According to Sunny Hundal’s new web service Rippla, Joseph Harker’s Guardian article, about racism and the demonisation of communities, was the most shared article in the UK yesterday.
And quite right too. It’s a truly sublime piece of analysis, comparing recent news sources, real demographic data, and an apt turn of phrase, to analyse the differing media coverage given to the same crimes, when committed by different perpetrators. When Muslims are convicted of sex crimes, the stories receive much more attention than when generic white Englishmen are found to have done the same deed. Worse, the actions of wayward Muslims are deemed to be somehow inspired by their culture. This same extrapolation never happens for white people.
This article feels like the definitive statement on the issue of how the media treats minorities. It raises its head in various guises all the time. Like many people, I have been mulling it for years. Back in 2003, when I was part of The LIP Magazine‘s editorial team, we published ‘Do You Belong To A Community?‘ by Aisha Phoenix which begins with a bite: “Whenever the media describes someone as coming from a ‘community’, you know they are not white.” Almost a decade later, and I see the same anxieties in this comment from the novelist Kamila Shamsie to the columnist David Aaronovich: “Could we have a moratorium on the phrase ‘Muslim leader’ please?”
Much rhetoric in politics is of a kind where the speaker (or writer) claims that his or her special interest group are being treated unfairly, and if they were of a different skin colour or religion (or whatever) they would be treated better. This is often an incorrect assumption, which betrays a lack of understanding of the society in which we live.
Harker makes precisely this kind of argument in his article, too. However, instead of making a vague assumption, the nature of the issue means he does have the ‘data’ to back up the rhetoric, and the article becomes akin to a scientific experiment. Since the two prosecutions he examines are so similar, it is almost as if one is the control group for the other, in one of those attitude surveys invented by psychologists: Keep the details similar but change the ethnicity of the person, and see how attitudes change.
I would love to see other scientific analogies used in political discourse. In particular, I yearn for an equivalent of dye tracing or radio-active marking when a controversy flares. This would be very useful during some of the free speech arguments I follow, when some kind of institution has to decide whether to support or withdraw an offensive text, event or artwork. It would be great to trace the decision-making process in such a way as to perceive the point where the support for the principle of free speech breaks down. That would help us identify where these values should be reinforced. Unfortunately, I cannot quite imagine how one might set the ‘tracer’ off… short of manufacturing an argument. So, if Anjem Choudary is reading this, perhaps he would give me advanced warning of his next stunt? Then I can track the reactions he provokes with academic precision.
Author: Robert (Page 139 of 327)
First posted over at the English PEN site.
In her monthly column for MediaShift, Jillian York (Director of International Free Expression at the EFF, and a Global Voices board member) turned her attention to online campaigns for imprisoned bloggers. In particular, how can a campaign be effective in a country like Syria, which has recently become impervious to international pressure?
As part of the piece, Jillian asked several free speech campaigners for their views on the question, and I responded on behalf of English PEN:
When a blogger is imprisoned, it is not just his voice that is silenced. Those who share his point of view are discouraged by his example, and choose to keep quiet. A public solidarity campaign on social media can have the opposite effect, emboldening others to speak out and fill the void left by their imprisoned comrade … so while the text of a message may be “Free Hussein Ghrer,” the subtext is “We Have Not Forgotten Hussein Ghrer,” which is a powerful message to send to the authorities. Sending letters or (as English PEN does) books to these prisoners carries a similar message.
You can read more of my comments, alongside those of several bloggers who are on the frontline of activism, at the MediaShift website. You can leave comments there too.
The colour palette for children’s TV is very green, isn’t it?
There are two reasons for this. One, many of the shows are set outside, which encourages kids to play outside too. It is a shame that this is not a given, but there we go.
Second, many of the programmes mix live action with animation. The easiest way to insert a person into a make-believe world, or bring an imaginary character into the real-world, is to use green-screen technology. If there is lots of grass in the set (imaginary or otherwise) it makes the job of the CGI teams easier, and it makes the resulting product better. It’s interesting that this technical requirement should mean that more programmes for kids are set outside.
In The Night Garden
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Back in 2006 or so, when blogging was The Next Big Thing That Everyone Was Doing, there was much discussion over whether a blog could kickstart a literary or journalistic career. Writers News even commissioned me to write an article about it, in which I quoted the economist and blogger Tim Worstall:
Tim Worstall, editor of the anthology 2005: Blogged, agrees. “I’m not sure that it is possible to make a living from blogging,” wrote Worstall, in his Second Anniversary blog post. “But”, he continued, “it is entirely possible to make a living out of having blogged.” Worstall sees blogging as an alternative to apprenticeships and unpaid internships, a route to paid writing.
I think we can cite many examples of writerswho gained exposure through blogging and then found paid writing gigs: David Allen Green and Laurie Penny at the New Statesman; book deals for PC David Copperfield and The Girl With A One Track Mind.
Another route is that taken by the creators of the Pornokitsch Blog, which takes the transatlantic Science Fiction & Fantasy culture as its beat. They have used their blog as a springboard into the publishing world, leveraging using the contacts and credibility developed over four years of blogging, to produce a series of short story collections. The blog as route not into journalism, but publishing.
And who should be one of the authors they publish? None other than… yrstrly. My story (0,0) is in the Crossroads anthology, released on the Kindle in August 2012. Its a companion book to Lost Souls, “tales of woe and angst, loneliness, redemption and humour” including stories by Arthur Conan-Doyle, Benjamin Disraeli and Mary Coleridge. If you order the limited edition copy of Lost Souls, you get Crossroads on the Kindle for free. You cannot say fairer than that.
Crossroads (cover) by Vincent Sammy
First posted on OpenDemocracy
The government has responded to grassroots pressure for libel reform, but its proposals do not go far enough towards genuinely safeguarding free speech on the internet and ensuring that powerful corporations cannot silence their critics.
During a panel event on Defamation Reform earlier this year, the lawyer Paul Tweed said that the recent focus on Libel Tourism was the result of “the most successful lobbying campaign since that conducted by the tobacco industry”. Those of us at English PEN, Index on Censorship and Sense About Science who had done some of that lobbying gleefully re-tweeted Tweed’s back-handed compliment.
We’re lobbying for libel reform in the UK because we believe the law is not fit for purpose in the 21st Century. The high cost of fighting an action in the High Court is coupled with a law that seems to prioritise reputation over free expression. The truth of the matter and the harm caused are presumed in favour of the claimant. And because the law has not been updated to reflect the invention of the Internet, each web-page is treated as a ‘publication’ as if it were a book printed in the country where it is read. All this has created the phenomenon of Libel Tourism, where foreign libel claimants take advantage of the English Courts’ claimant-friendly jurisdiction.
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