In the middle of any media broo-haha there is the possibility that new unanticipated stars can be born. This time we have been blessed with an especially fabulous new z list celeb in the form of hack’s hack, hapless Paul McMullan, who – with his wonky tie, unbuttoned shirt, and impossibly crumpled, maybe slept in, creamy suit – has haunted almost every BBC news broadcast on television and radio for the past week.

Described by Will Self as ‘marvelously fulfilling the rat-like feral persona of the gutter press’ only a few short minutes after Steve Coogan had lambasted him as a ‘PR disaster… you come across as a sort of risible individual who is symptomatic of everything that is wrong with the tabloids … you are morally bankrupt … you’ve been on all week because no one else can be bothered’ – his appearance on last night’s Newsnight was among the most joyously inept performances I’ve ever seen – one which reached its zenith when the vitriol subsided long enough for Emily Maitlis to inject a note unanticipated pity. ‘You keep coming on,’ she said concernedly, -’ but you seem like a tortured soul’. Alas Paul – perhaps the last cockroach left shivering as the News of the World smacked into its long overdue apocalypse – didn’t take the opportunity to sing the story of his crooked heart.

Even had he though, it would never have matched the eloquence of Gordon Burn’s wonderful novel ‘fullalove’ – narrated by a middle-aged tabloid hack suffering a sort of unending spiritual collapse as his job poisons his soul. This, Burn’s suggests is the way cultures die:

“…A local stringer for the Star has drawn the short straw and been nominated our man on the spot, running back hot-foot with the details should anything go off.

Meanwhile we sit here getting crocked and giving it that about who we’ve pulled, got alongside, bought up, boxed off. Money talk. Trade gossip.

‘…Now he is an A-1 example of somebody failing up’

‘…He’s only started to fuckin’ refer to the rag as Qualipop’

‘…there are only three big Gets out there at the minute – Di, Whacko Jacko and Lucan’

‘…Can I check I’ve got what the plod said’

‘…Everything’s a one-shot deal. You get it or you don’t’

‘…”Ethics” is his classic. “That’s that place to the east of London where they all wear white socks” ‘

‘…Through the wall he hears him say to her, “here’s five shillings. Go ‘an buy yourself a new hut” ‘

‘…All the fiddles in the warehouse, the machine room, the process department’.

Heath Hawkins upset a hackette who thinks nobody knows she had a bunk-up with him the night before last by producing his favourite picture of a child mauled by a Rottweiler. ‘Have you ever thought about counselling? I think you’re sick.’

‘What would you know about sick. If you want sick, I’ll show you sick, you smelly shitbag fucking bastard bitch.’

Two older hacks are competing with each other doing one-arm push-ups on the floor.

‘I was told in all seriousness by a sniper in Sarajevo, “I am happy to kill a child when he is with his mother, because there is something fantastic on the face of the mother”. They only pussied out of using it’

One night in a forest in I saw a Khmer Rouge hoist the smallest boy in a family by his ankles and in front of his family this was – swing him so that his head struck the trunk of a palm tree.’

A non-resident asks if he can pay his bill with plastic.

‘These days we take anything. I’d accept a note from your mother.’

‘There’s only one job advertised on the noticeboard at the Job Centre in town here – “Security work. Furness area. One pound fifty an hour. Bring your own dog.” ‘

‘Did you get that stuff about the Bonelli guy, the father, having his ears pierced a few years by a friend with an icecube and a carpet tack?’

Tuning out and in.

‘…One thing you can say about Carson. If bullshit was music, he’d be a brass band.’

‘….buying in spiders to keep the greenfly and blackfly down in the atrium.’

Still framing and re-framing intros. I don’t know why. As far as intros go, I am surplus to requirements… I’m here in the role of legman, errand-runner, fatter of his puny paragraphs.

The police helicopter strobes our faces as it clatters over the hotel. ‘We got ten minutes to get the last fuckin’ chopper out of here, man.’ Heath says.

The bar staff in their grease-rimmed, ill-fitting shirts, waiting to go home.

Farewell Paul McMullan goodnight, to sleep, goodbye, goodnightand Murdoch too goodbye, farewell, goodbye, goodbye, lie down in your crinkled halls of mustard newsprint, with your blood red banners furled, your final press, the final fish and chip paper slough of deceit across your eyes. Farewell goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. You’re done. But Paul, as you’re the last cockroach left, would you turn out the lights?

Today’s comprehensive spending review delivered long-predicted cuts to welfare and housing. Even poor old EMA, bless her, got the chop. But perhaps the deepest cuts have been to journalists’ vocabularies. Plenty of column inches over the coming months and years will be devoted to the government’s harshest measures. But if I hear one more journalist refer to the cuts as swingeing, I’m going to headbut my screen. And that would be an unmitigated tragedy because I’m quite looking forward to buying Fallout: New Vegas in a few days’ time.

Swingeing, it’s an interesting word that sounds a bit like a cross between swinging and wingeing, but in fact means punishing or severe. Other synonyms include stringent, heavy, drastic, oppressive, excessive, exorbitant. All good words.

There’s no doubting that swingeing is an accurate term to apply to the cuts. But when you’ve read it 500 times in 500 different publications, you begin to wonder if journalists lack imagination. And it’s not just journalists, bloggers are guilty of it too. I understand publications have strict style guides. The magazine I write for has an at times baffling style guide that seems determined to suck the life out of everything, but at least it has no time for cliches and that’s exactly what the term swingeing cuts is becoming.

Please, journalists, for the love of god, get a thesaurus!

Ok, false alarm, it’s not quite breaking news. People have known this for years. But I think, following today’s little outburst in The Independent, it’s worth reiterating. Julie Burchill is an idiot. Quite why a paper which is, by and large, aimed at intelligent, liberal minded progressives, chooses to print the journalistic equivalent of an explosive wet fart after a dodgy vindaloo from the mind (or lack thereof) of an idiotic Iraq war apologist who once declared Israel the only country she would “fucking die for”, is beyond me. So what brainless, sputum-laced drivel did she have to offer us today? Three short pieces, each wetter and fartier than the last. Thusly summarised, they go like this:

1) People who oppose the war in Afghanistan are Taliban appeasers and there’s absolutely no chance they could have any genuine moral or political objections to the war, like the deaths of Afghan civilians, or a principled opposition to imperialism. People who criticise the war without ever having fought in it are cowards, don’t deserve to have an opinion and should just shut up. Anti-war activists would be cheering Chamberlain if he were around today because it’s absolutely impossible that two completely different wars could be fought for two completely different reasons and that one might be slightly more defensible than the other. It’s much better to be an armchair warmonger than an armchair peacenik.

2) Julie belittles the plight of millions of Pakistanis whose lives have been ruined by the floods. She then admits she doesn’t know much about Islam (does she know much about anything?) before bringing up the fact that a Saudi billionaire was profligate enough so spend millions on a number plate as evidence that Muslims are probably hypocrites if they’re not sending aid to Pakistan. I’d suggest that Ms. Burchill is rather tenuously conflating two separate issues – one of extreme importance, the other of large irrelevance – because she’s running out of things to write about. This, I think, is evidenced by wet fart number three.

3) Naomi Campbell is pretty, but miserable. Kate Moss is pretty, clever and full of the joys of life. Well, Julie, if either of them had had their brain extracted and replaced by a monkey’s anus, they could have come up with a more interesting piece than this. You cretin.

A few highly representative (quite honestly) comments on Burchill’s article from the Independent’s website:

Tony: The Indy’s bosses could save themselves a few bob by just getting a random cabbie to rant incoherently about the problems of the day, and transcribing the results thereof. At least that might be entertaining.

Giordano Bruno: Islamophobia infiltrating the Independent! Funny how one can feel Burchill’s contempt if not hatred towards Islamic “umma”. Usual suspects like JB always come back with same rusty and dusty arguments. I’ve just wasted 5 minutes of my precious time.

Christopher: Being a columnist is just a little more than your IQ can manage. I suggest you switch to covering horse shows, which I expect you could do well.

Meles: Wow! Three items, all poorly-judged, offensive and ill-informed. I have learned to treat JB’s writing with… well, let’s call it scepticism… but this has to be an all time low.

Ian1: I was doing a spot of gardening this morning when I accidentally put my hand in a turd left in one of my borders by a neighbour’s cat. Unpleasant as that experience was, it pales into insignificance alongside the trauma associated with reading yet another ill-considered, poorly-constructed column by the worthless sack of crap that is Julie Burchill.

R. Broxted: Julie, couldn’t Lebedev afford Rod Liddle?

Guest post by Richard Symons

We came to “The Fear Factory” via an unusual but (as we discovered) incredibly astute request.

The Nationwide Foundation’s steering committee brief was simple enough, “give us a tool to change minds” – a regrettably necessary first step in making the treatment of young offenders something you could convince the public they should want. The result was “The Fear Factory”, an hour long documentary that reveals how and why the politicians and media – despite the evidence, economics and expert opinion – have engaged in a tough-talking, law and order arms race which has effectively brought our criminal justice system into crisis.

Most areas of the 3rd sector face an uphill struggle for public and government support even when it’s easy to prove the work they’re doing is effective and much needed. Those working in the arena of criminal justice have to overcome additional hurdles – primarily public and media opinion coupled with the political implications of headline-grabbing controversies that can win and lose elections. If a government-funded charity asked the public to donate “Playstations for Prisons” imagine the ensuing tabloid frenzy and you get an idea of the communications work needed.

But Salman Shaheen hit the nail on the 3rd Sectors head in his review of the film, questioning whether it can change minds? In an e-mail to me he said, “I am slightly sceptical of the film’s – and indeed anyone’s – ability to influence the morally bankrupt bunch of writers and editors spreading fear, hatred and division for a living whilst pretending what they’re doing is real journalism”. I beg to differ.

I don’t blame Salman for his skepticism, it forms part of the reasoning behind the brief for the film. And he’s right to the extent that a film on it’s own can’t do the job, but that’s the case with any tool. I suspect that’s why an unprecedented 47 NGOs have formed a coalition off the back of the film – a hammer simply won’t drive in a nail by itself, and changing someone’s mind is infinitely harder – especially when they’re “morally bankrupt”. The key is realising they’re not.

Our burgeoning criminal justice crisis in the UK has worsened because crime is an incredibly emotional issue, centering on fear for your own safety and the safety of your loved ones. Newspapers commercially exploit this fear and politicians piggyback. Ultimately, the underlying logic behind the emotion is that when it comes to crime, especially violent crime, there can only be one certainty with a “morally bankrupt” offender – if they’re locked up, you and your family are safe.

Unless you believe in redemption, rehabilitation. In which case there’s no such thing as “morally bankrupt”.

Belief in redemption’s an issue I’d barely thought about before making the film – let alone whether society has the ability to redeem a killer. That was before we filmed ex-offenders like Erwin James and John Hirst. It was also before we’d filmed Chris Roycroft-Davies, for twenty years he was the executive editor and leader writer of The Sun. What quickly became apparent was that both Erwin and John had been rehabilitated. There can be no doubt they both make a positive contribution to society whereas 20 years ago this wasn’t the case. There was much more debate during the production over whether a man like Roycroft-Davis could ever change his mind, be “redeemed”. Salman’s skepticism says not.

Chris sat amongst an audience of 400 3rd sector workers at the film’s launch whilst they watched two decades of the “law and order” arms race unfold – in no small part as a result of headlines and leaders that he’d written. I figured at best, a quote from him would be useful for the DVD inlay to illustrate just how intractable the tabloids were on this issue. I suppose I was as cynical as Salman. Turns out I was wrong. The quote we ended up using was, “A wonderfully put together film that changed my mind”.

A hammer and nail coupled to a dose of skepticism won’t get your building work done, won’t make a change. The 3rd sector exists in the criminal justice arena because it cares, believes in human nature, believes in it’s value, believes we’re all capable of change and believes no-one’s born inherently bad – we know that includes offenders, but sometimes forget it can include journalists, judges, politicians and the public – it’s just a long haul and it’s going to need the energy and dedication of all 47 coalition members.

The 3rd sector getting cynical would be a terrible shame. It’d probably mean that what it is to be human has been dialed down a notch.

Richard Symons is the head of Spirit Level Film, producers of The Fear Factory

Additional Quotes

‘Were The Fear Factory merely a critique of youth justice policy it might not deserve close attention. But it isn’t. It’s more than that. It constructively builds the case for our taking a different direction. A direction which would make it less likely that we will all be victimised by a new generation of criminals.’ Rod Morgan,Chairman of the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales. 2004-2007

“Exposes our criminal justice crisis with forensic precision.” Chris Huhne MP

“An important piece of work… terrific. Makes the case for change urgent and unarguable” Lord Puttnam

The recession seems to have become a pantomime this week. At every opportunity the Chancellor tells us: “it’s behind you”, then the Office of National Statistics (ONS) yell: “Oh no it isn’t!” So are we in recession or aren’t we? There’s an easy answer to this – some of us are and some of us aren’t.

This is surely the most inequitable recession on record. While some are badly affected, some have actually benefited. Take investment bankers for example – this is not the part where I say “some of my best friends are bankers” because they’re not and there’s a reason for that – I’m reliably informed those bankers that kept their jobs are currently laughing maniacally while rolling in bank notes and their own effluvia. Anyone who has an interest-only standard variable mortgage is feeling gratified because the interest rates are so low. People who have secure permanent work are also comparatively unaffected.

However, for me the recession has hit home this fortnight. I am currently unemployed. In journalism terms I am ‘between contracts’, a phrase which means exactly the same as ‘resting actor’ only with even more self-righteousness. Being ‘between contracts’ is not an unusual position for journalists and anyone who is self-employed. However, there is something different about it this time: there are very few jobs.

The ONS statistics say that unemployment is reaching the 3 million mark. I think you can easily double that figure. Those statistics don’t take into account anyone the government have managed to segue into a “scheme” of some sort. Then there are the legions of people doing unpaid or barely-paid internships and voluntary work, scraping by on occasional temp work or ‘between contracts’. Many of these people are not on jobseekers allowance (the very name conjures up a ‘seek and ye shall find’ optimism). Why? Surely anyone in their right mind would go on the dole?

Not me, I’m not eligible. Sadly, this isn’t because I’m fabulously wealthy, it’s because I’m married and my husband has a part-time job – therefore he has to ‘support’ me. Whether you agree with this or not (as a feminist I have ethical problems letting him pay for drinks, so you can imagine I’m thrilled…) you have to wonder – how many hidden unemployed are there? Are we getting the full picture?

For any of you still fortunate enough to be wondering if the recession is really that bad let me tell you what it’s like on the ground. I’m getting on my bike and looking for work like a good capitalist. I’m applying for jobs that in the past I would have walked into that day, smiling beneficently and holding my nose. Now I’m up against 150 other candidates, clawing and scratching. Now consider this: I am lucky enough to have many years of solid work experience and I live in London. What about people who live in parts of the country which have been worse affected by the economic downturn? What about people who have just left university and school and have very little experience and huge debts?

If you were wondering why the school/university holidays seem to be dragging on a bit it’s because there are hundreds of thousands of unemployed young people. Things are much worse for them than they are for me. Chances are another contract will come along for me soon enough, and I’ll keep sending CV’s and moaning in my little middle-class trough of despond until it does.

The next person to tell me that ‘when they were unemployed in the early 80’s it was a great time of artistic creativeness’ will have their head impaled on a memory stick. This is a Labour government, so why does it feel like the darkest days of Thatcherism? The millions of unemployed people in this country don’t want another initiative, they just want a job – but it seems to me that Westminster is too busy arguing over the minutiae of whether we are or aren’t in recession to notice. They forget that pantomime is the most democratic of all art forms and the audience has a habit of getting involved in the show…

A suitably gaudy headline for short piece about student tabloid journalism.  Needs to be pronounced “sher-rard” to work though…

This morning I stumbled across what I think is possibly the greatest juxtaposition of a name and a quotation of all time: ‘ “There’s a huge amount of snobbery around,” said Taymoor Atighetchi, a third year student from Trinity College, Cambridge.’

Taymoor – take a bow, son.  Not since Henry Kissinger had the audacity to actually show up and collect the Nobel Peace Prize has such a flagrant disregard for irony made me both laugh and cry in such equally large proportions… you posh twit.

Because sadly, Taymoor wasn’t rallying against inequality within our nation’s greatest, yet still highly elitist, educational institution. Rather, he was speaking in defense of its new online rag ‘The Tab‘ – Oxbridge’s first openly tabloid newspaper – which attracted some 80,000 hits in its first week alone.

First and foremost, and I say this begrudgingly, in so much as ‘it is what it is’, the paper has been quite done. Secondly, I was about to make a few snide remarks about its appalling and frequent misappropriation of grammar, but now feel unable to do so after having just reread my own sentence prior to this one. But third - and here’s where much of the contention lies - amongst its many delights sits ‘The Tab Totty’: a page-three-esque publicity stunt, whereby nubile young things parade suggestively with without a degree of dignity (geddit?… groan.)

Natalie Szarek, the Cambridge University Student Union’s (CUSU) Woman’s Officer, bless her little heart, is up in arms. “It reproduces and reinforces harmful attitudes towards women. Their fliers showing pictures of semi-naked women in provocative positions are being shoved in freshers’ faces… We can do better as a university” she said. And of course she is right. Of course she is. But who is really to blame here?

Varsity and The Cambridge Student (TCS) – the established Cambridge student press – currently have a print run that runs into about 20,000 copies per week.  Whilst I have not been there nor (here comes another pun) ingested those large organs recently, I can at least speak to the history of each.

TCS failed to ever gain any real traction as a publication. Despite spurts of independent thought and the odd decent editor, it remained largely a CUSU funded mouthpiece: too PC to ever say anything worth reading and too aware of its chief funder to ever really hold anyone to account. And its lack of a reputation, for these reasons, sometimes lead to some clearly second-rate applicants for its easily available posts.  Despite its obvious vitriol, The Tab’s own characterisation of TCS is quite fair: “The classic example… the survey, a device employed to create news out of thin air.  This week’s depressing TCS survey, ‘Freshers’ Week: Behind the smiles’ offered a good example.  The survey made such exciting discoveries as the fat that “half of students received work in their first three days and the most popular event was (wait for it) a “college party.”

Varsity to its credit was, however, fiercely always independent. But it was also fiercely banal, if such a thing is possible.  It tried to be sex, drugs and rock n roll but all to often was just a wank, some prozac and some indy douche groaning with a guitar.   However, under the stewardship of Jon Swaine (now of The Telegraph) and Amy Goodwin during my time, it was at least effective as an instrument of accountability. But even then only in the worse possible way.  Like so many mildly, socially liberal but otherwise thoroughly conservative voices, it all too often assumed the mantle of thoroughly holier-than-tho.  And that was when it cared grace student politics with its attention.  It was cynical.  Heavily Egotistical.  Almost viewing itself as “above politics”.  And subsequently just totally destructive and rarely worth a read.  You always sensed that they were at their happiest when starting a fire then just photographing it for their front page.  But its editorial line never had the balls, in short, to ‘put up’ itself.

So why are people turning to The Tab?  Are they all really just sexist pigs and gossip girls, without the faintest semblance of interest in anything?  Or is it because TCS couldn’t organise a bumrape in a barracks and Varsity couldn’t be less hard-hitting if it were edited by Tim Henman? My guess is that – for the large proportion of students at least – it is the latter of the two concerns. What was on offer was all too often bland, mediocre, ‘lifestyle-focused’ irrelevance.  So why are we surprised when the girls trade up to the genuinely juicy gossip and the boys to the porn?

The Tab is a facile piece of nonsense that anyone with a juvenile sense of humour and clever turn of phrase could write.  But that is not sole the reason it is getting readers.

Declining newspaper sales are not a crisis for journalism, but an opportunity to save it

There’s a crisis in print journalism. Newspaper sales across the board are facing an inexorable decline. Worst affected, with the notable exception of the Daily Mail, are the tabloids. The Mirror, once the country’s best selling paper, has seen its circulation plummet 49% in the last seven years, losing almost a million readers. The Sun, meanwhile, finds its sales figures down 16% from 2002. The bigger they come, it seems, the harder they fall. The quality papers are not unaffected, however. The Telegraph’s sales are down 14% in the same period, whilst The Guardian has lost around 60,000 readers. Only The Independent, the country’s lowest selling quality paper, remains relatively untouched.

With sales in a nosedive, it’s little wonder that the big media corporations are taking drastic measures. Earlier this year, Rupert Murdoch announced his intention to charge for online content. Meanwhile the Evening Standard, owned by Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev, went in the opposite direction, becoming a free paper this month in an attempt to recapture the glory days of circulations in excess of 600,000. Whatever means the moguls use to shore up support for their brands, there is one unavoidable truth. In the digital age, newspapers just aren’t as popular. And whilst the internet offers them new means to distribute their content to a potentially infinite audience, it not only presents a challenge to their profitability, but to their hegemony.

Should we mourn the terminal illness of print media? As an aspiring freelance journalist always on the lookout for that next big credit, my gut reaction is yes. But the more I think about it, the more I see the decline of the old newspapers not as a crisis, but an opportunity for progressive investigative journalism. The print media, overwhelmingly owned by massive, multinational media conglomerates, has always been dominated by the right. Of all the mainstream national daily papers, only three – The Independent, The Guardian and The Mirror – can really be considered left of centre. The others, to varying degrees, push a conservative agenda, in many cases manufacturing moral panic, most notably on immigration, through doctored statistics and sloppy reporting led more by editorial ideology than a commitment to uncovering truth.

The decline of print media and the rise and institutionalisation of the political blogosphere offers the potential for a much greater plurality of opinion and journalistic endeavour to be represented in the mainstream media. Falling newspaper sales, then, represent an opportunity to redress the political balance in the public sphere. Of course, the internet itself is no guarantor of balance. As has been widely noted, the right, and conservative bloggers, have thus far made much greater progress in this new medium than the left. Wikio’s list of top political blogs in the UK is dominated by the right. Of the top ten, only one, Liberal Conspiracy, is genuinely left-wing in its outlook. But, as the site’s editor, Sunny Hundal, notes, the times may be a changin’. The blogosphere emerged under a Labour government, the right-wing bloggers were born on the offensive. Under a Conservative government, however, it will be the left-wing activists, free from the unhealthy shadow of an unpopular party, who are newly fanged and going for the jugular in the way that energises and engages readers looking for an alternative point of view.

But, as Sunny points out, it is no longer enough for the left-wing bloggers to simply stand on their soapboxes. To truly step into the oversize shoes being fast vacated by the right-dominated print media, bloggers must champion original reporting and thorough investigative journalism. This is a philosophy The Third Estate has always embraced and we wholeheartedly support Sunny’s call. Earlier this year, we broke the story of Dana Ali – an Iraqi immigrant held in Oakington detention centre because a Home Office blunder failed to recognise his marriage to a British citizen – when no national newspaper would. Dozens of left blogs rallied to support his campaign and together we helped free him from Oakington and convince Conservative-run Waveney District Council to back his fight against deportation. In doing so, we proved the impact we can make.

It’s not going to be easy. Most bloggers are unpaid, their words are a labour of love, or hate. Between holding down a steady job and maintaining a semblance of a social life, they do not have the time to commit to chasing stories. Even the largest group blogs lack the resources of the international media corporations necessary to break big news. It’s a challenge, but it’s one the blogosphere, and the left in particular, must answer if we are to become truly relevant. In this opportune confluence of circumstances, with the decline of the right-wing newspapers and the rise of a right-wing government, what we can achieve is beyond measure. We have in our power the chance to save the true values of honest journalism, clawing genuine progressive investigation back from the morass of celebrity scandal and moral panic that dominate the daily headlines.

“A journalist’s responsibility is to be honest, to attempt to tell the truth,” Nick Davies, author of the oft-quoted Flat Earth News, told The Third Estate. The ailing tabloids have turned their back on honesty in a vain attempt to shift more copies. Now it’s up to us. The cost of failure is to be yesterday’s news. The prize is to be the news tomorrow.

There is nothing wrong with your computer screen. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to… The Third Estate!

For the past few months we have been proud to bring you top quality comment, analysis, news, reviews and interviews on a daily basis. Oh and we had something about mushrooms as well. Having six regular writers has allowed us to produce at least one decent piece every day. However, with our readership climbing every day, it’s time for us, like Mr Creosote with a waffer thin mint in his mouth, to expand. As well as producing more and better content every day, we are particularly looking to expand into original reporting and bring you some top exclusives. That’s why we’re taking on two great new writers.

Liz Stephens is a political hack and comedy writer, who spends her time writing the news and mocking it. She has written for The News Quiz and The Now Show on BBC Radio 4 and has performed at the Edinburgh Festival. After two excellent guest pieces, Liz will be taking up a regular Tuesday column and adding some much needed oestrogen to a testosterone-heavy blog. The Third Estate poached her from politics.co.uk and they’re not getting her back!

JW Arble has written a couple of guest pieces over the last few months and after bringing us his exclusive interview with Nick Davies, he’s earned his columnist badge. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and is a qualified journalist who has written for City AM, Richmond and Twickenham Times, The Ilford Recorder, The Chiswick Times, The Hounslow and Brentford Times. With a penchant for irreverent reviews and surreal satire, he promises to bring us some interesting articles.

Watch out for their first pieces later today! Thank you for sticking with us, we hope you like what they have to offer.

Guest post by Carl Packman

102 Minutes That Changed America, the brave documentary that aired on Channel 4 yesterday, made for very tough viewing.

The camera was very intrusive, and actually seemed to infuriate people, but it did what was best in documenting some very sombre and terrifying moments. People, covered in dust and debris, would wave their hands as if to say I’ve been in there, fuck off with your camera, and against their sensitivities managed to catch both their anger and their vulnerabilities. The viewer asks themselves the important question, definitely on the lips of those commissioning the programme: is watching this programme not tantamount to voyeurism, or, should I be watching these terrified people in their terror climaxes?

The answer should be no, but what is posterity worth? When Kevin Carter, the nobel prize winning photographer, was asked about filming South African necklacing – the act of filling a rubber tyre with petrol, placing it round a victims neck and setting on fire – he replied:

“I was appalled at what they were doing. I was appalled at what I was doing. But then people started talking about those pictures… then I felt that maybe my actions hadn’t been at all bad. Being a witness to something this horrible wasn’t necessarily such a bad thing to do.”

It was in 1993 that Carter took the photograph of a small girl in famine ridden Sudan, that took him to the long road of depression. What should a photographer do, should s/he attempt to help the subject, does art trump life, what moral proximity does the artist have towards his or her subject if any, and should this jeopardise his or her art or commitment?

It was these questions, and many more that Carter suffered before he took his own life at the age of 33 by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and running the other end to the passenger-side window.

Robert Capa, the Spanish civil war photographer famous for his photograph Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, was held in very high esteem for his very graphic and personal display of the other war against fascism. This year a Spanish professor, José Manuel Susperregui, published a book titled Shadows of Photography, which demonstrated that Capa’s photograph could not have been taken where it was alleged to have been, using separate photographic evidence.

Tough as it may be, sometimes, in order to save your corner, you have to come clean on your allies. In order to keep the Spanish Republican message alive, and by saving the right from using it to their advantage, the truth of Capa had to be released. Similarly, two Canadian documentary filmmakers were once making a film on Michael Moore, the leftwing polemicist, from a supportive bent. However, after weeks of specialising in the remit of Moore, they soon realised that much of his work was born out fiction, covered behind the gonzo-esque, perverting the realm of the anti-war movement in America – which obviously needed all the support it could gather. The point of the filmmakers’ – Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine – efforts could not have been better summed up by the title of their film; Manufacturing Dissent.

The above references – if they have any common theme – is to try and communicate a truth, even if using methods that don’t exactly weigh up as such. Kevin Carter’s profile as one who captures a truth haunted him until his dying day, Capa was willing to stage events in order to send a message across the world detailing the horrors of the Francoist regime – even if this event was fictitious. Sometimes the only way an artist can record the nearest representation to truth, is by recreating it, sometimes truth is not real enough. Perhaps Michael Moore could argue this case also, but two leftist documentary filmmakers were willing to spill the beans to save their corner.

These are the criteria for infiltrating the truth as its happening, for limiting ones own remit to that of the artist – the bearer of the potentially worldwide message – and not the saviour, or at least not in any immediate sense. Does Channel 4′s 9/11 documentary do just that? I’d risk saying not in this instance, the location shots seemed brave, and there was no fear of tweaking the truth of the events, only it seemed to mostly interfere. For what it’s worth, it did capture emotion fraught with fear, but did this hold the same weight as say Kevin Carter, or was it perversion, a glimpse at vulnerability for a public energised by action? I’d risk an accusation of the latter.

Nick Davies is the award-winning investigative journalist, writer and documentary maker who recently broke the story of the News of the World phone-taps. Last year, he published the bestselling Flat Earth News, an exposé of the systemic falsehood, distortion and propaganda current in the mainstream global media. The book won plaudits from critics across the political spectrum and is frequently referenced across the vast and nebulous blogosphere. We caught up with him to find out whether his views had changed in the last year, what he thinks of James Murdoch’s recent attack on the BBC and how he answers critics who feel, in attacking the media, he may be letting politicians off the hook.

The Third Estate: Could you tell us what you consider to be the essence of good news journalism? What are a journalist’s responsibilities?

Nick Davies: A journalist’s responsibility is to be honest, i.e. to attempt to tell the truth. He or she may fail: by simply not being able to find the truth with the time and resources available; or by making ‘an honest mistake’ and publishing in good faith something which turns out to be false or distorted. The unmovable responsibility is to attempt to tell the truth. And sometimes, with the wind behind us, we succeed.

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The Third Estate: Your book Flat Earth News ended with a very downbeat assessment of the state of the media in Britain, concluding:

‘I’m afraid that I think, in trying to expose the weakness of the media, I am taking a snapshot of a cancer. Maybe it helps a little to be able to see the illness… but I fear the illness is terminal.’

Since then we’ve seen the expenses scandal dominate the news for months. Was this an example of good of investigative journalism, and if so, has it made you any more optimistic for the future?

Nick Davies: The book argues that good journalism is very ill, not that it’s dead. There is a steady trickle of good stories still being constructed by journalists who manage to get the time and resources to do their jobs properly. The MPs expenses is an example, but there are others. As to the future, that depends on whether or not we can find a source of funding which will allow for a revival of the sick profession. At the moment, the business model is failing: circulations are falling and advertising income is plummeting. As and when the credit crisis passes, we will discover whether the business model picks up or whether, as I suspect, it will not. Even if it does pick up and starts to generate profit again, it will have to cope with the problem of its corporate owners extracting that profit for shareholders and executives instead of investing in journalism (which is the core of the problem described in Flat Earth News.) In the absence of effective funding from the traditional business model, ie from selling papers and carrying advertisements, the search is on for some new source of funding. Can we find a way to charge for online news? Can we find a way to divert advertising back to news sites? Will government step in with some politically safe form of funding, a kind of licence fee for news media? Or, or, or. If there is no solution to the funding problem, there is no future for good journalism.

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The Third Estate: James Murdoch is scarcely a darling of the left, but does he have a point about the dominance of the BBC – especially as regards online news? Is the BBC damaging newspapers or is it our last best hope for responsible journalism? Would it be a good thing if the BBC started funding local newspapers?

Nick Davies: Murdoch cares only for Murdoch. His attack on the BBC is something which his father has been engaged in for decades, long before the BBC had a website. He wants to kill off the competition. And he will grab at any available argument to try to justify it. We have to defend the BBC because it has a funding model (the licence fee) which works. In terms of journalism, we need the BBC in two different senses, first as a news organisation which, for all its failings, still has a culture of honesty; and, second, as a tool which tends to keep other, commercialised news organisations a little more honest.

It is breath-taking to hear a Murdoch blaming the BBC for damaging newspapers. Nobody in the history of journalism has done more damage to newspapers than Rupert Murdoch. He will say he has invested millions, but he has done that in the pursuit of profit and power and repeatedly, horribly at the expense of good journalism.

Compare the BBC as a source of honest journalism and for its impact on others, with the Sun as a source of repulsively dishonest journalism which has dragged the entire UK popular press down market. Look at the damage they have done to the Sunday Times, once arguably the best newspaper in the world.

If Murdoch has his way, television news in this country will be reduced to the level of Fox News in the US – poisoned by politics and riddled with commercial judgements, a genuine affront to decent journalism. Please don’t let’s get suckered into playing his game.

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The Third Estate: Your reports of the News of the World’s bad practice met with some mixed responses from people who would usually seem to be allies – I’m thinking particularly of Julian Assaunge’s (administrator of Wikileaks) email to his subscribers:

‘…the Guardian, in seeing an opportunity to attack a journalistic and class rival, has been doing its level best to castrate British Journalism by tut-tuting in article after article about the News’ alleged sourcing improprieties; a tabloid newspaper doing investigative journalism! Journalists skirting the law to expose the truth! The long suffering of British billionaires-and Royalty! And did we mention that the News’ is owned by Rupert Murdoch?-so, um… you know, the enemy of my enemy and all that! The Guardian’s coverage is disproportionate. It is moral opportunism. It is an excuse to mention tabloid stories in a broadsheet. And it is dangerous. The result be will a publishing climate and probably legislation aimed at keeping the British public in the dark… the real scandal is not that some British papers used private investigators to find out what the public wants to know. It is that more did not. It is that the News’ was extorted out of a million pounds because the relevant British legislation does not have an accessible public interest defence for the disclosure of telephone recordings. Until it does, despite the risks, journalists who take their forth [sic] estate role seriously are obligated not to take the legislation seriously.’

What would you say to this line of argument?

Nick Davies: I hadn’t seen this guy’s comment. I think he’s wrong, on at least two major points. First, the News of the World may claim to be acting in the public interest, but it certainly is not. It is acting in the commercial interest of its owner, drumming up sales. There is a massive spectrum of activity which needs to be covered by journalists working in the public interest – anything at all to do with policy, incompetence, fraud, waste or corruption in central govt, local govt, corporations, trade unions, NGOs, EU, Nato; tax avoidance and evasion; the arms trade; the environment; poverty and inequality; health and education and criminal justice. The list is huge. Ask yourself: why does the News of the World week after week fail to cover those areas but choose instead to define ‘public interest’ in terms of the private lives, especially the sexual aspect of the private lives, of celebrities? And I think you will see that this is commercial interest not public interest.

The second point flows from that – that for the first time in human history we have an industry whose primary purpose is to harvest the private lives of people in order to generate profit. This is an industry which thinks nothing of planting a hidden camera to record a man having sex with prostitutes; of breaking into confidential data bases, tapping telephones, hacking voice messages, snatching photographs to grab the private material which it can sell. If the organs of the democratic state try to engage in that sort of activity, we insist that it is a) regulated by legal procedure, and b) supervised by bodies who can ensure that those regulations are adhered to and can handle complaints. And yet the media – which submits itself to no kind of popular vote – considers it has the right to proceed without regulation or supervision, simply pushing aside the law as though our privacy meant nothing. Our friend from Wikileaks is confusing the invasion of personal privacy (illegitimate) with the penetration of official secrecy (legitimate).

Underlying his misunderstanding, there is a good point, which is that the British media is trapped by all kinds of legal restrictions which, compounded with its commercial obsessions, mean that it frequently fails to penetrate official secrecy. By all means, let us reform the laws to allow more real journalism in the public interest. But don’t confuse that with the News of the World’s obsessive searching through the dirty underwear of its targets. To put this whole argument another way: I’ve been a reporter for 33 years and never before have I written stories which have provoked complete strangers into coming up to me in the street to shake my hand and say well done.

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Our time with Nick Davies was limited and clearly further questions could be asked (not least regarding internet journalism and the place of blogs like The Third Estate in the new mediascape).

The real significance of Nick’s ongoing work seems to me to lie in a passage he himself quotes in Flat Earth News. It’s taken from It’s the Media Stupid, John Nichols and Robert McChesney (Open Media 2000).

‘The type of political culture that accompanies the rise of the corporate media system worldwide looks to be increasingly like that found in the United States; in the place of informed debate or political parties organising along the full spectrum of opinion there will be vacuous journalism and elections dominated by public relations, big money, moronic political advertising and limited debate on tangible issues. It is a world where the market and commercial values overwhelm notions of democracy and civic culture, a world where depoliticization runs rampant, and a world where the wealthy few face fewer and fewer threats of political challenge.’

Is this true? Tell us what you think.

For more information on Nick’s work go to www.flatearthnews.net