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!

For a long time we have heard about the dearth of journalistic jobs. Newspapers have struggled to “adapt their business models” to the epoch of everything written being free. Meanwhile other kinds of businesses are arising to pick up the slack, and take on underemployed writers. And some of them offer a truly frightening picture of the future of journalism.

Demand Media Studios is apparently where you need to go if your a writer without work, or indeed a film maker. You apply to join them as a freelance writer, and if accepted will enjoy the chance to write about a subject matter of your choice. Operating in the UK as well as the US, they regularly pay $15 for a 500 word article – a rate that rips the shit of out union rates, and even minimum wage rates. What you write then gets posted on one of their enormous websites. They, in turn, make money not through selling on your work, but through getting top rankings for an enormous range of google searches.

A few months back, technology magazine Wired caught up with Christian Munoz-Dunozo. An experienced wildlife filmaker, he had come to find that jobs were increasingly few and far between, and was “trading speed for finesse”, shooting ten videos in a morning at $20 a piece for Demand Media. His story is somewhat emblematic of the current media age. If it was once important for producers, writers and film makers to offer content that people would pay good money for, the overarching imperative for making money out of online media is “content, content, content!”. Stacking up clicks, and appearing a lot of searches arguably matters more than developing reader loyalty – a concept that has been somewhat problematized by the advent of google searches as the great gateway to the internet.

Of course freelancers in the media have always faced the difficulty of irregular work, and Demand Media – like similar companies – bills itself as a means to “fill in the gaps”. Yet Christian’s story is indicative of something else that is happening here. Namely, that the profession is being increasingly proletarianised: good journalistic jobs are being cut, and are being replaced by positions in content factories. Indeed Demand Media’s list of featured freelancers reveals an impressive array experienced and talented journalists who are now part of their system.

It was arguably naive for us all to assume that we could suddenly get journalistic content for free – with sales revenue being almost wholly replaced by advertising revenue – without the product itself being altered. Of course both a sales-based media and an ads-based media can be characterised as “market-dominated”, but there are nonetheless important differences between the two. Most importantly, a sales-based media business does have an incentive to focus on providing the kind of content that people are most interested in. Advertising revenue however provides a different focus. Rather than pushing media organisations to focus on the content that interests people the most, it pushes them to focus on content that is easily conducive to advertising: this might be because it is popular, but it might also be because it is connected with a wealthy or well defined consumer base, or because it is clearly connected with particular high value consumer goods. Why, after all, do you think newspapers have such enormous business and technology sections?

Moreover, while a sales-based media business will want customers to come back again and again, advertising revenue depends heavily on the number of unique visitors. As such getting people to click can be far more important than the quality of their reading experience.

The age of online freeganism could, then, prove deeply problematic both for journalists – with organisations like demand media increasingly making a mockery of union rates – and those of us who have an interest in quality journalism, or who think society benefits from a real fourth estate. It is a shame that the Murdoch press took the lead in pushing back for paid-for content, since this inevitably pushed most progressive opinion into a defence of everything-for-free. But if we do not want journalism to be reduced to a bi-product of the marketing sector, then we really do need to think more critically about whether we should be paying nothing for online print.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

Purdah is the Persian word for curtain. In the far-flung places of the world, it refers to the practice of concealing women from men through segregation or dress. Here in Britain, it is the somewhat curious term applied to the pre-election period in which the government is, more or less, prevented from making major policy announcements. Prima facie, the reason for its existence is obvious. It stops the incumbent government gaining an unfair advantage by pulling the strings of state to woo voters. But, as I’m increasingly coming to see, it is being used disingenuously to conceal even the most basic information from the public.

I’ve come across the term purdah quite a lot in the last couple of weeks. Writing for a publication concerned primarily with tax law, I’ve found myself on the phone to Treasury and HMRC more than a few times in recent days. Every time, even the broadest, most general line of questioning has been met with the following response: ‘computer says no’. Or, more precisely: ‘I’m afraid, due to purdah restrictions, we can’t comment on that’.

The first time this happened, I accepted it. But after it cropped up again and again, even when my request for the simplest of statements had nothing remotely to do with new policy announcements, or even old policy, I began to get the feeling I was being bullshitted. Or bullshat. In any case, it involved bulls and they were shitting all over me. I tried to call them on this, but I was met with a wall, not a curtain, of silence.

The truth, as I’m beginning to see it, is that purdah is being used unscrupulously by government departments to ignore journalists during election periods. Whilst a practice that prevents the government from commenting on major new policy announcements just before an election is necessary, press officers are using it as an excuse to dodge questions they simply don’t want to answer. By using purdah in this way, not only are they fobbing off reporters, they are concealing information from the public in the run-up to the election, regardless of whether or not it relates to new policy. This is not only uncomfortable for the intrepid reporter, it is dangerous for democracy as a whole.

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

Guest post by Ben Lyons

What do Blue Peter and John Bercow have in common? Neither of them pay their interns. With an increasingly competitive employment market, getting a job today often relies less on your interview skills than your ability to intern for free. An article in the New Statesman this week highlights this problem, but even they fail to pay those interns who are working for them.

To support yourself in London for three months costs around £2000. The division between those who can afford to do internships, and those who cannot, is greater than ever. Where students are intelligent, qualified and want to work, but can’t afford to live without pay, we have a problem. Britain will be a worse place in 20 years if a generation of potential journalists, fashion designers, TV producers and politicians are wasting their talent because their parents couldn’t afford to fund them why they got a foot on the ladder.

Each year thousands of students and graduates are turned away from the opportunities they deserve because they are unable to complete internships. This isn’t just unfair, going against the basic principle that work should be paid, but it is a growing cause of inequality. Earlier this year, the former government minister Alan Milburn headed a report to try and find out the major causes of inequality in Britain today. Unpaid internships required a chapter.

A solution lies in the government’s own minimum wage legislation, which must be changed to recognise interns as short-term employees. It is a national scandal that after over ten years of the minimum wage, many young working people do not receive it and in November, the Employment Tribunal sitting in Reading ruled that expenses-only internships are illegal. This isn’t to stop people working in their local Oxfam: the minimum wage legislation explicitly excludes genuine volunteering.

Today’s internship system leads to inequality. That’s why I launched a campaign called Intern Aware. It started as a Facebook group, Interns Must Be Paid The Minimum Wage. We now have 2,000 members and are supported by the NUS, trade unions, several ex-ministers and MPs and have branches at different universities.Visit http://www.internaware.org/ and ask your MP to support the campaign. Asking people to work for free is exploitation. Interns deserve better.

Ben Lyons is the co-director of Intern Aware

It should come as little surprise to hear that Ricky Gervais has quit Twitter after just one month and six tweets. After all, it would be hard to imagine the self-confessed (and not wholly undeserving) egotist getting everything he wants to say about himself down in 140 cringe-worthy characters. Of course, one of his characters – David Brent – might have interacted much better with society, and been much less funny, if he’d had a strict word limit. Gervais’s reason for tweeting his last, however, was that he finds the social networking and micro-blogging site ‘pointless’.

“I just don’t get it I’m afraid. I’m sure it’s fun as a networking device for teenagers but there’s something a bit undignified about adults using it,” Gervais wrote on his blog.

It goes without saying that 90% of what’s said on Twitter, much like 90% of what’s said in everyday conversation, is utterly inane rubbish that will be of very little interest to anyone other than the person writing it. I certainly don’t care what John Smith had for breakfast. I care even less that Emily Bloggs is going to see the sequel to Twilight tomorrow. And as for Dave Brown, well, I dnt cr at al 2 trnslt tht sntnc frm txt tlk.

Neither is The Office star the only intelligent adult to have failed to see the point of Twitter. Writing for The Third Estate back in April, Reuben said he found the idea of micro-blogging “horrific” and profoundly “self-centred”. Thankfully, however, Reuben came to see the error of his ways, and after a cunning bit of detective work by Owen, it was he who helped set the Twitterverse ablaze with the details of the Guardian-Trafigura gag. It didn’t take long for the rest of the lefty, and even the not so lefty, bloggers to re-tweet that one simple link and by the time Charlie Brooker, Derren Brown and Stephen Fry had caught on, the story was truly national, The Third Estate had gained 13,000 hits in a day, the gagging order was destroyed and a message was sent to big corporations up to no good that keeping something secret in the age of democratised mass digital media is not as easy as it once was.

The point is, Twitter ain’t just for kids. Like any kind of technology it is only as good or as bad as the people using it. Are aeroplanes evil just because two of them flew into the Twin Towers? Was it nuclear fission which killed 140,000 people in Hiroshima, or Paul Tibbets and the people who sent him there? Should we blame Gutenberg and the printing press for Mills and Boon, Melanie Phillips and Richard Littlejohn?

Of course, you’re never going to be able to use Twitter to make a grand philosophical treatise. But in a world of declining newspaper sales, where people read far too little and say far too much, it can be a powerful and perfectly dignified tool. A lot of nonsense may be written on Twitter, but it is only useless if you have nothing useful to say.

Like Starsuckers, reviewed last week, Ondi Timoner’s We Live in Public is a confused film. It’s a documentary about ‘the most brilliant dot.com millionaire you’ve never heard of’ [actually that would probably be all of them] ― a chap called Josh Harris.

Not that even if you had heard of him, you’d necessarily have recognised the brilliant dot.com millionaire, since he seems to have spent much of his life, including many of his board-meetings, dressed as his fully made-up, alter-ego ‘Luvvy the Clown’. An unusually hideous look even for a man who during his better moments (and in this film they’re precious few) appears damply constipated.

Whether getting the jump on the market in online porn chat and cheap-as-chips MTV really marks out Harris as a media visionary, I’ll let you decide. Nevertheless he oversaw two projects which have eerie resonance with much of contemporary online culture.

The first project ― part art-installation, part monumental vanity-project ― involved locking up and catering for, about a hundred volunteers in a windowless New York apartment block, filled with cameras and televisions, which allowed the participants to snoop on one another, in any location, at any time. Harris’ prototype Big Brother in fact went rather further than any of the progressively more gruesome TV versions, by including a basement filled with automatic weapons, and a white-tiled prison cell in which theatrical interrogations were held, the tone pitched somewhere between the Stanford Prisone Experiment and a Max Mosley wet dream. Ultimately the police shut the event down though not before most of the inhabitants had gone from a short-lived orgiastic euphoria into a black hysterical mania; while Harris (who had by now sold his own business to become ‘an artist’) had burned through most of his personal fortune.

Harris’ next project was to Big Brother his own life online, by sticking cameras up throughout his flat (with a dedication that extended to a spy-cam in his toilet bowl) and streaming the resulting film online 24 hours a day. Surprisingly Harris had a girlfriend at this point; less surprisingly she soon left him ― though whether this was because of the project itself or the simple result of living with a lunatic sociopath isn’t really discussed. The most interesting aspect of the project came from what was initially one of its by-products― the couple’s online chats with their viewers. For both of them the chats became an obsession, craving sympathy from their unseen arbiters; those capable of judgment but not punishment. Or more prosaically it reminded me of watching relationships explode on Facebook.

Like a character from Evelyn Waugh, Harris is last glimpsed living in deepest Africa as far away from new technology ― and by his own admission, his creditor’s ― as Luvvy and himself could manage.

Whether Harris’ story really does suggest the future for the rest of us is a moot point. In spite of a somewhat breathless commentary, and being at least half an hour too long, Timoner’s doc is worth looking out for on DVD because, whilst it is currently showing at select art house cinemas, it’s unlikely to make a much wider appearance.

Following our review of his new film, Starsuckers, we caught up with BAFTA-nominated director, Chris Atkins. Atkins made his name with the much admired Taking Liberties, a documentary on the erosion of civil liberties in Blair’s Britain. His latest offering, which premiered this year at the 53rd London Film Festival, is an exposé of the cult of celebrity and media misinformation. Talking to him about celebrity, media and politics, we found out why he finds Tony Blair a terrific liar and just why Simon Cowell would be a terrifying Prime Minister.

The Third Estate: So tell us about your new film.

Chris Atkins: In PR speak: it’s a romp through all the reasons we’re hooked on fame and then an expose of the people who are dealing it to us. I think that’s what I settled on. It a thesis led movie. I wanted to look at why we’re attracted to something so blatantly harmful and to look at the real reasons behind that from a scientific point of view. Then to look behind the curtain of the media, not celebrities themselves but the institutions and individuals who profit from it.

The Third Estate: I was thinking about that. There struck me as being two strands to the film: why we’re affected by fame and how the media manipulate us by abusing this knowledge ― but I wasn’t always clear on the connection. It seemed to have a lot of targets – the public are a target for being gullible. Celebrities for being stupid. The media for doing several things wrong – not reporting hard news, creating a myth of celebrity, giving into PR on the one hand but toppling governments on the other…

Chris Atkins: Yes, it’s a complex, messy area, so to paint an honest picture, you need a complex messy film. My last film, Taking Liberties, people seemed to get more, although Taking Liberties wasn’t a particularly honest picture. It was an argument about how the government, specifically Tony Blair, had taken away our liberties. But that isn’t the case; it’s a very simplified image. In Starsuckers I wanted to be more honest. The problem is it’s very complex. I wanted to build up a thesis to say there are a group of individuals holding the cards here. They pretend they have our better interests at heart but they don’t. That’s the core of it really.

The Third Estate: You do believe there’s almost a cabal of individuals then?

Chris Atkins: No, it’s not in the standard conspiracy theorist sense at all. It’s more of a kind of attitude than a secret society or anything as clear cut as that. A contract should exist between the media and the public. The public trust news media to have their interests at heart ― and they fundamentally don’t. They don’t care about the public; they don’t really care about the truth. And I say this as an insider: I’ve worked in the media for twelve years and we certainly don’t give a stuff about the public. We give a stuff about our wallets and having a jolly good time. Which is fine if you’re honest about it. But if you’re not honest about it, which most of the news media isn’t, they still have this facade of requiring trust and they don’t repay that trust.

The Third Estate: Much of the film reminded me of an aside in Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent where he talks about sports programmes as being a deliberate irrelevance people get sidetracked into so that they aren’t more politically engaged. But isn’t the truth about celebrity less sinister? Isn’t it simply cheaper to report, a by-product of an economic shift in the media?

Chris Atkins: Absolutely. It’s all economic. Well no, it’s initially economic, without question. It’s cheap, it’s reliable, it’s not controversial and it sells papers. People watch it for the reasons we list in the film and it starts delivering that media to us in a very predictable and affordable way. It’s almost replacing content. When you talk to commissioners the first thing they ask is what celebrity is in this television programme ― before they ask you what the programme is about. The celebrity is more important than what they’re surrounded by. That’s a wholesale shift in the way the media is generated. That’s happened in the last five years in both commercial channels and sadly the BBC as well. Yes, it’s initially commercial but once it starts being used for political reasons, for charities and activism, it starts becoming a real problem. It’s not just – here are some entertaining people doing some entertaining things – yes they’ve completely devalued truth in news – some people don’t seem to have a problem with that, I do – but when that moves into the political sphere, good causes, charities ― you’re in a whole heap of shit. Because what people are basically saying is that when celebrities are involved, truth doesn’t matter. Those are the dots we try to join together.

The Third Estate: I was just wondering; you say five years ago ― I’m sorry I’m looking at your Taking Liberties poster – and I’m reminded of the Gilligan affair. Was that perhaps the turning point for news reporting?

Chris Atkins: It certainly was a turning point, but I don’t see that it sits immediately inside this argument. Still it was a turning point on both sides. Gilligan didn’t check his facts. He went out on a limb, made something up. One thing out of 99 other things that were rock solid and they pulled him apart on it. I always look at Gilligan whenever I tempted to guild the lily, which is extremely frequently. So our Live 8 sequence – everything in that is bullet proof – because every night you think Gilligan: the entire argument could be pulled apart by one loose fact or slip of the tongue.

The Third Estate: Which reminds of the question I meant to ask at the start – how are the lawsuits going?

Chris Atkins: We’re in Private Eye this week. We’re front of media news. We had two Guardian front covers that doesn’t mean anything – Private Eye ― front of media news… We haven’t been sued by anyone this week. The whole Carter-Ruck thing was absolutely hilarious. At the time I was half-laughing, half-screaming. They shot themselves in the foot on various levels, one they’re wrong in law, two they managed to pick the world’s most unpopular law firm to initiate the injunction and three, most importantly, they managed to get the timing of the screening wrong. So they started trying to bring an injunction, not realising the press screening had already begun. We had to tell them ‘that’s happening now, 250 journalists are watching your client who’s 50 foot high in a Leicester Square cinema at this moment in time. The cat’s slightly out the bag.’

The Third Estate: So you’re not allowed to reveal anything that was bleeped out during the Max Clifford sequence?

Chris Atkins: No, absolutely not. For two reasons – one is obviously a libel point of view. I can’t back it up. I don’t know if it’s true or not. It’s Max rambling. Secondly, more importantly, I don’t want the film to become a source of celebrity gossip as we are critiquing sources of salacious, celebrity gossip. We would have been quite rightly burned by the critics if we had. The purpose of that sequence is to show what Max Clifford is prepared to do to protect his critics, which is contrary to the chubby nice guy image he portrays in the media.

The Third Estate: On matters litigious: you take a small shot at the Press Complaints Commission…

Chris Atkins: I’d hoped it was as big a shot as I could, but…

The Third Estate: Sorry. I noticed that one of your contributors, Nick Davies, was in the news recently. The News of the World has just beaten off the story he published in the Guardian about their phone tapping techniques after a PCC investigation?

Chris Atkins: Well they would, wouldn’t they? An organisation controlled by newspaper editors comes down on the side of newspaper editors.

The Third Estate: So would you support a state run PCC?

Chris Atkins: No, I’d support an independent run PCC. We manage to have these for all sorts of things; we have an independent police complaints commission. We’re about to have something independent for MPs and banks. Why not for the Press? Why can’t you and I do it? This is what the newspapers are terrified of. The PCC is purportedly there to protect the public from the press. It’s not. Everyone knows it’s not. It’s there to protect the press. As always the public suffers. You have newspaper editors winding up to tell you how scared they are by the adjudication of the PCC and reporters on the ground flatly contradicting that. We’ve not heard anything from the PCC about the revelations in the film and I think that proves our point.

The Third Estate: Going back a bit: you mentioned the character of the film. A lot of the character of the film comes from your voiceover, which is slightly grating – the kind of voice that you associate with voices that are deliberately patronising you.

Chris Atkins: Yes, that was actually deliberate.

The Third Estate: I guessed, but I was wondering whether you were trying to anger your audience into reacting? What was the thinking?

Chris Atkins: It’s a fair point. People have said he’s patronising, he’s glib and annoying and yes that was all quite deliberate. Whether I would make those deliberate choices again, I don’t know. What I was trying to do was create a Tony Blair. I needed a central villain. I didn’t want it to be about any one media corporation; or about Rupert Murdoch or Viacom or Max Clifford. I wanted it to be about all of them and none of them. So I created a satirical, ironic entity to bind them all together. He’s not there to be liked. There’s an artistic question opened up as to whether that’s a sensible thing to do: to have a central narrator you’re supposed to hate. That happens all the time in literature, in fiction. I’ve never seen it done before in a doc. Some people like the concept, some people absolutely hate it. I had a situation where I was trying to pull together a thesis about something most people believe they know a lot about. If I was to present it in a straight way – ‘I’m Chris Atkins I think celebrity culture’s bad’ – that would be absolutely ghastly. Who am I to tell people not to trust the media? So I wanted to turn it on its head and make it flippant. The voice encapsulates the editor of The Sun, the editor of the BBC News website when he puts up an article on Cheryl Cole rather than a news article.

The Third Estate: After the press screening, you mentioned that the material for the film lacked a top or bottom and I was wondering if, say, a Marxist had come along they would say ‘Well there is a bottom, it’s embedded power structures etc, etc’ but you’re not heading down that line?

Chris Atkins: When I said it didn’t have a top or bottom, I felt that was more to do with a creative film making problem. We had ten points in the thesis so it was deciding in which order do they come? Actually the order is quite straight forward. It’s where the fuck do you start, where the fuck do you end? That’s what I meant. In terms of ‘embedded in power structures’ ― celebrity is the face of capitalism. That’s a given. It is a mechanism for selling and giving an illusion of contentment. I believe all the arguments we gave on how celebrity is a means of control are essentially reheating the same argument that capitalism and money are a means of control. So yes I would concur that it has a starting point in the ability of those with power to control those without.

The Third Estate: A section of the film talks about celebrities in the Lithuanian parliament. I was just wondering if you could comment on that part of the film, and whether the true message of the film isn’t that people should be wary of celebrities entering politics, but that socially conscience people need to turn themselves into celebrities in order to affect change?

Chris Atkins: I think we just need to treat celebrities as dangerous. Just as 20 cups of coffee in a day is dangerous. Celebrities have a place we need to be extremely wary of allowing them to move spheres. I know that’s stating the obvious, but it’s happening a lot. In Lithuania you had a situation where, in young democracy, which at the same time was discovering new media – it was in a sense natural that entertainers quickly entered politics. Reality television was a massive success there, partly because voting was new to them. Voting for politicians and voting on reality shows seemed similar and in fact became one and the same thing. It became natural for celebrities in reality shows to stand for government. So they formed a party, became part of a government coalition and it’s a disaster. Their popularity rating has gone through the floor. It’s a kind of metaphor for what could, and I think may well, happen in the West. Consider the poll among young people taken recently about who they’d most like to see as Prime Minister: Simon Cowell came top of the list.

The Third Estate: That’s terrifying.

Chris Atkins: So people say, well it’s crazy ― those crazy Lithuanians, but it is happening here. Once you put celebrities into this sphere, damaging things happen. But nobody in the media questions it. The media are trained to be nice to celebrities and not question them. When we got our passes to film on red carpets, we were briefed not to ask celebrities anything challenging. So when they go into politics, with the level of scrutiny politicians receive, there’s a fundamental contradiction.

The Third Estate: So your message to celebrities would be to stay out of politics?

Chris Atkins: No, celebrities are irrelevant to the whole thing. If I was a celebrity being paid five million pounds a movie with people telling me I was brilliant every day, I would think I could change the world. That’s natural, the human mind does that to anyone. It’s called Acquired Narcissism Syndrome. I don’t blame the celebrities from thinking they can stop wars. That’s just natural; they’re cretins. The problem I have is when the media doesn’t challenge that. It doesn’t stand there and go ‘hang on a fricking minute what the hell is Angelina Jolie doing in Iraq?’

The Third Estate: To play devil’s advocate there’s an argument which I think is well expressed in a Kundera novel – there’s a march in Cambodia against land mines. An American actress goes along with what are mainly a group of French academics one of whom challenges her ‘what are you doing here? This isn’t a beauty parade.’ The actress replies that it is her social duty. Without her, the academics aren’t going to attract any attention to the problem and so she has to be seen there.

Chris Atkins: That’s a common argument. The problem again is the media. Why do the media only cover something if there’s some airhead blonde fronting it? Why don’t they cover it anyway? The celebrity is like a band aid, a much deeper problem with our media. For the celebrity to say I alone can change this problem is again part of this Acquired Narcissism Syndrome. This happened to Tony Blair a lot – my being somewhere will change things just by my presence. I’ve worked with actors for a decade. That’s how they feel, as if they’re the centre of the universe. It’s natural for them to get on a plane once a year and go somewhere a bit cold and pretend they’re making a difference. The problem is where the media follow in droves and repeat their banal state-the-bleeding-obvious points without question, but don’t go there when the celebrities aren’t around.

The Third Estate: If God is dead, Communism is the God that’s failed, we don’t believe in progress any more, Capitalism is on its knees and the American Dream has turned nightmare – isn’t celebrity all we have left to believe in? What’s the alternative?

Chris Atkins: God knows. I certainly would concur there’s a deep seated need for it to the extent it’s genetic, that we have behavioural urges to congregate around strong figures. In terms of what we do instead? When you have a world evermore mediatised and celebrity is the best way of delivering it; celebrity is here to stay. I think we need people to be more honest or more responsible. If the media said ― what you’re about to read is harmful and very little of it is true – I would have no problem. But we’re coming to a stage where media corporations are as powerful, if not more powerful, than governments.

The Third Estate: Which is strange when so much of the media is shrinking.

Chris Atkins: Well it is and it isn’t. Traditional structures are falling apart and in a sense all that remains is celebrity driven entertainment news. That’s doing well. Hard news is falling by the wayside and we’re left with a homogenised celebrity entertainment ether, which is everywhere but says nothing.

The Third Estate: Someone at the premiere asked a question about whether you’d prefer a weaker media – and argued, going back somewhat, that Anthony Eden, for example, would simply refuse to answer questions he wasn’t interested in. Surely that’s not preferable?

Chris Atkins: No, I’m not sitting here saying the media’s a terrible thing. Certainly from a political perspective we have this fantastic scrutiny, so that Twitter and blogs are able to protect the Houses of Parliament from a bloody law firm. It was absolutely astonishing. I was in the Guardian when all that kicked off. The whole Little Brother thing, the way people can take photographs of police beating newspaper vendors ― of course the media can protect us and scrutinise those in power more than they ever could. I would be the last person to try and roll any of that back. But it also means that the News of the World, with all the terrible ghastly things it does, hides behind the freedom of speech argument. It’s used as a shield for all kinds of illicit practices.

The Third Estate: I was struck by the Eden comment because, although he may have ignored the press, he ultimately fell on a lie. By comparison Blair lied continuously, and was caught out lying, but he survived. Doesn’t that suggest there’s too much competing media perhaps – the cacophony argument?

Chris Atkins: Well no, Blair just lied better. He used the media better. He changed how Downing Street briefings were done, by using that fantastic tool of celebrity PR – access. If you toed the line, ran the report the way the government wanted you to, you would get photos of Tony and Cherie. But if you didn’t and you ran an article asking ‘Where the fuck are these weapons of mass destruction?’ you’d be shut out of the briefing. No copy and as a journalist you’ll be in shit. That’s why Blair could get away with everything. It was a Max Clifford technique – there’s very little difference between Max Clifford and Alistair Campbell. Both in getting things written they want written, and stopping the publication of things they don’t want to see. It’s a celebrity PR trick.

The Third Estate: I can see some media commentators arguing that perhaps we don’t mind having liars at the top, culture has shifted. Rather than the media leading the public up the garden path, the media is simply reflective of contemporary mores.

Chris Atkins: Personally, I don’t want to think that’s true. Maybe it is true, in which case it’s a sad state of affairs if we’ve become desensitised to the idea of liars in office. I like the idea people trusted Tony Blair and that trust was simply misplaced. But people can get very angry: look at the row over MPs expenses. That was unheard of, certainly in all the time I’ve been watching politics. They were fiddling just a few grand.

The Third Estate: Compared to the bankers.

Chris Atkins: Compared to the bankers billions, yes. But I think it was more about trust and honesty than the money. Yes, it’s very annoying it happened in a recession – but literally more got written about that duck house than about RBS. We as people want to trust our leaders. We get very angry when our trust is abused. Celebrity reporting, PR spin coming from the world of entertainment into politics, brings with it this unbearably toxic effect.

The Third Estate: Where should people go for their news?

Chris Atkins: I get asked this all the time. I don’t have any particular answer. It’s interesting how many news outlets just recycle newswire. I’d say cut out the middle man, go to PA and Reuters. But I really don’t know. Hopefully out of this catastrophe in news people will come who want to invest in investigative journalism. Journalists who take their time to generate copy and charge for it, so that people go to those suppliers in a way that people go to a good brand. A lot of brands are in trouble at the moment. I read the Guardian but they run a lot of PR nonsense as well ―they ran our stories! Not that there wasn’t news value in that but we were essentially trying to sell our movie. Ultimately I don’t have a good answer.

The Third Estate: Why have you chosen to put this documentary into cinema ahead of television?

Chris Atkins: From our point of view, there’s no way this would be made for TV. Look at TV docs ― Dispatches: reporter in a taxi shouting at the camera. Panorama: Jeremy Vine shouting at the camera. Investigative journalism in television is pretty much dead. Certainly making a stand and taking on something as powerful as the tabloid press wouldn’t be thought of. Television makes things like Jeremy Clarkson going on a wine tasting course or Ross Kemp in Afghanistan, except he’s only a hundred miles away from the actual fighting. If you want to do something ballsy and revelatory in Britain it has to be done for the cinema. Then once it’s been out in the cinema, we’ve got our 4* reviews and people have tried to sue and failed, television comes sheepishly crawling in saying this is far more exciting than anything we’ve put on this year. Please can we buy it from you and start it with a big caveat saying ‘this is nothing to do with Channel 4, we’ve just bought, we didn’t make it, this is not our opinion’. That happened with Taking Liberties and will happen with this.

The Third Estate: You’re selling to Channel 4 rather than the BBC?

Chris Atkins: Yes. The BBC feature quite prominently in it. No one else picked up on this, but in fact the guy who commissioned the Live 8 documentaries, we feature as Bob Geldof basically rewriting history, is Richard Klein. He’s head of BBC 4. If we were going to sell to the BBC, he’d be the person buying.

The Third Estate: What would you say to people who want to make this kind of film?

Chris Atkins: Well you can’t ― that’s the problem. You can’t go to the BBC because they were part of it. Richard Curtis is a god at the BBC. Look at Comic Relief. People at 4 buy stuff from Brook Lapping which is Bob Geldof’s company. They’re all mates. It’s part of the problem. When you start to do something that criticises the media it becomes almost impossible. You need them to help. You say ‘there’s this oil company I want to doc on’, they say go ‘ahead here’s some cash’. You say, ‘there’s this media company I want to examine’, they say ‘my wife works there’. You have to lock the doors and do it independently.

www.starsuckersmovie.com

‘Starsuckers’ is the new documentary film by Chris Atkins, (Director of the Blair-baiting polemic ‘Taking Liberties’) which created a bit of a stir at the London Film Festival both by preleasing clips of tabloid journalists offering cash for trash stories about celeb boob-jobs, whilst being simultaneously sued by Max Clifford. The Guardian particularly loved the exposé of tabloid malpractice which chimed with the work of their reporter Nick Davies (who himself appears in the film).

The film is a jaunty, if uneven, investigation into the public’s, apparently insatiable, appetite for celeb gossip, alongside the media’s manipulation of this rather unsavoury diet. And it has a number hits: Clifford filmed secretly boasting about news stories he’s fabricated and covered up, examples of the seepage of ‘celebrity news values’ (or rather lack of them) into the reporting of politics, the corresponding movement of celebrities themselves into politics and a meticulously researched critique of the grossly smug Live8 concerts, which will doubtless have Bob Geldof’s apparatchiks vetting Youtube for years to come. Ultimately, however, the film’s guiding thesis, that celebrity is used by the media to control the masses, is both too obvious and too reductive to be especially interesting.

At a cinematic level it also suffers from a grating voiceover, intended to represent the media as a whole, but which seems more like a gimmick used to disguise an intrinsic lack of faith in the film’s own suppositions. Perhaps unsurprisingly this voiceover tends to vanish during the strongest sections in which ‘good old fashioned’ news reporting, truth as the voice of authority, takes over.

It’s a pity ‘Starsuckers’ is so hit and miss because as the media shifts into a digital age something fascinating is happening, not simply in the dispiriting thought that our main news sources are now PR companies and press officers rather than journalists, but in the distinction between media and the general public, and between the public figure and the private citizen.

As regards the media overall? Personally I’m with Baudrillard’s assessment (from a book first published in 1985 – no, there’s no new news)― ‘We should agree neither with those who praise the beneficial use of the media, nor with those who scream about manipulation, for the simple reason there is no relation between a system of meaning and a system of simulation’.

The net result for individuals, as he saw it, was ‘stupor; a radical uncertainty as to our own desires, our own choices, our own opinions, our own will. This is the clearest result of the whole media environment, of the information which makes demands on us from all sides and which is as good as blackmail.’

Stay tuned for The Third Estate’s exclusive interview with director Chris Atkins, coming to a computer screen near you tomorrow…