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I do certainly hope that Guido Fawkes is correct that Lord Leveson’s atrocious proposal for statutory regulation of the press gets no-where, particularly now that it seems some of the supporters of Leveson now realise what dangerous folly it is. Of course, I am not getting my hopes up too much, but it would be a relatively rare good piece of news from UK politics to see this idea shot down, hopefully for a long time. Here are related thoughts of mine about the Leveson process.
March 5th, 2013 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
 From about 1990 until about 2005, I held speaker meetings at my home in London SW1, on the last Friday of each month. I began them because I was a libertarian and we wanted such meetings, and because, having acquired a settled home, I could. And I ended them because their main purpose for me had been to stir up writing for the Libertarian Alliance, which by 2005 I was no longer doing. When the internet arrived as a mass experience, available to anyone with a computer, a telephone line and a few quid a month to spare, around the year 2000, I ceased being an editor of paper writings for an organised group, and became instead a citizen of the blogosphere. Most especially, I became a regular contributor to Samizdata. Suddenly, the blogosphere was where the action was, where the big opportunity was, and it supplied more than enough food for thought and for writing. But now, my Last Friday of the Month meetings are to resume. Partly, I have discovered that their incidental benefits to me personally were more real than I had realised. Basically, I felt that, very gradually, I was losing touch with people who were in that vital social hinterland between friends and strangers. But there is also a more public – altruistic, you might say – reason for me to crank these meetings up again. In retrospect, I think we can now see that the arrival of blogging was a most unusual time for us libertarians. Libertarian notions had spread rapidly during the years just before the internet and then blogging arrived among us. But because the number of libertarian enthusiasts involved was small compared to the population at large, these ideas had found few outlets in the late twentieth century mass media, which meant that we libertarians reacted to blogging like drowning sailors encountering a lifeboat. Meanwhile, our statist adversaries, many of them comfortably ensconced in what were clearly now the old school media, could at first only grumble about how their seemingly God-given intellectual hegemony had been so insolently challenged. At first, these hegemons behaved as if enough bitching by them about the new media, in the printed pages and on the TV chat and comedy shows of the old media, would send us amateur upstarts back to the oblivion from which we had so rudely emerged. When that didn’t work, they tried linkless fulminating in their, at first, very clumsily electrified newspapers. Only when it became clear even to them that the “new media”, and the new voices enabled by them, were here to stay, that anyone could say to anyone whatever anyone wanted to say, did at least some of the old school journos and organs start seriously adapting. → Continue reading: A libertarian meeting at my home on the last Friday of this month January 4th, 2013 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
To me, one of the great mysteries of the American media is the New York Times op-ed page. How exactly is one recruited to write for it? Given that this Thomas Friedman op-ed generator managed to produce copy that makes at least as much sense as real Tom Friedman op-eds, when is the page going to be outsourced to computers? Also, when is someone going to create an automated David Brooks? This will surely be at least as funny. December 30th, 2012 | 46 comments - (Comments are closed)
December 28th, 2012 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Incoming from Simon Gibbs of Libertarian Home, flagging up a video he has recently put up at YouTube. It is a report of a UK Uncut demo, which includes interviews with UK Uncut people, and some arguments against their arguments. To me, the most important thing about this is that a libertarian has taken a video camera out there and actually done some reporting. And some editing. And he has put the resulting video out there for us all to look at and listen to. (It lasts just six minutes.) I strongly agree with Gibbs that listening carefully to the arguments of people like those who speak for UK Uncut is worthwhile. The idea that, because the minds of people saying things we don’t agree with are mostly made up and unalterable, arguing with them is pointless, is just plain wrong. Others listen to these arguments. If counter-arguments are put, this will have consequences. Insofar as we libertarians disagree with these UK Uncut arguments, our own arguments will get sharper, as arguments always do when you actually listen to what you are arguing against. Here, for instance, is what Gibbs said later, in his LH retro-report (where the video can also be viewed):
The video itself might have been (even) better, in that Gibbs might have put that point rather more eloquently to the people he was talking to than he actually did. But such nitpicking misses what is crucial here, which is that there are times when the important thing is just to start doing it. How many libertarian videos did you stick up on YouTube last week? More than zero? That’s infinity percent more than most of us have managed. Sometimes load/fire/take aim is the way to go. Simon Gibbs has now loaded and fired. His aim, pretty good to start with, will go from good to even better. As a piece of reportage, about what UK Uncut demos are like, this video is already excellent. In all the ways that truly matter this is a terrific piece of work, and I really hope Gibbs keeps at it. December 12th, 2012 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Incoming from Alex Singleton:
Singleton’s review is entitled “Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky and Herman isn’t just wrong: it is ludicrous”. Chomsky argues that multinational corporations have it all their own way in the mainstream media. Singleton argues otherwise:
Indeed. Having worked in the media himself, Alex Singleton now earns his living advising organisations, big and small, about how to handle the media. So, if you run a wealthy organisation, and you are facing some sort of crisis and consequently are liable to get a media beating, why not give Singleton a call? Maybe he could manufacture some consent for you. December 10th, 2012 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
For more coverage on The Onion’s Sexiest Man Alive 2012, Kim Jong-Un, please visit our friends at the People’s Daily in China, a proud Communist subsidiary of The Onion, Inc. Exemplary reportage, comrades. – The Onion adds an update to its story of November 14th. Mick Hartley explains. December 4th, 2012 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
I left the following comment (that I have expanded slightly) on Natalie’s earlier post, in response to reader Alisa’s surprise at my observation in passing that other British television stations are owned by the government, besides the BBC. I have written about the weird history of British television before, but it is so weird that it deserves a small repeat
In 1955, a second, advertising funded television network came into being called ITV. This was supposedly not owned by the government but had a highly complex ownership structure. Britain was divided into a large number of regions, and the local television station was franchised to a different private owner in each place. (In larger cities, different companies had the right to broadcast on different days of the week and later different times of day). Much programming was national, but a government body was set up to decide which programming was allowed to be broadcast on a national basis. Private companies’ licenses were for seven years only, after which the government held a review and could and sometimes did take their licenses away if they did not satisfy a government defined “quality” threshold. In essence, the private companies controlled the sale of advertising but did not control their own programming. This arrangement of two channels led to a peculiar piece of British English, in which people will talk about “switching to the other side” when they mean change the channel. TV was perceived as akin to an LP record, with the BBC on one side and ITV on another. In 1964, the BBC gained a second channel, which was funded by the licence fee just like the first. In 1982, Channel 4 (and the Welsh version S4C) were created. This channel was and is owned by the government, but is funded by advertising. The channel had an ambit not to cater to the largest audiences but to cater to audiences that were not adequately served (as defined by the government) by existing services. In order to not upset the existing ITV companies, the ITV companies got to sell the advertising for Channel 4, and if Channel 4’s advertising revenues exceeded a certain point as defined by (you guessed it) the government, the ITV companies and not Channel 4 kept the money. Thus Britain managed to find two largely different models by which advertising funded television networks could be created that did not compete with the BBC and which were controlled by the government. Rupert Murdoch launched Sky in 1989 (and almost sent himself bankrupt doing it), but it only really became successful in about 1994-5 when it got going with television rights to the English Premier League soccer. This was the first genuine competition that the BBC had ever faced. This, ultimately, is why the establishment in Britain hate Rupert Murdoch so much. He had the audacity to compete with the BBC and to succeed. They will never forgive him this. As a brief summary of British television since. A fifth analogue terrestrial channel (Channel 5) launched in 1995, after the relevant government bureaucracy expressed great reluctance to issue the licence (refusing to do so the first time it was theoretically put out to tender). This was the first genuinely national and privately owned terrestrial television network in the UK. The various mid 1990s ITV companies were gradually allowed more control over their own businesses and to merge with each other (and the finite life of franchises eventually went away too), a process that finished with the merger of Carlton and Granada in 2004. So as of 2004, Britain had two, privately owned, national television networks, but (for various reasons) neither of them had any money. In a normal market, you would have large, well funded commercial terrestrial television networks that could compete with other companies, but the companies in Britain were so emaciated (deliberately) by the history of regulation that the only real competitor to the BBC was Sky. A digital terrestrial platform (OnDigital, subsequently ITV digital) was launched in 1998. This featured various channels from ITV, Sky, and other commercial providers, but it went bust in 2002, due to a combination of restrictive regulation – Sky had initially been a co-owner of the consortium, but was forced out from it on supposed competition grounds after the consortium won the licence but before it started broadcasting, and was subsequently required to provide certain programming for it without being able to profit from it in a serious way – and (to be fair) terrible management. This was subsequently replaced by Freeview, which is run and controlled by the BBC, who were refused the licence to run digital terrestrial in 1998, but were allowed to do so in 2003 due to the failure of the previous private option, which was largely caused by BBC friendly regulators. So non-BBC television is either owned by Rupert Murdoch, owned by the government, or doesn’t have any capital. such as ITV, Channel 5, and various other organisations who broadcast on Freeview. On top of that, one must observe that S4C is a very weird beast, even in a world of weird beasts. It was set up as the “Welsh” television channel at the time that Channel 4 was introduced in the rest of the UK, and is funded by a mixture of advertising revenue, Welsh specific cultural subsidy, and indirectly via the BBC licence fee. (The BBC has an ambit to produce some Welsh language programming, which it does and then provides to S4C without charge). For many years Wales received this channel instead of the Britain wide Channel 4, whether the Welsh liked it or not. In these days of digital, all of Wales received both channels. And as for Murdoch, he became powerful because it took as ferocious a competitor as he to find a place within the ferociously anti-competition regulatory framework of the UK. He bet everything to do this and almost lost the bet – in the early 1990s his banks were at one point in the weeks away from calling in receivers. Having won a place inside that regulatory framework, he benefits from the way in which it repels further competitors. One can only console oneself with the thought that the BBC media establishment has the competitor that it deserves. One can also note that Sky’s customers pay a significantly larger sum in total subscription fees than do the BBCs licence fee holders. Also Sky’s subscribers pay their subscription fees voluntarily, whereas the BBC’s have the money extracted from them by force. (Plus of course, one must pay the BBC’s fee as well before one is allowed to buy Sky’s channels). I won’t comment on which of these things may be more moral. December 2nd, 2012 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
“And may I say that the exaggerated outrage over the “phone hacking” scandal is particularly hypocritical given the culture of pervasive surveillance of citizens that the British government — ahead even of our own — has established over the past decade or two. Those criticizing the press here are in no position to complain about invasions of privacy.” Glenn Reynolds weighs in on the the Leveson Report’s recommendation to regulate the UK media. Being a good American living in a land that has a First Amendment – not always well observed – Reynolds is distinctly unimpressed by Leveson. And we Brits should well remember how, if the UK media – or bits of it – are subjected to control, how this will lend some encouragement to authortarians the world over. (This is a fact that some members of the present government, such as William Hague, the foreign secretary, have grasped). December 2nd, 2012 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am not often found defending the BBC or its offshoots, but this is just out of order. The Welsh Government (for so the lads with the office on the fifth floor of Tŷ Hywel have styled themselves since May 2011 – there’s posh for you) demanded that the Welsh-language TV station S4C give the government a right of reply and refrain from ever repeating an episode of the soap opera Pobol y Cwm because a fictional character said the Welsh government “doesn’t have the backbone” to cull badgers. Quite rightly, S4C repeated the programme as scheduled. Like anyone else, the Welsh government has the right to complain if it believes that the BBC has failed in its statutory duty of impartiality as a tax-funded broadcaster, and that includes complaining about fiction. I did so to the point of exhaustion here. But what gave the Welsh Government the impression that it could try to impose impartiality right down to the level of re-writing the script for a particular actress in a soap opera? The Leveson Report, probably. December 1st, 2012 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Conservative MP Dominic Raab has some good sense on the case against regulating the press here. (Again, non-UK readers should be aware that they might not be able to read this in full). Excerpt:
Sometimes I overcome my squeamishness and read the comment sections on pieces like this. Here, below the article above, is an example from a guy called Keith Meldrum of why I sometimes wonder whether I should regard some of my fellow Brits with pity or contempt:
Well no doubt Mr Meldrum can assume what he likes, but I notice no horror here from him as to the fact that such a high percentage of the UK public are fine and dandy with taking this country back 300+ years in terms of freedom of the press. I guess he regards such ideas as “hopelessly out of date”, rather as how former UK prime minister Tony Blair, in a disgusting speech a few years ago, referred to a concern for such “19th Century values” as the presumption of innocence in criminal cases, habeas corpus, respect for privacy, and so on. And then there is this creature, by the name of “Celtictaff”:
In other words, because the MSM have behaved like berks at times – and they have – we won’t be missing much if the media are regulated like doctors or whatever. Great. This is classic dog-in-the-manger thinking: Other people don’t have liberty, so why should you? This is dangerously short-sighted and foolish. The proper response, of course, is to demand equality before the law and repeal the current restrictions of freedom of speech that now exist, by copying the US First Amendment and enforcing it. Instead, like bitter, sad people in despair, we lash out at a decent argument for free speech because of the imperfections of this world. It is a classic case of the best being the enemy of the good. We are not going to achieve a perfectly free society soon, but let’s surely fight to protect what liberties are left. And remember, as the playwright Tom Stoppard said some years ago, you can tell we have a free press in this country because of the amount of crap that gets printed. Inevitably, a lot of what we read and see in the press and TV will be mediocre at best, or sensationalist rubbish, at worst. But that no more invalidates media freedom than it would justify state regulation of party clothing on a Saturday night because most Britons have the style sense of a toad. The point is that a free press, unshackled by the chilling effects of regulation, has the potential to do good and useful things. Of course, when the UK media is so dominated in the terrestrial broadcasting sense by a state-financed broadcaster such as the BBC, any idea that we operate a full free market in media and broadcasting needs to be hedged with a bit of a qualification anyway. An organisation that ought to be regarded with suspicion is the National Union of Journalists, which says that regulation of the media is okay. The NUJ must surely know that the next, almost inevitable step would be state licencing of journalists, something that the NUJ, no doubt keen to enforce a closed shop on journalism, would see as bolstering its power. Finally, if the letter-writers to the DT and other places think the media needs to be regulated by the sort of people who have done such a splendid job regulating financial services, for example, then they might want to emigrate to a place more to their liking, such as North Korea. Or maybe they should choose France, which operates under a draconian privacy law as Raab points out. Given that many French people are fleeing France due to its high taxes, though, there may not be many takers for this idea, however delightful that country is in many other respects. November 28th, 2012 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Blogger Tony Newbery of Harmless Sky tried to use the Freedom of Information Act to get the BBC to reveal who were the people present at a certain seminar whose advice led the BBC to decide to adopt a pro-AGW stance. The BBC described this decisive seminar as being graced by ‘some of the best scientific experts’. Newbery had a suspicion that there were many fewer experts and many more activists than the BBC made out. One out of the few – and I think that means one out of the one – people present at the seminar with views outside the consensus, Richard D North, said as much. Presumably North either had kept no record of the exact attendance list or had an obligation to keep it confidential. The BBC really did not want to say. Representing himself, up against the BBC’s six lawyers, Newbery, not surprisingly, lost his case at the Information Tribunal. The fact that one of the lay judges had strong views against “deniers” probably didn’t help. Though he had started an appeal, the point became moot when Maurizio Morabito of Omnologos found the list anyway by clever use of the Wayback Machine. Watts Up With That, Bishop Hill, and Guido all have posts. Summary: Newbery was right. They’re all there; Greenpeace, the New Economics Foundation, the Gaian branch of the Church of England, someone from Greenpeace China, bods from Stop Climate Chaos and Tearfund, Jon Plowman, Head of Comedy… What? Head of Comedy? Yes. One of the aims of this series of seminars was to “take this coverage [international affairs, including climate change] out of the box of news and current affairs, so that the lives of people in the rest of the world, and the issues which affect them, become a regular feature of a much wider range of BBC programmes, for example dramas and features.” Note that even some of the sciency sounding names and job titles listed are not exactly the hardest of the hard. According to the comments at Bishop Hill among the list there is a Senior Lecturer from the OU focussing on environmentalism and politics, a Geography PhD with an interest in conservation and human rights and a lucky undergraduate from Harvard specialising in documentary film making. Fun fact: all the four big-name resignations from the BBC over the last few days (Peter Rippon, Steve Mitchell, Helen Boaden and George Enwistle) were present. Someone somewhere (I’ve lost the link, I’m afraid) mentioned the Private Eye occasional feature “Curse of Gnome”. November 13th, 2012 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
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