Running With the Dogs of Neo-Liberal Imperialism

"News as Entertainment: The Rise of Global Infotainment" is the name of the new book from Daya Kishan Thussu. And Daya Kishan Thussu is the name of the University of Westminster professor who spoke yesterday to the Reuters Fellows. Just as one shouldn't judge a book by its cover, so one probably shouldn't judge a book by an hour-long seminar followed by an informal Q&A, and yet that's what I'm about to do.

Thussu isn't alone in his belief that television news--the main way the world finds out about itself--has become more concerned with entertaining its audience than informing it. It's a common trope. Thussu says that, owned by entertainment companies, desperate to hold dwindling audiences, eager to cut costs, news divisions have been lowering their standards, largely adopting the techniques of entertainment.

The world we live in is very different from the world that's depicted on TV news. "The world has very serious problems," he said. "Wars on TV are Hollywoodized. In the process we don't get the real picture." Thussu said that the "neo-liberal imperialism" of soft infotainment masks the reality of a troubled planet.

I had several reactions to this, the first of which was:
Mask away, baby! If what we see on TV news--which last time I watched included stories (non-Hollywoodized, in my opinion) about Iraq, global warming, genital mutilation, Darfur, dead dolphins and, yes, the occasional comic exploits of vapid celebrities--then someone's not doing a very good job of filtering out the death, despair and decay. I also wondered how his argument fares if audiences are still falling even though news executives have embraced softball journalism.

But what really confused me was that term "neo-liberal imperialism." I always thought imperialism was armies on a map, colonists on ships, administrators sweating in provincial capitals. I asked Thussu to clarify: Is neo-liberal imperialism the market? Does it mean allowing people to decide what they like to watch, whether it's a TV show on footballers' wives or a nature program about molluscs? Apparently it is the market.

I accept that global media has influence and that that influence may not always be a good thing. However, Thussu seems to be suggesting there is a specific mechanism by which western (mainly U.S.) media giants are seeking to pull the wool over the world's eyes. Bread, circuses, that sort of thing.

In his view, public service broadcasters such as the BBC are a bulwark against this creeping crapification. What's needed is global public service broadcaster, funded perhaps by a penny tax on each e-mail that's sent. How workable would that be? Here's your bill to support a Unesco-funded TV channel so we can bring you a program about unemployment in Chad.

The problem as I see it is that it's a short step from saying what people can watch to saying what people can't: No one's watching our story on Chadian unemployment! They're all watching "Hand Me the Defibrillator: TV's Funniest Onscreen Heart Attacks." Let's restrict their ability to do that.

What Thussu means, of course, is that there could be more, should be more, quality news programming. That's what he would like. I suppose I would like it too. But even a liberal like myself (I sometimes buy the Big Issue) believes that though the market may not be a perfect system, it's the best system we've got. Clunky as it is, it's preferable to a group of elites deciding what news would be good for me to consume.

And, lo! The market does seem to have hurled onto the beach something that would seem to fit Thussu's requirements. The web has made it possible for me to find news that, in his argument, the Rupert Murdochs of the world would like to hide from me. I can read foreign newspapers. I can sample foreign bloggers. I can access the fevered bleatings of various bloggers.

I agree with Thussu that journalism could be better. But I don't see its shortcomings as some sort of conspiracy. The media reflects the societies it covers while trying, in its imperfect way, to shine light into darkened corners. If some TV news program hasn't nailed down precisely how many Iraqi civilians have died in the war--80,000; one million; or something in between--could it be that this is a figure society (the market) isn't clamoring for?

It may be, as Thussu said, a chicken and egg argument: Do people become more interested in "important" news the more they're exposed to it? Or do we seek out that which we're interested in? Whichever it is, I'm uncomfortable with the notion that people make "wrong" choices and should be nudged in the "right" direction. I would call that neo-liberal totalitarianism.

The Aunt in the Attic
Well what about the BBC? The issue of whither the Beeb has felled more forests this year than a hundred Brazilian land barons. Thussu said he'd shudder to think what would happen to the respected current affairs program "Newsnight" if it had to compete on the open market, adrift from the safe bosom of the public service charter. I would say: Leave the BBC as it is. It may be a weird, anti-market anachronism, but you would have a tough time recreating its quality programming from scratch. Make it share its iPlayer on-demand technology with any other U.K. broadcasters who want it. (We all payed for it, after all.) But get it out of areas it seems to have no business being in. Travel books? Selling advertising on its international web site? What's that have to do with informing, educating and entertaining?

Roger That: Observing Roger Alton

I think one of the reasons I like the British newspaper biz is because I'm not too close to it. The figures I read about--the venal owners, the embattled editors, the disgraced reporters--aren't like real people to me. They're like characters from a comic book: flawed superheroes whose exploits I can enjoy at a remove.

In contrast, I find it harder to enjoy what's happening to the news biz in the United States: the grim circulation and advertising statistics, the layoffs, the lashings of gallows humor (and, believe me, no one does gallows humor like a journalist). It's all very close. Today is being called "D-Day" at The Washington Post, the deadline by which eligible newsroom employees must decide whether to take the company's buyout offer. (Hey, let's not forget that on the real D-Day the allies started turning things around in Europe!)

With his imposing stature and large, bald cranium, Roger Alton resembles a comic book character: the braniac mastermind who remains in the futuristic HQ while his ragtag band of superheroes do battle with the forces of evil. And that, essentially, is what a newspaper editor is. Alton ran the Observer, the Guardian's Sunday sister, for nearly 10 years, before leaving at the end of 2007. He'll become editor of the Independent in July. He spoke yesterday to the Reuters Fellows, delivering a lecture entitled "Not Dead Yet."

The title echoed one given by the New York Times's Bill Keller last fall in London. An "homage," said Alton. Alton's remarks were, if anything, even more upbeat than Keller's. (My write-up for the Reuters Institute should be up on its web page soon. Click here to check. ) Yes, times are tough, said Alton, but plenty of people still buy papers and there are plenty of ways to make sure they keep buying them.

I noticed that while Alton spoke, and especially when he answered questions, he would sketch on the papers in front of him: boxes, flowcharts, sets of concentric circles. He didn't show these jottings, they were just the graphical manifestation of what was going on in his mind. Many of the best editors I've worked with have shared that illustrative trait.

But is a nimble, doodling mind and a surfeit of energy enough to turn around the anemic Independent--or any newspaper these days? Alton touched on the changes new media have wrought--bloggers! vodcasting! social networks!--but it didn't sound like his heart was in any of it. He said his changes at the Indy wouldn't be revolutionary. "I'm not cut out for that," he admitted. He said the paper too often looked like a second section and that the campaigning tone it takes on so many front-page stories can induce a sort of campaign fatigue.

Independent columnist and former Sunday Telegraph editor Dominic Lawson was the seminar's discussant (isn't that those little sachets of chemicals packed with electronics equipment?). Like Alton (and me, I suppose) he's a bit of a newsosaur. Both decried the way Fleet Street peddles its wares these days with things like free DVDs and Prince CDs. It makes news a commodity, said Lawson--which, of course, is what it's become for many people. That old holy grail--the scoop--isn't respected anymore. It can't exist in an Internet world and it never did sell papers anyway, said Lawson. (England winning at soccer is much more likely to shift copies, but those days are over, right?) The tabloids are a bit adrift since their stock and trade--puncturing taboos over sex and celebrating topless trollops--now spills for free from our PCs.

And yet, and yet.... Alton said he can't help but believe that if you went down to the corner shop in the morning and there were no newspapers, you'd want to invent something like them. What else can you crumple in anger than a newspaper, said Lawson. I could see the wheels turning in their heads, these two old Sunday editors. Running a paper is like getting the coolest toy in the world to play with, a board game that entertains with every roll of the dice. Bring down a world leader: Move ahead three spaces! Defend an expensive libel suit: Lose your turn!

Or maybe it's like chess. What I wonder is if it's now like three-dimensional chess, that game they played on "Star Trek." Can any one person keep it all in his head?

In the Time of Nick
Alton is a main character in "Flat Earth News," the Nick Davies screed about the sorry state of journalism. ("Roger Alton has never claimed to be a political animal. His style is too intense, bordering on manic, at best full of charm, at worse eye-wateringly clumsy.") Davies says that Alton and the Observer basically carried water for Tony Blair in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, parroting the government's line and getting extra chummy with Blair and his PR Rasputin, Alastair Campbell.

Alton said he hasn't read the book but he bristled at one reference he had heard about, in which he allegedly returned from lunch with the Prime Minister "full of determined support for the campaign against Saddam." "It makes me sound like a fucking infant," said Alton, who said he never had lunch with Blair.

I think it's safe to say Alton and Davies won't be having lunch together anytime soon. Said Alton: "Journalists spend a lot of time shitbagging people so it's expected that they'll get shitbagged." At least, I think that's what he said. I hadn't heard the expression "shitbagging" before and perhaps I got it wrong.

Nick Davies will be talking about "Flat Earth News" at 8 p.m. on May 19 at Wolfson College in Cambridge. Click here for details.

The Oxford Lecture: It's All Greek to Me

Oxford University has no classes. Note that I didn't say that Oxford has no class. It has class out the ying-yang. (Is it declasse to say "ying-yang"?) But for the most part students don't do as I did many years ago at the University of Maryland: Follow a set curriculum that forces their butts into desks at certain times on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Instead, Oxford undergrads have tutorials. Every week they're given a list of books to read and lectures they might want to attend. And every week they meet their tutor (solo, or with another student) to go over the paper they were required to write. The lecture, or seminar, is the lifeblood of Oxford and I've been to plenty over the last few months. What I find interesting is how confrontational they're supposed to be. Not confrontational in the sense of shouted threats, flying fists and the sweaty grapplings of post-doctoral fellows, but intellectually confrontational. Every lecture, it seems, is a thesis defense.

I went to one yesterday afternoon at the European Studies Center. The Reuters Institute's Antonis Ellinas (PhD from Princeton; Fulbright scholar; expert on European nationalist politics) was giving a lecture on Greek politics and the media, specifically on an emergent far right party there. I now know 3,000 percent more about Greek politics than I did before, including about the anti-semitic, anti-immigrant LAOS party. After Antonis delivered his 30-minute lecture--sketching the Greek political system, outlining the rise and fall of earlier nationalist groups, taking us through exit-polling data--it was time for questions.

It's traditional for the chair of the lecture--the person from the department who sort of commissioned it--to ask the first question, and that's what Othon Anastasakis did. He had four or five questions, in fact, but he saved the killer one for last: Given the strong conservative sentiment in Greece was it correct to characterize LAOS as a far-right party at all?

Anastasakis had basically just introduced the possibility that the central tenet of Antonis's argument--the very foundation upon which it stood--was flawed, was non-existent, in fact. I imagined what I would do if my life's work was questioned. I saw myself leaping from my chair, running into the street, flagging down a taxi, heading to Southampton and signing on as a crewman on a cargo ship.

Antonis acquitted himself just fine, and I'm not really interested in that question or that answer. What fascinated me was how mannered the debate that followed was. And how illuminating. At these Oxford seminars the lecturer delivers something that is picked at, pulled apart, poked and prodded. The idea isn't (usually) to score points or to refute. It's to explore. By communally navigating the distance between the lecture and the questions, the lecturer and the audience reveal hidden features of the landscape.

Party Hearty
I was also struck by how easy students of American political science have it. They only have to master the machinations of two major parties: Democratic and Republican. Antonis and others who study European politics have to keep tabs on dozens of political parties, groups that rise, prosper and die like so many mayflies. It's like following professional baseball, plus all the farm teams.

The Peter Principle: I Make the Daily Mail

Being a columnist myself I understand the job's special requirements: the ability to feign outrage at the drop of a hat and the ability to churn out copy on deadline. I'm going to assume both things explain how a Daily Mail columnist came to mention me in that paper yesterday.

His name is Peter McKay and he visited the Reuters Fellows last month. Yesterday's column isn't online, so I'll quote the pertinent item in its entirety:
"Speaking to a group of foreign journalists at the Reuters' Institute in Oxford, I told the story of covering many years ago the homecoming of a 'lost' trawler in Aberdeen. A big story because everyone thought the crew had perished but, badly damaged, the boat had taken shelter until a North Sea storm died down. Then sailed home without knowing there had been a fuss about them. I said we'd asked the skipper to take the boat out of the harbour and sail it back in so that we could get good 'Ghost ship sails in' pictures instead of boring shots of it tied up. Being an idealistic young lad, I told my audience, I wondered if this artifice was ethical and decided it was. But a Washington Post journalist on the course said his paper would never countenance such a deception. The pompous idiots do, however, publish mock-up pictures every day of President George W. Bush 'in conversation' or 'sharing a joke' with distinguished visitors."

I'll get to that last sentence in just a bit, but first let's focus on the rest of the paragraph. McKay did indeed tell that story. But, according to my notes, he left some details out. McKay said he and the more senior Daily Express reporter he was working with paid the skipper to sail back. They'd missed the actual return and wanted a photograph that could be described as the ship making landfall for the first time. Having missed reality the first time around, they decided to manufacture it.

"Most news has been devised," McKay said. He explained that the structure of a story has been decided ahead of time and the journalist then sets out to assemble the elements that make the finished product possible.

McKay seemed reluctant to entertain the notion that journalism has an obligation to be anything other than entertaining. "Newspapering is a business," he said. It's "absolutely wrong," he said, to think that newspapers have any sort of duty to society.

Well, fine. At least you know where Peter McKay stands. Somewhere in the 1950s, but there you are. Now let's deconstruct that last sentence: "The pompous idiots do, however, publish mock-up pictures every day of President George W. Bush 'in conversation' or 'sharing a joke' with distinguished visitors." Pompous idiots? I don't think I was especially pompous or idiotic that afternoon. In fact I had just complimented--well, not complimented exactly, more remarked upon--the Daily Mail's hard-hitting coverage of women's breasts. I stand in awe of it. (From yesterday's Mail: "Christina Aguilera looks bustier than ever." Something to do with lactating, apparently.)

Next, does The Post publish "mock-up pictures"? Um, I don't think so, but to be sure I asked the Post's assistant managing editor for photography, Michel DuCille, if we did. Of course not, the Pulitzer Prize-winner said in an e-mail.

And would a Post photographer do as the inventive McKay did years ago: incent an Aberdeen fisherman to putt-putt around a harbor for the benefit of a photographer looking for his money shot? "We absolutely would never do that," DuCille wrote. "If we can't capture the real thing we don't recreate it. It is simply not the truth. Photojournalism must speak the truth."

DuCille sent along the National Press Photographers Association Code of Ethics. One part reads: "While photographing subjects do not intentionally contribute to, alter, or seek to alter or influence events." Sounds pretty straightforward to me.

Frankly, I can't quite understand what McKay is referring to. The Post doesn't do anything "every day" except print the weather forecast. Faked or PhotoShopped pictures of George Bush? Every day? Sharing a joke with distinguished visitors? McKay has something in mind but I can't for the life of me tell what it is. I don't think he can, either. When I e-mailed asking him, basically, WTF?, he responded with: "I am researching the WP's mock-up pictures situation." Let me know what you find out, Peter.

The thing is, I agree with some of what McKay said that afternoon, comments that were only occasionally punctuated by the tiresome "I long for the good old days" nostalgia that afflicts so many journalists. For example, he said: "If the public are interested, it's in the public's interest." This was by way of defending the Mail's take-no-prisoners approach to just about everything it covers. Which makes McKay's admission that the Mail has been sitting for months on a story involving the royal family very odd. There's some scandal, apparently, involving a minor royal. But McKay said the palace requested the paper sit on it and the Mail complied.

You'd think he would be right on it, with a camera in one hand and a wad of cash in the other.

The Money Shot
Here's the point in this post where I have to get all serious for a moment. I do not agree with McKay that most newspaper stories are decided ahead of time then assembled in IdentaKit fashion. Of course, I can only speak for The Washington Post. The best stories--the best columns, even--are the result of following the reporting where it takes you.

I won't even speculate if the unease and distrust many consumers feel for the media these days stems from the feeling that all journalists subscribe to the McKay model: loose with the facts in pursuit of a "better" story. The thing is, I'm not sure even he agrees with that. I suspect that deep down in his leathery Fleet Street heart McKay thinks that I'm right, which is why as a cub reporter he questioned his actions on that quay and why, a full month after we spoke, our little exchange still rankles. Or does that sound a bit pompous?

Freedom of the Press in Uganda

I like to think that in the United States--as in most of the West--the respect accorded the press isn't due simply to laws such as the First Amendment, but to a deeply-held belief that journalism helps a society function. We may decry the press's errors--we should decry them--but we hold the press dear, and even when it stumbles we feel uneasy at the prospect of dismantling its safeguards, of jailing its practitioners.

That's in the United States. But most of the world isn't the United States and it's sobering for a well-fed, coddled, protected journalist such as myself to hear of colleagues in other countries harassed for simply doing their jobs. It's a job that can get you killed you in some places. In others it can land you in jail.

One such place is Uganda, where Bernard Tabaire is an editor at the Daily Monitor newspaper. I haven't met Mr. Tabaire but he was a Reuters Fellow here at Oxford last year so I feel for him even more of the kinship than one journalist feels for another. It sounds like his paper was on to a good story: Faith Mwondha, a government minister in charge of ferreting out corruption, appeared to be on shaky ground herself. The Monitor received a copy of a report suggesting that there were some salary irregularities involving Ms. Mwondha (known as "God's Warrior" for her take-no-prisoners approach to her job). Her response was to encourage the police to arrest what now numbers five Monitor journalists. The five have been charged with "unlawful publication of a defamatory manner." They're out on bail awaiting trial.

"In running the story, we wanted to show that the person fighting corruption needs to explain a few things," Tabaire wrote in an e-mail to the Reuters Institute. "That is our obligation."

The Monitor admits it got one element of the story wrong: The report criticizing Mwondha was not commissioned by the Ministry of Finance, as was initially reported, but by other officials in the government. That error is the hook upon which Mwondha is basing her case, a case which Tabaire argues should be a civil matter, not a criminal one.

What can be done? English PEN is urging interested parties in the U.K. to contact the Ugandan representative here and request that the charges be dropped and that journalists in that country be allowed to do their jobs. The address is: Her Excellency Mrs Joan Kakima Nyakatuura Rwabyomere, Uganda House, 58-59 Trafalgar Square, London, WC2N 5DX. In the U.S., the contact is His Excellency Perezi Kamunanwire, Embassy of the Republic of Uganda, 5911 16th St. NW, Washington, DC 20011.

I don't know how much good pressure from citizens in other countries will do. But it's worth a try. And it's nice to see that Tabaire and his colleagues have some support in Uganda, as evidenced by a blog item from a man named Moses Paul Sserwanga. "Democracy thrives best in an atmosphere of trust, openness and accountability," he writes.

Jailing journalists isn't the way to provide that.