Exqueeze me?

This is truly bizarre.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/rod_liddle/article5950286.ece

DAILY VIGILANTE CELLAR HORROR EXCLUSIVE

At the trial yesterday of CELLAR MONSTER Josef Fritzl, the rape fiend hid his face behind COWERED behind a plastic ringbinder, doubtless to protect himself from the white-hot righteousness of the Daily Vigilante. Evidence of the DISGUSTING ABUSE which he inflicted on his daughter, Elisabeth, will be heard by the jury in segments of no longer than two hours, because of the HORRIFIC nature of the crimes. The media will be excluded from the hearing, in order to stop us getting all the juicy details, the bastards protect the vulnerable witness. 

One of the conditions of Elisabeth giving evidence was that she would never see her CELLAR MONSTER FIEND FATHER again, and so her evidence will be given via a video screen which is a real shame because it means we can’t shout questions at her in the street although one of our number did  break into the kitchen of the first safe home she’s ever had and take photos of her. Kudos, fellow newshound.

Anyways, CELLAR MONSTER RAPE FIEND FATHER Fritzl held his daughter in a TORTURE BASEMENT for twenty-four years, raping her more than 9000 TIMES and fathering seven children. Here are some pictures, which we fought like rats to obtain bring to you exclusively. Aren’t they horrible. Urgh. Just think about it. They should hang him, that’s what they should do. 

The Daily Vigilante will be in St Polten for the rest of this week, to bring you the latest titillating news as the entertainment trial progresses, so that you can condemn Fritzl whilst slavering over the salacious details.

Now see our comment and columnists!

DUNCAN SLAVER: Why the world must know everything, absolutely everything (P.3)

POLLY MOUTH-FROTH: Protect the victims – the children (with exclusive paparazzi pictures – P.4)

MICHAEL SELF-RIGHTEOUS: Serial rapists let everyone have a go on the moral high ground - even me (P.7)

CLARE BYGOTT: Why this would never have happened if Austria had capital punishment (P. 7)

THE FAD DOCTOR: Condemnation helps guard against cancer (P.8)

JAMES BADSTATS: Incest will rise as recession deepens (P.13)

The Amazing Multi-Purpose One Size Fits All Easy-To-Use RECESSION!

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***

Dear God, I’m getting tired of hearing the recession named as the root cause of everything from a rise in the popularity of narrow ties  to (unevidenced) increase in junk food consumption. In fact, I’m going to start keeping a record. Come Christmas 2009, we should have sufficient examples to hold a vote for Laziest And Most Ludicrous Use Of The Recession To Pass Off A Poorly-Researched Trend As News. For the record, it might be an idea to keep an eye on the freesheets, as the narrow ties tip-off came from the London Lite (which, in accordance with the rules about rusk in sausages, shouldn’t actually be allowed to call itself a ‘newspaper’).

And it doesn’t end there. Oh no. I might count myself as a left-wing free-thinking Indie reader, but even I have my limits. One more smugly doom-laden prediction about the effects of the recession like this, and I might start reading the bloody Telegraph. At least its free and easy use of stats and the opinion of anyone who can form a sentence and is near enough to the journalist to be audible could provide a laugh or two (although it might mean reading more poisonous bilge like this, so maybe not).

It’ll have to be The Times then, but only for David Aaronovitch. At least someone’s keeping their head.

The Fourth Estate

More eloquently than I’m capable of, here’s Anthony Sampson on the broadcasters (from Who Runs This Place? The Anatomy of Britain in the 21st Century):

‘They present themselves as detached observers, removed from political and commercial pressures. They have helped to transform the British picture of themselves over forty years, reflecting but also magnifying or distorting the changing social attitudes, tastes and fashions. But they are themselves in the midst of the marketplace, subject to their own obligations, ambitions and alliances. They are, says John Lloyd of  the Financial Times, ‘claiming to be passive narrators of reality while in fact being extraordinarily active in shaping that reality’ . . .  While journalists constantly call politicians to account, they are not themselves accountable to any electorate. They are, wrote Peter Mandelson [!] in 2002, ‘aggregating to themselves an unaccountable power that most people would think is inappropriate in a modern democracy’ . . . As the media become more dominant in setting the political agenda and providing the democratic debate, while other institutions become weaker, so the democratic question becomes more pressing: whom do they really speak for?’ (Sampson, A. 2004: 212 – 213).

The Secret Power Of The Newsreader

No, not me – what powers I have are confined to making a pretty good curry - I mean the real, Moira Stuart variety of newsreader.

Whilst reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point (Abacus, 2000), a hugely enjoyable pop-economics study of ’social epidemics’ (seriously, it’s great), I came across the following experiment*. OK, this is an old study, and I’m not a psychologist – the reference to the article is at the bottom of the page, so my clever psychologist readers (you know who you are), do please let me know if it looks dodgy. I do hope it isn’t, though, as it has a rather startling conclusion.

In 1984, a team of psychologists from Syracuse University recorded the three USA daily news shows for eight days in succession. The shows were ABC network, anchored by Peter Jennings; NBC, anchored by Tom Brokaw; and CBS, anchored by Dan Rather. All the shows were covering the presidential campaign between Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan.

The psychologists took the tapes of the news programmes and removed all references to the presidential candidates, breaking them down into 37 separate segments each about 2.5 seconds long. They then showed the segments, without audio, to a randomly selected group of people who did not know, and could not tell, what each of the three anchormen was talking about. The psychologists then asked them to rate the facial expression of the men, scoring the ‘emotional content’  of the expressions of each man on a 21-point scale, the lowest being ‘extremely negative’ and the highest ‘extremely positive’.

Dan Rather, of CBS, scored 10.46 (almost exactly neutral) when talking about Mondale, and 10.37 when he talked about Reagan. Brokaw, of NBC, scored 11.21 for Mondale and 11.50 for Reagan. But Peter Jennings of ABC was a different story. When talking about Mondale, he scored 13.38; when talking about Reagan, he scored a whopping 17.44. He was showing a massive bias in facial expression towards the Republican candidate.

There were, of course, controls built into the experiment to scrutinize other factors which might account for the difference in Jennings’ ratings. They showed that no, Jennings was not generally more expressive than the other two men: when the subjects were shown control segments of the newsreaders talking about ‘unequivocally happy or sad subjects’ (the examples stated are a breakthrough in treating a congenital disease, and Gandhi’s funeral) he scored the same as the others. Neither did he have a ‘happy’ expression on his face all the time: on the ‘happy’ control segments, he scored quite a lot lower than Rather and Brokaw.

But that’s not all. The psychologists then telephoned people in a number of cities around the US, people who regularly watched the evening news, and asked them who they voted for. In every case, those who watched ABC voted Reagan in far greater numbers than did those who watched CBS or NBC (for example, in Cleveland 75% of ABC viewers voted Reagan versus 61.9% of CBS or NBC viewers). And it didn’t seem to be because ABC viewers were more likely to be pro-Republican than the viewers of the other channels – on the basis of story selection, ABC was shown to be most Reagan-hostile of all US networks, so it’s unlikely it was a Republican favourite. The experiment was repeated four years later, in the presidential race between Dukakis and Bush, and once again Jennings showed significantly more positive facial expressions when referring to the Republican. Once again, also, viewers who watched ABC were more likely to have voted Bush. It looked like Jenning’s positive facial messages about the two winning candidates had actually influenced some people’s voting choices.

You might think that this kind of emotional expression of bias happens less in Britain, perhaps because the British often think of ourselves as less expressive and openly emotional than our neighbours across the Atlantic. But I’d been pondering this for a little while before I read of this experiment; in particular, the way in which newsreaders use tone of voice to indicate the expected (or ‘correct’) emotional response to a story. I couldn’t speculate on what the effect of such bias might be, in the way that the researchers above did when they measured the consequences of the anchorman’s subconscious endorsement of Reagan, but I am sure that it crops up regularly.

Take the news that Abu Qatada, radical Islamic preacher, was this week awarded £2,500 in compensation for being detained without trial in the UK on suspicion of terror charges (article here, don’t for God’s sake look at any of the Have Your Say responses). Now, here’s Harriet Cass on the Six O’Clock News, 19th February (warning: link goes straight to IPlayer). It’s quite difficult to explain this in writing, but there’s a definite feeling in her delivery of the headline; a difference in cadence and tone to the other headlines (for the record: a drop in UK tax revenue, the financial acrobatics of Alan Stanford, the Anna Politkovskaya murder trial, and prison officers’ rejection of a modernisation plan). If I had to describe it, I would call it a subtle but definite indication to outrage. It is a tone of voice which encodes the opinion that the awarding of compensation is ludicrous (note especially the delivery, and pasue after, the word ‘compensation’). Do you hear it too? I would, seriously, love to know. If you have a minute, give it a go.

*Mullen et al., ‘Newscasters’ facial expressions and voting behavior of viewers: can a smile elect a President?’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1986), vol. 51, pp.291-266

The opiate of the masses

Some time in early February Sharon Shoesmith, former director of Haringey Council Children’s Services, came into London to give an interview to Woman’s Hour. The interview could not be recorded live. She had received death threats. Her mother had been the victim of abusive house calls. She went in secretly, leaving enough time that she could leave London before the broadcast went out on the 7th February, to avoid reprisals. She did so because she wanted to tell her side of the story.

Haringey, as everybody now knows, is where the two worst cases of child cruelty in recent years have taken place. Victoria Climbie and the nameless Baby P were residents of the borough when their ‘carers’ abused them so badly that they died. Both were on the Child Protection Register. Ms. Shoesmith, as the person at the top, was sacked after the death of Baby P, and widely vilified in the tabloid and broadsheet press.

How much Woman’s Hour (or rather Jenni Murray) made of this golden opportunity can be ascertained from Jenni’s first question:

‘How concerned were you, particularly after Climbie had happened in Haringey, about your lack of social work experience, because it was a borough that already had a reputation for having had difficulty?’

Or how about:

‘So you were devastated [at the death of the child], and yet, in the media briefing afterwards . . . you didn’t apologise.’

Bias aficionados will be able to plot the direction of the rest of the interview from here. It was vastly disappointing, rehashing the blame-game howls of the red-tops with depressing predictability (and if there’s one thing all tabloids are sure of, it’s that only rolling heads will satisfy).

I don’t know what I think about Sharon Shoesmith’s role in the Baby P tragedy. That’s why I was listening to Woman’s Hour – in the hope of getting some form of intelligent discussion. Sharon seemed to be under the same impression: ‘The thing with this story, Jenni, is that it’s quite complex. And what has happened up to now is, it hasn’t been possible for us to tell what has happened to this little boy. There were so many stories in the press, and what I saw in today’s interview was an opportunity to say a little bit, in more detail, about what happened to the child.’ 

Unfortunately, it was not to be.

But this is relatively old hat – and BBC listeners are all over it like a rash. It’s Feedback I really want to talk about. Clearly there are a number of impartiality fans out there, because enough people wrote or rang in to criticise Jenni’s interview technique (Mary Rigby, I think we could be friends) that the issue made it onto the programme. Feedback decided to talk to Jill Burridge, editor of Woman’s Hour. Roger Bolton, God bless him, proposed that the interview had been a ‘dialogue of the deaf’. Was Jill happy with the interview?

‘Yes I was. Because Jenni was asking the questions that we felt listeners would want to know the answers to.’

Apologies for putting that in bold, but I still can’t quite get over it. Deep breath.

How do you know, Ms. Burridge, what questions I want to know the answer to? Or that anyone else wants to know the answer to? Were they even questions? A lot of them sounded like attacks to me.

Come on, admit it. Did you just go with the prevailing media wind? Did you assume that the questions everyone wanted answered were the ones which a large proportion of people had already been encouraged to ask by a hostile press? My goodness, but this is getting a bit complicated. Are we, in fact, saying that you, a member of the media, decided to ask Ms. Shoesmith questions which you assumed people wanted answered because those were the questions which kept coming up in the press campaign against her which was all started by people in your own industry?

Maybe you should all get together and sort it out. It would certainly make the world a more civilised place. But thank you, anyway, for opening my eyes. This is what’s going on behind the scenes. This is why so many interviews are fights, so many current affairs programmes are propaganda, so much speculation is passed off as news. Why bother with the real thing when you can give people what you think they want?

Apologies all . . .

. . . I haven’t forgotten about you. I’ll be updating tomorrow, when I’ll hopefully bring you something juicy about Sharon Shoesmith, Woman’s Hour and the art of the hostile interview. Unless something else catches my eye.

See you soon!

The Good Stuff

I’m going to come clean – I’m in a very, very good mood today. The sun is shining, the snow is gone, and the proto-vandals who’ve spent the last week throwing snowballs at moving vehicles on the road outside will soon be safely incarcerated in school again. Much as I love getting cross, and can’t actually help it a lot of the time (particularly when exposed to Noel Edmonds, Satan in – well – Satan’s form), I don’t think I can manage it today. So I’m going to go on a slight digression and tell you about something good: last night’s Archive Hour on Radio 4.

Entitled ‘The Book Burners’, it was a documentary about the publication of, and subsequent reaction to, The Satanic Verses. The programme-makers interviewed a number of people who had been present at the iconic burning of the volume, talking about why they were at the protest, how they had felt about it, how it had affected their view of themselves, their ethnic identity, their country and their religion. It was fantastic. It was so good that I stood in the kitchen for 15 minutes after I’d finished cooking, so that I wouldn’t miss anything. 

This was a controversial subject, involving the imposition of a death sentence on a British national by the Islamic fundamentalist leader of Iran, and there wasn’t a sniff of hysteria. Not the slightest hint of bias. Not even the smallest sign of leading questions, dodgy stats or simplistic soundbites. The story told itself. The documentary team facilitated it.

This is what I love about the BBC. It’s what they do best, and especially on Radio 4, where they’re under less critical pressure. I’m extremely fond of Radio 4, and will even forgive it Count Arthur Strong and the Afternoon Play. But if they can do this sort of thing in a documentary, why can’t they do it in the news programmes? The world is complicated, but something like The Archive Hour shows us that we don’t need it simplifying into reductionist, bite-sized chunks; more than that, it showed why it’s irresponsible to do so. When you see how unpredictable, how multifaceted is anything that involves human beings, you see how dangerous it is to boil down an issue into an inflexible formula. That’s what fundamentalism is.

Sure, the news programmes don’t have a whole hour for one issue. Nor do they have the luxury of a good few years between them and the heat of controversy. But is it too much to ask that complexity is acknowledged? That uncertainty should be nothing to be ashamed of? If we were so good at accurately judging knotty situations that we could understand them from a few simple facts and then apply a nice, short, accurate sticky label to them, we’d be living in a rather more peaceful world. I don’t understand how my toaster works, let alone whether the recession will cause a crimewave, or how many more jobs will go. That’s not to say people shouldn’t investigate these things, just that they should be investigated and reported in a way that respects their complexity, and with a certain amount of humility.

To which end I will say now: I might be wrong about this. Now excuse me, I’m off to take the toaster apart.

Have Your Say

I wasn’t intending to write about this today. There I was, wandering happily through the links of the BBC website, trawling for the usual suspects, when what should happen to leap out at me but this? Yes, we’re back on crime again. But my God - could this be balanced coverage?

Oh, but don’t be fooled. Read it. Now read the question at the bottom.

‘Have you been a victim of a burglary? Do you think your home is safe? Send us your stories using the form below’.

Now ask yourself what kind of responses that question selects for.

It didn’t select for mine. Shortly, it should appear on ‘Have Your Say’, the home of reasoned debate. I invite you to join me. How wonderful it would be if all the people who weren’t burgled July-September last year (99.7% of households, remember), or even the whole year (should be about 98.8%)  wrote in with ‘our stories’.

‘No. Everything’s fine.’

‘I went away for the whole of the summer, and when I came back everything was fine!’

‘I own a small business, and last year it wasn’t burgled once.’

Imagine it. A tiny reality revolution. What a beautiful thing.

 

Update:

We might have Had Our Say, but the BBC doesn’t appear to have published any comments on that story on their website. Until next time, HYS . . .

Rubbish

Ah, the Daily Telegraph again. Hello, old friend. It’s beginning to seem like I might have it in for you, but I promise we can be bessie mates just as soon as you stop trying to present me with conjecture dressed up as fact. Yes, I’m talking about Wednesday. You remember. The day when you ran the story ‘Recycling ‘could be adding to global warming” on your front page.

We need to talk.

Firstly, maybe you should consider the substance of your ’story’. I’ve boiled it down for you. Here we go:

‘Peter Jones, former director of waste firm Biffa and ‘advisor’ [unspecified nature] to environment ministers [unspecified] and Boris Johnson, thinks that collecting, transporting and processing recyclable waste might be producing more greenhouse gases than it saves. He thinks we should just burn it to generate electricity.’ 

There was some general griping about bins in the second half, but I understand that you, along with many tabloids, have a strange obsession with bins and share a conviction that once-a-fortnight bin collections, being penalised for throwing out irresponsible amounts of rubbish and having to sort your waste into separate containers are the demands of a harsh and oppressive state, so we’ll pass over that one. Everyone has their quirks.

The rest of the story is a bit harder to pass over.

Let me say now that there are a couple of good points in there – the dumping of recyclable waste in landfill is a bad thing, as it transporting it to China because Britain doesn’t have sufficient processing facilities. Collection practices which make recyclable waste hard or impossible to sort are also bad. Waste disposal firms having to stockpile paper, metals and plastics because they are unable to sell it on owing to a collapse in the market value of recyclable waste is not good news.

However, this leads me to ask whether the Government shouldn’t be upgrading and building new recycling facilities and making sure collections are carried out effectively. This would cost money, but so, I presume, would upgrading and creating waste-burning power plants to deal with the huge increase in the volume of rubbish. I’m not claiming any expertise, just thinking aloud. In the same vein, recycling isn’t only about reducing greenhouse gases. Recycling also helps reduce the amount of materials we have to extract from an already-ravaged planet, some of which are finite resources. Burn them and we don’t get them back again. It’s not a long-term solution.

Now, here’s what troubles me: I think it’s extremely likely that Mr Jones knows that as well, because he has an OBE for services to the environment. The plot thickens. Could it be that you selected the bits you fancied from his statement, and presented them in a biased light? We could start with the fact that Mr. Jones didn’t actually say he thought recycling was adding to global warming; he said he thought there was a need for review of the system to make sure that wasn’t happening. Add that to the bin-griping and the sentence: ‘Mr Jones’s comments will add to the suspicion of many householders that the Government’s recycling strategy is in chaos’, and it looks to me a bit like you want to tell your readers that recycling is adding to global warming, whatever the evidence. 

You might want to because ‘Man Bites Dog’ is an irresistable story. You might want to because your reputation as the ‘Torygraph’ means that you’re naturally invested in criticising the Government. But it also seems a bit like you might want to because you think this whole sorting-things-into-separate-bins business is a hassle, unnecessary, that it whiffs of the ‘nanny state’ and left-wing ideals. If you were neutral on the issue, why did you run this non-story on the front page, with that headline? And I’m sorry to say that you totally gave yourself away with this little contribution from Bryony Gordon (new entrant for 2009’s Chris Grayling Hyperbole Awards).

Now let me tell you that the reason this came to my attention is that the boss of a friend of mine, a man that she’s been trying to persuade to recycle for years, brought a copy of this story into her office and left it on her desk, with ‘Knew it!’ written on it. How many people bought a copy that day? How many of them might have seen it as a vindication of their choice not to recycle, despite the fact that unless the waste-burning plan is put into action, it’s still better than sending everything to landfill?

Oh, well done, Telegraph. Well done indeed, but on reflection, don’t bother calling me. I don’t think we’re going to get through this one.