Commenting on the commentators commenting

There was a distinct sound of chomping in the air at last night's 'The Power of the Commentariat' event at the Royal Society of Arts. It was the sound of the press eating itself. A panel of commentators (Simon Jenkins, Suzanne Moore, Daniel Finkelstein et al) commenting on a report written by Editorial Intelligence and the Reuters Institute about the influence of commentators in front of an audience of... commentators.

At least it was - in some cases - self-conscious cannibalism. Simon Jenkins opened by calling the occasion 'impossibly narcissistic', and Suzanne Moore worried about the clash of egos. Still, one couldn't help thinking that, if you're trying to assess the power of media commentators, shouldn't you do it with an audience of those they are supposed to have power over?

Still, despite its incestuousness, the discussion was not without its talking points. Polly Toynbee - from the audience - asking (in all seriousness) how we create an objective measure of the influence of commentators. Simon Jenkins saying, in reference to online debate and comments by the public, "we've unleashed a monster". And Daniel Finkelstein claiming that Paddy Ashdown's proposed appointment as chief administrator in Afghanistan was vetoed by Hamid Karzai due to a column published in a British paper.

Yet no-one raised the central question of whether the 'power of the commentariat' was rising or falling. The assumption implicit in the panel, and within the accompanying pamphlet, is that it is rising. I'd take issue with this. In fact I'd argue the opposite.

If, as Peter Wilby suggested in the Media Guardian on Monday, the power of commentators now comes mainly from their role as the representative voice of their readers - rather than 'because their judgments were thought to have value in themselves' (as in the past) - then as their readers splinter and atomize, so does their influence.

This is borne out by the increasing tendency of commentators - even those previously calm and measured - to shriek and yell to get heard. As Timothy Garton Ash says in the EI/Reuters report "I think it is true that the pressure is to shout louder and louder". Take Anatole Kaletsky, the awfully smart political economist who writes for The Times. In a column about house prices and the economy last month Kaletsky told his readers they 'had better reach for the Book of Revelations to find an appropriate word for Britain's economic prospects in the next year or two'. Isn't there a teensy bit of hyperbole there?

The current position of commentators is, I think, anomalous. They have temporarily filled a gap in the body politic vacated by local and national politicians, unions, and other bodies that developed to represent the public. But commentators' right to that representation is tenuous to say the least. They were not voted in, they have no executive political power. All they have is the power of their pen. As their audiences drop and if they resort to hyperbole to cling onto those that remain, that power will, inevitably, fade.

Journalisted adds biographical links

Yet more useful features on journalisted...

As Comment is Free has shown, a brief bio about a journalist can be helpful when reading their opinion. It gives you a little more context and colour and - sometimes - gives you a steer on where the journalist is coming from.

I didn't know, for example, that Simon Jenkins has edited the Evening Standard as well as The Times. Nor was I aware that David Aaronovitch was the author of 'Paddling to Jerusalem: An Aquatic Tour of Our Small Country' (2000). And though I knew Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's articles from Baghdad I hadn't realised he also reported from behind the insurgent lines in Falluja.

This is why we've just added some biographical details to www.journalisted.com. When there is a Wikipedia page on a journalist or biographical details on Comment is Free we'll indicate that and provide a link through. It's only these two at the moment but as time goes on we'll keep adding more.

Oh, and we've had alot of people emailing us asking for contact details of journalists. For the record we don't keep contact details but if a journalist has helpfully provided their email at the bottom of one of their articles, journalisted will now automatically display that address on the journalist's page.

If you have any more suggestions for the site feel free to email and let me / us know (team@journalisted.com).

Breath of fresh air

I'm heading off, far from any access to a computer (well, darkest Devon actually) for a week, so won't be blogging again till 6th May

The Orwell Prize: From Ramallah on Foot

How do you explain presence? It's not something you can really rationalise. Suggest a scientific explanation and you find yourself muttering about the release of pheromones or the 'smell' of confidence.

Whatever it is, you know it when someone has it. And Raja Shehadeh has it. This is despite being a slight man - he can't be more than 5'4 and he hasn't an ounce of spare flesh on him. Nor does he have a powerful voice, quite the opposite. He speaks sparely, calmly, without inflammatory verbs or adjectives - much like his writing. Indeed this is how he tells the story of his 6 walks around the West Bank. 6 walks made over three decades that chart how the place where he lives has been concreted over, literally and metaphorically. Yet though he is small and understated, you can't help but be aware when he's in the room.

Shehadeh last night won the Orwell Prize for political writing for his book 'Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape' (the Media Standards Trust runs the Prize in partnership with the Orwell Trust and Political Quarterly). A book that received astonishingly little attention when it was published last autumn, despite (or because of) being one of the few attempts to discuss the politics of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank without resorting to wild exaggeration or screaming (Shehadeh and his wife Penny flew over from Ramallah specially to accept the award).

The prize for journalism went to the Independent's Johann Hari. A "young whippersnapper" journalist (in Clive James' words) who, Hari told us, still gets asked for I.D. at the off license. Hari won for five articles he wrote last year including one about a cruise he took with American neo-cons and another about France's secret war in the Central African Republic.

If you haven't read these then do. 'Ship of Fools' is funny and scary in equal measure. 'France's Secret War' is just scary. Hari goes to the middle of Africa, to a brutal, blood soaked country where the French still pursue a far from ethical foreign policy:

'This is a forgotten corner of a forgotten country. Birao lies and dies in the far north-east of the Central African Republic (CAR). CAR itself has a population of just 3.8 million, spread across a territory bigger than Britain's, landlocked at the exact geographical heart of Africa. It is the least-reported country on earth. Even the fact that 212,000 people have been driven out of their homes in this war doesn't register on the global radar. In Birao, I realise I am too close to the immediate horror to find the deeper explanations for this war. I only begin to uncover the origins of this story when I stumble across a very rare find in the CAR – an old man.'

Clive James, given a lifetime achievement award for writing and broadcasting, spoke so easily and fluently you could've sworn you'd just tuned into Radio 4. He has such a beguiling wit and humour that he can prod life into even the most humdrum political issues. Oh, and he knows a surprising amount about George Orwell too (which you can see from this interview he did with us before the prize).

You can hear Clive James' Point of View programmes (or read the scripts) at the Orwell Prize website, where you can also find quite a fun Orwell essay about how to make a cup of tea.

TV News & Current Affairs - the future's looking rosey... apparently

Agree with what Peter Bazalgette says or disagree (and much of it I wholeheartedly disagree with), but he has the knack of capturing a contemporary truth with a telling analogy.

Attacking the complacency of the big broadcasters at the Royal Television Society, Bazalgette said the current debate about topslicing the BBC's income "resembles the first class passengers in the bar of the Titanic arguing furiously over who should pay the bill" (from Owen Gibson).

That's what it felt like this morning as a series of senior people from TV news and current affairs lined up to say things are looking rosey, that they were very optimistic about the future of news and current affairs on TV, and that the Daily Express was a fine and upstanding newspaper (I made this last one up) - at the Voice of the Listener and Viewer's annual spring conference.

Huh? Wasn't it less than two weeks ago that the broadcasting regulator, OFCOM (an organisation not known for acting quickly) announced it was bringing its public service broadcasting review forward by two years because the current situation is not sustainable? At the same time didn't it say that by 2011, less than three years away, 'the costs of their public service broadcasting commitments may outweigh the benefits' for commercially funded public service broadcasters? And aren't the economic pressures on broadcast news already affecting local newsgathering and the editorial resources of ITN? (Hence Michael Grade's proposals to reduce ITV's local broadcasting commitments significantly).

Yet here were heads and editors from the channels themselves, including Simon Bucks (Associate Editor, Sky News), Robin Elias (Managing Editor, ITN News), Helen Boaden (Director of BBC News), Dorothy Byrne (Head of C4 News and Current Affairs), Clive Edwards (Executive Editor & Commissioning Editor, BBC), Mike Lewis (Editor, ITV Tonight), and Kevin Sutcliffe (Editor of C4's Dispatches), saying they were happy with the status quo and sanguine about the future.

We should applaud their bulldog spirit. And optimism is, of course, more comforting than prophecies of doom. But, as the editors congratulated themselves on the quality of their output and on how well they were serving their audiences, one couldn't help but hear the clinking of glasses as the iceberg hoves into view.

Spinning against spinning

Spin is a central part of every election. But mayoral contests are especially conducive to the machinations of political PRs. They are based - necessarily - around limited policy agendas. They are targeted at a highly concentrated geographical area. And they focus enormously on the personalities of the contestants.

That's is why it's so fascinating to watch Boris' progress.

Boris Johnson hired the infamous Lynton Crosby to run his campaign. He then supplemented Crosby's advice with the help of Inhouse PR. Their advice seems to have been - don't engage with the opposition, woo the media.

So we see Boris' face popping up in weekend magazine Q&As, in personal interviews in the FT, dropping in to have a chat with The Sun, and studiously avoiding face to face debates.

But, even more galling, Boris' PRs seem intent on convincing people that Ken Livingstone is the one doing the spinning. Inhouse PR last week fed a story to the Daily Mail that Ken Livingstone had a PR team that was 'three times the size of the PM's'. The Mail couldn't resist it and, though sourcing the story to the Tories, seems to have published the details almost verbatim (down to describing the additional '105 media staff to promote his transport and economic policies') - see Michael Lea's article here. Livingstone vehemently denies this figures but his protestations don't make the headlines (source - PR Week).

And the spin appears to be working. Indeed you always know when a spin operation is successful when things happen and you can't tell if they've been orchestrated or not. Did Harriet Harman issue an order that Labour politicians should not refer to Boris Johnson as Boris? She could have done but then again, sounds like good PR...

Economic hardship + media stoked resentment

Thanks in part to the downturn in the economy, this week's spat between the newspapers about whether the rise in immigration has led to a significant increase in crime, is more than an academic exercise.

It is one thing to demonise foreigners when economic conditions are good. It is something quite different to do so when they are bad (or going in that direction).

When times are bad, feelings of resentment towards other communities - particularly immigrants, are more likely to spill over into latent aggression. Tolerance of difference is likely to be lower, and anger is more likely to be directed at specific communities.

Which means that the current press battle is not just a fight over ACPO reports and statistics. An argument over whether to generalise about criminal behaviour on the basis of a small sample can quickly turn into an indictment of a whole ethnic or national group.

Take Harriet Sargeant's piece, for example, in yesterday's Daily Mail:

"Just under a third of those charged with a criminal offence in the capital last year were foreign. Jamaicans, Poles, Romanians and Lithuanians topped the list"

"Around a third of all sex offences and a half of all frauds in the London area are carried out by non-British citizens"

"Romanian gangs were behind an astonishing 80 to 85 per cent of cash machine crimes in Britain and responsible for a sharp rise in street violence, people-trafficking, prostitution, theft and fraud"

Notice that the first two of these examples are based only on London statistics (even though the main police complaints have come from outside London), and the last one, while starting specific, goes on to accuse Romanian gangs of virtually all rises in crime (despite the police report saying crime had actually fallen). But the impression one is left with, from these and other generalisations in Sargeant's piece, is that anyone Romanian is a criminal and you should at all costs steer clear of foreigners.

Of course migration leads to change and upheaval. Any movement of people is bound to. But to create a narrative of 'British good foreigner bad'; British do not commit crimes, foreigners do;' is not simply inaccurate and misleading but dangerous.

There have been alot of recent comparisons between our current economic situation and the Great Depression following 1929. Perhaps it would be worth comparing not just our economic but our social situation. Economic hardship in 1930s Europe, combined with social resentment, didn't just lead to unemployment and hunger, it led to violence and persecution, particularly of minorities.