media – Page 4 – Anomaly UK

Flat Earth News

I have just read Flat Earth News, by Nick Davies.

It’s an excellent account of the forces distorting the news as reported by mainstream newspapers and television. He covers the ideological biases of owners and journalists, and the needs of both owners and journalists to ingratiate themselves with the politically powerful. However, the biggest distortion of all is the fact that finding out the truth takes time and resources, while printing whatever lands in your inbox is quick and cheap. Under commercial pressures, even the most respectable media sources rely heavily on wire services and press releases, while the wire services themselves mostly pass on the news that is given to them.

What is frustrating about the book is that Davies doesn’t look at the demand side. His thesis is that prior to the 1980s, newspapers and journalists sought out stories and checked them, out of professional pride, and that that diligence was squeezed out of the system under commercial competitive pressure from the 1980s onwards. He seems to assume that the media could have got away with that “churnalism” at any time, but chose in the good old days to assume higher standards.

What I wonder is whether there used to be pressure from customers to do proper journalism, and only in the last 20-30 years has it become profitable to print junk instead, due to changes in the audience. Basically, I would like to answer the following questions:

Do readers care whether what they read is true?

Do they believe that what they read is true?

My guess, and it’s just a guess, is that journalism was originally targeted at a market of people who really wanted the truth, though it may have supplied other people as a by-product. Today the people who need the truth have other ways of getting it, and the key newspaper audience simply doesn’t care whether the stories they read are true or not.

Another theory would be that a textbook Market for Lemons has developed – readers want the truth, and know that they’re not getting it, but they don’t have any way of getting it. A newspaper that spent more money to do proper journalism would cost more, but the consumer wouldn’t be able to tell that it was really any better, and so the expensive option would lose in the marketplace. I don’t think this is likely, because I think it would be fairly straightforward to establish a reputation for avoiding the kinds of bad journalism that Davies describes.

A third theory is that proper journalism has suffered from Baumol’s cost disease, and become too expensive. The early-20th century journalist came from the literate lower-middle class, and provided human judgement at low cost. Human judgement has become the critical component in the modern economy, and a journalist’s time is now too expensive for him to be sent around the country sniffing for interesting stories.

Nick Davies is a leftist, but I don’t think the book suffers from that. He tries hard to be fair, and his bias comes through mostly in his examples – it is much easier to spot abuses by one’s political opponents. However, one of the key results of the process he describes is that when there is controversy, both sides will manipulate the media in the ways that have become so easy, and so the reader of his book can easily spot the examples on the other side that he has missed. His argument includes the fact that the ideological bias of media owners, while still significant, is milder than in earlier eras.

Recommended.

Politics is a spectator sport

More evidence for my claim that the main value of politics to ordinary people is as a spectator sport:

The Monkey Cage writes:

the actual audience for news wants to hear more about strategy. Why? Probably because they already know what candidate or, in this case, policy they favor — at least in broad terms (e.g., yea or nay on health care reform) — and so they want to know whether their preferred policy is “winning.” That’s what strategy coverage provides them.

via TGGP

(By the way, I’ve been quiet lately because I’m working on something that will revolutionalise the state of the art of zombie population modelling).

Celebrity and Politics

So, Esther Rantzen has confirmed that she will by standing at the next election, in spite of my entreaties.

I do not think she will win, but she may be a harbinger of what is to come. I have suspected for a while that media figures are capable of moving into politics very successfully, through the more normal mechanism of joining major parties rather than running as independents. In the long run, the question is not so much whether celebrities will be able to win seats in parliament, as why they would want to.

It is necessary to understand what an MP is. Technically, MPs are legislators, who vote in parliament on bills and motions. However, that is now a ceremonial role, with no effect on the government or the country. The position of MP is an apprenticeship to the ministers or shadow ministers. In the same way that apprentice footballers have the irrelevant job of cleaning boots to keep them in their place and instill obedience, MPs have the irrelevant job of turning up for votes in accordance with the whips’ orders. (They also have the even more irrelevant job of acting as a kind of Citizens’ Advice Bureau for their constituents, but I’m not sure whether that’s to give them practice running an office, or for some other nefarious end.)

Therefore being an MP is, in itself, no more desirable a prize than being a football club boot-cleaner. OK, it is rather better paid, but that’s not much of a pull for the average TV star. It doesn’t even provide much publicity – does anyone remember hearing much about, say, Gyles Brandreth during his time in the House?The position of MP is only meaningful as a step towards the front bench, just as a football apprentice is only in it for his chance at the first team.

The advantage that a celebrity has is recognition. But while recognition is an advantage while rising in a political career, it is a handicap as the top approaches. When it comes to a party leadership contest, the most important factor is actual power – Gordon Brown was able to succeed Blair because he was already powerful. But after that the biggest advantage is not being disliked. In a leader-of-the-opposition contest, the ideal is for the general public not to know anything about you at all. That worked for Cameron, Duncan-Smith, Hague, and Blair. (Howard was an exception, but he was never intended or expected to win a general election).

Therefore, if a soap star or newsreader wanted to succeed in politics, they could probably get selected as a candidate, probably get into parliament, would probably be able to rise quite rapidly to a junior government role – PPS, or Minister of State, but would find it quite difficult to reach a major cabinet position, because of all the people who didn’t like them.

We see glimmers of the future in Brown’s elevation of Alan Sugar. Not being an MP, Sugar is out of the main political career path, but if his entrance had been a bit more planned he could have got a seat in the Commons and been better situated for a less temporary role. He would have gained his current position in his first parliament, but the odds would not be in his favour for further promotions.

The celebrities with the greatest advantage would be those whose public roles gave them credibility on political issues; the interviewers, newsreaders, and pundits. Robert Peston, say. Or more lightweight figures like Nicky Campbell, or Rantzen twenty years ago rather than now.

I suspect the step has been slowed by the reluctance of party grandees to admit potential rivals with such inbuilt advantages. In today’s environment, however, the potential candidate only needs to announce his intention, and the onus is on the party to explain why they are refusing him.

The key question, as I said, is whether celebrities would want to abandon their media careers for politics. Most wouldn’t, at the moment. We have seen that those that did, like Martin Bell and Robert Kilroy-Silk, set their expectations too high.

But once a few more oddities have blazed the path, the game changes, because ambitious young things with eyes on the greasy pole will see media as the career path to the cabinet – not in one explosive burst but by working through the ranks just a bit quicker than the normal rate. Rather than hanging around the think tanks and party research offices, they’ll be driving with all their ambition into the local TV studios, working the system with whatever influence they have at their disposal to get them the foothold of popular visibility, so that they can then switch to party politics with a head start over their anonymous rivals. Rising stars will be guided by their political mentors through tame TV or newspaper departments. The end result is that the two sectors just merge into one. Media figures will expand their reach from the political areas they currently own (such as the London Mayoralty) to those which are currently held against them by the party machines. Shifts from media to politics and back, like Kilroy-Silk’s will become commonplace.

What’s most important is not the effect on politics, but the effect on media. That is always the way – politics stays the same, but what it touches gets polluted. The Robert Pestons and Jeremy Paxmans (Paxmen?) of the future will not be doing their jobs because that is what they set out to do – they will be doing their jobs to get the public reputation that will put them in high government office. The detrimental effect on the media will be equivalent to the detrimental effect on Parliament of making an MP job nothing more than a stepping-stone. The lines have been blurring for some time.

Dying Government

In the political news of the last few weeks – the minister’s husband’s porn, the dirty tricks website, the home-video address to the nation – we have the stereotypical last days of a failing government.

What causes this syndrome? It could be an effect of desperation on the part of the government; knowing the odds are against them anyway, they try long shots to get any chance of winning. Most or all of the long shots backfire, but they don’t have that much to loose.

Another possibility is the media attitude. The media is often accused of bias, but I have always felt they are more biased towards what seems like a good story than to any political position. Part of what makes a good story is a familiar overriding narrative – history may be one damned thing after another, but there’s no satisfaction in reporting that. The tragedy of a dying government is a good strong theme you can fit events into, so events that fit the theme are more likely to be reported.

I don’t think either of these is the real reason, plausible as they are. The real glue that keeps government – particularly the party-political part of government – together is loyalty founded on the expectation of future favours. A government without a realistic chance of still being in power in twelve months just doesn’t have any leverage to keep people in line. The result is petty treason: leaks, frauds, and personal vendettas overwhelm the overall direction.

This applies also to the press. As has been evidenced again by the McBride saga, the lobby journalists are very much insiders in the system. They are as keen to qualify for future favours as any backbench M.P. And, like the backbenchers, when there is no expectation of future favours (or punishments), they find themselves free to report what a year previously they would have covered up or at least spun in a less damaging way.

My reason for bringing this up is that it is impossible to understand our system of government, with its millions of employees, contractors and valueless activity, without understanding that patronage is the gravity that shapes it. Almost every political question, whatever the theories and ideals that seem to impinge on it, is eventually decided on the basis of who gets the loot – either in economic value or in more influence, meaning more opportunity to channel loot to others and thereby control them.

To quote one of my favourite lines of Mencius Moldbug’s:

If seventeen officials need to provide signoff for you to repaint the fence in your front yard, this is not because George W. Bush, El Maximo Jefe, was so concerned about the toxicity of red paint that he wants to make seventeen-times-sure that no wandering fruit flies are spattered with the nefarious chemical. It is because a lot of people have succeeded in making work for themselves, and that work has been spread wide and well.

Right-wing Blogosphere?

We’re told the ultimate cause of the McBride fiasco was that the Labour party feels threatened by the existence of “right-wing” blogs, and is trying to redress the balance.

I don’t really think there is much of an imbalance to correct. The Conservative party has Iain Dale and Tim Montgomerie, but that’s about it. The important blogs are the ones that fill gaps left by more prominent outlets. Guido is right-wing, but he isn’t Tory. The effect of a Labour party blog would be negligible compared to, say, www.guardian.co.uk , and the Tory blogs are insignficant compared to www.telegraph.co.uk .

Now it’s true that among political groups unrepresented by the mainstream, Libertarians are much better represented than, say, Marxists or nationalists. Given the tendency of the centre-left to label even Devil’s Kitchen as “Tory”, what looks like a Tory bias is mostly a Libertarian bias.

Why are Libertarians better represented than other non-mainstream groups? One answer is that technologists are disproportionately libertarian, and libertarians are very disproportionately technologists. That has always been true – I came to libertarianism via Usenet, and those people now all have blogs. That is less convincing as a reason than it used to be, as the technological bar to clear to get a blog presence is now negligible, compared to when Samizdata and Instapundit started up. There could still be momentum from that early lead, but I think it’s small.

I think it’s more that they are just closer to the mainstream. Also they have fewer existing organisations – Marxists and nationalists have the SWP and the BNP as long-standing centres to organise around.

Consistent with this, the Liberal Democrats seem to me to be strongly represented in blogs. That is to be expected, as they are mainstream but do not have the resources of the two main parties, particularly in terms of friendly press outlets.

Parallels with the US are confusing. The big difference there is that they do not have nearly as strong a right-wing sector of the mainstream media as Britain has with the Telegraph, Mail, Sun etc. You also don’t see monolithic party machines as we have here – their parties are fragmented geographically, and at the end of the day answerable to Primary elections). So when you look at the US, you see a strong right-wing presence which is very much mainstream Republican. Here we see a strong sort-of-right-wing blogosphere, which consists in fact of dissidents from the Conservative party. At a glance, there seems to be an equivalence.

At the end of the day, the Labour party doesn’t need Labour List, Red Rag or anything like them. Their blog presence will flop not because they’re doing it badly, but because it’s redundant. They have the Guardian and the BBC.

Sam Mason

The Sam Mason episode is quite amusing.

There’s a strange anomaly in our laws regarding thoughtcrime as they stand today – it’s illegal for an employer to choose an employee on the basis of race, but it’s quite legal for a consumer to choose a supplier on the basis of race. We are not followed around and audited on the colour of the tradesmen we hire or the shopkeepers we buy from. I would think any such laws are probably still ten years off.

Of course, the main reason why it is still legal is simply the difficulty of detecting it. Once we have a national ID database, and requirements to provide ID when buying most goods (not just obviously terrorist ones, like phones), such audits will become much more practical.

But even today, it is possible, if one is clumsy enough, to leave a paper trail. “We should advise you that this call may be monitored for training purposes, or for the purpose of ratting you out to your employer for political incorrectness, if you’re stupid enough to boast about who your employer is in a misplaced attempt to impress us”

The other amusing aspect is that it was all about not alarming the poor little girl. When it comes to protecting our children from any appearance of a threat, mere facts are not, as a general rule, any obstacle. Be it emissions from wifi routers, artificial food colourings, or toys that could possibly be violently dismantled in such a manner as to create small parts, no evidence beyond simple prejudice is ever required to justify keeping children away from such peril. But not all irrational prejudices are good irrational prejudices.

Value of politicians

Here’s a little factoid that I think is relevant to my politics as entertainment theme:

Three employees of our government, and their approximate salaries:

Gordon Brown, Prime Minister: £200,000

Mark Thomson, Director-General of the BBC: £816,000

Jonathan Ross, Entertainer: £6,000,000

Where is the power really in our system of government? Jonathan Ross’s earning power is the result of a “tournament” effect of the star system in entertainment, so maybe we should leave that out. But what does it mean that the manager of the BBC is worth four times as much as the PM?

Possibly he is better qualified? Wikipedia suggests not. (Brown has a PhD in history from the university of Edinburgh). Hmm, Gordon Brown took a doctorate in history and I never knew. Is there some significance in the lack of public attention given (by me, at least) to that? Isn’t it really quite important? Does the fact that the thesis was on a bit of the history of the Labour party make it less important?

Back to the pay, can we explain it away by saying that the mechanics of the different roles means that the director of the BBC needs to have special expertise, whereas the PM doesn’t, instead having (highly paid) civil servants to supply the technical expertise?

OK, perhaps this isn’t a big deal. Being Prime Minister certainly has perks beyond the salary. But the fact that taxpayers pay 30 times as much for Jonathan Ross than we do for a Prime Minister at least takes some of the ridicule away from my theory that politics provides more value as entertainment than as government.

Entertainment and Policy

Boris Johnson’s win is consistent with my theory that politics is a branch of the entertainment industry. Boris won because people liked him on TV, not because they had any confidence he’d do a good job. In fact, it simply doesn’t matter whether he does a good job or not.

Whatever the budget of the GLA, the actual amount of cash he can shift from one activity to another over the next four years is probably on the order of only a few millions. He can change a few buses, approve a few “don’t knife each other, there’s good chaps” posters, approve or deny one or two large buildings.

On the other hand, he will be on television a lot, and get a lot more attention, because now he’s (drum roll) In Government. And if you treat each of his appearances as a light entertainment programme, value it as equivalent to an equally entertaining non-political celebrity appearance, and multiply up the number of such appearances over the four years, his entertainment value to the voters easily outweighs whatever costs might be imposed on the voters if he is a Bad Mayor in a policy sense.

And in fact the predictable cost of Boris vs Ken is near enough zero. Who knows, Boris might even be better. While the predictable difference in entertainment value is huge – not only is Boris more entertaining than Ken on a level playing field, but more importantly the Ken show has run for eight years and we’ve seen all the best bits.

My point is that (a) Boris has been elected because he’s funny and people are bored of Ken, and (b) This is, with apologies to Bryan Caplan, rational voting.

And of course, it is nothing new: Ken was elected in 2000 for just the same good reason.

BBC drops UKIP from election results

Update – they’ve corrected the omission now. I did notify them of the error directly as well as ranting here.

The London Elects website shows results by first preference votes for 10 candidates. The BBC website shows 9 candidates: Gerald Batten, who came 7th for UKIP with 22,422 votes is missing. The Left List, English Democrat and Independent that polled fewer votes are shown in 7th, 8th and 9th.

It’s rather reminiscent of the US Republican primaries, where Ron Paul was routinely omitted from media publications of results, even while lower-polling rivals like Giuliani were included.

The BNP had to be covered, because they were discussed before the election and people would be looking to see what they got, but the fact that UKIP on zero publicity had outpolled the hard left was a fact that could be safely kept from public view.

London mayor election results (BBC)

Boris Johnson (Tory): 1,043,761

Ken Livingstone (Lab): 893,877

Brian Paddick (Lib Dem): 236,685

Sian Berry, (Green): 77,374

Richard Barnbrook (BNP): 69,710

Alan Craig, (Christian Choice): 39,249

Lindsey German (Left List): 16,796

Matt O’Connor, (Eng Democrats): 10,695

Winston McKenzie (Ind): 5,389

London mayor election results (London Elects)

Results by candidate for 2008

Candidate name	Party	1st choice votes	1st choice %	2nd choice %
Boris Johnson	Conservative Party	1,043,761	42.48%	0.00%
Ken Livingstone	The Labour Party	893,877	36.38%	0.00%
Brian Paddick	Liberal Democrats	236,685	9.63%	0.00%
Siân Berry	Green Party	77,374	3.15%	0.00%
Richard Barnbrook	British National Party	69,710	2.84%	0.00%
Alan Craig	Christian Peoples Alliance and Christian Party	39,249	1.60%	0.00%
Gerard Batten	UK Independence Party	22,422	0.91%	0.00%
Lindsey German	Left List	16,796	0.68%	0.00%
Matt O’Connor	English Democrats	10,695	0.44%	0.00%
Winston McKenzie	Independent	5,389	0.22%	0.00%

Democracy and Entertainment

Yesterday’s bit on the greater resources of television current affairs departments compared with political parties was more of a question than an answer. I’ll try to work out what it means.

There are a few caveats:

The money that is spent on news programming includes things like studios and cameras as well as developing the content to put on them.
MPs get paid by the government, which is extra resource to the parties not counted in their budgets.
The civil service plays a role in developing policies for the ruling party.
Political parties have an incentive to be vague about policy, whereas media organisations can afford to be more specific and clearer – they gain more by being provocative than by being right.

Nonetheless, I still think that Channel 4’s policy on higher education is the product of more research and investment than went into the Labour party’s. MPs are paid to be MPs, not to develop policy, and the civil service has its own goals and constraints and is not under the control of the Labour party.

What does this mean?

First, I should be less sceptical than I have been about the “power of the media”. I have always felt that, since the media is constrained to doing what gets it audience, its independent influence on policy is small. However, if what it needs to do is to provide some alternative policy with which to challenge politicians, but it has relative freedom to choose which alternative to develop, then its independent influence is greater than I thought.

Next, why is it the case that we (as a society) invest more in reporting politics than we do in politics itself. Either something is seriously screwy, or we value politics as entertainment more than as a way of controlling government. Or both.

I think it’s quite clear that the population does treat politics mostly as entertainment. The resemblance between Question Time and Never Mind the Buzzcocks is too close to ignore. If someone arrived from another planet and had to work out which of the two concerns how the country is governed, I think they might find it tricky. (I think they get similar numbers of viewers). There are even hybrids like Have I Got News For You to make it more difficult still.

Further, I think voters are correct to see politics primarily as entertainment. Since my attempt to construct an argument that voting could have a non-negligible probability of affecting an election – the infamous correlation dodge – died a logical death, I am left with the usual reasons for voting – primarily how doing it makes me feel. Those reasons apply equally well to voting for Big Brother or Strictly Come Dancing.

In conclusion, I think our system of government is one which selects leaders and policies as a byproduct of the entertainment industry. This might not be a bad thing: the traditional alternative is to select leaders and policies as a byproduct of the defense industry, which I don’t think is obviously superior.