Category; Media
A former UKIP Councillor
News is about narratives. You pick your starting point and take it from there. That starting point is both literal and metaphorical; the opening sentence in any decent news report is worth as much as the rest of the report, and the viewpoint of the author, or outlet, moulds facts.
It’s how Fox News and The Guardian manage to shape the same facts in such different ways.
Category; Law, Media, Politics
© Munir Uz Zaman/AFP/Getty
A terrible industrial disaster in Bangladesh, a building full of workshops collapses leaving more than a thousand dead (click here), and our first reaction in developed economies is to question our responsibilities as consumers and whether we should boycott the western companies who have clothing made there (click here).
It’s an example of the fact we seem to have forgotten what the state is for.
Category; Finance, Law, Media, Politics
Schiuma
It’s easy to get worked into a schiuma by the revelation that Starbucks hasn’t managed to pay any corporation tax in the UK since 2009 – click here for report. Big turnover is, apparently, eaten away by expensive licensing royalties to an overseas subsidiary (Holland) of the Starbucks parent company, expensive beans bought from another overseas subsidiary (Switzerland) and then roasted by yet another overseas subsidiary (Holland).
Politicians and journalists are gleefully calling for a boycott of the company that doesn’t ‘pay it’s share’ – see here and here. But it’s very simple. Read the rest of this entry »
Same guy, different set of photos
In allowing himself to be photographed, naked, or as they’d say in Nevada, butt naked, in the high-roller suite of a Las Vegas casino, with an equally naked young woman, or as they’d say in Nevada, a hottie, whose acquaintance could be measured more in minutes than hours, Prince Harry, or as they’d say in Windsor, His Royal Highness Prince Henry Charles Albert David of Wales, has proven himself the heir to his great great great grandfather Edward VII (click here), and a bit of an idiot.
But should the newspapers be publishing those photos? The short answer is; yeah, why not?
Of course, that’s not to say they needed to be published, it’s just seriously; why not? Read the rest of this entry »
Category; Middle East, Media
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia
There has been fevered discussion about who was responsible for the killing of an Iranian nuclear engineer this week; click here for a news report, or click here, or click here or here.
I say discussion, but actually everything I have read has assumed that Israel was involved; the only point of discussion is whether America was involved too. That’s lazy journalism; I cannot work out why no-one has mentioned another player in the region – Saudi Arabia.
There are at least three reasons why they should have joined Israel and America in the list of possibles: Read the rest of this entry »
“Why Not?”
That was the question asked by the charity fundraiser (or chugger) for Save the Children as I walked past today, with a shake of the head and a weak smile.
Why not? Well, four reasons:
First; do no evil
The man from Save the Children had the bad luck to collar me just as I’m reading a shocking analysis of the work of international aid agencies.
Linda Polman’s book ‘War Games’ (click here for details) catalogues how international aid agencies actually do much harm. How the work to save and improve lives actually, in many situations, does exactly the opposite. Read the rest of this entry »
Category; Media, Middle East, Politics
George Galloway gave a straight answer to a straight question yesterday.
OK, he didn’t give the straight answer straight away; he blustered, he railed, he orated. Then he gave a straight answer.
Problem is, the answer he gave, the definitive and certain answer; it wasn’t true. And demonstrably wasn’t true. Read the rest of this entry »
Category; Middle East, Media
Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles has been giving lectures on Western morality recently, and explaining that the West does not have the moral authority to condemn Arab dictators:
…the West no longer has the moral high ground in the way that perhaps it did in the Middle East…we cannot really preach to the Arab world, we cannot really be seen to have the moral force we need… (BBC Newsnight, 15 June 2011)
He’s the sort of person who might think twice before lecturing others on morality on national television. But he’s also the sort of person who ought not to be invited onto news programmes as a neutral expert. Read the rest of this entry »
Category; Media, Middle East
Facts are relative to context. No news report can be encyclopaedic enough to encompass every view and every nuance. Broadcast media especially are broad-brush and, at their best, leave an impression rather than swamping the audience with facts.
But news must be anchored in facts, and sometimes it seems the distance to that anchor is so great that the report becomes adrift.
Take the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 on 10th June 2011. Read the rest of this entry »
If the courts took the approach I recently talked about and simply used the common law to deal with the issues raised by superinjunctions it’s been suggested to me this wouldn’t cover the twitter problem…it might stop the newspapers, but it can’t stop individuals tweeting away.
Yes it can. And the head of Twitter in Europe seems to have realised that too. Tony Wang recently warned that individual users who post secrets need to watch out because the law might come after them. Read the rest of this entry »
The legal earthquake over superinjunctions is the result of a number of tectonic plates crashing up against each other; European legal codes v English common law, and European privacy v Anglo-Saxon free speech.
There’s no good reason this has become such a public mess. Except that the law is not used to being hurried and lobbied and that is what has happened. A whole new, untested, area of law emerged after Max Mosley won his privacy case. The judges were thrown by this and have been struggling ever since to come up with a credible and coherent response. There is one – and it lies within longstanding English law. Read the rest of this entry »
Category: Media, Anti-semitism
Sir Alistair Horne CBE made a mistake recently; he went to a restaurant he knew 70 years ago, hoping it would be as it was.
Horne was reviewing the restaurant for The Spectator. Unfortunately they published it - click here to read it.
Newly re-opened, the glitzy refurbished Savoy Grill is owned by a Saudi Arabian and operated by Gordon Ramsay – see here. It’s a little like going to Versailles and discovering the café there has changed since Marie Antoinette ran the place.
Horne chose to channel his disappointment into some casual anti-semitism. Here is an excerpt from his review, the block letters are added: Read the rest of this entry »
Category; Media, Middle East
I can understand why people are sometimes scared of clowns. There’s a frightening buffoon appearing in the British media at the moment; Sami Khiyami, the Syrian Ambassador to the UK.
Jeremy Paxman did an excellent job trying to impose a sense of reality on a man who describes his country, in the grip of civil unrest and which has seen more than a hundred of its citizens killed by their own government, as ‘the nicest and most beautiful state in the Middle East‘.
As to the cause of the unrest, it is nothing to do with the authoritarian regime of President Assad, but it may be the work of the Israelis; ‘they could be behind any bad thing in the world‘.
You can watch the interview here:
Paxman handled the surreality of the interview well. His colleagues on the Radio 4′s Today programme did not.
Evan Davis interviewed Khiyami on the Today Programme on 1st April 2011. It is a negligent piece of journalism. In a programme known for combative questioning, Khiyami was handled with kid gloves.
It’s a dreadful interview. Davis even sums up for him, have a listen: Read the rest of this entry »
Category; Politics, Middle East, Media
What an arresting sight on the Northern Line platform at Leicester Square Underground Station: George Galloway addressing the platform from a poster for Press TV; telling us what ‘they‘ don’t want us to hear.
I wonder if he will tell us about his recent inclusion in a two-part World Service Documentary on Useful Idiots through the ages. This is how the programme defined Useful Idiot, a term which originated with Lenin;
Useful idiots, in a broader sense, refers to Western journalists, travellers and intellectuals who gave their blessing – often with evangelistic fervour – to tyrannies and tyrants, thereby convincing politicians and public that utopias rather than Belsens thrived.
Galloway’s most famous, and craven, display of Useful Idiocy was in the presence of Iraqi tyrant and mass-murderer Saddam Hussein. He has, more recently, claimed that his words were addressed not to Saddam but to the Iraqi people.
But they were directed straight to Saddam. When quoted, the Arabic is often left out, presumably for reasons of understanding. If the Arabic is included there can be no doubt as to what Galloway was saying: Read the rest of this entry »
Category; Media, Middle East, Politics
BBC Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen and Gaddaffi 1/3/11
This is the photo the BBC chose to put on it’s homepage on 1/3/11 for coverage of the ongoing crisis in Libya. It shows their Middle East Editor with Colonel Gaddaffi.
As I write this Colonel Gaddafi is holding onto power in Libya while insurgents hold various parts of the country and there are sporadic battles.
Internationally there are calls for the overthrow of Gaddafi and calls for foreign intervention to bring that about. Things are changing on a daily, an hourly basis at times. The situation may be different tomorrow.
This episode brings into focus the values that drive Human Rights as a political and legal issue. On what grounds should the west be actively working for his overthrow? Read the rest of this entry »
