And now for some Inside Baseball.
Last week, I managed to irritate legal blogger Jack of Kent (a.k.a. David Allen Green) by suggesting he was being stingy with his links, and then not telling him about it. This was not entirely true on either count – He was not being as unlinky as I had thought; and I had tried to let him know.
Since David and I have worked together on the Libel Reform Campaign, I assume that he is not going to sue me for trashing his reputation in the Guardian. However, elements of our exchange got me thinking about issues of ‘responsibility’ in blogging.
Here’s the thing: When David asked me “why didn’t you check?” I felt strangely short-changed, despitre the fact that I certainly had not checked with him beforehand. This is because when I typed the original post, I fully expected David to become aware of it. Incoming links and twitter recommendations usually alert people to the fact they are being discussed. Moreover, I think some part of my subconsicious decided that to cite him was, in effect, an invitation to respond. The invitation was not explicit, but to me it feels like an integral part of the blogging conversation.
I write this not to try and get myself off the hook for the pint I know I must pay to David, but instead to ask how responsible blogging might be different from responsible journalism. A key pillar of the existing Reynolds Defence (a public interest defence for libellous statements) is the idea of verification before publishing. But should this hold for bloggers? What of the idea (which I had internalised until David complained) that the early publishing of comment or allegations on a blog or twitter, is in itself part of the verification and fact-checking process? For citizen bloggers, publishing a claim online carries the implicit (and often explicit) request – “please help me verify”.
Mainstream media critics of blogging, and the politicians, certainly disagree, and see the publication of anything unchecked as being irresponsible. I would appreciate thoughts on this from The Man Himself – Could this form of early publication online be considered ‘responsible’, due to the very nature of the medium?
Tag: Media (Page 18 of 36)
As tweeted yesterday, I was asked onto Paul Hammond’s morning show on UCB Radio, to discuss Norwegian gunman Anders Behring Breiviks’ manifesto, which has been published online. I made the case that, unpleasant though Breivik’s views are, censoring his manifesto would only give him a martyrish status. Also, the reasons given for suppressing such writings would quickly be used to attack and censor other books (like the Bible).
Here is the audio of my segment [6 Mb].
On the UCB’s Facebook page, a few people raised dissenting views.
… surely the human rights of the Norwegian students and there families should be held in higher esteem the Anders Behring Breiviks. He gave up his rights the moment he blew up the building in Oslo.
I think this is just a confusion of the concept of human rights. Of course rights such as free expression may be lawfully removed, but its wrong to say that a killer or any other hated person in society can forfeit their rights in this way. If that were the case, we would call them ‘privileges’ not ‘rights’.
Another common sentiment:
But I would caution against publishingg such material. Not everyone has the wisdom or intelligence to be able to read it. God forbid but what if there was to be a copycat killing because of publishing this?
To this, I am reminded of Bronwen Maddox writing in The Times, discussing the ramblingsof another killer, Cho Seung Hui:
The accusation that the NBC broadcasts may provoke copycat attacks — the most serious charge against the network — appears to rest on a notion of severe mental illness as contagious, common and predictable.
UCB is a Christian radio station, and as such there were a few comments invoking the more nebulous concepts of God and Satan:
He had his foot in satans kindom, he is a freemason wich is v evil ,he also listend 2 chantin an playd demonic games on computa,he gave the devil an entrance 2 his mind.ther so much ocult activities that warp the mind an insesetive the value of life
I don’t think this is helpful. Evil and even satanic Anders Breivik may be, but these are adjectives to describe his end state of mind, not the process by which he became like that. Explaining a good or a bad act as being the work of God or Satan is a way of avoiding hard thoughts and (maybe) a difficult truth.
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.
‘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.
'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.