Robert Sharp

Pupil Barrister

Tag: Media (Page 23 of 36)

The Anatomy of #Bigotgate

29 April 2010 / / 3 Comments

For those living on Europa or Enceladus; for those reading these archives on other worlds, ten thousand years hence, when all our election chatter will be no more than a particle of sand on a mite in a desert; and for those on the Isle of Wight… Yesterday’s news story was all about a Gordon Brown gaffe. He had an unsatisfactory exchange with a voter, and then was caught muttering that she was a bigot.  The BBC picked this up on one of their microphones, and Brown was forced to apologise.  Cue a media and internet frenzy.
The first thing to note (again) is just how quickly the political news cycle rotates these days.  By the time most of us had found out what had happened, the Prime Minister was already on the doorstep of Mrs Gillian Duffy, apologising in person and then (bizarrely) smirking about it.
The First Spin of the Top:  The Gaffe
In the digital age, politicians are coming under scrutiny in a way they could never have been before.  Previous Prime Ministers would not have had disposable lapel microphones trailing off their jackets, and news teams would not have been able to disseminate their utterances in real-time to the world.  Every mobile phone is a microphone now, or a bug, if you will.  Mehdi Hassan reminds us that Barack Obama’s biggest gaffe was very similar, when he said that many people “cling to guns and religion”.  Moreover, with Internet in our pockets and on our desks, we are Funes – we all have a perfect memory of what has been said and written, and it comes back to haunt us: bloggers, aspiring politicians and party leaders together.
The Second Spin of the Top: The Propaganda
This draining of power away from the politicians has been evidence ever since we gave the name ‘spin doctors’ to the PR men who try to control the message.  To name them, to allow them to be celebrities in their own right, is akin to pointing out the curtain in The Wizard of Oz – Once you know its there, you cannot help but look behind and expose the crippled wizard for what he really is.  We live in highly skeptical times… and that’s great.
The Third Spin of the Top: The Backlash
What has changed since the last British General election, is that the mainstream media have also lost control of the narrative.  They too are being subjected to this scrutiny.  I discussed last week how the spin placed upon stories by the media is equally as unreliable as the politicans at the centre of the discussion.  The public reaction to the story itself, and also to the woefully inadequate media coverage of the Mrs Duffy incident, was easily discernable via twitter and teh blogs.

@BeauBodOr: Sky News Breaking: Exclusive interview with nephew of Channel 4 reporter who interviewed Gillian Duffy’s niece

This development is also great, and interesting.  As always, a consensus emerges from the chatter.  Its interesting that in this case, the media narrative (hugely damaging to Brown) is in fact tempered by the commentary and analysis that appears online and can be shared through Twitter.  The new media counters the traditional media and balances it.  Hard to believe, but without the new technology, I think yesterday would have been worse for Mr Brown.

Fear of Offending

28 April 2010 / / 33 Comments

Last week we learned that South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have suffered death-threats on an Islamist site, after they attempted to depict the Prophet Mohammed in South Park.  Contributors to site called Revolutionmuslim.com warned they might be killed, like the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh.  The Revolutionmuslim site is now down, but their threats are cached by Google:

We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show. This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them.

The post also contained a link to a Huffington Post article which describes where Stone and Parker live.  The group later presented a ‘clarification’ on SlideShare, which is still live, and which repeats the threat:

As for the Islamic ruling on the situation, then this is clear. There is no difference of opinion from those with any degree of a reputation that the punishment is death.  For one example, Ibn Taymiyyah the great scholar of Islam says, “Whoever curses the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) – a Muslim or a non Muslim- then he must be killed…” and this is the opinion of the general body of Islamic  scholars.
… This shows that taking this stance is virtually obligatory, but it does not mean that our taking this stance is in some way an absolute call toward the requirement that the creators of South Park must be killed, nor a deliberate attempt at incitement, it is only to declare the truth regardless of consequence and to offer an awareness in the mind of Westerners when they proceed forward with even more of the same.

Quite chilling. In the end, Mohammed was shown on South Park in a bear suit, and then underneath a big black ‘censored’ box, with references to his name bleeped out. Producers at Comedy Central made clear that it was they, and not Stone/Parker, that inserted this censorship.  In the second of the two part episode, the man in the suit was revealed to be Father Christmas, not Mohammed.
What is odd about all this is that, before the Mohammed cartoons controversy in Denmark, South Park quite happily featured Mohammed, unveiled, uncloaked, and unbearsuited.  The episode freely circulates in repeats and on DVD, and can be viewed in this short Boing Boing interview with Parker and Stone:

This week, the saga took a strang twist, when cartoonist Molly Norris published and circulated a cartoon entitled ‘Everybody Draw Mohammed Day‘, highlighting the ridiculous outcome of the South Park situation, where drawing anything can be taboo if it is labelled ‘Mohammed’:

The images and the idea were dedicated to Parker and Stone, but their heritage can be traced back clearly to the beginnings of conceptual art: René Magritte’s ‘The Treachery of Images‘ (“Ceci n’est pas une pipe”), perhaps? Norris ‘Citizens Against Citizens Against Humor’ label was quickly taken to be a real movement (it was not), and the ‘day’ assumed to be a proper publicity drive (which it wasn’t). Norris quickly removed her image, and made clear that she was not attempting to disrespect religion herself.
This entire episode marks a continuation, rather than a departure, from the frustrating discourse around blasphemy and ‘offence’.  Since the Rushdie affair, and especially since more recent examples such as the Theo Van Gogh murder, the ideal and right of free expression has been on the back foot.  Matt Stone’s quote in the video above highlights the sorry state of affairs:

Now that’s the new normal.  We lost. Something that was OK is now not OK.

When people like Stone and Parker do attempt to take this on, they are foiled by their own network.  Cartoonists like Molly Norris back away from any controversy.  In the UK, the recent production of Behud by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti reminds us that no-one is brave enough to put on Behzti, her controversial play set in a Sikh Temple.   Even the board of the illustrious Index on Censorship backed away from publishing a Mohammed cartoon earlier this year.
We are living in one of two worlds.  Either

  • the fears of all these people are justified, in which case, we have actually descended into a sort of fascist dystopia;  Or
  • we are being over-cautious, and self-censoring unnecessarily

My personal sense is that it is the latter state of affairs is where we are at.  The Revolution Muslim group seem tiny, pathetic and are easily dealt with using existing laws against threatening behaviour.  Likewise with other protesting groups in both the USA and the UK, who can be easily countered if free speech activists and artists co-ordinate properly.  Moreover, public opinion is certainly with free speech, and against those who think that blasphemy is a legitimate reason to censor.
Those with a personal connection to Theo Van Gogh, or Hitoshi Igarashi (Salman Rushdie’s Japanese translator) may disagree over the nature of the threat.  Crucially, however, either situation is untenable and an assault on democracy, and cannot be allowed to stand.
My feeling is that political leadership is required.  Only political leaders can guarantee police and legal protection for those who push the boundaries of satire… and the companies that facilitate this.  We don’t have this at the moment, and artists seem to be swimming in uncertainty, lost and scared.

The Long and Short of It

27 April 2010 / / 1 Comment

From The Guardian last week:

“We think this will be the renaissance of the short story,” said novelist Sophia Bartleet, who came up with the idea for Ether Books’s app while desperate for something to read when travelling back and forth to see her ill mother. She believes time-poor commuters, or workers grabbing a 10-minute break, could be tempted into reading a short story here, or a poem or essay there, on their phones.

Well, yes. The only problem is, I saved this article to read later on Instapaper for my iPhone. Combine Instapaper with @LongReads on Twitter, or the new LongForm website, and you have pretty much mirrored the Ether Books model. I worry that this is yet another niche filled by something free.
The longest things I have written on this blog are probably this meditation on Britishness, and this Borgesian theatre review… neither of which are that long at all, really. Writing something longer might be a goal for my thirty-second year, beginning today.

James Brindle archived two years of twitters into a hardback book. Photo by STML

Do Daily Mail Journalists Cry at Night?

23 April 2010 / / 1 Comment

I posted this on Liberal Conspiracy yesterday. Happy to say it got a lot of RTs.
The pathetic and desperate hatchet job on Nick Clegg, by our friends at the Daily Mail, was pretty much instantly rebutted last night, in just 140 characters.

@DougSaunders: British journalism in microcosm: 2002 op-ed by Nick Clegg: http://is.gd/bCESl Resulting Daily Mail front pager tomorrow: http://is.gd/bCETh

Merely linking to the article that was the basis for Tim Shipman’s front-page piece shows the real context, debunks the Mail‘s outrage, and exposes their highly partisan agenda. Iain Dale is right: this will backfire on the Conservatives (regardless of whether they actually had a hand in placing the smears), and further highlight The Slow Death of the British Newspaper As We Know It.
Alongside the online rebuttals and link-sharing, we see the rise of the satirical #hashtag, in this case #NickCleggsFault (seeded by Justin McKeating, I believe), and Chris Applegate has updated his seminal Daily Mail Headline Generator to capture the Zeitgeist:

WILL NICK CLEGG GIVE YOUR HOUSE SWINE FLU?

A few questions present themselves. The first is the obvious perennial: how deep does this sort of ridicule penetrate into the national conversation? Are these jokes just a distraction for a insular blogosphere, the “Twitterati”, or does the meme spread out enough to properly counter the spin being spread by the Mail?
Social marketers will spend all election trying to answer this question… but whatever the level of influence right now, I think it is safe to say that it grows on a daily basis. Meanwhile, the tabloids diminish in stature. This is now a given.
But what I really want to know, is this: What do the journalists at these outlets really think about the satirical attacks on their paper? I can well imagine a bunker mentality affecting the editorial team at the Mail, or the Express, or the Telegraph – these are intense and high-stakes positions, after all.
But does this attitude extend to, say, a young journalist working on the news desk? Or the sub-editors? Or the music reviewers? Or the poor chap (or chapess) who has to moderate all the angry comments!? What do they think when they see the Daily Mail Headline Generator and the #NickCleggsFault hastag cluttering up their screens? Just as the Mail’s readership is not a monolith, we know that their staff cannot be either.
I would love to know their reaction to these kinds of online surges – and not out of any sense of schadenfreude, fly-on-the-wall, Downfall-type snigger. I think it would be a genuinely useful insight into how major media operations operate in the second decade of the 21st Century.
Any pseudonomynous contributions in the comments would be gratefully received.

Rob's #LeadersDebate Reax

15 April 2010 / / 0 Comments

The Leaders Debate, on the Telly


First, it was refreshing to hear a political debate without the noise. I mean that not only with regards to PMQs, but to Question Time too.
I think there was substance in what all three leaders said, but precious little ideology. I was struck by how many of the policies seemed interchangable, as if one party only had the policy because they thought of it first. The only big policy differences that did seem to be based on ideology were Trident (where Clegg split with Cameron and Brown) and on taxes, where the old argument about rises and cuts seemed to play out unchanged since the 1970s.
The moderator Alastair Stewart was awkward when addressing the camera and audience. He was also annoying when moderating… but I actually think this was necessary, and a sign he did well. Only because Stewart was so firm, did he manage to minimise the constant talking over other people, and refusal to heed the chairman, that we see on Question Time.
There was surprisingly little snark. Brown tried a pre-written gag about smiling in election posters, and followed it up with a Lord Ashcroft dig at the Tories… but it fell flat.
I think Nick Clegg missed a trick, which was to ram home a point about judgement. As well as emphasising ideas, he should also have made more of the calls the the Liberal Democrat are acknowledged to have got right. I didn’t hear Vince Cable’s name mentioned, despite his prescience on the 2007/08 banking crisis. The public consensus is that the Lib Dems also got the call on the Iraq war right too, and Clegg could have reminded people about that (even though that issue was dealt with at the 2005 election).
Alll three men looked ‘Prime Ministerial’ and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably a partisan hack. But in a perverse way, I think the uniformity of the leaders reminded me of the crucial difference of the parties rank-and-file. The fact is that the Tory, Labour and Liberal Democrat activists are different from their leaders, and very different to each other. It is these activists who will influence how the winning party(s) govern. In addition to these debates, which I think are healthy, this election also needs a greater examination of the parties’ underlying values too.
And how is the media analysing the event? Well, I’ve just turned back over to Newsnight and they were analysing whether or not Cameron and Brown made enough eye-contact, and how they choreographed shaking hands at the end: Pathetic. Now I am watching Michael Crick, presenting an ‘instapoll’, and giving an analysis of what other analysts say, a fine British example of what Jay Rosen calls ‘The Church of the Savvy’.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2026 Robert Sharp

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑