Robert Sharp

Pupil Barrister

Category: Diary (Page 130 of 300)

Things that happen to me, or things I do

On Linking To Your Enemies

4 August 2011 / / 8 Comments

In my morning trawl through the Internet, I noticed two examples of a practice that has become mainstream: denying the object of your opprobrium a link.
First, the fascinating Brian Kellet writes this, in a fisk of a Liz Jones column about the NHS says:

I’m not going to link to the original story because I don’t want to send visitors to the rag that is the Daily Mail.

Then, in a battle of the pseudonyms, highly respected legal blogger Jack of Kent decides that he is going to have an argument with Gudio Fawkes, but without actually namechecking Guido or linking to the ridiculous Death Pentalty campaign he just launched. I’m particularly disappointed in Jack of K, as he writes, in his very next post, that one should “use links and sources wherever possible.”
Linking out, regardless of whether you agree with the person you”re linking to, should be the standard for blogging, just as it is for academia. It is the link to sources which gives the work credibility. In contrast, anonymous gossip disguised as lobby reporting is one of the reasons why there is so little trust in journalists at the moment (a topic discussed at the recent POLIS journalism conference, where I asked a panel of spin doctors and hacks whether the press should abolish anonymous sources)… and the fact that a tabloid does not have to cite its sources is one of the reasons why #Hackgate could happen.
Moreover, we know that our online bubbles are not as diverse as we like to think. Safe silos like Facebook actually filter content to prioritise those people that you already agree with, and our failure to link out just strengthens the confirmation bias. I disagree with Paul Staine’s worldview and his approach to blogging, but I do actually want to know what he is saying about the death penalty, the better to campaign against him.
So, just as we’ve stopped using the Blame The Daily Mail cliche as a substitute for actual political analysis, can we have a moratorium on the whole “I’m not linking to those people” schtick, please? I know we can Google pretty much anything we want to these days, but not everything appears on page one of the results. Worse, a failure to link looks a bit sly and scheming. Let’s leave the obfuscation and misdirection to those outlets with lower standards: The Newspapers.

#Flashride

30 July 2011 / / 0 Comments

Cycling home on Friday, I was unwittingly caught up in the London Cycling Campaign’s ‘Flashride’ across Blackfriars Bridge. They want the speed limit on the bridge to remain at 20mph but apparently the Mayor of London isn’t heeding the request, and it will become more dangerous for cyclists later this year.
In protest, several hundred cyclists rode together over the bridge, in full compliance with the Highway Code. I was able to take a little bit of footage of the happening.

Without wishing to boast or come across as some kind of syncophantic Mac fanboy, I must note how easy it was to capture and edit the footage. I was able to whip out my birthday iPad on the central reservation, take a couple of minutes of HD footage, and then cycle off down The Cut and homeward. It took all of ten minutes to edit the footage in iMovie and the longest part of the process was the HD upload to YouTube. The speed of ‘broadcast’ and ‘publication’ these days is truly revolutionary – causing a genuine shift in power away from elites.

The Corrupt Corporate Culture At the Heart of #Hackgate (Part II)

20 July 2011 / / 1 Comment

'Son of Murdoch' by ssoosay on Flickr

‘Son of Murdoch’ by ssoosay on Flickr


The phone hacking scandal is becoming increasingly confusing.  During the debate on the issue today, I confess I became utterly lost by Ed Miliband’s long explanation of the relationships and personalities involved.  David Cameron was able to use phrases like “conspiracy theory” and “tissue of intruige” which brand the scandal as a Westminster fabrication.  John Rentoul is right to say that Cameron’s critics need much simpler language to explain the problem with the Prime Minister’s judgement and relationships.
Labour’s tactic is to doggedly pursue the ‘smoking gun’ of lore: the archived e-mail or the scribbled note that proves that Cameron knew more, and knew it earlier.  At yesterday’s select committee hearings, the questions were pitched to discover similar key facts that could skewer Murdochs R and J.
This is risky in both cases, because such evidence may never emerge.  It is also counter-productive, because on the meantime, both the politicians and media barons get to punt the difficult questions with “let’s wait until the inquiry” or “I don’t want to jeapordise the criminal investigation”.
A narrow fixation on evidence that could further damage the Prime Minister, or ruin Rebakah Brooks, means that the wider issue – polical, police and corporate corruption – is left to fallow.  Rupert Murdoch presided over the expansion of a corporate culture in which the phone-hacking of murder victims and other obscenities were the inevitable end result.  Whatever he knew and whenever he was told, he is at fault, he is to blame.  Meanwhile, David Cameron’s first act as Prime Minister was to employ someone who he knew had come straight from that morally barren Hades.  There may not be a smoking gun, but you can almost see the steam coming off this scandal.

The Corrupt Corporate Culture At the Heart of #Hackgate (Part I)

20 July 2011 / / 1 Comment

News International's Rebekah Brooks Under Fire, by ssoosay on Flickr

'News International's Rebekah Brooks Under Fire' by ssoosay on Flickr


There are three recent articles that have stuck with me over the course of this scandal, and they’re all about the wider pheonmenon, the corrupt culture that allows all these power abuses to take place.  At Labour Uncut, Anthony Painter calls News Corporation a ‘monster’:

It is nothing to do with Rupert Murdoch as businessman or as an individual or about his politics. It’s about the over-weaning power of a media empire that seems willing to flex its muscles to infect politics, public discourse, and law enforcement agencies. The point is not to join all the dots painstakingly one by one. It is to say: this media empire is too powerful; it is time to take action.
…
The difference in the case of News International is that having committed wrong, it was then able to use its power to protect itself. It drew critical public institutions into its web of power in the process

Second, Nick Cohen filed a really interesting column last week on the culture of fear.  Few people, says Cohen, are brave enough to be whistleblowers:

I know good journalists at News International, but not one of them challenged a management that was presiding over a criminal conspiracy. If they had spoken plainly, their editors would have fired them and in all likelihood they would never have worked in the media again, because no other manager would want them to do to him what they had done to his predecessors.In their complicity with their superiors, they aped the workers in the City and on Wall Street, who knew that asking awkward questions would ruin their careers.

And finally, the indispensable Jay Rosen delves into the warped corporate culture that prevailed at News Corporation, which allowed hacking to become routine.  He brands News Corp as a company primarily interested in weilding influence, with its newspapers and channels as a lobbying tool for that primary purpose.  The refusal of the journalists at NI papers to acknowledge this is, says Rosen, the big lie that sows the rest of the deceit.
A corrupt culture, a generic malaise (in which the public is also implicated, by the way) is a much more ephemeral target for those of us who are angry at the power abuses that are now being uncovered.  Unfortunately, the slow realisation that our collective psychology has been so abused does not provide the same catharsis of a good political lynching.  So we concentrate on the humbling of bêtes noires like Rebekah Brooks and Ruper Murdoch instead.

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