We cherish the idea that we clever Westerners have something called 'freedom of the press'.
But what exactly does that expression mean? Does it mean that those who constitute the body of publishing folk who define themselves as 'the press' have special status and associated freedoms which may or may not be enjoyed by the rest of us mere citizens?
Or does it mean that everyone has (in principle) the right to find access to printing devices and then get stuff out there, ie the main newspapers and other large media outlets have no status separate from the rest of us?
I of course incline to the latter view. Indeed, perhaps unwisely I take it for granted.
The whole issue is complicated because once upon a time there was literally no way to get views circulated in any sort of written way other than by getting access to a printing press machine.
This really matters.
Why? Because it goes to the heart of any concept of democracy.
Is there an elite - a 'mainstream media' - who assume to themselves the right to have special freedoms denied to the rest of us? If such an elite group of opinion-formers has some sort of extra legal status, where does that leave laws aimed at defining what sort of speech is allowed during an election campaign, and by whom?
Plus, what happens when as in the USA the majority of mainstream media outlets act as blockers for one political tendency (currently the Obama Democrats)?
Anyway, Volokh Conspiracy (leading US group law blog) takes a good look at rival interpretations of what 'freedome of the press' means in formal US legal/constitutional terms, and explains a lot:
But other judges and scholars — including the Citizens United majority and Justice Brennan — have argued that the “freedom ... of the press” does not protect the press-as-industry, but rather protects everyone’s use of the printing press (and its modern equivalents) as a technology. People or organizations who occasionally rent the technology, for instance by buying newspaper space, broadcast time, or the services of a printing company, are just as protected as newspaper publishers or broadcasters...
Both sides in the debate often appeal at least partly to the constitutional text and its presumed original meaning. The words “the press” in the First Amendment must mean the institutional press, says one side. The words must mean press-as-technology, says the other. Citizens United is unlikely to settle the question, given how sharply the four dissenters and many outside commentators have disagreed with the majority.
So who is right? What light does the “history” referred to by the Citizens United dissent shed on the “text” and the Framers’ “purpose”?
The answer, it turns out, is that people during the Framing era likely understood the text as fitting the press-as-technology model — as securing the right of every person to use communications technology, and not just securing a right belonging exclusively to members of the publishing industry. The text was likely not understood as treating the press-as-industry differently from other people who wanted to rent or borrow the press-as-technology on an occasional basis.
Read the whole thing. It directly affects you both as a reader and as a potential publisher of your own thoughts on the Web or otherwise..
And if you are in any way interested in how the tension between mass printing and personal freedom first emerged, read an awesome book by Adrian Johns on the way mass publishing started. Note especially the startling scope of cheating and stealing as printing presses became more widespread across Europe - Newton and other great scientists had huge problems stopping other brainy people elsewhere in England or on the Continent simply republishing their work and claiming it as their own.
This, by the way, explains why Parliament proclaimed that a copy of every book published had to be sent to the British Museum and other grand 'legal deposit' institutions - there had to be at least one verifiable original against which fraudsters' work might be measured.
The way everyone tried to take advantage of the surging technologies of the day back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is eerily reminiscent of the myriad problems we now face in dealing with Internet piracy and so on.
Adrian Johns explains all this in a magnificent way. I bought his book on the subject while I was at Harvard in 1997 and stupidly lent it to someone, never to get it back.
So in writing this blog post I have just reordered a copy via Amazon. I warmly recommend you do the same - a true book about books:
Here is my latest article at DIPLOMAT magazine on the ever-fascinating question of diplomatic and wider media technique in a confusing new world:
Once upon a time diplomats were rarely seen or heard in public. To do their vital work of privately communicating messages between national leaders they needed to be discreet, anonymous, detached, aloof, rarefied. In a word, invisible.
When I joined the Foreign Office in 1979 the rules on such things were clear and strict. UK-based diplomats would never appear in the British media: that was what Ministers were expected (and wanted) to do. Overseas it was slightly different. British diplomats had some discretion to respond to foreign media requests for interviews and statements, but when in doubt, they should check with the FCO News Department in London. No Foreign Minister wanted to have their breakfast ruined by opening the newspaper to find a sensational report of something unexpected or unwelcome proclaimed by an FCO official overseas.
Back then these limitations on diplomatic media appearances made sense: the media themselves were restricted. In Britain and elsewhere there were a tiny number of TV stations and relatively few newspapers. Official foreign policy pronouncements could – and should – be rationed accordingly to keep everything at a suitable level of sobriety.
This all changed. Along came new technology, CNN, the internet, Twitter and Facebook, a proliferation of TV channels available across the planet at any time of day or night, digital radio, blogging. A Tower of Babel. A tsunami of noisy words, comment, pseudo-analysis and even, now and again, some facts. The media are increasingly no longer something separate or ‘above’ the general public. The media are the general public.
Or the general public are the media...
With added free media presentation tips for getting messages out in this hubbub:
One basic lesson came through loud and clear when I trained new FCO diplomats. In a mock interview, one had to act the role of a British spokesman, the other an American spokesman. The young man tasked to pretend to be American was nervous. Yet when we played back the video, he was far more effective. In his nervousness he had said very little, but what he had said came across on the screen as conveying toughness and determination. By contrast his colleague who played the British spokesman had been relaxed and cheerful. Much too relaxed and cheerful: he came across as friendly but frivolous.
My heartfelt advice to any diplomat facing a TV or radio interview? Have only one or two (maximum three) points to get across. Sound positive and firm! Don’t feel obliged to answer the question: simply use the question as the springboard for conveying your core points, then stop.
Above all, keep it simple. The more you say – and above all the more you try to be clever – the more you open yourself up to a devastating jibe from the interviewer. Oh, and when the interview ends remember that the cameras may still be filming you until you’ve left the studio…
From today's Sun on the poignant story of a very fat woman who was dumped by her fiance for an even fatter one - see the third para:
Amanda Hart, 25, had a whirlwind romance with Matt Kemp, 27, when she met him online after struggling for years to find a lover who would accept her size.
They got engaged and started planning their wedding, but just three months before the big day she found out he was cheating on her with even heavier Michelle Flack, 33.
Michelle has now dumped the bigger woman loving fireman and her and Amanda have become firm friends.
Yesterday my Sunday was interrupted by a request from RT-TV (Russia's answer to the BBC's world broadcasts) to take part in a programme talking about the Eurozone in general and Italy in particular.
As they asked nicely and as it was not too far to the BBC Oxford studio where the short session was to be recorded, off I went.
Here is part of the transcript of the interview, with my friend Patrick Young as it happens also featured just below (Patrick knows more than any human being decently should know about software programs running Balkan and other such new stock exchanges).
Off I go:
“All the countries in the eurozone which are getting these debt difficulties are having the same problem. This is because they are in the eurozone and cannot devalue their currencies. In effect they are left with borrowing money from the international market and the other eurozone members. They are left with reducing government spending, which is sacking people, which is not popular with the people who are sacked. They are reduced to putting up taxes, which is not popular with everyone else," ...
“Once you’ve got into these very strong difficult debt situations, the ways out are all very painful. So in both Greece and Italy and in some other eurozone countries the choices available to the leaders of the countries concerned are very limited. That is why the eurozone is coming under stress – because the political and psychological pressures are coming up against the way the whole thing was set up in the first place,”
Crawford emphasised that the crisis in Europe is like an impressive house where the foundations, it turns out, were not very well built. And it is very difficult to repair the foundations while inside the house and without moving somewhere else.
If you're feeling brave, watch the full interview (only some four minutes) by pressing the link above. Lawks, I look tired. Maybe it was clear and fluent enough for the occasion, even if I got a bit too involved in one or two long sentence thoughts. Keep it short - and simple!
Fascinating in a grimly painful way to watch one's own twitches and mannerisms (such as starting each answer with "Well, ...") when part of one's work is training others in how to do media work ha ha.
A random comment below from one Bogdan shows that he/she has not quite grasped the point of a TV interview:
A weaker Italy might appeal to many inside the EU. It would be very interesting indeed if Mr Crawford could as well analyse the dire status of economy in his own country, which should be the UK by the biased style of his article...
The medium is the message, or something. Even in Russia.
I have written here before about the way the BBC defaults towards glossing over collectivist crimes and damning with faint praise the success of market-based solutions. Or slips in other strange invariably Lefty assumptions via sly editing.
- simply making things up at the height of a crisis to boost ratings and by implication damn reformers
It is beyond debate that the BBC does this not because there is a secret nerve-centre of Leftists controlling output, but rather because the whole intellectual culture of the organisation tilts in a specific way to make many reporters and presenters simply unaware of the crude biases they are showing.
Take two new examples.
Here is an especially chilling one. Paul Crook worked for 30 years(!) at the BBC World Service describing his life in Mao's China. His communist parents themselves get horrendously persecuted. But he doesn't lose faith! And he gets a nice fat space on the BBC World website to propagate his own humiliation (my emphasis):
We thought my father would be released within a few days, in a few weeks. We had all been educated to think that things were getting better all the time, but sometimes there would be mistakes. One of the slogans at that time was: 'You should trust the Masses, and trust the Party!'
... My mother was repeatedly summoned for questioning and eventually she too disappeared...
We were anxious about what had happened to our parents, but we weren't eaten up by anger or worry, as we were brought up to believe that if you were innocent then this would be proved in due course.
Meanwhile my parents' friends gave us care and encouragement, and the official position towards young people whose parents were in trouble was that they could still be educated 'to take the right path'.
... In the end my mother was freed after just over three years of lock-up on the university campus. My father was released from prison after five years, much of it spent in solitary confinement. He and my mother were later exonerated of any wrongdoing, and received an official apology.
My parents were never physically abused in all the time they were locked up, but it was a trying time, to say the least. They were sustained by their belief that all this upheaval was part of an attempt to create a better society...
Like many of my friends I grew to be rather sceptical, to be critical of what people's stated intentions were, and what their grand visions entailed.
My father said when he was locked up, he did think it was a mistake and wondered how he could clear his name. When he came out he found that many of his Chinese colleagues had gone through very similar experiences.
And he was reconciled to the fact that the leadership was making an earnest effort to get rid of these abuses. He had lost five years of his life in prison but he didn't see why he should change his ideals.
Isn't that staggering? Imagine the BBC giving all that space to a slave who had ended up being brainwashed and describes how his slavery was 'all for the best'?
This family have been relatively lucky in not being murdered by the Mao regime, yet they also suffered mightily for nothing. And they still retained their 'ideals' and their belief in the leadership's 'earnestness' in stopping 'abuses'. No sign at all of any thinking that the sort of undemocratic elitist system they believed in might inevitably create such crimes?
*pauses, lost for words*
What sort of evil ideas did wretched Paul Crook emit into the world's airways on UK taxpayers' money during his long years at the BBC World Service?
That example shows furtive pro-communist propaganda. This next one shows furtive anti-market propaganda: Has Western capitalism failed?
Note the fact that this very question is asked. The five 'experts' are indeed all prominent enough and give a range of more or less coherent responses. Indeed, they even manage to find a sassy Ghanaian entrepreneur who praises 'Western capitalism in its truest form' as well as Lord Desai:
Russian capitalism is somewhat old and in need of urgent repair, but the spirit of capitalism - risk-taking, saving, investing, hard work - all those virtues have now migrated and are happily ensconced in China, India, Indonesia, Korea and Japan - the countries which we never thought would ever get out of poverty.
Western capitalism probably had half a century of over-indulgence - continued prosperity, full employment, almost guaranteed growth - and that in its turn meant that our costs went up and manufacturing industry migrated abroad, while finance has proved to be a fickle friend.
We will have to rethink our model, our values, we will have to acquire old-fashioned virtues, because capitalism is not going to go any time fast. If Asia has vigorous energetic capitalism and we have tired old capitalism, we will end up paying a huge price and we will trade our prosperity for their prosperity.
Socialism died 20 years ago - capitalism lives on. It changes its form, it migrates, it is fully global. Now we at last understand what globalisation means - it means we are just as important as anyone else. If we don't work very hard, we will lose our importance.
Against them are pronouncements comparing capitalism to slavery, and mystic meanderings from Professor Tim Jackson:
Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries. Yet question it we must. The myth of growth has failed us. It has failed the two billion people who still live on less than $2 a day. It has failed the fragile ecological systems on which we depend for survival...
Living well is about good nutrition, decent homes, access to good quality services, stable communities, satisfying employment. Prosperity, in any meaningful sense of the word, transcends material concerns. It resides in our love for our families, the support of our friends, the strength of our communities, our ability to participate fully in the life of society, a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives.
Which takes us back to Communist China. Where the regime imposed poverty upon almost a billion people, but where now, thanks directly to capitalist growth, prosperity and freedom are now advancing strongly.
So the real question for the BBC is: Has Western socialism failed? Since most of the people living even now on less than $2 a day are the victims of governing undemocratic regimes which in one way or the other Western socialism has feted for decades.
Will that question ever be asked prominently on the BBC website?
In the 2011 Total Politics Blog Survey I have made it to the giddy heights of 11th in the UK Non-Aligned Blog category, mainly in very grand company: one behind the BBC's Nick Robinson (but only one ahead of the scary teeth and fetid breath of underdogs bite upwards).
I also fleetingly appeared earlier today at 40th or so on the list of Right-Wing Blogs but then vanished haha. On that list it is good to see Archbishop Cranmer featuring in the Top Five for the first time, and Very British Dude making a huge jump into the Top 30.
In previous years I have featured on the Libertarian Blog list, so I am zig-zagging satisfactorily across the political spectrum. Keep moving so they don't find you.
Most gratifying that so many of my readers (or enemies) took the trouble to vote for me again this year. Much appreciated.
GCSEs: sloppy grammar will cost pupils' one in 10 marks
Pupils face losing more than one in 10 marks in their GCSEs for poor spelling and grammar amid fears that too many teenagers start work with poor literacy skills.
Helpful story and excellent government policy-shift. But amazing how the Telegraph's simple editing and punctuation standards have collapsed in recent years. Simon Heffer - where are you now?
Why bother with the great show of presidential elections when presidents are denied the power to match their pomp? The politics of miasma, where words matter more than facts and actions, lets the Tea Party demand the impossible – debt reduction with tax cuts, spending cuts without touching the gargantuan defence budget.
Huh? President Obama had plenty of options, including for a while Democratic control of both Houses of Congress. He also had options for dealing with the debt crisis.
Plus debt reduction without tax cuts and reducing defence is not 'impossible. Just cut other things. Start with, for example, the annual $80 billion lost because of Medicare/Medicaid fraud and abuse.
The rise of the Tea Party owes a great deal to Rupert Murdoch's Fox TV, the foghorn of extremism that changed the nature of political discourse
My goodness. Fox News! That same channel which attracts a stunning 400,000 25-54 viewers in US TV prime time. Yet we still should be alarmed:
American intellectual fashions waft our way: a taste of the Tea Party arrives on these shores in the peculiar paranoia of the climate-change deniers. You may dismiss some as fruitcakes or oil company lobbyists, but when Andrew Turnbull, former head of the civil service, reveals that he is of their number, it should alarm us.
Andrew of course had a glittering civil service career - under Polly's Labour!
Reason should rule, but none of us is as rational as we pretend, each inhabiting our imaginations more than we do the real world, with opinions driven by beliefs, passions, convictions, hopes, fears and a hundred contradictory thoughts and impulses. But to make sense of the world, there is an obligation to seek out evidence and trust to expertise.
Fair enough. So, Polly, why do you write idiotic articles like this one, almost 100% fact-free? Why rave against Lord Turnbull who has given more heavyweight senior measured professional thought to Climate policy issues than almost anyone else in the country, if not the world? He's about as good as it gets and as good as it can get, in any democracy or indeed any government ever.
What have we done to get such drivel served up to us in a supposedly serious paper?
Wait ... those like the Tea Party who campaign against unsustainable spending are the crazy ones - those who drive reputable institutions into the ground and profit amidst the wreckage are the sane ones. Of course!
Here is Craig Murray rumbling on about the fact that News International recently held a reception in the FCO:
Last week the Murdoch phone hacking empire hired the palatial rooms of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for their summer party. There Rebekah Brooks and Murdoch junior sumptuously entertained their bought politicians from all the major parties, who turned up in droves, tongues dragging on the bespoke axminster, from Cameron down.
But what's this?
A couple of years ago when Charles Crawford and I were considering holding a public debate on foreign policy and the practice of diplomacy, I asked whether it would be possible to rent a state room in the FCO. I was told I was not an appropriate person to rent a room there.
Let's see what they say now under Conservative/LibDem management...
More mega-comment web-factories are appearing, before our very eyes.
Here is Iain Dale's new Dale & Co. site, a self-styled current affairs mega-blog. I of course immediately click on World Affairs, and what do I find?
Not much, including this curious little piece by one James Chartlton (sic), a trainee journalist whose "proudest achievement to date is a 5th place finish in the 2006 ‘Christleton to Waverton’ fun run".
Mr Chartlton helpfully gives us his expert views on why the UK should admire Germany: football, Eurovision, federal system, timely trains and so on. Turbo-charged Fifth-form analysis.
Moving up a clear gear we find former Tribune Editor Mark Seddon arguing that the UK will have a major EU referendum in the next five years:
There will be a referendum on Britain’s whole relationship with the European Union within five years. I’m prepared to break the habit of a life time and go to the bookies to lay a bet to that effect.
It is not that I am anti European, or a ‘little Englander ‘– far from it. But clearly the institution has grown and changed to such a degree and more importantly seeks to accrue yet more powers at a time when global recession means that it has not a great deal to offer in return, that popular will in this country may soon dictate that there has to be a referendum.
Will I be right? Who knows? The trouble is that once this out there there can be no rowing back. I hope that I am.
The Dale & Co. contributors en masse look like a very respectable, safe, mainly Westminstery insider, establishment-pundity group, with perhaps the distinguished exception of punchy Anna Raccoon, whose secret identity is at last revealed here.
Meanwhile another commentary behemoth but with added News has emerged, The Huffington Post UK.
This one looks bigger and intellectually heavier, but also more obviously left-liberal: it even has squeaks from Ed Miliband here and there.
And there's a contribution from HM Ambassador to Washington, Sir Nigel Sheinwald:
A Golden Welcome for Will and Kate
Their Royal Highnesses' visit to LA this week will bring to the fore some of the most important practical aspects of a relationship which the president, six weeks ago, rightly described as "essential" as well as "special." The Duke and Duchess will attend a job fair that is intended to help US military personnel to reintegrate into civilian life.
Hmm. Over lunch I was chatting to a former senior UK intelligence officer about the fact that the Americans had had to hold back from us key intelligence information for fear of it being the subject of legal challenge in UK courts.
Then there is The Commentator, an openly conservative-minded site primarily offering fresh perspectives on issues of civilisational importance. Growing nicely but not (yet) with the scale/ambition of the first two.
Basically, we are all sinking in a growing, sprawling swamp of Comment (to which this website contributes its own little portions, although I do at least try to attach some of what I write to operational experience and reliable information) which feeds on an ever-diminishing shared organised basis for Facts and what used to be called 'hard news'.
It's almost as though we all expect facts and news miraculously to appear on their own, perhaps from massed social networks such as Twitter (with whatever checking mechanisms they may or may not offer), so that everyone can then grandly pile in with ever-more noisy (and often simply ignorant but no less noisy) opinions.
All in all, a growing if not towering babbling incoherence on a scale which makes rational government and intelligent adult discussion almost impossible. In all this clamour the News of the World drama is merely another MSM death-spasm, a further example of a networked swarm effect abruptly devouring an established and hitherto formidable organisation which this time round happens to be a media force but in fact could be almost anything.
Check out this exchange where a Fletcher School graduate tries to correct a Reuters fact-blunder in a story, Reuters putting the School as part of Boston University (it in fact is part of Tufts University).
What's interesting is this part of their explanation:
Regarding your request, please see the resolution from our Editorial team:
After doing our research we got in touch with our correspondent and they (sic) informed us: There are always conflicting facts about people. We have just looked again at this and found a website ‘Global Business Leaders’
Three points here.
First, the reply from the Reuters 'correspondent' seems unable to distinguish between 'Boston' and 'Boston University'.
Second, Reuters is relying on this correspondent who by his/her own admission is relying on ... da-dah ... a website to produce definitive information!
In other words, Reuters is employing someone too stupid or too lazy to do some simple digging and cross-checking, and eg look at the FSLD or BU websites which might reasonably be taken as giving a clear steer here. Let alone make a telphone call or two.
Third, we all have no way of knowing whether this blithering idle chump is behind more Reuters stories.
Embarrassingly poor.
Next time you hear a journalist making snooty remarks about bloggers, remember that a journalist these days is just another drone peering at a computer screen - and even at Reuters a journalist may be too incompetent to get even basic things right - or (far worse) even to care whether they're right or wrong.
Oh, and talking of the high standards of modern journalism, the Johann Hari plagiarism saga is beyond magnificent. The gift that keeps on giving.
The Weinergate scandal soared to a spectacular new level yesterday in New York, when Congressman Weiner admitted to a press conference that he had lied about his obscene Twitterish activities.
Not that that made his situation much better. Pressed on what he knew about the young women with whom he'd been 'communicating' via the Internet, he said "to the best of my knowledge they were adults".
More! Before the Weiner press conference started, Andrew Breitbart took the stage for an impromptu press conference all of his own. For those of you wisely not following US political trench warfare, Breitbart is a conservative web journalist who specialises in exposing Left/progressive machinations and the way the 'liberal' US mainstream media cover up for them. Two for the price of one.
In this case, Breitbart had run with the Weiner Twitter story at the start, only to be howlingly denounced by assorted liberal pundits and bloggers. Yesterday Breitbart directly confronted the New York press pack and the wider chattering left classes with their own hypocrisy. Worth watching in full - things like this don't come along very often.
Then Weiner himself appeared. It's all too rare to hear a politician saying "I lied", especially one as vain and obnoxious as Mr Weiner, so when it happens we must relish every precious moment
Yet admire the sheer ambition of those Weineristic lies. His aggressive denials, his attempt to bully the interviewer, the horrid intensity in his eyes as he deflects questions and boldly LIES to camera. A truly epic performance.
The last 80 seconds of it will have you squirming in your seat — not only the way he claims to be the innocent target of a hoax but his insistence on lecturing the interviewer for assuming the worst, taking care to maintain accusatory eye contact the whole way. It’s genuinely disturbing.
What does it all mean? In such moments of psychic turbulence in the political stratosphere, we turn (where else?) to the one and only:
For the sake of argument, let us take it as read that American men are emailing their genitals across the fruited plain all day long, and that in the nature of these things one or two attachments go awry and wind up in the in-box of the elderly spinster who runs the quilting bee and you have to make a rather sheepish apology.
Congressmen are among the few in this land who, in such a situation, can breezily say, as Weiner did to CNN's Dana Bash, "You have statements that my office has put out... ."
Herein lies the full horror of American politics in the death throes of the republic: A Congressman has nothing better to do of an evening than Tweet his crotch to coeds, but he requires an "office" with "staffers" to "put out" "statements" on the subject.
When Weiners have staffers, it's very difficult to have limited government: You cannot have a small state run by big Weiners. If you require an "office" to issue "statements" about your Tweets, it's hardly surprising you're indifferent to statist bloat elsewhere.
In the end, the Congressman was not so "distracted" that he wasn't able to vote to raise the debt limit. Confronted by his Twitpic, one is tempted to channel Mae West: Is that a debt-ceiling increase in your Fruit of the Looms or are you just pleased to see me? Alas for America, it's both.
What's the equivalent of this in UK terms?
Something like this.
David Miliband MP is a thrusting brash young Labourite carrying progressive hopes for the next generation of collectivists. He (of undiluted progressive Jewish descent) is married to a beautiful Muslim (hurrah!) woman who leads Jack Straw's office; Tony Blair himself presided over their wedding!
Despite his newly wedded condition, Miliband carries on an older habit of having lewd conversations with various young females via the Web. But he presses the wrong button and instead of Tweeting a picture of his groaning underpants by direct message 'privately' to woman A, he broadcasts it much more widely.
It's spotted. Aaargh. He takes down his Twitter account and feverishly tries to cover his e-traces. Too late. Conservative web denizens led by Guido are soon on the case. Miliband publicly lies, saying his Twitter account was hacked! But he won't ask the police to investigate...
A pack of lefty lofty media/blogger bigwigs and earwigs (Andrew Marr, Polly Toynbee, Johann Hari, Will Straw, Penny Red, Left Foot Forward) spring into action not to censure Miliband, but to lambast Guido for traducing Miliband. They invent elaborate conspiracy stories to show that it's all a Really Nasty Right-wing Set-up.
Then ... it falls to bits. Guido gets irrefutable photo evidence from other women with whom Miliband has been furtively communicating, including one 'X-rated' snap. Knowing that his credibility is shot to pieces, Miliband calls a press conference weepily to confess.
But Guido gets there first, and stands before the snivelling mainstraem media hordes asking them about their own dishonesty in the way they've covered this story and so many others.
Weiner eventually appears and, blathering and shuffling and sniffing, manages to blurt out that, yes, he apologises not only to his wife and supporters but also to Guido too!
The Guardian and Indy immediately explode. But a cool new breeze of honesty and transparency soon blows away the rancid smoke.
The difference between the US and UK is that here the MP concerned would be completely discredited and probably forced to step down. In the USA, the liberal media are already busily trying to 'move on' in the hope that Weiner survives a Congressional ethics investigation and it all gets forgotten.
Nemesis is always hot on the trail of hubris, across time and space, and the goddess has been particularly busy in destroying the carefully crafted images of Bono, John Edwards, Timothy Geithner, Al Gore, Eliot Spitzer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Anthony Weiner, and a host of others.
What do their tax hypocrisies, sexual indulgences, and aristocratic socialist lifestyles all have in common?
Collectively, they represent a self-appointed or elected global elite that oversees, lectures about — in sanctimonious fashion — the ethical responsibilities of the redistributive state...
Of course, we witness all these jarring disconnects amid a larger landscape of the collapse of southern European socialism, the tottering of the entire U.S. financial system as the Obamites trumped the Republican deficits and have piled up another $5 trillion in debt, the discrediting of the global warming fundamentalist religion, and the unsustainability of the redistributive welfare state.
What are we left with? The daily struggle to remember sumus homines, non dei — “we are just humans, not gods.” Whether Strauss-Kahn or Weiner or Gore, the common denominator is arrogance and a sense of exemption from the rules and protocols.
In a word, human nature as we understand it from the earliest observances of the Greeks. Be careful about lecturing others on their moral frailties. If one consumes well beyond what one needs, ensure that one pays one’s own tab and does not indulge on someone else’s money.
Beware of Nemesis, an omnipotent, all-seeing deity that marks in her scrolls every pontification, every sermon we make and then collates such professions with our deeds — so eager to note the discrepancy. She is an unforgiving goddess, and perhaps a cruel one as well
A few days ago there was a flurry of gruesome media coverage of the appalling death in Crimea (Ukraine) of a local Muslim girl who had been a beauty queen, and stoned to death by an enraged boyfriend for breaching Islamic Law.
Only one problem. It wasn't true.
Apparently.
Read RFE/RL's story which has looked at it all in some detail, noting how media reports in different countries fed hungrily on each other's exaggerations and inventions. Much easier to do that than actually go to the trouble of checking and double-checking what actually happened.
It's just so difficult to know what and whom to believe these days.
We have returned from Florida and I am emerging from jet-lag, just in time to appear today on the BBC World Have Your Say radio programme this afternoon on the rather incoherent subject of Privacy. If you are interested the link to the programme is here, until it fades away.
I cited an extract from this argument by Roy Greenslade, one among many good ones out there on the way English law is currently looking at these issues:
We want there to be a fair and reasonable balance between the right to privacy and the right to know. And the best criterion for judging between the two must be the public interest (and not merely interesting the public).
Is that really it (said I)? Boosting someone else's supposed right to privacy means diminishing someone else's free speech, someone else's right to blog or read or talk or sing. The High Court is not always the best place to 'weigh' the balance of advantage between an emotional plaintiff and an abstract principle such as 'freedom'.
As Ian Hislop argued robustly on WHYS, the current state of the English law matched by the inclination of some judges is in effect allowing wealthy men to silence less powerful women - not much justice there. Once upon a time we had 'publish and be damned' - now we seem to have 'only publish if the court says so'.
The programme featured contributions from listeners, which together brought out perfectly that no set of laws can manage incompatible issues of principle or keep up with the racing advance of social networking and the access of hundreds of millions of people to sassy new small cameras and IT kit.
There is no clear right answer on Privacy, in theory or in practice, and crafty new ideas such as the so-called 'right to be forgotten' (also described as the right to have 'personal data' deleted from commercial databases) can end up being abused to extend state power - if I choose to shop at Tesco, why should any data held by Tesco on me which I chose to freely hand over be described as solely 'my' data? They paid for it to be collected. Should Tesco be denied the right to use the data represented by my DNA (fingerprints) as distributed round the store if they suspect me of shoplifting?
On the other hand, the myriad information about us all sloshing around out there can now be analysed to see big (and not so big) patterns of activity - and attitude. This does empower in various novel and not necessarily benign ways the people and organisations able to crunch all those numbers.
It's all about trade-offs, and maybe it's best to let consumers and companies come to workable and more or less transparent informal arrangements at their own pace than try to create too clever legal and regulatory frameworks which will be out of date as soon as they are drafted.
In other words, we readily accept the risk that by driving a car we may have a horrible or even fatal crash at some point. Maybe we likewise should accept that we may have a reputation crash too at some point during life as part of the 'cost' of enjoying all these clever new IT toys, and insure as best we can against it.
My bottom line. If a rich footballer or entrepreneur cheats on his/her spouse, the law should not stop the spouse or the partner in cheating or someone else writing about it or discussing it in public. Mess around? Fine - but take the risks that your messing will be exposed. No-one should be stopped by the state from writing the truth.
Sure that will create some rough justice in some high-profile cases. But so does every other outcome in this fearsomely difficult area. Let's at least err on the side of 'truth will out'.
How has the FCO managed the Libya and other emergency situations?
The only true test of how well the FCO has done is, of course, the absence or otherwise of shrill and ignorant moaning from the Daily Mail. So the FCO clearly passed the Tunisia and Egypt hurdles quite well. What, though, went wrong with Libya?
Basically, what happens once a decision is taken to plan for mass evacuation of British citizens? Roughly this.
First, people are urged to use commercial air flights or any other seemingly sensible route to leave the country. Hence in this latest one, even though many Brits were temporarily becalmed in the steaming filth of Tripoli airport waiting for the delayed FCO aircraft to appear, plenty of other Brits were quietly leaving Libya by land or otherwise as they could manage.
If commercial air-flights are suspended and/or insufficient, the FCO may decide to charter aircraft (using charter firms which DFID also use for getting emergency supplies round the world fast) to fly into the trouble-spot and airlift people out. If civilian flights are still flying, the FCO asks people to promise to pay a suitable economy fair payment to help cover the cost of this service.
If (exceptionally) commercial flights refuse to fly (maybe their insurance won't allow it in certain specific circumstances) then military options are considered. But having military planes flying in raises all sorts of new problems and may well not be welcome to the suspicious local authorities.
In short, the FCO has an 'escalating response' to consular crises. This worked well in Tunisia and Egypt.
It went wrong in Libya this week partly because of sheer bad luck (one aircraft broke down, one had concerns about flying to Libya), but also because (I gather) the FCO system did not seem to respond to these difficulties ruthlessly enough. Too much Nu-Labourish procedure to take fast and tough (and expensive) operational decisions outside existing parameters, and maybe not the right level of urgency and 'grip' lower down the operational food-chain?
Something to be sorted out in slower time, as is now happening. Plus a new look at urgent back-up arrangements if the agreed charter plane conks out?
In other words, whereas in some consular emergencies the media rubbish the Embassy concerned, here it was HQ in London where things seemed to get stuck for a short while.
But only for a short while. Almost all Brits in easily accessible places were taken out efficiently once the whole operation got into top gear. The Embassy in Tripoli (like its counterparts in Cairo and Tunis) will have done a terrific job in highly stressful conditions to help make this happen. If you listen very very carefully you won't hear the media praising their efforts.
As for vacuous observations like "Even the Turks did it quicker than we did", piffle.
One reason why the eg Turks can move so fast in a crisis like this one is that they are likely to have less stringent attitudes to and laws/rules about 'risk management' and 'health and safety' than we do.
Plus the risk to eg a Turkish aircraft in an Islamic society is objectively less than it is to a UK plane. In particular, what would the media be saying had the FCO somehow leant on a charter company to fly in quickly against its owners' judgement, and that plane was then shot down by lunatic mercenaries or the local army as it took off, packed with British citizens?
Conclusion?
Very difficult judgement calls are needed by the FCO people on the spot and back at HQ when mass evacuations are required in sharp-end situations in problematic countries.
There is no point the media making a silly noise (other than their fevered requirement to sell a few more copies) about the FCO getting a plane into a trouble-spot some hours later than might have been the case, and/or 'bribes' paid by British officials to corrupt local air traffic people to allow an aircraft to leave.
The key thing is not that sometimes things go wrong in these emergencies - rather that so often so much is accomplished so effectively (and relatively cheaply for the taxpayer).
As Tolstoy famously put it:
Happy consular emergencies are all alike. Every unhappy consular emergency is unhappy in its own way.
Deal with it.
Oh. And remember that while we have the luxury of wittering on in a self-absorbed about such supposed problems, Libya is going to have to come to terms with the truth about stunning horrors like this one.
If you read the article it seems that some community police officers warned local residents that "there have been cases where criminals have sued for injuries they have suffered while committing a criminal act". The wire used to protect sheds might (said the police) be dangerous to thieves.
Hence this:
Residents in Surrey and Kent villages have been ordered by police to remove wire mesh from their windows as burglars could be injured.
Home owners in the villages of Tandridge and Tatsfield in Surrey and in Westerham, Brasted and Sundridge in Kent have said they are furious that they are being branded 'criminals' for protecting their property.
First, shame on the police for giving out idiotic warnings.
So what if some criminals have sued for damages for injuries sustained while being criminal? How many won their cases and in which circumstances? They must have had to prove a pretty hefty level of unreasonableness/negligence - something like using a powerful sharp man-trap or a shotgun to protect an allotment, where the level of 'force' deployed by the property owner was capable of being seen as wholly disproportionate.
This is yet another case of the evil Precautionary Principle run amok in the public sector. Something bad might happen even though it's unbelievably unlikely, so let's panic! If David Cameron wants us to have any Society, Big or Small, he needs to do something about this madness.
Second, shame on the home owners for being (according to this article) so stupid as to be unaware of the distinction between (a) civil and (b) criminal proceedings. If a criminal sues you, you are not a "criminal who only wanted to defend your property". Even if the criminal wins. Duh.
So to sum up.
This article makes no sense whatsoever, even on its face.
The villagers were not 'ordered' by the police to remove the wire protection.
They were not 'ordered' by the police not to protect their property.
They were given dim-witted advice which they appear dim-wittedly to have followed, allowing a dim-witted journalist (aka Daily Mail Reporter) a noisy facile non-story.
Attentive readers recall that a year ago I joined a group of former British Ambassadors in setting up ADRg Ambassadors, a new panel selling professional diplomatic consulting, training and mediation skills to support 'corporate diplomacy'.
Since then we have been busy 'building the brand' to good effect, to the point that we are now considering reorganising ourselves in a formal LLP format. Indeed, if you type 'corporate diplomacy' into Google on my Google settings at least, ADRg Ambassadors come out towards the top. Hurrah.
What, though, actually is 'corporate diplomacy'? The expression has been out there for a while without any clear understanding of what, if anything, it means.
Thus the University of Kent's Conflict Analysis Research Centre in 2009 offered a three-day course on it:
Corporate Diplomacy: Negotiation skills for executives operating in today’s volatile global business environment
The course offered interesting-looking case-studies and role-plays, with a focus on negotiation/mediation skills. But to get there you had to survive ... Morning One:
Skilled top managers employ the tools of diplomacy to advance their objectives through interactions with the leaders of other corporations, governments, analysts, the media and interest groups.
This lecture will describe some of the tools and techniques necessary to conduct effective corporate diplomacy on a bilateral and multilateral basis. It will cover decision making theories such as cybernetic, rational actor, disjointed incrementalism, organisational processes and group think
Hmm. No wonder the FCO slid downhill under New Labour: it was just not cybernetic enough in tackling the problems of the Middle East and Balkans.
There are other ideas as to what corporate diplomacy is all about. According to another view corporate diplomacy pertains to situations where corporations' brands are identified with one particular country (Coca Cola = America) and what that means in practice:
In 1999, the U.S. State Department introduced the [Award for Corporate Excellence] to recognize companies that display best business practices, strong community service programs, and exemplary corporate social responsibility practices abroad.
... the authors suggest that ‘corporate diplomacy’ is also a process by which corporations intend to be recognized as representatives of something that might be a concept or a country or its related values. In this case, it is essential to create a sincere adaptation of the corporate values to the societal values if a corporation wishes to have a symbiotic relationship with key stakeholders.
‘Corporate diplomacy’ thus becomes a complex process of commitment towards society, and in particular with its public institutions, whose main added value to the corporation is a greater degree of legitimacy or “license-to-operate,” which in turn improves its power within a given social system.
Uuurgh. Note especially the depressing collectivistic distinction drawn between the corporation concerned and 'society'.
Back in the real world, this is more like it: talking about actual technique:
Great diplomats proceed from the assumption that supportive alliances must be built in order to get anything serious done. They understand that opposition to change is likely, so they anticipate and develop strategies for surmounting it.
They don't expect to win over everyone; instead they focus on creating a critical mass of support. Most important, they devote as much energy to figuring out how to do things as they do to understanding what should be done.
The foundation of effective corporate diplomacy is a deep understanding of agendas and alignments. Leaders put a lot of effort into cultivating relationships in their organizations, believing that these connections will pay off when it comes time to get things done - which is true.
It's wise for leaders to build new relationships in anticipation of future needs. After all, you'd never want to be meeting your neighbors for the first time in the middle of the night while your house is burning down...
If relationships don't necessarily imply alliances, the reverse also is true: effective corporate diplomats often build alliances with people with whom they have no significant ongoing relationships.
Here's another variation on that theme. Cari Guittard explains how 'diplomatic' skills can be used to build relationships:
Respect – Your mindset should be I am a guest in their country, and at all times should be respectful of their customs, traditions, and modes of behavior
Maybe it's all about damage limitation and managing legal problems judiciously:
... companies with complex structures, operations and supply chains can expect to face disputes over their impacts on communities and other stakeholders, however good their policies, monitoring and auditing systems. The only question, then, is how they respond. A failure to resolve disputes effectively carries numerous risks: lost productivity, high staff turnover, strikes, attacks on infrastructure, lost reputation and brand value, lawsuits and lost business opportunities.
Further rummaging around on Google will give lots more examples.
What is notable in looking at these different examples (and more) is how few of them seem to involve real-life diplomats or former diplomats making useful contributions. Instead you see all sorts of people proclaiming importantly what diplomacy is or does, without showing much first-hand knowledge on how in fact diplomats do it.
This is perhaps not surprising. Real diplomats are hard at work doing real diplomacy. And there aren't too many ex-diplomats wandering around, at least as compared to sociologists, corporate affairs pundits and other phenomena within the dense corporate diplomacy analysis undergrowth.
Which brings us back to ADRg Ambassadors. We are unique in global corporate diplomacy processes in having a team of former diplomats with many decades of hard-won experience between us plus, now, the additional insights afforded by professional mediation training.
Plus all of us in one way or the other have done actual diplomatic commercial work with the FCO/DTI, advising significant companies on how best to tackle local and/or global markets, problems and personalities.
In short, any senior executive with a problem in the organisation may sense that a bit more 'corporate diplomacy' is part of the answer. But blather, jargon and theory are no use. What busy serious people need is discreet advice on what exactly s/he should do next to make the problem manageable and then tackle it in a systematic but subtle 'diplomatic' way with an eye on government, media, NGO and numerous other angles simultaneously.
They also may need experienced outside advice not only on making close relationships but on when and how to break them, and at what cost. Diplomacy is not only about the nice, reassuring 'win-win' options - sometimes they are just too expensive, or create even worse problems elsewhere.
Corporate Diplomacy boils down to our old but elusive friend, Judgement:
Because in foreign policy things are complicated. Long-term v short-term. Big v Small. Certainty v uncertainty. Principle v Politics v Practical v Possible.
Thus in a democracy what Ministers need is a team of skilled people able to help them steer through these operational and philosophical complexities for a few years.
People who simplify complexity but in a subtle, nuanced way. Who are good at bringing people of rival opinions together and explaining convincingly what might best be done. People who can juggle numerous balls but keep their eye on the Big Picture. People of unerring accuracy.
And 'Judgement' is the word for all that. Without Judgement a civil servant (like a Minister) is fairly useless.
Maybe the same thing can be said about a judgement-free Chief Executive.
If you are a Chief Executive needing ideas on how top-level standards of diplomatic Judgement might best be applied within or by your own corporate organisation to get a turbo-boost of Corporate Diplomacy, it makes sense to approach people steeped in those standards. People who actually know from working for years at high levels of global diplomacy what they are talking about.
The Macedonian, Albanian and Serbian services will be axed, as will English for the Caribbean and Portuguese for Africa, in a bid to save £46m a year
Pa kako je to uopste moguce, bre? Sramota!
One of the few (but real) advantages of moving house to a smaller dwelling is that you are firmly confronted with your own nostalgic insecurity. All around you are possessions - books, furniture, pictures, records, stuff - acquired years ago which now just won't fit.
No-one wants these things. The hassle of selling them on eBay is way beyond you.
Yet ... how can you bear to get rid of them? They are part of what defines you!
Gulp. Sigh. Off to the recycling tip.
Gone.
And the funny thing is, once they're gone you don't miss them one bit.
In fact, you actually feel rather better with fewer newer lighter things around you.
The other day I heard Lord Coe on the radio talking about the Olympic Stadium. He pitched part of his argument against the Tottenham proposal to demolish much of the stadium after the 2012 Games in terms of a zany metaphysical loyalty to memories: it would be just awful if a famed medal winner from 2012 returned to the site of his/her triumph many years in the future, only to find the stadium ... gone!
Grotesque.
I have no idea whether it makes sense all things considered to favour the Tottenham bid over the West Ham bid. Insofar as I have any personal interest, it is that the Tottenham bid if successful would move the Spurs stadium even further from where I now live, although maybe the road network would make it marginally more accessible than the current squalid White Hart Lane area.
But what makes no sense in current economic circumstances is to have a huge stadium sitting largely unused, unsuitable for football and unfillable when there are the occasional athletics competitions. And to justify the endlessly escalating cost of that by appealing to nostalgic insecurity.
Thus to the new BBC World Service language services chainsaw massacre.
Out comes the regular army of people frothed up by the BBC to bewail the fact that end of civilisation now hurtles in our general direction as these language services are ruthlessly axed.
They conjure up images of heroic people huddled round a crackly radio in a dark Balkan mountain shack, the lights dimmed and the sound turned down lest the KGB hear the Enemy's voice. Out from the radio comes a BBC programme in the local language - a unique, precious lifeline to a Better World.
All very poignant. It's just that things have, hem, moved on.
Now, even in the benighted Balkans, people do have choices. Local media outlets proliferate, including some previously set up with UK taxpayers support. And there is the ready availability of the Internet - anyone wanting different views (and different British views) now has myriad choices including free Internet radio stations and other online services. That's where young people are now - we should be investing mainly in them.
As the FCO is now taking some painful cuts, so must the BBC too. Some things, such as the UK taxpayer coughing up so that some people can read the BBC news in Serbian/Albanian/Macedonian fall into the category of nice - but no longer affordable/necessary.
Lo!, even under the wicked Coalition's appalling cuts, the BBCWS will (I gather) be enjoying much the same proportion of the FCO budget as it did in 2007/08. Shocking brutality.
So let's do some spring-cleaning and this time accept without a phoney galama that a smaller, lighter, faster BBC World Service is maybe good enough for current requirements.
One personal memory of the BBC's Yugoslav service. Back in 1980 before my first posting to Belgrade I went to call on the Yugoslav service, headed by none other than one David Wedgwood Benn, brother of.
D W Benn boasted to me that the Yugoslav service had a proud record of objectivity - it had never had an official complaint from the Yugoslav communist regime.
Great.
What a fine job it must have been doing in spreading Western values of freedom and democracy in that region of Europe. Did anyone ever get to the bottom of just how many Titoist UDBA agents sneaked in to work there over the years?
New world records for drivel and shameful dishonest nonsense have been set following the Tucson shootings.
As far as I can see, the only thing President Obama wants to 'heal' is his own dismal ratings, and his speech to some extent may have done that - for a while. But the Left talking-point propaganda claim as amplified by the BBC/Guardian and others on this side of the pond that 'right-wing rhetoric' somehow contributed to the shootings is beyond grotesque.
Advocating violence is terrible, but it is also terrible to try to delegitimize vibrant criticism of the government, to have a biased view of where the least valuable speech is coming from, and to connect speech to violence when there is no connection. The truth is we should dismiss the massacre as the mere act of a deranged individual and go on as before. Why should we change because a madman shot people?
Ironically, saying that a massacre can change the course of American politics encourages massacres! Why would you put such a thought into the heads of madmen? Hell, sane men might put the pieces together and plan a massacre to disrupt the work of the politicians who won the last elections. We need to turn away from the bloody slaughter and go on as before.
Freedom of speech, like freedom of traffic, can only be defined by the curbs and regulations that make it real...If American politics is now going the way of wounding, not healing, it needs the tonic of order.
It is the great paradox of democracy. Free speech cannot exist without chains.
What?
There may be the glimmer of a point in there somewhere. But whatever it is pales into insignificance when compared to the wider point, namely that we hear a lot about the dangers supposedly posed by rhetoric of the 'toxic Right' but nothing is said about the rhetoric of the toxic Left.
The good news is that US talk radio is about the only force on the planet which consistently confronts the Toxic Left. President Obama wisely has decided not to side with the Toxic Leftists who want to use the 'fairness doctrine' to shut down this truculent rival voice.
Implications of the Tucson shootings? None.
The USA is a big country, and by the law of averages among 300 million people a small few may contemplate assassinating politicians, a small number of them may actually try to do so and a tiny number will succeed.
If anything the fact that these episodes are so rare shows just how 'civil' US politics are for 99.999% of normal purposes as compared to most cultures in human history. A ghastly tragedy for those involved, of course, but as Ann Althouse says the country as a whole should not start panicking.
The supposedly liberal 'mainstream media' in the USA in this case have disgraced themselves over this obvious point by ranting against Sarah Palin for no reason whatsoever, thereby merely accelerating their own much-deserved collapse.
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