Blogoir

A reader argues that I am underestimating the impact of Fox News in the USA:

Thus the numbers of people 'reached' in America are not the paltry 2.8 million you purport, but rather 80% of the total viewership for the day, 18,166,000, (again ridiculous, 20% of 18 million people did not tune into FOX news yesterday and spend the entire day watching it)...

So obviously many more people were one time show watchers tuning into an original program they wished to view, rather than spending their entire day watching a news channel on a non-news day.

I did not 'purport' anything. The figures I quoted were clearly describing 'prime time' viewership alone. That said, the ratings over a longer period of course stack up for Fox as for everyone else.

The media term for this is the cume. See how Arbitron defines it:

Major ratings products include cume (the cumulative number of unique listeners over a period), average quarter hour (AQH - the average number of people listening every 15 minutes), time spent listening, (TSL), and market breakdowns by demographic.

It is important to understand that the CUME only counts a listener once, whereas the AQH can count the same person multiple times, this is how to determine the TSL. For example, if you looked into a room and saw Fred and Jane, then 15 minutes later saw Fred with Sara. The Cume would be 3 (Fred, Jane, Sara) and the AQH would be 2. (an average of two people in the room in a given 15 minute period)

Which is why in fact CNN claim that their cume is greater than Fox's.

The point of my posting was to look at the sense behind the claim of a senior Democrat that four times as many viewers watch Fox as watch CNN. If the total numbers for both are relatively small, why if at all does that matter?

This piece supports my position, noting that back in 1969 the main evening US news channels would reach 40 million people (at a time when the US population was a lot smaller):

There's a growing perception that opinion news outlets like Fox and MSNBC drive the news agenda. Do they?

No. The state of the economy, the war in Afghanistan, whether swine flu is going to turn more deadly--these things drive the news. That perception may be there, but cable news is still a niche medium.

Fox's Bill O'Reilly has around 3.5 million people watching each night, or about 1% of American adults. That would get you canceled on broadcast television. The three nightly newscasts have about 20 million viewers, not 3.5 million.

What Fox clearly does is reinforce the sympathies and energies of a smallish number of conservative Americans. So what? It's a free country! Most other cable and network channels push in a more 'liberal' direction, far outnumbering Fox.

Where US conservatives do have an edge is with Talk Radio, with Rush Limbaugh reaching some 13.5 million listeners a week. But again, that is only two million per day on average.

The basic fact is that with the huge expansion of TV channels and Internet-based entertainment and information of the past couple of decades, fairly few Americans now watch TV for news and current affairs. Newspaper circulations are falling too.

Hence the vicious circle of those programmes (and newspapers) cutting reporters and so getting more and more shallow or even solely 'opinion-based' (ie making a loud and often silly noise) to try to keep up their ratings.

That trend is evident here in the UK too. See for example how the BBC lost my vote back in 1993 with its scandalously poor assessment of the attempted coup against President Yeltsin, which I watched at the Embassy in Moscow with gunfire echoing round the city in the background:

When I subsequently took up with a senior BBC personality the BBC's dismal, dishonest reporting at the height of the crisis he just shrugged, saying that that sort of dramatic reporting boosted ratings and was what people wanted to hear these days.

In short, if the Democrats want to blame something for their woes, maybe the right target is not Fox News but rather their own policies?

Dnevni Avaz in Sarajevo reports that the UK court has ordered that Ejup Ganic stay in prison for a further week, apparently to give Serbia more time to present evidence against him for the Dobrovoljacka St massacre in 1992.

A protest demonstration is to be held outside the British and Serbian Embassies in Sarajevo.

Here in the UK the absurd and preposterous media silencefulness about this story is truly terrific.

As far as I can see:

Nothing more on the Telegraph website since 2 March.

Nothing more on the Guardian website since 1 March (Note: I mentioned this to the Guardian's Diplomatic Editor last night).

Nothing more on the Times website since 3 March.

Nothing more on the Independent website since 1 March.

Good grief.

A former European leader has been arrested and detained on a Balkan war crimes extradition rap, involving an attack on a UN convoy. The London court blunders its own procedures and brings the wrong prisoner to court. The issue stirs controversy and adds to Bosnia's already sharp political divisions.

Is all this and much more not in some way maybe ... newsworthy?

UK/World News today: Should Carla Bruni have Worn a Bra?

Duh. Of course not.

Update:  Bishop Hill (being a lot smarter than I am) has found a way to save the key sound-clip. See also the interesting comments the posting has prompted.

* * * * *

Quick! Listen before it disappears down the iPlayer memory hole.

BBC presenter Peter Allen on Radio 5 live Drive on 1 March, talking to Angela Dingwall from a Scottish ski resort about this year's heavy snow.

After their chatting about the scale of this year's snow, he asks her if she puts it all down to 'yer global warming'.

She says "No, I don't believe in global warming I'm afraid... It comes and goes."

Peter Allen is heard to go 'tsk': "You're allowed to say that but I'm not" (All laugh)

Here, starting at 0.28 minutes in.

Of course, it's all in good humour. But the sort of jokes one cracks - especially live on the radio - maybe say something?

Via The Browser a rather lame article by Jay Rosen arguing that journalists in the USA have become so non-judgmental that they are striving for an impossible professional 'innocence' and are just missing the point.

By way of evidence he cites a long analysis of the Tea Party tendency in the USA by famed NYT reporter David Barstow, who saw much evidence that Tea Party people feared 'impending tyranny':

The other thing that came through was this idea of impending tyranny. You could not go to Tea Party rallies or spend time talking to people within the movement without hearing that fear expressed in myriad ways.

I was struck by the number of people who had come to the point where they were literally in fear of whether or not the United States of America would continue to be a free country. I just started seeing that theme come up everywhere I went.

Jay Rosen says that it is not enough that a reporter show analytical detachment, and so 'merely' report on what such people believe:

Seriously: Why is this phrase, impending tyranny, just sitting there, as if Barstow had no way of knowing whether it was crazed and manipulated or verifiable and reasonable?

If we credit the observation that a great many Americans drawn to the Tea Party live in fear that the United States is about to turn into a tyranny, with rigged elections, loss of civil liberties, no more free press, a police state… can we also credit the professional attitude that refuses to say whether this fear is reality-based? I don’t see how we can...

We have come upon something interfering with political journalism’s “sense of reality” as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin called it (see section 5.1) And I think I have a term for the confusing factor: a quest for innocence in reportage and dispute description. Innocence, meaning a determination not to be implicated, enlisted, or seen by the public as involved.

Well, so be it.

What I dislike is the Rosen logic leap which takes us from where we are today to a banal lumpen Cuba-style tyranny - rigged elections, loss of civil liberties, no more free press, a police state - as if there was nothing in the middle which people should be worried about. Since he defines tyranny in such a banal way, Tea Party people ipso facto must be delusional!

Let's look at examples of the tyranny of modern life in the UK, which is all the more nasty for being insidious. Not the abrupt clumsy squashing of the public by a Monty Python Foot of Tyranny, but rather intellectual and cultural oppression by myriad pinpricks and official insults.

Thus the Tyranny of Filth. Drive between Swindon and Oxford, or round the intersections of the M40 and M25 and the M25 with M1. The roadsides for mile after mile are filthy with litter. What policy processes are happening to exact more and more taxes from people when the standard of public services is so obviously slumping? How can we be lectured incessantly by central and local authorities on 'the environment' while outside the windows of their offices the rubbish is piling up?

Or the Tyranny of Indoctrination. Listening to Radio Five Live in the car the other day (Friday), I heard the BBC presenter talking to a woman in Scotland about current snow problems. He asked her whether she thought it was down to Global Warming. "No, I don't believe in all that - it's just the changing weather" was (in effect) her reply. "You can say that. I can't" he replied in a curiously arch tone of voice. Huh?

Or the Tyranny of Complexity. My accountant tells me that many of his clients have had £100 notices for late tax filings, when he knows for sure that the returns were delivered on time (now the Revenue refuse to issue receipts to confirm delivery). He has tried to penetrate the tax system to find out what is going on. Eventually he finds a human tax-person: "We have hundreds of unopened envelopes here - there's a backlog."

Try the Tyranny of Official Querulousness. A five-year old girl was left in a car which had crashed into a river for 97 minutes because the police refused to try to rescure her as they had not had the right training.

The Tyranny of Educational Underachievement. Manipulating the results of school exams for non-academic reasons.

The Tyranny of Abuse of Public Funds to Reward One's Friends. See these especially awful examples from DFID.

Or the Tyranny of EU Deceipt, as exemplified by promising a referendum on the new EU Treaty then bundling it through Parliament instead.

And so many, many more.

It's not that any one of these is tyrannical in itself. Life is not perfect. Governments will over-reach themselves.

Rather that the cumulative effect of all these nasty developments is to create a new sort of PoMo post-democratic tyranny, one in which the citizens stop owning the state. Freedom and responsibility as currently understood - and as operationally meaningful ideas - decline. Instead everything sinks into an ooze of dirty ambiguity and mediocre uncertainty.

So if the Tea Party people are 'fearful' of that sort of thing accelerating in the USA as it has done here, as their Federal Government borrows recklessly against the future, are they really so wrong? 

Bishop Hill has been trying to post a climate comment on the Guardian's opinion site, CiF.

But he is being 'moderated'. In other words he is in a category of suspected comments offenders, which means that his comments may or may not be posted, once the 'moderators' have perused and sanctioned them.

Why? Because he previously suggested that Guardian pundit Monbiot resign!

Earth to Guardian: thanks for making Bishop Hill more credible than you.

My observations on the Decay of Language have made it to the Independent, albeit in a somewhat truncated and mysterious form, ie leaving out the bits about No 10's spelling incompetence and not making it clear that the opening passages were not by me but from a reader.

Still, the main point is conveyed to the Indy's erudite army of readers.

Fame. At last.

Perhaps written English is going to mutate into three streams.

A 'high' stream written by an elite able to master English vocabulary and grammar to the level currently seen in eg the Independent.

A 'medium' stream used by people writing formal messages to each other (eg a Prime Minister writing to Parliament), full of what we now would see as mistakes but clear enough for the job.

And a 'low' stream of text speech and general linguistic anarchy for SMS-ers, Twits and Facebookers and all the other armies of people communicating online, who just want to say it in as few key-strokes as poss where prcsn doesnt matter  ROTFLMAO.

Ooops. It's happened already.

The question is, how much emphasis and effort are to be put into learning High English at schools? If none, how will it survive? 

And will there be anyone around to teach it?  

IWBAPTAKYAIYSTA

Craig Murray's vanity knows no bounds. His 'story' is soon to be dramatised on the BBC! If I can bear to listen I'll do so and give you a full and fair review.

Meanwhile he launches another misguided missile at the role of the government's Law Officers.

He appears to understand nothing about how it all works in practice, a surprising failing in someone self-proclaimed to have had a 'brilliant career'.

What I strongly object to is his renewed propagandistic traducing in that posting of Michael Wood, former FCO Legal Adviser.

Here is what I have posted on Craig's site (note: correcting three typos which I overlooked when posting the comment - my bad):

Craig,

You write:

"Sir Michael Wood has perhaps been best known to a wider public as the man that the FCO wheeled in to tell me that it was perfectly legal to obtain intelligence from torture, as long as somebody else did the torture."

It may indeed be the case that Michael has become known to 'a wider public' through your book. What is more than unfortunate is that in the book and here on this website you shamelessly and repeatedly misrepresent what he actually said to you.

In MiS (pp 160-164 in my copy) you described the events leading up to your meeting with Michael and Linda Duffield. You argued the case to them that, based on your research, it was illegal under the Convention to use or even possess material based on torture.

Michael told you that this was not the legal position, a view he subsequently put in writing. And, since as you say he is a masterful international lawyer, he was right. His view was later upheld by the House of Lords in a key decision you praise in the book (p. 367).

In the book you characterised what Michael said to you as "So there we had it. Torture by proxy for intelligence purposes was legal". This is a trivial misreading of Michael's minute and position, based on your complete misunderstanding of the law.

Now you repeat this nonsense again in the posting above:

"...it was perfectly legal to obtain intelligence from torture, as long as somebody else did the torture."

You time and again make great play of Michael's minute of 13 March 2003 as if it supports your position. It doesn't. Try reading it.

As for your wider point, you don't understand the way the AG's office works, as Jane18 patiently pointed out. It is reasonable for the government to have a central pool of top legal advice rather than rely solely on the legal advice from one department of state.

Craig is either dimmer than he claims to be or he is being dishonest. It is blindingly obvious that there are a great number of different questions (and answers) concerning the torture issue which he runs together as and when it suits him.

Thus, for example:

• is torture legal under international law?
• is it lawful for one government to act on information supplied by another government and suspected to have been extracted by torture?
• what sort of actions might fairly be described as being 'complicit in torture' committed by others?
• can evidence possibly extracted under torture be used in court? 

It is a great pity that anyone takes Craig seriously when he is unable to write accurately about these subjects.

To be clear. I do not think that the fact that he makes a number of strong policy points with considerable passion is enough.

Craig creates a considerable media noise and no doubt makes some money by claiming to derive validation from the fact that he lived up to the very highest professional ethics of senior civil servants and paid a price for doing so, unlike (he asserts) a large number of his former colleagues.

Fine. We all have to make tough choices, and reasonable people may come down on different sides.

But let's at least agree that those professional ethics are based on unrelenting accuracy and integrity, and an ability to identify (and act on) fine distinctions of logic and meaning.

In this new posting once again Craig falls well short of that simple standard. 

Update:  here is Michael Wood's statement to the Chilcot Inquiry which blows away everything Craig says about relations between the FCO and Attorney General - and describes in meticulous detail Michael's views on the (il)legality of the Iraq intervention. 

Perusing Hacker Factor I found this notable device, a Gender Guesser programme for (yes) guessing the gender of a writer from 300 or so words of prose.

Worth a try.

So I cut and pasted this passage from a recent blog entry of mine:

The strength of the Iranian protest movement lies in its diffused, domestic and almost spontaneous mass nature. But that can be a weakness too - to bring down a system like Iran's will require deadly focused force aimed at the heart of the regime, and probably a lot of ruthless killing along the way.

One way Western powers can help is to try to drive wedges into the system. To try to identify moderate or wavering fanatics within the ruling elite, and urge them privately that the game is up - and that they should hold back as and when the final crisis comes. Nothing like an obviously authentic secret personal message from the top of a Western intelligence agency to concentrate the mind.

More publicly we might want to think about setting up websites populated by lists and pictures of the worst people in the Iranian regime whom we would expect the Iranian people to want to put on trial for crimes against humanity, as and when the regime falls. Once people are on an open list that warns that the long arm of Justice will eventually nab them, who knows what they might do to get off it?

And when in doubt, push stories that the regime's top people are getting ready to run away. Those around them are likely to believe them and get cross at the idea of being left behind to face the music. Remember all the rumours that Milosevic was poised to flee to Kazakhstan?

The trouble with countries as corrupted as Iran is that far too many people are implicated in misdeeds. Which means that it may suit the mass of pirates running the ship to throw a couple of leaders overboard as if in a great popular convulsion and go below decks for a while, to bide their time when they can sneak back into power or at least strong places of influence under a new fairer dispensation...

The result? Wow!

Genre: Informal
  Female = 246
  Male   = 708
  Difference = 462; 74.21%
  Verdict: MALE

Genre: Formal
  Female = 248
  Male   = 668
  Difference = 420; 72.92%
  Verdict: MALE

So then I thought I'd better throw into the pot some prose from a Typical Woman by way of cross-checking. How about Jane Austen?

Genre: Informal
  Female = 399
  Male   = 380
  Difference = -19; 48.78%
  Verdict: Weak FEMALE

Weak emphasis could indicate European.

Genre: Formal
  Female = 427
  Male   = 228
  Difference = -199; 34.8%
  Verdict: FEMALE

It works!

But just one more check ... how about Polly Toynbee?

Public jobs are tough. Running a local authority, or a beacon comprehensive or teaching hospital in a hard-pressed borough, takes more managerial talent than running any company. Selling food or cars has just one target – the bottom line. Compare that with a public manager's multiple goals. A happy and well-educated child or a recovered hip-fracture patient returned safely to their home require skills no investment banker has. That is why it's one-way traffic: no one asks retail managers to run schools, hospitals or councils. They might find the responsibility for other people's lives hair-raising – and the pay would be too low. However, public servants jeopardise the respect they deserve once they, too, want their worth weighed in gold.

That is why, as Compass proposes, we need a high pay commission covering both sectors. To be fair to the public administration committee's excellent report, it was beyond their remit to include the private sector. As committee chair Tony Wright points out, their proposed commission would track private sector comparators and report on general pay trends: "There is no doubt that private pay drags the public sector along in its wake

Result? Eeek!

Genre: Informal
  Female = 222
  Male   = 295
  Difference = 73; 57.05%
  Verdict: Weak MALE

Weak emphasis could indicate European

Genre: Formal
  Female = 107
  Male   = 245
  Difference = 138; 69.6%
  Verdict: MALE

Is this what happens to women when they work for the Guardian and BBC for too long?

Goes to the Times website today:

Bad, bad and very bad. Our critics' butcher this year's turkeys

Baffled and annoyed by all the scientific arguments to and fro about Climate Change?

Want some help?

Try Iowahawk's fine DIY guide to producing impressive climate statistics - and to presenting data in all sorts of different ways ...

As previously noted, it all boils down to showing why the Medieval Warming Period is (not) relevant to what we are seeing now.

Update:  Tireless reader Norman Fraser continues to accuse me of being 'in denial' about various climate change issues.

Problem is, if you agree that you are in denial does that mean that you aren't?

It's all so confusing.

Just like the Epimenides Paradox. You know, the one where a Cretan says that "All Cretans are liars":

Several interpretations and analyses are available, if the statement is considered false. It might be contended that the truth-value "false" can be consistently assigned to the simple proposition that "All Cretans are liars," so that this statement by itself, when deemed false, is not, strictly speaking, paradoxical.

Thus, if there ever existed a Cretan who even once spoke the truth, the categorical statement "All Cretans are (always) liars," would be false, and Epimenides might be simply regarded as having made a false statement himself.

An interesting asymmetry is possible under one interpretation: the statement's truth clearly implies its falsehood, but, unless the statement is interpreted to refer specifically to itself (rather than referring categorically to all statements by Cretans), the statement could be contingently false without implying its own truth.

Naturally, any truly logical idea of a paradox with the statement falls flat if one understands that while "all Cretans" may be "liars," such a statement in realistic terms does not necessarily mean that all Cretans lie all the time or that they lie only.

Even if it is said that "Cretans are always liars," this does not produce a paradox if one understands the various meanings of the term always - as in "John always says No!" does not mean that "No" is all - or the only thing - John ever says.

See?

The Climate Summit is in disarray wails the Guardian, all because of a leaked position paper which suggests an attempted rich country stitch-up, or something like that.

Points to note:

• this is above all a Negotiation on a vast and therefore ultimately simple scale
• Poor countries say: Rich countries caused the problem, so they should pay to clean it up
• Rich countries say: Some of you Poor countries are not so poor any more, and are causing huge new problems. We'll pay something. But this is a team effort. Oh, and no blank cheques
• S/he who writes the core draft text to be put in front of World Leaders (after frantic haggling) has an advantage in defining the process; someone has to write that text, since without it the whole thing will be a fiasco
• the essence of any achievable deal has to a paper which:
• offers something practical and significant but non-binding by way of emissions cuts
• makes some serious Western money available for clean technological advances in the developing world
• has some sensible mechanisms for achieving all that, preferably with much less UN
• in other words, something curiously like the leaked paper
• once the paper appears, a huge choreographed row has to erupt, with those who think it is not good enough screaming blue murder
• within the camp of those who think it is not good enough will be:
• a few big developing countries (India and China etc) who know how the game has to go but are pressing hard for More
• many smaller countries who rightly fear that they don't count for much as the endgame looms
• and a gazillion NGOs whose only role is to scream blue (or green) murder to add quotes for the Guardian

All of which looks to be going to plan nicely: the louder the squealing, the more likely a deal.

Or it does collapse in disarray.

A Saddam Hussein TV channel has been launched.

The BBC gets reactions:

An Iraqi member of parliament, Jaber Habib Jaber, condemned what he called the channel's "glorification of a tyrant".

So far so good.

One Baghdad resident told the BBC that the channel has become his favourite even though watching it makes him sad for reminding him of when Iraq was safe.

What?

Safe like this?

Mark Mardell, BBC North America editor, looks at the problems the Democrats are having in the USA in explaining their policies to an inceasingly unhappy electorate.

He's not taking sides. No sirree!

But read this awesome passage (emphasis added):

There is little doubt that the Obama administration is widely perceived as extending the role of federal government, while it seems that a majority of Americans dislike and distrust big government. The Democrats don't seem to know how to cope with this.

They could argue that it is a misperception; they could maintain that all government is big government these days; they could argue that big government protects little people. It really doesn't matter too much what their rationale is, as long as they have one. The Democrats have a great communicator as president, but at the moment, they don't seem to have a story to tell.

Excellent.

Liberals - if you don't have a story, make one up! Say whatever it takes to stay afloat, regardless of the truth!

Now we know the BBC's guiding philosophy, a lot of things are much clearer.

What is it with J 'n' J over at the Guardian?

First we had this Jonathan Steele going to Hell.

Now we have Jonathan Freedland frothing himself up about eastern Europe's horrible predisposition to Nazi-style extremism:

... a brand of ultra-nationalistic politics that would repel most voters in western Europe. It exists in Poland and Latvia, but also Lithuania, Estonia, Hungary, Romania and beyond. During the long decades of the Soviet era this chauvinistic, often racially supremacist politics was buried; but in 1989 it was exhumed, shook off the dirt, and breathed once more...

Eek!

He cites at least one wild Hungarian to support this cheeky little thesis, so that's OK then.

But there's more.

It's really all about ...

Steadily, eastern European governments have sought to craft a new, internationally accepted narrative in which the crimes of Nazism and Stalinism are regarded as equal, with, if anything, the latter as the greater evil. It is the theory of the "double genocide"...

Yes, these people want to deny the Holocaust, by claiming that the crimes of Stalin's communists need to be weighed with the crimes of Hitler's Nazis.

Huh?

If JF wants to explore the dirty rivers of current European anti-semitism, he needs only click on to the Guardian's own CiF pages and read the rantings of people there against Israel and Jews.

And there's even a website to help him do just that. 

For those readers interested in Funny British Ways, here is another one.

We here have a body called the Press Complaints Commission which presides over a Code of Practice giving some rather specific guidleines on how the 'press' whould behave. Here they are.

If a member of the public is unhappy with the way a media outlet has behaved, s/he may complain to the PCC. If the complaint is upheld:

5. Complaint upheld

If the Commission concludes that the Code has been breached (and the breach has not - or cannot - be remedied) it will uphold your complaint in a public ruling. The newspaper or magazine is obliged to publish the critical ruling in full and with due prominence. This is a serious outcome for any editor and puts down a marker for future press behaviour.

Quite why this is a 'serious' outcome for any editor is not quite clear to me.

But if you are unhappy with the PCC you can complain about them too, to the grandly titled Charter Commissioner - none other than my friend from my Bosnia times, Lt Gen Sir Michael Willcocks. He will make some very grand findings indeed.

I mention all this because Martin Belam looks at the PCC in the context of that Daily Mail article by Jan Moir. The PCC has seen 21,000+ complaints lodged about it.

Martin also links to this piece by Sarah Hartley on the Fifth Estate.

Am I missing something?

If newspapers want to set up Codes of Conduct on how eg they report goings-on in hospitals and schools and generally behave, with a view to meeting what they decide are 'the highest professional standards', let them get on with it.

If they then fail to meet those standards, the public will no doubt notice and make their purchasing decisions and allocate their time accordingly.

The point is that a PCC-like organisation comes from the days when there were relatively few media outlets, with relatively few ways for the public to express dissatisfaction. Thus some sort of lofty 'establishment' arrangement was needed to keep a 'balance'.

Has it worked? How would we know?

One argument might be that without the PCC the media would spiral to the bottom of the populist cess-pit. Well, some outlets would, and some would not, fighting to keep a good market share by being honest and sensible. Plus we had rampant scurrilous pamphleteering and general free-press anarchy a couple of hundred years ago and yet we survived. 

Today so much TV and newspaper output is riddled with error, dumbing-down or prejudice/bias (and perhaps it always has been) that the idea of 'high professional standards' in this sector seems somewhat far-fetched. If the PCC were tasked to deal properly with every complaint on this score, it would seize up in minutes.

Martin Belam:

Perhaps the most useful thing to come out of this will be wider public awareness of just how ineffective press self-regulation is about handling complaints on the grounds of taste and decency when widespread offence has been caused to an audience not directly involved in the story.

Indeed. Plus how many of those unhappy with the Mail on this and other counts are regular Daily Mail readers and actually buy the newspaper?

Maybe these days a storm of emails and twittering and the other phenomena of the Internet age are as good as anything else at alerting editors to a sense that maybe they have got something wrong in their output, and so risk losing readers/markets? 

In other words, no PCC 'reform' is needed? 

Instead let the so-called professional media be free to sink and/or swim and/or be obnoxious and/or make a fool of themselves.

Just like the rest of us?

A zany but prominent piece in this morning's Guardian, asserting that the newspaper has been 'prevented for reporting Parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds':

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

The Guardian has vowed urgently to go to court to overturn the gag on its reporting.

The report mentions the various battles of John Wilkes in the eighteenth century to keep the public informed over what went on in Parliament.

Indeed.

A summary of this lively fellow's life and work is here.

The point is that Wilkes several times went to prison to defend and champion and advance his and our liberties.

Not our brave Guardian friends. They apparently have been served with some sort of injunction against writing a story. They are quite free to ignore it and publish anyway, battling it in the courts subsequently.

You are only gagged if you let someone gag you - without fighting back.

Luckily we have the Internet to help us find out what is happening.

Enter Guido and Mr Eugenides. And yes, one MSM stalwart - the Independent.

The point?

Namely that in this country the liberties we have were gained incrementally over hundreds of years, usually by people fighting for them and often paying a price.

Likewise these liberties can be rolled back incrementally.

The more so if people who usually claim to make a fuss about Liberty give a sad sigh and lean forward in a resigned fashion to receive the gag as the gagger comes along.

Craig Murray has a good posting on the important interview between Iain Dale and Michal Kaminski. It just shows where things now stand when a mere Blogger does what no so-called serious MSM journalist has done, and talks to the person at the centre of a controversy to hear what he might have to say.

Craig uses this interview to give some pertinent thoughts on Polish anti-semitism and other 'racist' phenomena in Poland, drawing on his own time in Poland in the 1990s:

... I should add that a young black British businessmen reported to me that being spat at was an almost daily occurence.

The strange thing is that I adore Poland, and Poles, and Polish culture. I was ever so happy in my time there. There are reasons for the development of this deep-seated racist strain which are historic. There is a limit to how far you can blame individuals for adopting attitudes which are widespread in their culture; and without understanding you cannot change attitudes. Which brings me back to Kaminski. Much as he tries to hide his past, for the present I do not think we should rule out that he really has changed his views, after being exposed to wider cultural influences (like Iain Dale!)

...

A key part of Poland coming to terms with its anti-semitism will be an acknowledgement of what Polish people did to Jews in or just after World War II. Iain Dale's questioning about the Jedwabne massacre is actually important. This was one of a number of massacres of Jews by Poles, but there were also hundreds of individual murders of Jewish survivors who inconveniently resurfaced, and perhaps tried to reclaim their property.

Poland must come to terms with all of its history, not just the heroic bits. Poland suffered terribly for three hundred years of near continuous foreign occupation. It was moved about physically on the map, sometimes disappearing, and emerged an artificially placed and artificially ethnically homogenous nation. Of course it was screwed up and nationalistic. Of course Kamnski is screwed up and nationalistic. Poland is slowly getting better. Who knows? Maybe Michal is too.

Not quite how I would have put it, but it's a free country.

Some wider thoughts.

'Anti-semitism' comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes, so when we talk about so-called 'Polish anti-semitism' we need to be a bit more precise.

At one extreme of the anti-semitism spectrum there is one of my favourites, Japanese Anti-Semitism, which has nothing to do with any actual Jewish people as far as one can tell but rather spirals off into surreally kinky Asian occult fantasising.

The Polish case is quite different. For centuries as Poland's borders ebbed and flowed in central Europe large communities of Jews lived in Polish villages, towns and cities, often flourishing and achieving reknown. As and when surges of anti-Jewish feeling erupted elsewhere in Europe, Jews headed for Poland or Polish-dominated places.

For example, Jews were not even allowed to live in Moscow until about 1800. Their numbers grew there until some 30,000 Jews were expelled in 1892; they headed for Lodz and Warsaw.

A further disaster happened in 1914/15 when Germany attacked Russian territory and the Russians expelled up to  500,000 supposedly disloyal Jews at virtually no notice, 100,000 people dying in the process.

To cut a long and complex story short, the reality of anti-semitism in Poland does not spring from mystic nutty theories of Jewish conspiracy/supremacy, although that strain is now there (see below). It rather comes from a combination of centuries-long Catholic anti-Jewish teaching (the Jews being deemed responsible for the crucifixion of Christ) and what might be called 'normal' ethnic rivalry/tension of the sort seen today in plenty of other places, where different language/cultural communities are jostling for position precisely because they are so close and mutually entangled (see eg Bosnia).

Which explains why, yes, Poland between the Wars did take up its share of the sort of Nazi-backed pseudo-scientific anti-Jewish propaganda and legalised oppression which by then had a thriving tradition elsewhere in Europe, but also why Poland conspicuously did not rise up against its Jewish population when the Nazis invaded. The Nazis built several big death-camps in Poland once they embarked on the Final Solution because that's where so many Jews were (plus eg Auschwitz was a handy railway junction for trains from elsewhere in Europe).

So now (as Craig rightly says) there are different legacy issues in Poland.

Plenty of Jewish cultural activities go on. A huge new museum for the history of Polish Jews is being built in Warsaw. Many Poles are discovering unexpected Jewish roots in their own families. All serious political leaders emphasise their good relations with the Jewish community. Above all, John Paul II made a massive effort to lead the Catholic Church towards reconciliation with the Jewish faith, and that is percolating its way through the Church in Poland too.

On the other hand, there is a lumpen low-level anti-semitism around on a scale which is depressing. Newspaper kiosks in Warsaw carry weird little pamphlets about Jewish conspiracies, stickers against Jews appear inside buses, football fan graffiti attacks other clubs for their Jewish affinities, and so on.

As for wider racism, Poland looks to visitors from the UK like a stunningly 'white' place. Dark-skinned people are few and far between.

Is Poland an especially racist place? Not obviously. Once (prompted by an alarming report from our Embassy in Budapest describing how dark-skinned colleagues in Hungary were being jostled on public transport and constantly receiving racist slurs) I asked one Embassy colleague with Asian DNA if she had had problems in Warsaw. "Apart from some funny looks now and then, no."

So, praise the Lord, on this one I am basically with Craig Murray.

Racist/ethnic/religious/cultural and other aggressive forms of Fear of The Other have been a feature of life round the planet for much of human history, if not all of it. We are all working our way through it, some with more integrity and open-mindedness than others. 

Poland was the default refuge of choice in Europe for Jews for hundreds of years. Its huge and successful Jewish community was obliterated by the fathers and grandfathers of the Germans sitting primly in EU meetings now. It also saw a huge number of Poles being executed by the Nazis for trying to protect Jews from persecution.

In short, Poland is the last country on earth which needs to be lectured on the subject of anti-semitism.

And the noises in the UK from senior parts of the Labour Party spin-machine to try to smear the Conservative Party for their links with supposedly 'anti-semitic Poles' are beyond contempt.

Jonah G (not to be confused with Whoopi G) describes the good news in the Polanski arrest saga:

That brings us to the even more refreshing aspect of this controversy: It is not a Left-Right issue. I’m not normally one to celebrate bipartisan unity, but it’s nice to know there are some things political or ideological opponents can agree on. Some of the most ardent and clear voices on the Polanski issue have been on the Left...

And yet, there is a controversy. Many of the international community’s leading lights are rallying to the Free Polanski movement...It all boils down to the fact that Polanski is famous and talented and an Olympian artist, living above the world of mortals.

He concludes:

His defenders don’t care. They are above and beyond bourgeois notions of morality, even legality.    

And that’s the main reason I am grateful for this controversy. It is a dye marker, “lighting up” a whole archipelago of morally wretched people. With their time, their money, and their craft, these very people routinely lecture America about what is right and wrong. It’s good to know that at the most fundamental level, they have no idea what they’re talking about.

A whole archipelago of morally wretched people.

Phrase of the Year.

The Polanski story is creating a buzz, as one might expect.

My friend Anne Applebaum has been criticised for not declaring an interest.

And as for Whoopi Goldberg who helpfully gives us a new feministic distinction between 'rape' and 'rape-rape'?!

More here.

This is an easy one.

What Polanski did was grotesque, albeit now a long time ago. He should accept the substance of that fact, behave like a grown-up, and allow himself to be escorted back to the USA to face the music.

This is excellent.

Really excellent.

It shows how politicians now are baffled by the idea that they are there for us.

No, we are here for them, and on their terms.