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News International Threatens Media Lens with Legal and Police Action

JamieSW — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 12:22:55 +0000

On June 28 and July 3, Media Lens received repeated threats of both legal and police action from Alastair Brett, legal manager of News International’s Times Newspapers.

Noam Chomsky described the threat, pithily, as “pretty sick.” (Email, June 28, 2008) David Miller, professor of sociology at the University of Strathclyde and founder member of Spinwatch, commented:

“The response from the Times is an absolutely outrageous attempt to bully and censor you. It is not - unfortunately - surprising though, as the Murdoch empire is determined to attempt to snuff out those voices which try to bear witness to the truths of our age. Those that unmask naked power will be targeted by the Murdoch empire and its hench people. Maddox is the latest in a long line and is evidently a well networked member of the political elite - being a governor of the shadowy Ditchley Foundation. It is simply laughable that sending emails to complain about her distorted coverage constitutes harassment. Frankly, the drumbeat for war with Iran, to which she adds her voice, is much more like harassment, but of a whole nation. Its consequences are already more deadly serious for the people of Iran than any amount of emails from Medialens readers.” (Email, July 8, 2008)

Brett claimed Times journalist Bronwen Maddox had been subject to “vexatious and threatening” emails from Media Lens readers, which constituted “harassment”. If this did not stop, Brett told us, he would notify the police who might wish to investigate the matter with a view to bringing a criminal prosecution. As former New Statesman editor, Peter Wilby, noted in his Guardian article on the Times threat, this was no joke - prosecution for criminal harassment “can lead to six months' imprisonment or, if a court order is breached, up to five years”.

Maddox claimed to have received "dozens of emails, many abusive or threatening". (Ibid)

Beginning with our very first media alert, published seven years ago yesterday, we have always advised our readers to treat journalists with respect:

“The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.”

As usual, many emails were copied or forwarded to us. We saw precisely one that could conceivably be described as “vexatious and threatening”. The email read:

"You have know [sic] idea who you are dealing with here. But I do like to help. I suggest that you read this [an inaccessible Facebook website entry] very, very carefully and fully. You have until 4pm Monday to respond to my original email or I will deem you to be fired."

This was also the only email offered up as evidence to Wilby for his Guardian piece. Unprompted by us, the offending emailer had earlier written to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, informing one executive:

“If you take more than 1 working day to reply to this email without a reason that I consider acceptable you can consider yourself fired.”

He also wrote to around 40 senior UK editors and journalists in June describing Media Lens as “a pack of absolute tossers”.

Ironically, we have been subject to far worse abuse than Maddox and Brett, and at the hands of mainstream journalists. Before becoming editor of the Independent, the former Observer editor, Roger Alton, asked one of our readers:

“Have you just been told to write in by those c*nts at medialens?” (Email forwarded, June 1, 2006 - original uncensored. Changed here to avoid triggering spam filters)

An online Observer article by Peter Beaumont described Media Lens as “a curious willy-waving exercise... Think a train spotters' club run by Uncle Joe Stalin.” (Beaumont, ‘Microscope on Medialens,’ June 18, 2006)

We have always found these insults more chucklesome than vexatious. Chomsky was once asked for his reaction to the abuse he receives:

"Man: ‘Noam... You've been called a neo-Nazi, your books have been burned, you've been called anti-Israeli - don't you get a bit upset by the way that your views are always distorted by the media and by intellectuals?’

“Noam: ‘No why should I? I get called anything, I'm accused of everything you can think of: being a Communist propagandist, a Nazi propagandist, a pawn of freedom of speech, an anti-Semite, liar, whatever you want. Actually, I think that's all a good sign. I mean, if you are a dissident, typically you are ignored. If you can't be ignored, and you can't be answered, you're vilified - that's obvious: no institution is going to help people undermine it. So I would only regard the kind of things you're talking about as signs of progress.’" (Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power, The New Press, 2002, pp.204-5)

Questions Of Copyright

Brett also claimed that we would be acting unlawfully by publishing an email from Maddox without permission. We sought advice and one legal expert told us:

“The Times has no case over the confidentiality of email correspondence. Email correspondence, in itself, is not considered confidential - unless the precise contents of an email are confidential.”

Another suggested that the law is less clear and that the Times might carry out its threat. Another reminded us:

"Added weight to your cause is that the statements expressed and reproduced on your site represent important ‘political commentary’ (as opposed to artistic or commercial commentary). Political commentary is the most heavily protected type of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (via the Human Rights Act 1998 in the UK)."

Another lawyer cited a barrister friend who nutshelled his view of the credibility of the Times’s case: "Tell them to f*ck off.”

Douwe Korff, Professor of International Law at London Metropolitan University and an expert on the European Convention on Human Rights, commented:

"I find the stance of the Times appalling in moral terms and flimsy at best in law. Their legal position, if endorsed by the courts, would severely limit freedom of the press over issues of major public concern. Is that what they want? I have little doubt their arguments would be kicked out by the UK courts if they pursued them here; they would certainly not be upheld by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. This is simply an attempt by a heavy-weight corporation to brow-beat a small freelance news operation that dares to be critical of its editorial line. It is quite scandalous. The Times should be ashamed of itself." (Email to Media Lens, July 8, 2008)

Having minimal resources for fighting a court case, either in terms of time or money, we decided to delete Maddox’s email from our media alert, ‘Selling The Fireball’, as demanded. You can see the amended version here

We also published a message on our website emphasising the need for respectful communication with journalists. Coincidentally, we had previously discussed the issue at length in ’Compassionate Media Activism,’ an interview with former Buddhist monk, Matthew Bain, published this week on the new Elephant Skin website.

The happy result of this episode is that a number of high-powered legal minds have offered us their services free of charge should the need arise in future.

Peter Wilby wrote about the Times’ threat in the Guardian:

“We journalists are accustomed to dishing it out, but have the thinnest of skins. At the merest hint of criticism, we are apt to turn to our lawyers. One reason for this professional sensitivity, I suppose, is that journalists are insecure egotists who like to occupy the high moral ground. Criticism assaults their sense of self-worth and, since their colleagues and potential employers are assiduous consumers of print, it may damage their future prospects.”

Wilby quoted from the banned email, perhaps thereby indicating his own feelings on the matter. But his piece was ’balanced’. He criticised us for not providing a link to Maddox’s original article, for not urging readers to always read journalists’ work before writing, and for not making clear to Maddox who we were when we wrote to her. He contrasted these “failings” with the Times’s “professional sensitivities”, which he suggested were over-developed.

There was something missing from Wilby’s article, however: the human catastrophe that provides the moral backdrop to the entire debate. George Monbiot alluded to it in 2004 when he wrote: "the falsehoods reproduced by the media before the invasion of Iraq were massive and consequential: it is hard to see how Britain could have gone to war if the press had done its job.”

Like the rest of the British media, the Times played a vital role in selling the public a pack of outrageous government lies that presented a totally non-existent and obviously risible ‘threat’ as somehow serious, plausible, and even (god help us!) urgent.

Many of the most sophisticated philosophies of human culture contend that rational understanding is the result, not just of wisdom, but also of compassion. This is certainly true of the current discussion. Brett’s complaints that our actions caused distress to one of his journalists, and Wilby’s ’balanced’ response, can seem almost reasonable, until we focus our minds and hearts (if we are able) on a single overwhelming fact. In significant part as a result of the actions of the British media, more than one million human beings are now lying dead in Iraq. In fact, the entire country has been subject to unrelenting destruction and slaughter by two decades of Western policy rooted in selfish greed. All of this has been buried in official propaganda, media silence and compromised ’balance’ - it barely exists for the public.

And of course there is more and worse. Almost unbelievably, the media’s Iran focus 2008 is near-identical to the media’s Iraq focus 2002-2003. It is entirely possible that hundreds of thousands of people will soon be lying dead in Iran as a result of sanctions and war, just across the border from Iraq.

The point is that we are unable to perceive the obscenity of the media silence surrounding this mass slaughter if we are unable to perceive the truth of those one million Iraqi deaths. And we cannot experience the truth of those deaths unless we have some compassion for our victims.

To understand what we have done to the Iraqi people, to feel something of their torment, casts the media silence in a very different light. It transforms, utterly, the actions of people like us trying to break that silence, as it does the actions of those who seek to stop us on the grounds that emailing journalists is “not proper behaviour” and makes “a mess of their inboxes”. (Brett)

In truth, the steps we have suggested are pitiful in their timidity. We have always seen media activism as a small, energising contribution intended to inspire much wider, much more profound, political organisation and activism.

What we have done to Iraq is not a video game; it is not a Hollywood invention. We really have destroyed an entire nation and brought misery to millions. About that, this whole country should not be writing a few emails; it should be in uproar.

Media Commentary on the Oil Price Crisis

tim — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 12:21:34 +0000

Introduction

The past few months have seen an upsurge in comment on Saudi Arabia in the British media at a similar rate to the upsurge in oil prices, the current cause of the country being in the news.

While previous Arab Media Watch studies found that portrayals of Saudi Arabia were "often negative and sometimes openly hostile" - particularly at the time of the Saudi royal visit to Britain in November 2007, and the BAE arms deal - the current spike in media attention has a far more reasoned character to it. For this report, AMW monitored all the British national daily newspapers (except the Financial Times), as well as the Evening Standard.

Blame Saudi

Out of a total of 20 editorials and commentaries, just five contained comments that seemed to place blame for the current oil price crisis on Saudi Arabia. The Daily Telegraph's executive foreign editor Con Coughlin argued that "as things stand, protecting their precious reserves, rather than providing the world with cheaper oil, appears to be their main priority" (20 June 2008).

The newspaper's international business editor Ambrose Evans-Pritchard described the visit of President Bush to the country in January "to plead for higher oil output," only to be "politely rebuffed" (16 May 2008). Of Bush's subsequent visit in May, Evans-Pritchard wrote: "If the Saudis deny help once again, they risk incalculable damage to their strategic alliance with Washington. The price of crude has rocketed by over $30 a barrel since that last fruitless meeting."

He continued: "The US-Saudi tango has been on thin ice ever since the terrorist attacks of 9/11…Riyadh is giving no ground…The Saudis have let their output fall from 9.5m to 8.5m bpd over the last two years." A few days later (20 May 2008), the Times' US editor and assistant editor Gerard Baker wrote that following this meeting, "the helpful chaps at the House of Saud duly agreed to ramp up output by a few hundred thousand barrels a day." He described this as "a drop in the tanker of Saudi," which "to nobody's great surprise…had no effect whatsoever."

However, Baker cast doubt on Bush's efforts, suggesting they were "more of a political gesture than a meaningful policy initiative." The Times' chief foreign affairs commentator Bronwen Maddox labelled the Opec summit in Jeddah "a Saudi show, to deliver a Saudi message" (25 June 2008), adding: "Before Sunday's meeting, King Abdullah bin Abdelaziz al-Saud said that the kingdom was resolved to prevent oil prices from rising 'in an unjustified and abnormal manner', while announcing an increase in production too small to have any such impact."

Don't Blame Saudi

Saudi Arabia, as the world's largest producer, naturally loomed large in recent coverage of the oil price crisis. Shadow business secretary Alan Duncan noted in the Daily Telegraph that it was "the only country with enough capacity and flexibility to turn on the taps…" (27 May 2008).

However, "life isn't so simple," he continued, explaining the relevance of various grades of oil and the corresponding different markets, concluding that "just turning on Opec's taps would not necessarily solve the current problem." In fact, he issued a word of warning: "…watch carefully the unbridled folly of those such as the Lib Dems who want to gang up on Saudi Arabia. Those same naifs who delighted at the fall of the Shah seem to want the same ghastly political outcome in Saudi Arabia- and the $300 oil that would come with it."

The Telegraph's executive foreign editor Con Coughlin argued that the country is working to capacity (20 June 2008): "…the Saudis announced their intention to increase production by another 500,000 barrels per day, which will bring total production to 9.7 million barrels - the kingdom's highest ever level. And that is about the upper limit of what the Saudis can produce for any sustained period." However, "the Saudis will only produce more oil if they believe it is in their interests to do so," Coughlin added, somewhat contradictorily.

An Increase in Production Won't Help

Independent columnist Dominic Lawson exonerated Saudi Arabia (and Opec) from blame in the current price crisis, writing that "far from operating as a restrictive cartel…12 of the 13 members of Opec are pumping out oil at maximum capacity" (23 May 2008).

The Saudis, being the 13th member, "are already producing well in excess of their official Opec quota." He also noted that an announced production increase by 300,000 barrels per day "had no effect in halting the upward rush of the market price." In another article (17 June 2008), Lawson stated that "oil makes hypocrites of us all," noting the overarching presence of politics in the recent high-level visits to Saudi Arabia by George Bush, Ban Ki-Moon and Gordon Brown. "The strange thing is that there isn't an absolute shortage of oil in the markets," he added. "There's already a sufficient amount of the black stuff to go round to meet current levels of demand, as the Saudis have wearily insisted often enough over the past few months."

Therefore, Lawson concluded, King Abdullah's pledge to raise output "is the purest politics, simply to get the weight of the world's opprobrium off his kaffiyeh. I don't blame the King, however."

An editorial in the Independent (16 June 2008) suggested a few reasons for the oil price crisis: "There is little doubt that speculation is playing some part in pushing up the price of oil to an unprecedented $140 a barrel. Yet the fact that inventories have been at normal levels suggests this is not the driving force behind price rises. Growing demand is the far more likely culprit." However, there was some suspicion felt about the Saudi role: "It is often asserted that Saudis still have vast oil reserves. But there is no independently verified proof of this. We have no choice but to rely on what they choose to tell us."

Nonetheless, the editorial cast doubt on the possibility of bringing the oil price down by increasing Saudi production. "How long before our political leaders return to Saudi and its Opec allies to plead for more? And what will be the political price extracted for this?" asked the Independent, adding that "it is ridiculous for Western governments to tell Saudi Arabia and other oil producers how much they ought to pump out of the ground. The debate ought to be about how best to break our economic dependence on oil."

An editorial in the same newspaper the following week (23 June 2008) likewise detected the overarching presence of politics in Brown's attendance of the oil summit in Jeddah: "In attending the Saudi King's energy summit at the weekend, the Prime Minister colluded in a publicity stunt of the first order…The clear intention was to convince hard-pressed British consumers that he feels our pain on energy prices and is doing his level best to bring them down." The editorial apportioned blame to several factors: "The sky-rocketing price of energy in Britain stems at least as much from his own government's tax take and the energy companies' profits as it does from the vagaries of the Saudi oil flow. If production is an issue, then the Iraq war is at least as much to blame. A prime ministerial call for national belt-tightening would be a more honest and dignified approach."

Independent columnist Michael Savage cast doubt on increased production as the solution to the oil price crisis (21 May 2008). "Recent events have shown that there are problems with the assumption that Opec could ease the oil price by turning on the taps," he wrote, noting the "little impact" of an announced production increase. The Evening Standard's business and financial commentator Anthony Hilton agreed (23 May 2008): "It is years since any new oil field was found which could deliver more than one million barrels a day and currently the world consumes more than 85 million barrels a day. Put like that, the increase in production of 300,000 barrels which President Bush got out of the Saudis last week was hardly worth the paper used for the press release."

The Times' international business editor Carl Mortishead had a different reason for doubting the effectiveness of an increase in Saudi oil production (23 June 2008): "The truth is that the world doesn't need the extra Saudi crude. It's the wrong sort of oil - too sulphurous and viscous for refiners trying to produce more petrol, diesel and jet fuel."

An editorial in the same newspaper also cast doubt, citing global decline in supplies as the reason (20 April 2008): "Even Saudi Arabia, the desert kingdom that sits on 25 per cent of the world's known hydrocarbon reserves, can no longer be relied on to turn on the taps, even if it wanted to. Oil is also becoming progressively harder to find and more expensive to refine." Sun columnist Kelvin MacKenzie had little interest in production quotas, instead noting the reduction in traffic on British roads due to "the Shell tanker strike plus the staggering cost of petrol" (19 June 2008). He added that "we do have something to thank the Saudis for - we can get to work quicker."

Statements & Predictions

Other commentators went less into the mechanisms of global oil markets and production, and instead made broader, gloomier statements and predictions about the future of oil, with particular regard to Saudi Arabia. However, a few commentators still saw a boom time for the country.

Cause for Concern

"Oil does terrible things to a nation, breaking the link between taxation and revenue, and so encouraging corruption," wrote Daily Telegraph leader writer and Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan (30 April 2008). "Look at the Gulf States...unfortunate enough to be sitting on the stuff."

The Guardian's industrial correspondent Terry Macalister also sounded a note of alarm for Saudi Arabia, whose economy "and political stability" are "tied heavily to crude revenue" (20 June 2008). Despite the billions in extra revenue, Saudi leaders are "worried the long-term impact of high prices will be to cause conflict with western countries that militarily and politically support the House of Saud," he added. "The kingdom's rulers are also fearful that high prices will lead to lower demand as users switch to other fuels." Similarly, the Independent's diplomatic editor Anne Penketh wrote that "it appears the Saudis are just as worried that record prices…could dampen growth in the industrialised West and lower demand, which would in turn hurt the kingdom" (16 June 2008).

"Saudi Arabia is keenly aware of the political and economic effect of the oil market on the upwards spiral of food prices, and contributed $500m to the World Food Programme," she added. The Times' international business editor Carl Mortishead described a situation in which having oil is not enough, writing that "the price of natural gas in the Gulf has soared amid shortages and increased global demand" (19 May 2008). This is to blame for "the oil-rich Gulf states…planning to import coal…because, for the first time, the Gulf states are beginning to feel the burden of the soaring cost of fossil fuels."

Cashing In

A couple of commentators saw a more positive side to Saudi Arabia's current state, if only for its own national interest. Patrick Bishop in the Daily Mail focused on the wealth already accrued by the country (16 May 2008): "Despite their mind-boggling extravagance, they remain monstrously minted thanks to a 70-year oil boom that has sometimes faltered but never collapsed. Those who have succeeded in getting close to them have done pretty well, too." The Times' City columnist Edward Fennell agreed, writing that "whatever else may be happening in the rest of the world, the Gulf states are riding high on global demand for their oil," thanks to "profits sky-high and confidence that this will continue for the foreseeable future" (12 June 2008).

‘A Tale of Two Englands’

Ellie Keen — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:50:12 +0000

‘Race’ and Violent Crime in the Press

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This report explores the reporting – and the semantic meanings transmitted through reporting – of violent crime in relation to the ethnicity of both victim and perpetrator. The purpose of this study is to analyse the place of ‘race’ and ethnicity of both victim and perpetrator in reporting of violent crime, and to draw out and make explicit the implicit theories underlying and informing this reporting. By systematically examining crime articles in the national print media as well as a selection of regional media over a period of two months, this report demonstrates how notions of race still tint the lens through which criminality is both viewed and projected. The report argues that violent crime is seen as endemic within the minority ethnic ‘communities’, but unrelated to the structure of British society and the experience of minority ethnic people within it. In crime reporting, wider structural factors – such as discrimination, disadvantage and inequality – are generally ignored as contributors to crime trends and patterns.

The key argument is that a particular understanding of ‘culture’ has replaced overtly racist ideologies as the dominant discourse on race and crime. However, following the decline of racial determinism as a paradigm of diversity, ‘culture’ has re-introduced racism through the back door. ‘Culture’ appears to have replaced ‘race’ because, as a non-biological concept, it is supposedly non-racialized, and thereby non-racist. But in spite of its de-essentializing appearance, ‘culture’ still leaves racial understandings of diversity and difference as a profound challenge. Together with two other master tropes – community and ethnic identity – culture has become one of the pillars of the dominant discourse about ethnic diversity and ethnic minority groups. This discourse conceives culture as an innate quality, something people have and makes them act in certain ways under certain circumstances; culture is understood as a ‘way of life’ determined by birth.

Culturalist explanations for behaviour have entered crime reporting of the mainstream media in force. The debate about crime in contemporary Britain, particularly violent teenage crime, habitually invokes a specific notion of ‘culture’ to explain the behaviour of perpetrators of violent acts. Gang, gun and knife violence is conceptualized as ‘cultural’ phenomena, albeit pathological sub-cultures distinct from and in contrast to the moral values of the law-abiding majority. Given the simplistic equation between ‘culture’, ‘ethnic identity’ and ‘community’, the report demonstrates the ways in which the press connects different types of criminal ‘cultures’ to specific ethnic communities.

The connection between criminal ‘cultures’ and ‘communities’ leads to a logical fallacy. The claim that ‘culture’ is the source of violent crime necessarily attaches violence to certain ‘communities’ defined by their ethnic ‘identity’. This implies that most members of those groups are violent. The effect is that entire ‘communities’ are criminalized on the basis of their ‘cultures’. Importantly, this equation relates exclusively to ethnic minority groups, but largely excludes the white majority. ‘Culture’ and ‘community’ are seldom evoked when speaking about white Britons. White middle-class England is not thought of as a ‘community’ in itself, and to be English is not considered a ‘cultural’ trait.

The purpose of this study is not to accuse the media of institutional racism – a term that is often used without particular qualification of what it actually means – but rather to explore the ways in which popular understandings of race and crime influence reporting in the media, and vice versa. A fair and reflexive media representation of the state and nature of crime in Britain – including the involvement of all ethnic groups as both victims and perpetrators – is necessary not only from a social justice point of view, but for practical reasons as well. Through this report, we hope to engage the media in a constructive dialogue on how British society thinks about the complex relationship between race and crime.

Key points

Although diverse views are discernable both between and within papers, there are clear differential patterns in the way in which the press reports on violent crime. These patterns are strongly informed by notions of race.
In essence, England is conceived as two-fold: an England consisting of a law-abiding and morally superior Us; and an England inhabited by criminal and pathological Others. The current breakdown of law and order is conceived as spilling out from inner cities and sink estates into leafy suburbs, threatening the very pillars of Englishness.
Many journalists employ a strategic lack of precision when discussing different ethnic groups. In some instances, this includes an allusive taxonomy equating criminal cultures with particular communities: Eastern European bag snatchers, Jamaican yardie crack dealers, Somali gang members and so on. At other times, however, all these different ‘communities’ are lumped together as standing in direct contrast to white middle-class England. This strategic lack of precision creates an impression of a ‘tide’ of alien and hostile elements threatening the white English identity and its values.
Media theories – both implicit and explicit are often ‘common sense’ theories. Anecdotal evidence is habitually treated like evident truths and conclusive proof. For example, an inconclusive and brief Metropolitan Police report on the London gang profile was employed as evidence that the majority of young refugees from ‘anarchistic warlord cultures’ are necessarily committing violence on the streets of Britain.
An important aspect of the common sense connection between ‘culture’, ‘community’ and crime is that it freely lends itself to a logical fallacy generic in the press; while it may be true that certain groups are responsible for a disproportionate amount of certain types of crimes, it does not logically follow that most members of those groups are involved in offending behaviour. However, this logical leap is often made.
Although a ‘gang’ can refer to both black and white youth, it is not a race neutral term. young black criminality would more often be associated with ‘gang membership’, drawing on stereotyped images of gangs in America. The archetypal ‘gang member’ is black; correspondingly, a murder covered in the news was more likely to be assumed to be ‘gang related’ if there was black youth involved than if all involved were white.
It would be unfair to point the finger exclusively towards the media. The press is part of a discursive system which includes a range of social actors. However, the media does have an immense influence on the development of social and ideological perceptions and practices of not only its audience, but other elite institutions and influential social actors as well, such as politicians, corporations and civil society.
Judging from senior politicians’ responses to the media frenzy of 2007, crime reporting is potentially a strong force in policy development. The over-representation of young black people in the criminal justice system (CJS) is a problem of enormous severity, and the gap appears to be growing wider. Media attention to these matters may prompt a more decisivepolicy response. However, the question is how the problem, and by extension the solution, is analysed and formulated. Policies based on the assumption that black 'culture' is criminogenic, that black crime is qualitatively different from white crime, and that black communities are themselves to blame for their overrepresentation in the CJS are unlikely to be effective.

The rest of the report can be downloaded here

Will a decline in reporting European news result in more paid-for journalism?

tim — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:20:46 +0000

Like other powerful but controversial institutions the European Parliament is stepping up its investment in what amounts to paid-for journalism. Contracts are about to be awarded for funding programmes to be broadcast by local and international television channels. But, with editorial budgets for investigative and analytical journalism in steep decline, are the European Parliament -- and also the European Commission -- faced with no alternative but to buy news coverage in the media market place in the hope of gaining some favourable exposure?

If the initial reports are correct, and if the contracts likely to be awarded for programmes on CNN and ITV are to be controlled by script and even post-production approval, the European Parliament could be in danger of repeating the worst examples of embedded journalism during the Iraq War and might well end up financing nothing more than blatant propaganda. Nicholas Jones examines an initiative which is already producing some agonised soul searching among Europe’s journalists.

Journalists trying to wrestle with the complexities of the European Union pose a difficult dilemma for both the European Parliament and the European Commission: How are these two institutions going to overcome an appalling information deficit among the people of Europe? And, perhaps more alarmingly, is the news media about to be manipulated?

Having spent the last five years meeting and talking to reporters in many of the newer and most recent EU member states, I know how irritated they can become in their dealings with the Parliament and Commission. Not only are there language problems but all too often they say that in their search for reliable facts and guidance they come up against a seemingly impenetrable bureaucratic barrier.

Such is their frustration they tend to fall back on reporting the facts and opinions relayed to them by their national governments and politicians rather than do their own investigation. As a result, there is little analysis and their reporting is stuck in the rut of pre-determined agendas.

Nowhere is the communications gap more apparent than in an accession country like Turkey. In its south-east corner, on the borders with Syria -- and what might finally become the EU’s ultimate eastern frontier -- the plight of local journalists was all too evident when their representatives met to consider how to improve coverage of European affairs.

Although anxious to learn more about the implications of Turkey’s proposed membership of the EU, the difficulties which the journalists faced seemed insurmountable. At a seminar in Gaziantep (28.3.2008) to discuss the response so far by media organisations in south-east Anatolia, Murat Gures of the Gaziantep Journalists’ Association, painted a bleak picture.

The Association represents journalists on seven television channels, fifteen local newspapers and twenty local magazines but he readily acknowledged that negotiations for Turkey’s accession to the EU have sparked little interest. There was not enough understanding of European issues to generate an adequate level of reporting.

Nor was any solution forthcoming from the newspaper owners. Orhan Kizilaslan, president of the Gaziantep Anatolian Press Association, freely admitted that the local press did not have the economic wherewithal to provide the kind of journalism that would inform the local people of the EU accession process.

“Local newspapers are the most important instrument for providing the people of Anatolia with information about the EU. But although the local press could be used as a tool for providing news and comment we do not have the economic means to inform the public and support the EU process”.

What compounded the difficulties faced by the Anatolian news media was an equally frank acknowledgement by Ms Ulrike Hauer, a counsellor and head of section in the European Commission’s delegation to Turkey, that its communication strategies, especially in accession countries, were woefully inadequate.

Surely the right answer is for the EU to do much more to disseminate information in an accessible form to media organisations in the 27 member states and those countries hoping to join. As a first step it could invite journalists to Brussels at the Commission’s expense so that they could be instructed on how best to extract information on EU policies and how to follow the Parliament’s decision-making process.

Instead of reaching out to the journalists themselves, the Parliament seems to think the only realistic solution is to invest in collaborative projects with local media outlets in order to help them finance the production of more informed reporting of its proceedings.

Rather than opt for what could turn into some pretty blatant product placement, another more imaginative solution might be to fund an arms-length television and radio service along the lines of the BBC or even a channel like Al Jazeera, which has transformed news coverage in the Arab world thanks to the foresight and generosity of the Emir of Qatar?

When facing the twin pressures of strained resources and increased competition, journalists realise they cannot turn their back entirely on the reality of media economics. Subsidised reporting comes in many different forms: without an agreement to accept advertisements there would be no way of sustaining both BBC World and overseas access to BBC News Online.

What seems to be missing in the plethora of documents about the development of the European Union’s media strategies is a clear-cut statement on the need to protect journalistic independence and an assurance that subsidised reporting and collaborative programming will not undermine the financial viability of existing hard-pressed media outlets.

Awarding prizes to journalists for the most informed reporting of the European Parliament will alarm some MEPs who fear this will encourage sycophancy. The test of any such contest will be its independence from the donor of the prizes and the degree to which it can reflect differing national agendas.

Perhaps there will have to be prizes in each member state which might make the cost prohibitive but so great is the lack of understanding among journalists about EU affairs and so few are the opportunities to learn more, that an awards system might at least generate some interest.

Challenging the Whitewash

Ellie Keen — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0000

The white working class is an embittered minority: racist, bigoted, broken and fragmented. That was the view of several programmes in the recent BBC television series The White Season. The problem, according to the programme makers, is that the white working class has lost its identity due to the impact of de-industrialisation and immigration. Richard Klein, the commissioning editor of the White Season, went further, saying "I feel that the white working class has been ignored by the political classes because they feel the pressure of political correctness."

The advert for The White Season showed a white face gradually being obliterated by different languages being written over it. The message is clear: multiculturalism and anti-racism are bad for white workers and leave them feeling alienated and threatened. This was reinforced by one of the participants in a programme about a working men's club in Bradford who said, "There is no fairness. A lot of people feel the same way. I am not a racist but I do think the ethnic communities seem to be favoured more than the indigenous people."

Several of the programmes gave the impression that only the fascist British National Party (BNP) speaks up for white working class people. If the picture the programme makers paint of the working class is true, there is little hope for those of us who want to live in a multiracial society. So it is important to challenge and dispel what is being passed as fact about the white working class in Britain.

First, how are working class people represented in the media? They are on our television screens every day. There are numerous reality programmes showing hoodied kids with Asbos being drunk and disorderly or stealing cars.

There is rarely a programme which shows working class people just living their lives. Even the soaps are distorted.

How often do you see a real worker in EastEnders - a postal worker or a supermarket warehouse worker - not someone running their own business, or selling dodgy goods in the pub?

Contrast this with the rafts of shows portraying and catering to middle class lifestyles: holiday programmes; Location, Location, Location; guides on how to buy properties around the world. Almost every sitcom is about an angst ridden middle class family. And having a handful of programmes that cater for Asian and black viewers does not alter the fact that black and Asian people are even more unrepresented on our screens.

The working class is seen as interested only in bingo, football and drinking. There is nothing wrong with any of these leisure pursuits, but it is a totally one-dimensional view of the working class. Historian Jonathan Rose's fascinating book, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, shows that working class people have always desired culture, including theatre, music and reading.

Over the past 50 years the so-called indigenous population and successive waves of immigrants have borrowed heavily from each other's cultures, creating new and inspiring art forms. Despite this, the media reduces all working class people to a series of crude caricatures - whites are "chavs" and louts, black kids are gun carrying gangsters and Asians are potential terrorists.

We don't see the tens of thousands of people who have attended Stop the War meetings and anti-fascist concerts and rallies around the country in recent years. Tony Benn pointed out on Radio 4 last month that the media never quote from the speeches or discussion at such political rallies. At no point do television cameras come and film the primarily working class audiences expressing their view about the world. If they did, they would see that working class people are articulate and knowledgeable.

Of course, if you go to some working men's clubs you are going to see workers at their most isolated and backward. But to generalise from this gives a completely false picture of the working class in Britain.

There is no doubt that three decades of Labour and Tory governments, and neoliberal and anti-union policies have damaged working class communities. This is most obvious in some mining areas which were decimated by the Tory pit closure programmes. Some of these communities have not recovered.

Cities like Bradford and the London Borough of Barking & Dagenham (both of which were featured in The White Season) have also been hit by a decline in certain sectors of manufacturing. The Bradford textile industry was wiped out, and Dagenham saw the near total closure of the Ford car plant (the biggest local employer) and dozens of component factories. This has left both areas blighted by unemployment, poverty and social deprivation.

But even these areas are not wastelands. In Bradford unemployment stood at 6.4 percent in 2006 and in Barking & Dagenham at 8.5 percent. Obviously life for those who are unemployed is harsh, but the vast majority of people are in work. Unemployment nationally remains relatively low (an average of 5.2 percent). Life is not wonderful under Gordon Brown, but most working class people do not live on the fringes of society. They have relatively stable employment, even if it is low paid.

Yes, there are impoverished white workers. The TUC has calculated that 19 percent of white people live in poverty. However, the situation is much worse for ethnic minorities. For example, 58 percent of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are defined as poor, as are 47 percent of black non-Caribbean and 34 percent of black Caribbean workers.

Attacks by successive governments, but in particular Labour, have left many people demoralised and confused. When the government pursuing these policies is meant to be on our side, the bitterness and feeling of alienation are all the deeper. This is further compounded by the fact that the Labour Party, which had strong roots and an ideological hold in many working class areas, has lost many of its local activists. When Blair came to power there were nearly 500,000 party members. Today there are about 170,000.

This demoralisation and the resulting political vacuum have pushed a minority into the arms of the BNP. In the past seven years the BNP vote has increased from 3,022 to 292,911 in local council elections. While this vote is concentrated in a small number of areas its support has risen as Labour has failed to deliver. This is a worrying development that needs to be countered.

It is popular to explain such changes with the claim that the working class is in decline and at worst decimated. But in reality the working class is bigger than ever. Major structural changes have taken place. In 1978 some 6.9 million people worked in manufacturing industries. By 2005 this number had fallen to 3.2 million and it continues to fall. But manufacturing still represents a serious sector of the British working class. It is very well organised, and remains a powerful and important sector of the British economy. But the decline has left its scars.

However, these changes have coincided with the growth of white collar and service sector jobs, which are becoming increasingly unionised. Teachers, council workers and civil servants now make up an important militant part of the labour movement.

Seven million people belong to trade unions, which remain the biggest voluntary organisation in the country. When was the last time the BBC screened a film about a trade union? They rarely talk about them, unless to denounce them as a throwback to a bygone age.

White workers make up 93 percent of all trade union members. Despite the under-representation of black and Asian workers at the top of unions, anti-racism is taken very seriously. There have been a number of struggles against racist managers and fights to incorporate migrant workers on the same pay and conditions as their fellow workers. (Strangely, this is ignored by the media.) Unions like Usdaw and Unite now employ Polish and Eastern European full time organisers to encourage migrant workers to join their unions.

Every major union in the country supports Unite Against Fascism and the Stop the War Coalition. Of course, no one can deny that some working class people hold racist ideas, but life is much more complicated than this.

The dramatic rise in Islamophobia and the growing offensive against Muslims since the 9/11 attacks has been driven by the government and fuelled by scare stories in the media. Multiculturalism, the idea that people from many cultures can live together and be enriched by our different identities, is under attack on many fronts. Gordon Brown claims he wants to instil an idea of Britishness into the population, calling for a "British Day" and daily pledges of allegiance in schools, US style, to queen and flag.

The effect of such talk has been to encourage the perception that some inherent part of white Britain's culture is being lost because of immigration. A recent BBC Newsnight survey found that 4 percent of people in 1997 thought immigration was a problem. In 2007 it had risen to 38 percent. What has changed in the past ten years? In 1997 people hoped that things were going to change for the better. Ten years of a Labour government which has relentlessly attacked working class people has led to a level of despair where immigrants can become scapegoats.

However, integration between black, white and Asian people in working class communities is much higher than we are led to believe. In a recent BBC poll of working class people, despite the loaded nature of the questions and a very narrow definition of "working class", 42 percent thought that immigration was a positive thing.

In 1955 two thirds of the British population considered themselves prejudiced, and half of these said they were deeply prejudiced. By 2001 only 4 percent said they were very prejudiced and 35 percent said they were a little prejudiced. In 1958 a Gallup poll found that 71 percent of Britons were opposed to mixed marriage. Today the figure is so low that Gallup no longer records the statistic.

Levels of racial integration in British society are highest among working class people. Britain is not like the US - there are no ghettos. According to the Office for National Statistics 70 percent of people describe their ethnicity as white and their religion as Christian. There are only 14 wards in Britain where an ethnic group other than white makes up more than half of the population. In none of these wards does that single group reach as much as 75 percent of the population. Compare that with the 5,000 wards in Britain where whites make up more than 98 percent.

Integration is shown in the most obvious way by people's personal relationships. The Observer newspaper stated that Britain has the highest rate of interracial marriage in Europe. The census records over 100,000 children of mixed Asian and white origin, and 158,000 children of mixed Caribbean and white origin.

Working class communities are mixed. People from all different nationalities live and work together, with their children going to the same schools. There are exceptions to this, particularly in education, but integration is the general trend.

The most recent arrivals are workers from Eastern Europe. Along with Muslims they have faced a horrific onslaught of abuse from both media and politicians. Such treatment has been a recurring theme in British history. Jewish workers in the 1930s and black and Asian workers over the past 30 years have suffered similar abuse and have been forced to defend their communities. A section of the white working class has always stood alongside them.

Integration

Even with the newest migrant workers integration, not separation, is the norm - especially in the workplace. Because Eastern European workers have to register their job when they enter Britain we know exactly where they work, and what the figures reveal is a picture of integration. These workers are not on the margins of the employment sector. Of the 388,000 Eastern European workers who came to Britain between 2005 and 2006, 24,000 are packers, 10,000 work in sales and 25,000 are warehouse workers. In other words, they work for big corporations like Tesco, Morrisons and Asda. They work and socialise alongside white and black workers and belong to the same unions and social clubs.

The whole history of the British working class has been shaped by immigration - from French Huguenots, Jews from Eastern Europe, Irish Roman Catholics, and, in the second half of the 20th century, African-Caribbeans and Asians, through to today's Eastern European migrants.

Far from being a bastion of reaction, the working class has a proud history of being at the centre of resistance to racism. After all, where did Gandhi stay when he came to Britain? In the working class area of Poplar in East London. It was white and Jewish workers who stopped the fascist Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts in 1936 at Cable Street, and it was black and white youth who stopped the National Front marching in Lewisham in 1977.

Today there are real and deep contradictions inside the white working class. There is resentment, a feeling of being disenfranchised by a Labour government which seems more interested in big business than its traditional electorate. A minority blame black people and Asians, and feel their identity is being taken away. But there are bigger and stronger forces inside the working class which resist this and attempt to build real communities.

When you dig below the crude stereotypes and assumptions about the white working class the real concerns emerge. By far the most important of these are the gap between rich and poor, the lack of affordable housing, and neoliberal economic policies.

These are not problems confined to the white working class - they affect all workers, whatever their race or culture. Racial identity is not the problem; the class divide is.

Tabloid Fabricated Heathrow Plot

The Staff — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 03:04:05 +0000

From climatecamp.org.uk:

Evening Standard condemned by press watchdog for coverage of the Camp for Climate Action's Heathrow protest. Claim of fabrication upheld.

In a much awaited ruling the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) issued a stinging rebuke against the Evening Standard today. The usually mild- mannered PCC slammed the Standard's coverage of last summer's Camp for Climate Action at Heathrow as 'materially misleading' and 'alarmist'. The Evening Standard will be forced to carry the ruling with due-prominence today.

On 13 August last year, the Standard ran a front page story headlined 'Militants will hit Heathrow' the day before a climate change protest camp near Heathrow airport opened. Chief reporter Robert Mendick said he had uncovered a plot to paralyse the airport via invading runways and placing suspect packages. The story was subsequently echoed in several media outlets, all of which ran the false claims believing them to be true. The Camp for Climate Action immediately wrote to the PCC declaring that the article was "fabricated". The PCC adjudicated the complaint as "upheld".

The PCC gave the strongest possible reprimand in its powers, finding that the article was a 'serious breach' of the PCC code of journalistic standards. They found that "adequate care had not been taken" by the Standard, despite the Standard's claim that their reporting was the result of an 'extensive operation organised by an extremely experienced team of executives and senior reporters' [Doug Wills, Letter to PCC, February 12, 2007].

The rare PCC ruling comes after seven months' worth of submissions, in which the story's authorship, sources and credibility are all called into question. Alexandra Harvey, one of the team responsible for pulling apart the Standard's story, said today:

"This was a political hit job of the worst kind. There was no plot, and the Standard's ever changing claims throughout this process show that this was a fiction created for political ends - to stop the growth of a mass movement taking action on climate change".

Chief reporter Robert Mendick has previously denied writing the very article he authored and the PCC condemned. The Standard subsequently claimed the story was the work of a different junior journalist, Rashid Razaq, working undercover.

Mr Razaq has a history of being accused of fabrications which the Standard has ignored. Last year Mr Razaq wrote a story falsely alleging the showing of films sympathetic to terrorists at the Freud Museum. The alleged interviewee said the interview Mr Razaq reported in the article never took place. A complaint by the museum's director and curator was never answered. An undercover story by Mr Razaq about his work at Barnet Hospital as a cleaner was called into question when the Hospital stated that he was in fact employed as a porter, and had misreported significant facts. "This is a disturbing pattern, and the Standard ought to examine why Mr Razaq was allowed to continue writing these stories for so long," said Ms Harvey.

Natasha Edlemann said, "This summer will see increased direct action aimed at stopping climate change. This growing movement expects and deserves scrutiny from the media, but we need to draw a line under dangerous propaganda by those who claim to care about climate change while seeking to destroy the reputations of the people who are actually doing something about it."

This year's Camp for Climate Action will take place 4 to 11 August at Kingsnorth power station in Kent. Everyone is invited to join in.

For all the documents and more details, visit Anatomy of a fabrication

Ronan Bennett: A Sense of Impending Tragedy

Ellie Keen — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 00:01:02 +0000

How did 10 Days to War, your series of eight short dramas marking the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, come about?

Someone had come up with the idea of dramatising the run-up to the war in a series of short films. It was green lit, fully financed, and given a broadcast date - which was obviously the anniversary of the war - but had no script. So I was asked.

We set ourselves the goal of dramatising events that happened each day five years ago. So it limited what we were able to do in some ways. Then we had to pick stories that we felt would illuminate things that had been forgotten or overlooked.

One of the things that came through strongly from the research was the issue of the second United Nations (UN) resolution. The danger is that what's left in people's collective memory is Blair saying, "We're working flat out for a second resolution." We talked to diplomats at the UN and to many people who knew what was going on at that time, and it is clear that there was never going to be a second resolution.

Up until as late as the week of 10 March Blair was still saying there would be a second resolution. He was trying to persuade the country that the war was legal and that it had UN sanction. To me that was a complete lie, because they all knew they were never going to get it, yet they carried on with that fiction. So one of our films dramatises the fight for the so-called "second resolution", which also involved pressure on the non-permanent members from all sides.

We used the historical anecdote of Yemen who in 1991 voted against a US resolution calling for the use of force against Iraq. They had a multimillion dollar aid package about to be approved by the US which was then cancelled. The US ambassador turned to his Yemeni counterpart and said, "That's the most expensive vote you will ever cast." So we show the threats, the bullying taking place at the UN.

What do you think it will be like for an audience who watch the films with the benefit of hindsight of the last five years?

Well, for example, we dramatise Colonel Tim Collins, played by Kenneth Branagh, who made the speech made famous by the Daily Mail. It was actually really beautiful and stirring and contained lines like "We will leave Iraq a better place" and "We will treat them humanely and with respect."

I asked myself, by having an actor like Branagh deliver these lines is there a danger that this would be misinterpreted as gung-ho? But you can't listen to what he says and not think about the five years that have been. So he says, "Tread lightly there" - 500 pound bombs, "Treat prisoners with respect" - Abu Ghraib. So I let the speech stand and people can measure it against what happened afterwards.

I went to see Collins and one of the interesting things he said was that they only found out that the war had started from the television. The US hadn't bothered to tell them. So they suddenly had to get into gear because they were supposed to be spearheading the invasion from Kuwait into southern Iraq. So he jumped into his jeep and his driver said, "I'm not being funny sir, but why are we doing this?"

This is far more effective coming out of the mouth of a soldier than if any of us had said it.

What do you make of David Miliband reasserting the doctrine that humanitarian intervention is still something they can maintain?

Miliband comes across as unbelievably crude, ignorant and stupid. New Labour has never been very good with history. It's never been its strong suit, but you would have thought that the lessons of the last five years should have been learned. Those arguments are confounded, in just about every quarter, by every experience we have had over the last five years. He's just had to admit that secret rendition flights did use British ground.

I had a heated argument with Chris Mullin [the MP] who used to be a half decent bloke when he was campaigning for the Birmingham Six. But two or three years ago detainees at Belmarsh prison had hearings - a bit like Long Kesh in the 1970s after internment. They had witnesses giving evidence from behind screens. I asked Chris - he was a government minister at the time - "How can you possibly defend this?" He said, "Ronan, 9/11 changed everything." History didn't start with this! They are philistines - with their lack of history or any other perspectives than the West's.

Do any of the films look at the anti-war movement, and what do you think is its legacy?

One of the films deals with the impact the coming of the war had on the Muslim population and the way Muslims were radicalised. You see a group of Muslims preparing to go on a march - not the biggest one, which is out of our time frame. One says that Blair and the British government didn't listen after the 15 February march, so why should they bother marching? Another person makes the argument that politics is part of a process: you keep going and that's how you get results.

We do have a responsibility not to be pessimistic. But for me the big shock and disappointment was that Blair was re-elected. I can't square the feeling that I sensed all around me on the marches, with people then going and putting their X on the ballot and putting New Labour back into power.

Now even the military families are campaigning. Some now find that soldiers who have survived, but are severely injured, are being abandoned and mistreated.

That's the thing you want to say to the parents and kids who join up. They will use you and then they'll discard you. We're not shocked about that because we know the history. That's all it takes - a bit of historical knowledge. The Ministry of Defence doesn't feel any obligation to these people. It doesn't feel any moral responsibility for them.

But I'm far more critical of soldiers and the military than a lot of others would be. I think there is a tendency even among ourselves - broadly speaking, the left - to say that they are just following orders. But soldiers do not cease to be moral, responsible citizens just because they put on a uniform. I think they get the benefit of the doubt too much.

Do any of the programmes look at the war from an Iraqi perspective?

Yes, one is about an episode when the weapons inspectors went to a milk factory. They knew they weren't going to find anything, and yet everybody was trying to be helpful. The point was that the Iraqis wanted the weapons inspectors there because the minute they were pulled out that meant they were going to be bombed.

So I try to convey that sense of impending tragedy and the impact it's going to have on the Iraqis through this relationship between the weapons inspectors and the people they're inspecting. I went to the UN to talk to weapons inspectors and other people. In Iraq, they were in a place called the Canal Hotel on the outskirts of Baghdad and had Iraqi staff - cleaners and so on. And the news came through that they were being withdrawn. Apparently there was screaming and howling by the cleaners, because they knew what was coming: their children were going to be bombed. So we tried to get the sense in the film of what that meant for Iraqis.

Have you got any novels on the go, given your preoccupation with this project?

One I hope to finish by the end of the year is called This Is Private. There are kind of two strands to it. One is the issue of privacy - and having once or twice been the subject of intrusion it made me wonder about the issue. But the other thing I deal with is something I started thinking about three years ago. I wrote a piece for the Guardian about the suicide of a child in prison, called Joseph Scholes, from Manchester. I went up to the inquest and it was just so shocking. This kid had been from a broken home, had been involved in some really quite minor offences, and was sentenced to two years in jail. Everybody - the psychiatrist, the doctors, the social workers, the care home - said to the judge, "If you send this boy to prison he'll kill himself." The judge didn't care and sent him to prison for two years. Joseph only lasted nine days.

When I came back from the inquest and turned on the news, the first item was on a 15 year old boy named Gareth Paul Myatt who had died in a Group 4 run prison. He had left the kitchen area in bit of a state and gone back to his room and the staff had said, "Clean up the kitchen," and he'd said - according to the staff - "Fuck off!" Three Group 4 people followed him into his room and by the time they left he was dead.

Coming back from the inquest and hearing that on the news, I just thought I had to write about this.

The prison numbers are rising and rising, and the number of women and children. There's no end to it.

Do you mind being characterised as a political writer?

Well, I am a political writer. Everything I do, whether it's a Hollywood project, a novel, or 10 Days to War, I choose because it has a political side to it. I'm interested in the intersection between the personal and the domestic on the one side, and the political on the other, and that's what motivates me as a writer. If I didn't feel I could do that, I wouldn't write.

I've been very lucky because I work in the mainstream and people get to see my films and read my books. But there are compromises you have to make. On one level it can be a Hollywood script in which I had a reference to Abu Ghraib and the studio notes came back saying, "This has to come out." So things like that happen, but for all the politics you can't forget the domestic and the personal. That's why people are interested in books and fiction and drama because it's about people, and you mustn't short change that side of it.

Also there's probably a greater element of uncertainty and doubt in my fiction about political issues. I feel very clear about where I stand on things, but you can't put that certainty into a novel because fiction can't thrive on certainty: it thrives on doubt.

The thing I have to reconcile is just mixing that uncertainty and questioning and doubt and the weakness of the characters, their flaws and so on, but trying to get the message across at the same time. Sometimes it goes wrong. Sometimes things can be misread. I was told this week that two prominent Blairites are apparently huge fans of my novel Havoc, in its Third Year, and that made me think I'd done something wrong. But I have no objection being called a political writer at all.

I have lived in Hackney for 20 years now and I'm very interested in this community. I went to the BBC a year ago and said that I really wanted to write a screenplay about kids in Hackney, and it was commissioned. I hope it will be made this summer. It's a look at life on the street for kids, mostly black kids, and the struggles they face with the police and all the rest of it.

That satisfies me on a political level because it's about the community I live in and it'll be from a view I don't think is often represented on television. Working in the mainstream is really important to me, because as much as I admire people who have their niches, there's no fun being a writer if people are not reading your words.

The 10 Days to War mini-films will be shown in the Newsnight slot on BBC 2 from 10 March. The paperback of Ronan Bennett's novel Zugzwang will be published next month.

Ronan Bennett at a glance

1956 Born in Newtownabbey, Northern Ireland

1974 Convicted at juryless Diplock court for the murder of a Royal Ulster Constabulary inspector and sent to Long Kesh prison. Conviction overturned in 1975.

1978 Arrested in London for conspiracy to cause explosions, spending 16 months in prison on remand. Bennett and co-defendants acquitted in 1979.

1990 Writes Stolen Years: Before and After Guildford with Paul Hill, one of the Guildford Four

1991 Ronan's first novel, The Second Prison, is shortlisted for the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Prize

1998 The Catastrophist, Ronan's third novel, shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award

2004 Havoc, in its Third Year, wins the Hughes and Hughes/Sunday Independent Irish Novel of the Year Award.

2006 Zugzwang serialised in the Observer newspaper

It fucks you up, your country.

JamieSW — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 20:43:46 +0000

Every now and again, the government has a policy review about how it will deal with the national childhood problem. There are a range of themes taken up, but the basic problem is that they are violent, clubbish, bestial and need to be controlled. Britain is, as studies have shown, a particularly harsh place for children to live in. New Labour, representing a virulently authoritarian version of neoliberal social-democracy (if that's possible), proposes a combination of modest poverty-reduction strategies (which fail, both in the specific goal, and in the intended effect), curfews, control orders, ASBOs, hoodie bans, stop and search mechanisms, and more detention. Blair wanted to spy on potential 'problem families' (apparently identifiable through the warning signs of track suits, tatoos, Lambert & Butler cigarettes and an insufficiently appreciative attitude toward the government). The heavily punitive accent of government policy is supported by a culture of child-hating, which is ironic given the late capitalist infantilization of adults (in which capital tries to convert us into impulsive, needy, irrational consumers, cultivating nonsensical enthusiasms so that we part with our money more quickly). A direct corollary of the sentimentality about ickle children is the incredible amount of aggression toward the young in popular culture, especially as they reach their adolescent years, and especially if they're working class. Behind the scenes, if you like, this aggression more frequently takes the form of child abuse by parents than one might think. For example, a study in the UK found that 11% of boys and 21% of girls experienced some form of child abuse. I would have thought that most of this is emotional abuse or neglect, which is horrendous enough, but the study found that when it is narrowed to 'contact' abuse (sexual or physical), 16% of women and 7% of men said that they had experienced this kind of abuse. Obviously, this is not simply an unpleasantness that one can 'walk off' and 'get over'. It exacts a long term psychological toll - shrinking the hippocampus, which deals with emotional responses, and producing abnormal levels of cortisol, which deals with fight or flight responses - and the younger it happens the more severe the effects. Beyond the family, it is also expressed in the other institutions in which a child might be raised: foster care, obviously, and penal custody. On average, two children died in penal custody every year since 1990, and a controversy has recently erupted over the officially sanctioned abuse of children known euphemistically as 'restraint'.

The 'Children's Commissioner' has become an easy target for rightist polemic after he criticised the use of painful 'restraints' in custodial institution, which are designed to control behaviour with the application of pain. He spoke of the rights of children, and he lamented some of the authoritarian measures used by the government. Melanie Phillips blustered in the Daily Mail: Children's rights? What about the rights of those who live in fear of young thugs? This was only a particularly forceful version of the raised media heckles of 'dimwit', 'who-does-he-think-he-is', 'waste-of-taxpayers-money', 'we'll-smack-our-kids-if-we-want-to', and so on. (These people do get terribly exercised about their inherent right to beat their children. When a smacking ban was first proposed, they went absolutely bonkers. The comedian Jack Dee, by contrast, suggested that it was a good idea to stop beating kids, but "maybe we should stop fucking them first"). For this particular persuasion, children have only one right: the right to remain silent. Here is one 'young thug' who won't be around to bother the nice people. A fourteen year old boy, who suffered enormous trauma due to deaths in his family, experienced emotional turmoil, and was locked up for 'behaviour difficulties' after allegedly wounding a man. He survived a month in his prison until he was violently 'restrained' by officers, who broke his nose, leaving him terrified, as well as sickened and depressed: he hung himself. But that's just one example. There was also Joseph Scholes, a mentally unwell young man given to self-harm, who was imprisoned for a minor street crime, despite multiple expert witnesses telling the judge that the boy would kill himself if he was put in that kind of environment. Of course, even those witnesses couldn't have known that he would be forced to wear a loose garment resembling a horse blanket, and demeaned and driven to his death within a week. Then there is Gareth Paul Myatt, who died four days into a one year sentence at a 'training centre' run by Group 4 following an 'incident'. Shortly after that death, the government announced £16m for more child prisons.

Now these examples are not incidental. Gordon Brown's twee catchphrase is that "children are 40% of the population, but 100% of the future". We can either collectively vomit over this phrase or try to extract some literal truth from it (or both). The truth is that fucked up children make for fucked up adults. Brutalising children is not going to produce a nation of well-adapted citizens. The clinical psychologist Oliver James points out that one of the most alarming statistics of recent years is the discovery that 90% of the prison population was in some way mentally unwell. As he further elaborates, the causes of this are not rooted in the poor genetic stock of the working class, who are vastly over-represented in all penal institutions. Far more often, it is the result of a particular kind of nurture experienced especially but not exclusively in the first three to six years of childhood. You raise a kid in a comfortable bourgeois home with lots of attention, you get a comfortable bourgeois person. You raise a kid in a strict, authoritarian home with parents trying to break his will through the application of regular violence (tough love) all for his own good, you get a young fascist. You raise a kid in a chaotic household with episodic, rather than structured, violence and abuse, you get manipulative people with poor consciences prone to acting out physical or sexual violence. You raise a kid in a tough working class household with a survivalist mentality and regular insecurity, you get Monty Python's bragging Yorkshiremen. Sorry, I've lost my thread, where was I ...? Oh yes. To extend the logic, suppose you raise children in a cruel, aggressive country with: violent, manipulative, sanctimonious hypocrites in charge; a virulent ethos of social competitiveness saturating the culture; underfunded schools with over-worked teachers and kids bored or stressed through banal lessons and routine examination; few and degraded amenities and hostile over-policing in the remaining public spaces such as shopping centres; violent 'control' of children encouraged on the one hand, with violence exalted in the culture as a means of empowerment on the other; with manifest injustice coupled with powerlessness to do anything about it; and so on. Violence, neglect, hypocrisy, wilful manipulation, insecurity, competition as the sole source of self-esteem, abuse, injustice, indifference - it's a recipe for disaster. Yet the program appears to be more of the same: cut benefits, close facilities, install CCTV, impose stricter discipline in schools, toughen policing, lock more kids up in violent penal institutions, threaten their parents with benefit-cuts if they bunk off school, intensify social competition through more testing - and now, on top of it all, Lord Goldsmith wants kids to swear allegiance to the Queen so that they'll feel more British! If Goldsmith epitomises 'Britishness', then our elusive national 'values' can now be summarised as naked corruption, criminality, careerism, arms dealing, warmongering and a facade of blustering pomposity.

Of course, I would be the first to admit that children are awful people. Having a sensible conversation with anyone under nine years old is almost impossible, and they are as a rule unbelievably tactless. The smaller they are, the less they know about anything. As Randy Newman once sang about rednecks, they don't know their ass from a hole in the ground. On the other hand, most population groups have flaws, especially those in the armed forces, and I wouldn't wish the amount of crap kids go through on them either.

Sharia Law in Britain

Ellie Keen — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 12:20:30 +0000

The remarks by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, have seen the media and politicians unleash a vicious wave of Islamophobia, from the ravings of the tabloid press, to the disgraceful Independent on Sunday splash about domestic violence and the shocking claims about “inbreeding” by Phil Woolas MP, who has responded to the current hysteria by leaping head-first into the racist gutter.

What are the basic facts behind the Muslim-baiting?

1. Most British Muslims do not demand Sharia law.

Muslim Council of Britain: “We do not wish to see a parallel system or a separate system of judiciary for Muslims.”

Shaista Gohir, government adviser: “The majority of Muslims do not want it. Many Muslim commentators and the media are wrongly assuming that all Muslims want Sharia law in the UK.”

2. What British Muslims want is for the UK, US and Israel to end their bloody occupations of Muslim countries.

3. They want an end to the racism against British Muslims, who are overwhelmingly dark-skinned.

4. A 2004 ICM poll found 61% of British Muslims might support Sharia courts being introduced in Britain, but only to resolve civil cases within the Muslim community, and only so long as the penalties did not contravene British law.

5. Archbishop Rowan Williams argued for “a delegation of certain legal functions to the religious courts of a community”, not for an extensive parallel legal system. The aspects of Sharia being considered by Williams are restricted to matters of family and finance law, i.e. civil matters. No one is suggesting introducing an Islamic penal code.

6. Religious courts already operate in this country for Orthodox Jews. Why shouldn’t Muslims enjoy the same right?

7. Sharia courts also operate in the UK, although without official recognition and concentrating only on mundane issues such as inheritance and divorce. Many British Muslims are already married under Sharia law, eat meat slaughtered by it, and bank according to it.

8. The UK is already amending its finance laws to allow Sharia-compliant products such as halal mortgages and Islamic bonds, in part to attract billions of petro-dollars from the cash-rich Gulf.

9. Ontario, Canada, for 15 years had a system of “faith based arbitration” whereby family issues such as inheritance and property division could be adjudicated by religious authorities. In 2005 Ontario’s attorney general reviewed how the system worked for Muslims and “did not find any evidence to suggest that women are being systematically discriminated against as a result of arbitration of family law issues”.

10. Criticism of Islam segues effortlessly with prejudice against black immigrants. “Niggers out” no longer wins many votes, but Muslim-bashing presses the same political buttons. For our rulers, Islam is a doubly-convenient scapegoat for resistance to the West’s “war on terror”. Any discussion of Islam today is therefore a discussion about war and about racism. By ignoring this basic fact the media join hands with the racists and the warmongers.

For the latest, see the excellent resource islamophobia-watch.com

'Creative Destruction' - the Madness of the Global Economy (Part Two)

JamieSW — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 14:04:44 +0000

Exchange With The Independent’s Hamish McRae

In Part One of this alert, we noted an observation made by Hamish McRae, economics columnist at the Independent:

“Bankers, like the rest of us, make mistakes, but the scale of the mistakes, particularly in US banks, has been enormous.” (McRae, ‘The markets are bad, but don’t panic just yet’, The Independent, January 23, 2008)

We asked him why he talked merely of “mistakes”, adding:

“Why are the terms of your analysis so narrow; so skewed towards the perspective of financial power?” (Email, January 23, 2008)

As an alternative, we suggested a few observations made in Part One; in particular, that the current economic system is both innately unstable and destructive. We asked McRae why he appears to reject such a rational analysis. On the same day, he wrote back confusingly:

“Thanks – I see your point. I suppose I feel I should deal with the world as it is, rather than as it might be. Is that narrow? Well, yes if you are seeking a discussion of the merits and demerits of the present global market economy, but no if you are trying to understand and calibrate what is actually happening. I think I am probably more use doing the latter.”

We responded:

“You say: ‘I feel I should deal with the world as it is.’ Perhaps it would be more accurate to rephrase this as: ‘I feel I should deal with the world as I see it.’”

His reply, sent as he was about to head for the World Economic Forum in Switzerland:

“Not sure – let me think about it. But in all earnestness I do think that you should not discount the huge progress made in India and China in lifting people out of poverty. I visited both in recent months and am in awe. I shall have to stop this interchange as I have to pack for Davos now.”

But just how accurate is McRae’s observation of the “huge progress made in India and China”, a mantra that appears regularly in the corporate media?

India And China: The Latest ‘Success Stories’ Of Capitalism

Cheerleaders for capitalism are keen to advertise the system’s ‘successes’. Earlier, model countries were said to include Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Thailand. But that was before the East Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. India and China are today’s poster states for capitalism.

Some progress in these countries is real. However, as we noted before, any social progress under ‘neoliberal reforms’ has not been sustained and, moreover, has been to the detriment of people losing out elsewhere in the global economy (not to mention the damage to global ecosystems).

Another important factor, glossed over in conventional reporting, is that massive state intervention and subsidies have been required to ameliorate the worst consequences of ‘shock therapy’ in following neoliberal doctrines of ‘market reforms.’ Political economist David Kotz notes that China’s strategy of opening up its economy since 1978 “bears almost no resemblance to the neoliberal approach followed by Russia.”

For example, government price controls were lifted only gradually in China. Also, the large-scale privatisation of state-owned enterprises, upon which many people depended, did not begin until 1996, 18 years into the transition. The state continued to direct and support large state enterprises, only gradually loosening its regulation as experience grew of operating in a market environment.

Public spending and public investment continued to grow, rather than shrink as in Russia. China did not privatise its banks, as Russia did, but retained a state-controlled financial system. And rather than rapidly eliminating barriers to trade and capital movements, China has retained significant controls over both. (Kotz, ‘The Role of the State in Economic Transformation: Comparing the Transition Experiences of Russia and China’, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, October 1, 2004; http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_papers_51…)

By keeping strict control of key elements of the economy, China managed (at least initially) to avoid the disasters that assailed other countries. India, too, has long pursued interventionist economic strategies, with the government restricting the attempted access by foreign corporations to domestic markets and enterprises.

Commentators in the corporate media seem reluctant to acknowledge all this when they talk of the supposed successes of ‘market reforms’ in China and India. Moreover, behind McRae’s impression “of huge progress” in these countries, the reality is far more disturbing.

Take India first. In 2007, the country’s rank in the Human Development Index of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) fell two places to 128. That put India in the bottom 50 of the 177 nations examined. P. Sainath, rural affairs editor of The Hindu newspaper, points out the disturbing context of the statistics:

“El Salvador, which saw a bloody civil war for over a decade from the 1980s, ranks 25 places ahead of us at 103. Bolivia, often called South America’s poorest nation, is 11 steps above us at 117. Guatemala, nearly half of whose citizens are poor indigenous people, saw the longest civil war in Central America. One that lasted close to four decades and which saw 200,000 people killed or disappear. That too, in a nation of just 12 million. Guatemala ranks 10 places above us at 118.” (Sainath, ‘India 2007: High growth, low development’, The Hindu, December 24, 2007)

Sainath adds, with grim humour:

“India rose in the dollar billionaire rankings, though. From rank 8 in 2006 to number 4 in the Forbes list this year [...] In the billionaire stakes, we are ahead of most of the planet and might even close in on two of the three nations ahead of us (Germany and Russia).”

As India’s new billionaires snap up palatial homes and luxury yachts, desperate conditions for the nation’s farmers have led to an epidemic of suicides. Vandana Shiva, director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, refers to the appalling suicides of more than 40,000 Indian farmers since 1997 as “genocide”:

“This genocide is a result of deliberate policy imposed by the World Trade Organisation and implemented by the Government. It is designed to destroy small farmers and transform Indian agriculture into large-scale corporate industrial farming.”

Farmers are in despair over crippling debts from rising production costs and falling prices, both linked to the corporate-led imposition of ‘free trade’ in agriculture. Shiva warns of the growing forced dependence on hybrid and genetically modified seeds which are costly and cannot be saved. These consequences derive from the corporate policy of privatising seed supply and the drive towards multinational seed monopolies. (Special correspondent, ‘Farmers’ suicides nothing but genocide, says Vandana Shiva’, The Hindu, May 9, 2006)

So India’s ‘success’ has come at a huge social price. What about China?

“A Large Statistical Glitch”

A new World Bank study has revealed that China’s economy is considerably smaller than had been thought, perhaps by as much as 40 per cent. “What happened was a large statistical glitch,” reported the New York Times. But it’s a glitch that has huge repercussions:

“Suddenly the number of Chinese who live below the World Bank’s poverty line of a dollar a day jumped from about 100 million to 300 million.” That is the same size as the entire population of the United States. The new figures mean that the size of India’s economy, too, has probably been exaggerated until now. “And, by the way, global growth has very likely been slower than we thought.” (Eduardo Porter, ‘China shrinks’, New York Times, December 9, 2007).

Economist Martin Hart-Landsberg notes that China’s alleged success is “at the expense of economic problems elsewhere”:

“[W]hile investment rates are very high in China, they are low and falling in most of the rest of East Asia. Their economies have become increasingly dependent on exporting to China and to succeed they have been forced to keep wages low.” (Email, January 26, 2008)

China has largely failed to generate new jobs: an endemic feature of neoliberalism. Indeed, a 2004 study by Alliance Capital Management reported that manufacturing jobs are being eliminated faster in China than in any other country. Between 1995 and 2002, China lost more than 15 million factory jobs: 15 per cent of its total manufacturing workforce. (Jeremy Rifkin, ‘Return of a Conundrum’, The Guardian, March 2, 2004)

Even by the World Bank’s own analysis, China’s poor have been growing poorer as the country’s economy ‘booms.’ The real income of the poorest 10 per cent of China’s 1.3 billion people fell by 2.4 per cent in the two years to 2003. During this time the economy was growing by nearly 10 per cent a year. Over the same period, the income of China’s richest 10 per cent rose by more than 16 per cent. (Richard McGregor, ‘China’s poorest worse off after boom,’ Financial Times, November 21, 2006)

Tragically, studies of China’s health indicators show a slowdown or even reversal of trends. A report in 2005 “concluded that China’s rates of improvement in life expectancy were lower than those of East Asia and the Pacific region as a whole in every decade other than the 1960s, and fell below the world average in the 1990s. They observed a similar trend for infant mortality, noting that China’s advances were again outpaced by those of high income countries and other East Asian and Pacific states.” (Sanjay Reddy, “Death in China, Market Reforms and Health,” New Left Review, 45, May/June 2007, p. 62)

Hart-Landsberg warns that “past health gains from immunizations, water and sewer infrastructure, education, etc. may now be exhausted. And as marketization continues, the social infrastructure is being destroyed, with the consequence that problems are emerging for most Chinese. Social support/public health care system is not there and health care is now a market process. Many cannot afford it as they have to pay for access to it.” (Email, January 26, 2008)

On top of this working class misery, inequality between China’s rich and poor is appalling and is actually getting worse. The Asian Development Bank studied the degree of inequality, using the popular Gini coefficient, in 22 East Asian developing countries. It found that China had the second highest degree of inequality, trailing only Nepal (Asian Development Bank, ‘Inequality in Asia, Key Indicators 2007, Special Chapter Highlights’, p. 3; http://www.adb.org/statistics/).

China’s tragic transformation from one of the most equal, to one of the least equal, countries is even more striking if we switch our measure of inequality from the Gini coefficient to income ratios; in particular, the earnings of the top 20 per cent relative to the bottom 20 per cent of the population. Using this measure, China had by far the highest growth in inequality (Ibid., p. 7). Sadly, Hart-Landsberger warns that there is “every reason to believe that these [official] statistics strongly underestimate the degree of inequality.” (Email, January 26, 2008)

There are further ‘hidden’ costs to China’s rapid growth: rising pollution, destruction of ecosystems and the heightened threat of climate chaos. Future generations will bear the brunt of these ‘externalities.’ The Worldwatch Institute reported at the end of 2006 that China had slid down the annual Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI), a measure of a country’s climate protection efforts, due to its rising emissions of carbon dioxide. China ranked 29th out of 53 countries in 2006, dropping to 54th out of 56 in the 2007 update. (Hua Zhang, ‘China’s Climate Change Performance Worsening’, Worldwatch Institute, November 23, 2006; http://www.worldwatch.org/node/4748)

The history of neoliberal ‘reforms’ suggests things can only get worse.

Concluding Remarks

The dominant system of economics is unstable, inimical to social justice and lethally damaging to the environmental support systems on which we all depend. A major failure in professional journalism has been the refusal to analyse this; or even to report that real growth rates in the developed world have been declining since the 1970s. Instead, corporate-employed journalists and mainstream analysts frequently extol the alleged spectacular achievements of an ‘unparalleled’ rise in wealth.

We referred in Part One to the desperate attempts by governments to manipulate official statistics to hype the ‘success’ of global capitalism. Do commentators in the media really believe that a civilised society should tolerate an economic system so dependent on deception to maintain public ‘confidence’ in ‘free’ and ‘open’ markets?

The media’s omission of rational perspectives on the global economy is particularly galling in the case of the publicly-funded BBC, which professes a “commitment to impartiality.” This “commitment” supposedly means that “we strive to reflect a wide range of opinion and explore a range and conflict of views so that no significant strand of thought is knowingly unreflected or under represented.” (BBC, Editorial Guidelines, http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/edguide/impariality/... accessed January 23, 2008). As on so many other issues that we have examined in media alerts over the years, this is simply BBC rhetoric.

Meanwhile the threat of global economic recession, the horrific divisions between rich and poor, and worldwide climate chaos, threaten to engulf us all.
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