Shirt Happens: BritNews RoundUp

What is it with the Daily Mail and underarms? They're obsessed with whether female celebrities have shaved their armpits. Savvy celebrities who hope to avoid the Mail's censure by simply wearing a long-sleeved shirt are out of luck. As the paper reported this week: "Tara Palmer-Tomkinson flashes her sweaty armpits in transparent shirt." No, I have no idea who Tara Palmer-Tomkison is (can a reader help?) but I suggest she invest in a neoprene wet suit before braving the cameras again.

Leicestershire man Neil O'Brien flew into a rage after hearing his girlfriend have sex with another man--when she accidentally phoned O'Brien during the act. "It appears that while they were in bed together - and it is relevant that they were having sex - her mobile phone was knocked on to the floor," said John Hallisey, the man prosecuting O'Brien, who drove to his girlfriend's house and beat her up. "It landed in such a way that it dialed O'Brien's number. The first she knew of what had happened was when she heard him shouting her name."

Moral of the story: Just as when entering a movie theater, church or school recital, always turn off your mobile phone before going in the bedroom.

It sounds as if working at Trefeca College, a religious retreat in Wales, is a bit like being in the 7th grade. At least if you work around Mair Jones, 40, the self-described "Queen of Innuendo." Or, as she might pronounce it: "In-your-end-oh." It seems that Jones delights in twisting every comment, no matter how innocuous, into a sexual pretzel. Said co-worker Stephen Price: "Every conversation would somehow end up being a conversation about sex. I asked for a big ruler and she responded: 'Ooh, you like them big do you?' in obvious reference to a man's penis size. This happened continuously and was part of her repertoire."

On another occasion Jones remarked upon how funny it was that a local landmark was known as Lord Hereford's Knob and a village was called Three Cocks. Price says Jones also gave him a roll of toilet paper covered in pink fairies. Price, who is gay, has accused Jones of sexual harassment. Ha! He said "her ass"!

The British press frequently writes about the UK's teenage binge-drinking problem. Who knew it also contributed to it: "Journalist cautioned for giving alcohol to 16-year-olds." According to the Guardian story, the unnamed 28-year-old journalist gave booze to the kids as part of a photo shoot on underage drinking "and told them they could keep the alcohol afterwards." There is a level of irony here that even I can't quite fathom.

Look, up in the sky, it's the Royal Air Force in the news: An RAF fighter pilot has won his battle with the United States Air Force over the size of his handlebar moustache. ("Ooooh, he likes them big, does he? -- Mair Jones.) And the Ministry of Defence is clashing with a company that sells a duvet cover featuring the RAF's distinctive roundel design, accusing it of copyright infringement.

Finally, for those of you who woke up this morning wishing you could see a photo of a piglet wearing Wellington boots, your prayers have been answered. Ditto those of you hoping to see a photo of Lindsay Lohan in flip-flops, used for some reason to illustrate a story on how that choice of footwear can raise your risk of getting cancer.

That Other Place
I'm not the only Washingtonian set loose in an English college town and blogging about it. The DC Editors in Cambridge are a pair of journalists who reside in that village that's 71 roundabouts away from Oxford. They travel even more than I do and their report from Maastricht includes a delightful photo that shows Dutch ingenuity at its best.

Gargoyle of the Week
Here's the steeple on the Exeter College chapel:


You'll notice that hanging from near the base are some very nice examples of the gargoyle carver's art:



They look like they're ready to swoop down and take a chunk out of an undergraduate.

We're swooping to Ireland this weekend, so no blog on Monday. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend.

The 71 Roundabouts

You'd think I would have learned my lesson. After traveling from Oxford to Cambridge by bus last year I did it again this week. It's a punishing trip, not dissimilar to the Middle Passage that ferried kidnapped Africans across the Atlantic. Three-and-a-half hours and only about 20 minutes of that are on roads of anything wider than two lanes. I wrote before about the nausea-inducing whipsaw motion the bus takes every time it goes around a roundabout. And there are lots of roundabouts.

How many? Seventy-one. I counted them:



There are big roundabouts of the sort that funnel vehicles onto and off of a motorway. There are tiny roundabouts, just card table-sized raised white circles on the tarmac. There are about 10 roundabouts in Milton Keynes alone. Or, rather, the bus goes around roundabouts 10 times. Some of them are multiple passes at the same roundabout, like a bull repeatedly circling back on a toreador or a pinball pinging between posts.

I don't begrudge the English their roundabouts. It's part of what makes this country great. I had an epiphany, though. Many well-traveled English people I've met talk about how they crossed the United States "on a Greyhound bus." They have fond memories of this life-changing journey, describing it as if it was something out of Bob Dylan or a Creedence song: This is the real America. I realize now that, though they may not know it (these things operate on a subconscious level), what they are reacting to is a bus ride without roundabouts. It isn't the sharecroppers' shacks sliding by in the Deep South or the Rocky Mountains marching majestically to the horizon or even the anomie of American ex-urbia that makes such an impression, it's the fact that the Greyhound isn't continuously lurching back and forth like a drunkard looking for a dropped coin.

Seventy-one roundabouts. Between them the bus would pick up speed and the rapeseed fields would flash by, their yellow blossoms making it look as if extra sunlight was pouring down from the sky. I listened to the people around me. A group of teenage apprentices behind me unwound after a day at technical college in Bedford. They were joking about their ineptitude--the roofs they'd fallen off of, the carpet they'd cut wrong--but under that self-deprecating veneer was a new pride. One boy told his friends about the tools he used, his own tools, not rented ones, tools he'd bought with his own money. "If they got nicked I'd be out of pocket well back," he said. There was a girl on the bus sporting a wristful of polished wooden bracelets. "I could make them," he told her. "I'm a carpenter. It's my job."

The boys traded drinking tales--the bartender who knew they were underage but served them anyway, the friend who bizarrely only drank top-shelf liquor, the vomiting, the hangovers.... When they talked about booze they were loud and boisterous, but when they talked about sex--about a girl they knew or wished they knew, about whether "she did or she didn't"--their voices dropped to a whisper. They talked softly for a while, comparing notes, filling in gaps in their knowledge, then the talk turned to football and they were shouting again. "I was playing this kid one-on-one," said a boy. "He says, 'I had a trial with Man United.' Man United must be hard up 'cause I won 5-1 and I'm useless at football."

The bus stopped at one village and a laughing woman with an arm in a cast got on. She nodded to a man weed-whacking his front garden. "He said you'd gone," the woman said to the driver. "I asked if the bus had come and he said it had. If I'd been talking to him you would have gone right by. It wouldn't have been your fault."

She sat down behind me and told the story to everyone around her, how she'd almost missed the bus and how it was her good fortune that she hadn't.

Nick Davies: All the PR That's Fit to Print?

Last night in Cambridge someone asked Nick Davies what he would do if he was given 50 million pounds to fix journalism in the United Kingdom. Davies said he’d set up a "shadow newsroom" to sample all the output of the country's various newspapers to see what proportion of stories proved false or distorted. He’d make it a legal requirement that media products be labeled like food products, with stories rated as to the sources of information: how much original reporting had gone into them and which ones were just re-written press releases. “I think then consumers would start to abandon [the media] if they saw how bad their products were,” said Davies.

I don’t know if Nick Davies deserves 50 million pounds but certainly he deserves more than 6,000 pounds. That's what he said he netted after two years’ hard work on “Flat Earth News,” his delightfully detailed diatribe against journalism as it’s currently practiced. The book has struck a chord--nay, a very orchestra--in British media circles and there was a large crowd last night at the Wolfson College Press Fellowship event to hear him talk about it.

“New owners of the mass media have shifted their priority from propaganda to commerce,” Davies writes in "Flat Earth News." He argues that press barons no longer want to influence agendas but, instead, fatten their wallets. This obsession with the bottom line at a time of increased competition and falling profits has made owners ruthlessly cut costs. Reporters have to squeeze out more stories every day. Forced to increase their output they desperately turn to churnalism: recycling press releases. Writes Davies: “Almost all journalists work within a kind of professional cage which distorts their work and crushes their spirit.”

I was there to provide an American perspective though I don’t know how useful I was. I’ve only ever worked for The Washington Post and I’m unfamiliar with the assembly-line approach Davies described. We don’t have reporters writing nine stories a day, as Davies’s book claims is common in England. (Things may be different when I return to a post-buyout newsroom.) Nor does The Post resort to the dubious survey story, that is, a story based on "research" that's done by a business solely to get its name in the paper. Of course, the U.S. media makes its own mis-steps. For example, a medical show recently broadcast on NPR has been criticized for not informing listeners that the experts quoted all received money from drugmaker Eli Lilly.

Davies didn’t address some of the contradictions I found in his book. In one chapter he criticizes the lazy or overworked hacks who are content to do all their reporting (such as it is) via telephone and Google. But in another, he lambastes Fleet Street for employing private detectives to unearth private information—police records, phone records, health records—about story subjects. The latter activities imply a scoop-at-any-cost mindset lacking in the former. Davies returned to the economic rationale: Papers slashed their investigative staffs and now are forced to rely on crooked dicks going through trashcans and bribing police sources.

His attempts to wrap everything under the anti-commercial rubric weakens the book, I think. It would be just as strong as a catalogue of the media's shortcomings. His chapter on the failure of the press in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq--the issue that got him started on the project in the first place--is sobering. And his opening chapter on coverage of the Millennium Bug (remember that?) should be read by every journalist ready to pile on a hot story.

Davies doesn't offer any solutions. I think some of Britain's problems are easily fixed. Ban cheesy survey stories for a start. Don't be so concerned with matching dubious non-news events, just because your competitors have them. (That this might prove difficult was underscored by a former Fleet Street editor who pointed out that people need those sorts of trivial stories so they won’t feel left out down at the pub.)

There was definitely a fatalism in the air. Newspapers stink. The publishing business stinks (small, worthy books have to pay for themselves these days, said Davies, rather than be subsidized by blockbusters). One woman in the audience said she sees the same decay in academia—at Cambridge, presumably. “Things are going right downhill," she said. "I don’t understand how I’ve allowed this to happen. How have intelligent people lost control of their institutions?”

I’m not sure we’ve lost control. I'm not sure we ever had control. Things change. Davies writes in his book that there never was a golden age of journalism, but he certainly implies there is an ideal we are failing to achieve. Is there an audience for that ideal? That's hard to say. Going downmarket--flat Earth news, in Davies's parlance--seems to sell. Still, I'm hopeful that the sort of journalism I like to read--and I like to do--will always have an audience. If it doesn't, I don't want to be cramming it down peoples' throats just because it's good for them.

That’s a market solution Davies the socialist wouldn’t like. But it’s all I’ve got.

Col. Mustard, in the Conservatory, With an RSS Feed

So why did I go to Cambridge last week anyway? To attend a lecture in honor of the Wolfson Press Fellowship's 25th anniversary, delivered by Financial Times columnist and Reuters Institute brain John Lloyd. It was a sobering catalogue of the challenges facing the media.
Lloyd said journalists are right to reflect with "some foreboding" on the woes we face, "but we must have some faith that serious journalism is worth doing." (An excerpt from his remarks ran in Cambridge's Varsity student newspaper.)

The evening reminded me of one of those Agatha Christie mysteries where it turns out more than one killer offed the victim. Who does Lloyd think has stabbed serious journalism, leaving it hovering near death in the intensive-care unit, a respirator in its mouth, a catheter bag hanging by the bedside? Among the suspects:

Pack journalism that's intent on tearing down politicians and other public figures by accentuating the negative. (Especially in Britain, which suffers, Lloyd said, from "endemic incivility.")
The concomitant rise in spin, as politicians try to shape the news.
The hungry maw of the 24-hour news cycle, which requires a constant supply of fresh meat on which to chew.
Dwindling news staffs, which means fewer journalists doing more work of lower quality.
The growth of the public relations industry and the embrace journalism has given it, resulting in journalists who do little more than "launder" press releases.
Free sheets such as Metro, which threaten established evening papers such as the Evening Standard.
The ability of consumers to put together their own news from myriad sources, commodifying journalism.

Most of these, Lloyd suggested, are the result of market forces, prompting him to wonder if perhaps the market has failed when it comes to providing serious journalism. If that is the case, then other methods of support should be contemplated, including funding from the state (as with the BBC) or from not-for-profit institutions (such as Pew or Carnegie).

I would hate to see it come to that, desirous as I am that journalism--serious and otherwise--be able to pay its own way. And I was trying to see the appeal that would be made to the public on journalism's behalf. Would the argument by that this is like trying to save, say, a homegrown steel industry (vital national security issues are at stake) or like seeking funding for an experimental ballet company (sure, it only appeals to a few people but culture is important for our society)?

Sean Taylor, R.I.P.
Sean Taylor, the Washington Redskins player, was shot and killed near Miami earlier this week. A tragedy to be sure. It's interesting watching the media pick through the 24-year-old's life and death and create narratives or explanations. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson makes an impassioned plea that we resist thinking in these terms. Writes Robinson: "Do me a favor: If you have to impose an off-the-shelf narrative on Sean Taylor's death, pick something other than the Young Black Men story."

The Post's Len Shapiro performs the sort of linguistic gymnastics columnists all over America are doing today, writing in one paragraph "At the moment, it is far too soon to draw any conclusions as to how or why this tragedy occurred..." before a few lines later concluding: "Still, could anyone honestly say they never saw this coming?"

Taylor had several well-publicized brushes with the law, with the NFL and with his own team. He once spit in an opposing player's face. He allegedly threatened a group of men he thought had stolen his all-terrain vehicle (not his car, as a British paper reported yesterday). (And what is it about ATVs anyway? They're always in the news for the wrong reasons: breaking the necks of 6-year-olds or inspiring feats of misguided loyalty.)

Every story about Taylor mentions that his father is a police chief. I guess the two didn't talk much about the best way to behave in tense situations. We can be sure of one thing: Writer's strike or no, the folks at "CSI: Miami" are sharpening their pencils as we speak.

Cambridge By Bus, or: "Why Does Spock Have a Beard?"

Last week I went from Oxford to Cambridge, where I was a guest of John Naughton, who runs the Wolfson Press Fellowship at Wolfson College. You would think that these two important centers of learning would be connected by turbocharged airship service or a subterranean mag-lev train hewn from the living rock, but in fact transportation planners in England discourage traversing the 80-odd miles that separate the two university towns.

My choices were a rather expensive trip by train south into London and then north to Cambridge or a 3 1/2-hour cross-country bus journey. Being a cheapskate I opted for the bus. I'm sure the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder will lift soon.

How bad can a bus journey be? First of all, banish from your mind the picture of a modern motor coach of the sort that ferries package holidaygoers around Britain--hell, that ferries eighth-grade band students to Hershey Park. No plush reclining seats or in-flight movie for the brave Oxbridge pilgrims. No, we were on a double-decker bus outfitted with seats designed to be comfortable for no longer than 10 minutes, not that we could stay in one place for that long. The bus would enter roundabouts like a great jibing sailboat. The driver would whip the steering wheel to the left as he merged, then to the right as we moved counterclockwise through the roundabout. Then he'd saw to the left again to exit. Between roundabouts he'd floor the accelerator like a man convinced he'd left the iron on at home.

It starts getting dark around 4:30 p.m. in England these days so I didn't see much of Cambridge but what I did see left me disturbed. Cambridge was like Planet X, that Earthlike planet eternally on the far side of the sun, invisible to us here. It was so like Oxford, and yet so different.

Both of course take their names from their roles in getting over pesky rivers. Both owe their international fame to the ancient (Cambridge's slightly less ancient) universities that are there. Both have Wolfson Colleges, as a matter of fact. But there are slight, vertigo-inducing differences. The Latin grace before dinner in Cambridge was very short (just two words, "Benedictae, benedictum" if I'm not mistaken [and I may be]) while the last formal meal I had at an Oxford college was preceded by a long, sung blessing. The Cambridge press fellowship, similar to the Reuters program at Oxford, brings journalists from around the world. But while they have a journalist from Brazil, we have one from Argentina. They have a journalist from Pakistan. We have one from India. (We both have one from the BBC, not surprising given that you can't take out the trash in England without tripping over a BBC producer.) It was like that episode of "Seinfeld" where Jerry, George, Kramer and Elaine encounter their TV doppelgangers. I kept looking for an American in a shiny suit, their me.

Wolfson College Cambridge, like Green College Oxford, has a bar for students. Green's bar is like a tatty basement rec room. Wolfson's is like something from a cruise ship: bright and flashy. To get the key for the room I was staying in for the night I had to check in with the porter. I've only ever seen male porters at Oxford. The Wolfson porter was a woman. Maybe all the porters in Cambridge are women.

I think I know why it's so hard to travel between the two cities. You're not just heading from Oxfordshire to Cambridgesire. You're traveling through a rip in the time-space continuum.

Freedom From Speech
Oxford has been abuzz with fallout from the Oxford Union's decision to invite a Holocaust-denier and the leader of a quasi-fascist political party to speak at an event addressing the issue of freedom of speech. Some members of the Oxford Union complained that the president of the famed debating group was just looking for publicity. But the membership voted to allow David Irving and Nick Griffin to speak last night.

It didn't go off as planned. Demonstrators stormed the gates and occupied the stage, forcing the two men to deliver their remarks in separate rooms. Repugnant the mens' views are but stifling those views just gives them a perverse appeal.