with an ounce of sense should do.

For me, perhaps the dominant theme for this election – as with many previous elections – will be the Prisoner’s Dilemma – or the BF, as outlined in this slightly homophobic post.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s Peter Levine on the way that the healthcare viagra buy online cheap debate has been reported by the press in the US:

“…the news media spent a year feeding American citizens a steady diet of stories about Congressional procedure, the possible impact of health-care reform on elections, and quotes that falsely described the bill or denounced its critics. Americans never showed any desire to watch Congress “scratch and claw.” They would have appreciated some information about what various legislative bills would do.

Now that the bill has passed, reporters finally feel an obligation to explain it. Bernard’s story lists the major provisions, although The Times also feels obliged to run a front-page “news analysis” of Obama’s alleged strategy (he cast a “bet that the Republicans … overplayed their hand”), a separate article about political fights to come, and a panoply of one-liners: “Freedom dies a little bit today …” “It is almost like the Salem Witch trials …” The ratio of substance to horse-race reporting remains low, but I predict that weekly news magazines and metropolitan dailies will begin to run helpful explanatory pieces.”

I find it impossible to believe that politics could be treated in the same way here in the UK.

In today’s Guardian, (and here with footnotes) George Monbiot asks:

“I can think of only two local newspapers that consistently hold power to account: the West Highland Free Press and the Salford Star. Are any others worth saving? If so, please let me know.”

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His observation ….

“Most local papers exist to amplify the voices of their proprietors and advertisers and other powerful people with whom they wish to stay on good terms. In this respect they scarcely differ from most of the national media. But they also contribute to what in Mexico is called caciquismo: the entrenched power of local elites. This is the real threat to local democracy, not the crumpling of the media empires of arrogant millionaires.”

… is strikingly similar to Helen Swaffer’s line that…

“Freedom of the press in Britain is freedom to print such of the proprietor’s prejudices as the advertiser’s won’t object to.”

In no lesser a place than the Washington Post, there are arguments for state-sponsored journalism. Here’s my question: Should local authorities be asking for powers – and the ability to raise funding – to offer subsidies for responsible independent newspapers?

Can this be done in a way that ensures independent reporting?

Apologies to anyone who thinks that a blog about local democracy has been hijacked and turned into one about how the internet effects newspapers. In defence of this focus, I’d argue that the way that local issues are reported (and how the internet changes this) is one of the big issues that will shape local democracy (and how the hyperscrutiny of the internet will change the character and nature of our local elected representatives is another)

Here’s how the whole question used to look….

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From 1981 (via SacredFacts)

Eduardo Da Silva the cheat. Are phone-ins better at discussing sport than politics? (Click for pic attribution).

Matthew Taylor has a good post up about the architecture of morality, and it’s all the better for the fact that he’s chosen an important issue (football) to illustrate his point.

Personally, I spend six days a week tut-tutting about the way that popular political discourse is convened and managed. Panel shows on TV and radio, high-volume blogs and forums, demagogic columnists, leader-writers and the selective letters pages are all regular bugbears for the bloggers who contribute to this site and many of my favourite blogs.

On the seventh day, however, I rest. I spend the afternoons that I don’t have a ticket for the mothership shouting at Radio Five Live and occasionally I make a half-hearted (never successful) attempt to Have My Say on the 606 Show. It’s often exasperating to listen to, but some of the callers pre-occupations are spot on – particuarly (returning to Matthew’s starting point) about diving in the penalty box.

On big moral issues, a highly public shouting match always hits the problem of the ‘hard to reach’ and ‘hard to avoid’ groups. So you get what Tom Freeman calls ‘quality uncontrolled audience participation’ – slightly unrepresentative views from contributors .. “..frothing at the mouth at what some council somewhere is doing to stop ordinary British hardworking families from setting fire to Muslims’ heads, because of so-called health and safety.” (A line too good not to pinch – from here). Read the rest of this entry »

The Western People - do local newspapers in Ireland illustrate the problems with English local newspapers?

My recent sojourn in the west of Ireland has made me look at this whole newspapers v councils issue in a new light.

Roy Greenslade, it seems to me, is thinking inside a very English box. On the Guardian blog, he accuses Darlington councillor Nick Wallis of disingenuity in his dealings with a local journalist when he says (of the fact that his local authority is publishing it’s own newspaper):

“I’m guessing this hurts the local newspaper industry at a time when advertising revenue is at a premium.”

Greenslade goes on:

But Wallis has the gall to add that “local councils can’t win” because “they’re damned if they have a council magazine with significant costs to the taxpayer, and damned if they try to offset those costs with advertising revenue.”

That misses the point by a mile. Councils are not damned for not publishing at all. Council taxpayers across the country are not demanding that their councils produce mini-Pravdas. They know it’s propaganda and treat it as such.

What those residents don’t realise is that their local newspapers are losing revenue and facing closure because their councils can’t stand proper independent scrutiny.

Barron, one of Britain’s most respected regional editors, runs as good a paper as his Newsquest/Gannett budget allows.

I’d suggest that it is Greenslade who is missing an important point here. His loyalty to his own profession is touching, and there is no question that Britain’s journalists aspire to subject local authorities to “proper independent scrutiny”, but the people that own the newspapers (and it is they who count here) simply don’t share this conviction. Mr Greenslade will be familliar enough with books by Nick Davies and John Lloyd to understand this churnalism point, and it’s disingenuous of him to ignore it here.

The last few words in that quote, above, leap out: “…as good a paper as his Newsquest/Gannett budget allows.”

Media owners have not, for some time, shown much concern for the quality of their local reporting. The problem, I would suggest, is in the market failure that has impacted upon local newspapers. It runs something like this:

• Local printed media – with it’s high entry costs and strong economies of scale – tends towards monopolies that secure their position by driving down prices
• This results in a market failure whereby the need to secure a monopoly drives out local players who would compete on quality as well as price

In the UK, we have a handful of media groups that offer a fairly low-level of editorial service, selling newspapers cheaply and handing the profits that accrue from their economies of scale over to their shareholders. Our problem is that we have consolidated mega-groups of local newspapers.

It also isn’t the business of a local councillor to ensure that every single industry exists in an ecology that ensures that it will survive – particularly when they have many of the characteristics of a monopoly. Read the rest of this entry »

Having posted yesterday on the question of local council-produced newspapers, I’ve just seen a piece in London’s Evening Standard by Andrew Gilligan.

“In the past few years, a total of nine London boroughs have ditched low-key, factual publicity material and started high-frequency, in-your-face tabloids, full of good news – even if, as we shall see, it’s not always quite true.

Most are fortnightly but two are actually weekly. A Standard investigation has found that in London more writers are now employed by these official papers than by the local independent press.”

The questions that deserve asking around this issue are being asked elsewhere, but the fact that Andrew Gilligan is asking them illustrates what a potent political question this is. Gilligan’s political antenae are telling him all sorts of things, and his only omission is that he ducks the question that his own particular brand of partisan journalism foregrounds:

If local authority press officers aren’t the right people to offer an objective assessment of the performance of a local authority, why does he imagine that journalists such as himself are any more suited to the job?

In that article, as in so much of his writing, Gilligan is a partisan figure who feels able to brazenly advance the commercial and political aspirations of his editors and newspaper proprietors.

Roy Greenslade broadly agrees with Gilligan – and I suspect, if the argument came from elsewhere, we’d be able to play the ball rather than the man on this one. I don’t know about you, but I find that journalists are fairly unreliable witnesses on this one…

Does the sceptical journalist solve the problems that we thought they did?

As local newspapers retreat from providing anything like a good quality of news coverage, local authorities are wondering what their response should be.

On the one hand, there’s the model that Birmingham City Council have taken – providing a much more user-friendly information gateway that is designed to provide resources to citizen-journalists and bloggers.

Other options include beefing up the council’s information department with a view to turning the fairly skimpy info circulars into fully-fledged newspapers or being more in tune with hyperlocal sites of the kind that Will Perrin is promoting at the moment.

It’s a question that raises a number of important philosophical questions about the role of the state and the bureaucracy in providing information about itself. Stripping bureaucracies of the monopoly position that they have in describing their own services is a potentially game-changing idea that could, in some ways, redefine the state as we know it.

But what about the idea of ‘public service journalism’? The Press Association have a slightly opportunistic proposal to position themselves as the hub for ‘public service journalism’ – as far as I can see, the BBC do it with an efficiency that other media players can only dream of. Read the rest of this entry »