Heated debate on press and privacy

A heated debate featuring Nick Davies and Kelvin MacKenzie took place at the Journalism in Crisis conference in a session on privacy and the media heavily criticising the Press Complaints Commission.

Davies and MacKenzie discussed with Jennifer McDermott, Head of Media and Public Law and partner at Whithers and Jonathan Coad from Swan Turton solicitors, the potential impact of recent court judgements on journalism.

The main questions that were raised during the session was whether responsible journalism will become more difficult and whether the current system of self-regulation should be reformed.

Jennifer McDermott

 

With the scandal around the MPs’ expenses reaching heights, Jennifer McDermott reminded during this debate how MPs asked a few years ago for the Freedom of Information Act to be amended so that they could hide their expenses. She said that details about someone’s private life should only be published if it is of public concern.

She also mentioned that the privacy law can go too far in protecting private lives, such as in the case of princess Caroline at Montecarlo, but that this was “more an exception than a rule”.

Kelvin MacKenzie

MacKenzie, targeted Justice Eady throughout his speech labelling him as “overprotective of privacy” and “biased against the media”. He argued that privacy law is ludicrous and added: “It isn’t true to say that what you get up to in your sexual life does not have an effect on the outside world.

“As Eady is fighting a one man campaign, I am rather interested in his private life. I’d like to ask him ‘Do you wear French knickers? Thongs?’”

McDermott defended Justice Eady, saying he “weighs up all factors” when issuing an injunction to stop stories being published.

MacKenzie said that the theory against the PCC was “made by conspiracy theorists who only want to get more money”.

 

Nick Davies

The famous journalist was at his usual passionate best, launching a broadside against the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) and criticizing MacKenzie’s stance along the way.

“The PCC is a structurally corrupt body,” said Davies, emphasising that Fleet Street has been embroiled with phone hacking scandals and tapping into private banking data of everyday citizens without reprimand from the commission.” He said that too many claims are rejected upon technical reasons and that the system was “ludicrous”.

He “profoundly disagreed” with MacKenzie, saying “there is no reason for you or anyone else to be filmed while having sex unless it is a crime, and even then you shouldn’t film it, but try to stop it.”

Nick Davies declared that the reason why the press is getting so much into people’s private life is because of the relentless commercial pressure on journalists to give stories. He added that “technologies enable people to pirate emails and hack into mobile phones, something we could not do a few years ago and that give more opportunities to journalists for getting information illegally.”

“Unfortunately, Davies argued, “newspapers are now competing with the internet where there is no regulation at all.”

Jonathan Coad

Jonathan Coad further exposed the PCC as corrupt, and pointed out its “rank hypocrisy when running its own affairs”, in light of the recent MPs expenses scandal. “Parliament make their own rules, but so do the PCC”.

He presented the results of a research study showing that the PCC code is incredibly weak. “We have had a law of breach of confidence, breach of privacy for well over 100 years. The real issue is where should the line be drawn and who should decide where the lines are drawn?”

Q&A

Questions were opened to the floor, and heated debated on whether stories should be published if they cause “harm” to third parties followed.

Kelvin MacKenzie stated he had never considered the potential for harm when publishing a story, and MacDermott went as far as saying that the PCC should become a part of OfCom, explaining that it would enable the same regulations to be applied to all media.

Davies and McDermott agreed that people should go straight to court instead of contacting the PCC since requests are too often rejected and for very questionable reasons.

Citizen Journalism conference

The second day of Journalism In Crisis just started and renowned academics gathered in the Old Cinema to discuss the concept of “Citizen Journalism”.

 

Journalism’s paradigm shifts: a model for understanding long-term change

Colette Brin, from the Universite Laval, Quebec, opened the discussion with a presentation on the patterns of change in the journalism practice.

“The current context of intense and rapid changes is a cause of great uncertainty and concern as to the future of journalism, mostly among journalists themselves, but also among educators and scholars.”

Colette Brin presented a theoritical model of long-term patterns of change in journalistic practice. She demonstrated how the crisis journalism is facing today actually began around the 1970s and has progressively replace the “information journalism” by an emerging “communication journalism paradigm, characterized by intersubjectivity, intense information flow and a hypercompetitive media market”.

She explained her theory in further details by introducing the example of Quebec’s first tabloid newspaper Le journal de Montreal who recently created a website called Rue Frontenac, which illustrates this new “communication revolution”.

Reflections on Journalism

Three cheers for Subjectivity: or the crumbling of the seven pillars of journalistic wisdom

Ivor Gaber from City University London and University of Bedfordshire came to Westminster this afternoon to discuss the notion of Subjectivity in journalism.

The base of journalism practice is often recalled as “the inverted pyramid”.

” Students are taught to start a news story with the “5W” (Who, What, Where, When and Why) before dealing with important facts and finish with the background,” he said. “But the most important part, I keep repeating my students, is the ‘So What?’, what relevance does your story have for the reader.”

“Different news organizations will have a different opinion on which angle of a story you should take.”

Ivor Gaber illustrated his speech with Sky’s new unofficial motto: “Never wrong for long”.

He then made an interesting observation on the opposition between journalists and blogger: “The new blogosphere is chattering the journalistic wisdom. Journalists are impartial & interested in the truth, bloggers aren’t. Journalists are unbiased, bloggers are proudly biased,” he declared.

Gaber finished his presentation with the seven pillars of journalistic wisdom that he thinks are primordial to a professional practice:

• Thou shalt recognize one’s own subjectivity
• Thou strive to be fair
• Thou strive to be accurate
• Thou strive to be thorough
• Thou seek verification
• Thou strive to be transparent
• Thou be accountable

One striking example of how our vision of the world is conditioned by the media coverage is well embeded in a research study Paul Shaw mentioned during his speech.

“We asked young children which words best describe the notion of ‘Third World’. The answer was striking: poverty, war, starvation, refugees, death, disease, drought, dirty water.”

Paul Shaw then introduced his “Typology of Negativity” whichgoes as following:

• the act of simplifying the facts of an event for easy comprehension by the audience
• taking things out of context
• the process of seeking out conflict, dissent, disagreement
• news as tragedy

New developments - glasses half full

Optimism on the developments of journalism featured in this session, with radio journalism receiving a glowing report from Anya Luscombe, and Stephen Harrington offering a different view on the crisis of journalism.

“It is time to consider journalism not as singular, but as a range of different journalisms” said Harrington, proposing that Satire and emergent forms of journalism are actually prospering while others face the ‘crisis’.

Harrington mentioned “Media Chaos”, as mentioned by McNair, being caused by three major reasons: Technical evolution, the collapse of social deference towards institutions and hyper competetitiveness.

According to him, however, this increased media democracy as it offers a more accurate and transparent version of events, citing the execution of Saddam Hussein as an example.

Blogging and Local Media

Andy Price, from Teesside University, used The Evening Gazette as an example of how local papers need not be threatened by the internet.

Over the last year, the paper has launched 20 microwebsites, collaborated with 400 bloggers and in the month of December had 275,000 unique users.

He pointed out that “what is newsworthy on the internet is different from what is newsworthy on conventional media”. and that the internet can be used as a regional press platform.

Andrew Kenyon outlined his research comparing Malaysian, Australiand and Singaporean media, both in Engish and in Malay, drawing, among others, the conclusion that allegations made in Australia are much more targeted and specific than in the other “soft” tyrranical regimes.

Glowing Radio Report

Agreeing with Lashman’s view earlier that radio is bearing the flag for good journalism, Anya Luscombe provided plenty of optimistic data on the status of radio.

90% of the UK population above 18 tune in to the radio each week, 92% in the Netherlands and 93% in the USA. .

In the UK, 7.2 million people have downloaded a podcast, and Radio 4 has an average weekly audience of 10 million, 19% of the total.

The Today Programme on Radio 4 also registered an increse in audience in the final quarter of 2008, with people seeking detailed coverage of the financial crisis and Obama’s election campaign.

Interviews she conducted with journalists working within Radio show that there is a tendency to favour speed over quality and precision, and the “whole business of a crafted, honed, polished piece of writing has largely been jettisoned”.

But overall, the prospect for radio, according to both its workers and the statistics, looks bright.

James Curran speech: “Journalism in Crisis”

James Curran, professor at Goldsmiths College and Director of Goldsmiths Media Research Center opened the day of conferences with “Journalism In Crisis”, a speech on the issues the media industry is facing today.

JIC marks the 20th anniversary of the British Journalism Review and James Curran declared it makes it “a double pleasure to be at the University of Westminster today”.

The major cause of the crisis journalism in facing nowadays is the emergence of internet as a popular medium. Since 1999, the proportion of UK households using the internet rise up to 62%. Two third of the nation is connected which makes us to wonder “What’s the impact of the internet on news production?”

James Curran pointed out that many people believe the internet is not creating a “crisis” but an endless list of opportunities and quoted Jim Callaghan who once said: “Crisis? What crisis?”; words that many academics and media personas echoed in the recent years.

The Goldsmiths professor then dealt with what he thinks are the main issues journalism is facing nowadays. The first one is what he calls “the tabloid approach”. For him, too many newspapers are trying to catch the reader’s attention by any means.

“We must make the readers crossed” seems to be journalists’ new let motive. “If one way to gain a reader’s attention is to make them angry, another one is to make them frightened”, he added.

Curran also believes that today’s journalism encourages excesses and inaccuracy. Too many stories have been “sexied up” to make them more attractive to the readers.

He later outlined how British media are unrepresentative of the nation’s real political views, arguing that the UK press’s political views are way more conservative than the population’s.

An other problem Prof. Curran mentioned was the increasing pressure journalists have to face in order to produce stories fast. They don’t get the time to “think” their angle anymore and most of the time recycle the information they get from a limited number of sources. The consumer ends up reading the same stories in different websites, which undermine the value of news production today.

Professor Curran cited the failures of both PSB and commercial broadcast models, illustrating his point by examples of the Iraqi War coverage in the New York Times.

“The American media tradition is in crisis because it is being converted to the net,” James Curran argued that many newspapers in America are in serious trouble because of the emergence of the internet. “It’s beginning to look as if the business to produce news by advertising is in crisis,” Curran said.

“About 60 newspapers has died in the last year in the UK. Yet, the web apocalypse that is hitting journalism in western countries is not happening everywhere else in the world. In eastern countries such as India, newspapers sales are on the rise.”

James Curran believes that the web is giving the British PSBs a way to reach a younger audience.

Citizen journalism and web-based journalism are getting global. But James Curran insisted that “dominant news brands are still dominant”, user-generated content has not taken over as the favourite form of journalism yet.

First quote from Mr. Curran

Professor James Curran from Goldsmiths College will shortly deliver the opening speech “Journalism In Crisis” focusing on “a crisis not just in journalism, but also in media reformism”, he said.

Mr. Curran didn’t expand any more and has apparently been asked a number of times what his speech will be about, but has kept his cards close to his chest. When asked if he was going to deliver something groundbreaking, he said “No, I don’t think so.” Mysterious.

‘Lets’ live in ‘Harmony’ with a new currency

Long-time retiree Jenny Hunts thinks now, given the recession, is the perfect time for people to switch to an alternative economic system and currency.

Jenny has been exchanging goods and services with people in her local area without using cash since 1992, when she started running the Local Exchange Trading System (Lets) network in Harrow.

Lets networks operate locally in city boroughs, towns and villages across the UK – there were about 300 in 2006 according to Letslink UK.

“Person A could do some gardening for person B, and person B will do somebody else’s hair - somebody quite different,” explains Jenny. “And then person C will do something for somebody else, and each time a cheque is paid. The people agree between them what they should pay per hour or for the job as a whole.”

Each scheme has its own fictional currency and cheque-sheets. Brixton Lets in South London for example has Bricks. Harrow Lets in North West London has Harmonies - short for Harrow Monies - valued at roughly £1 (though it cannot be exchanged for cash).

Sometimes members pay with a mix of the fictional currency – which covers time and skill - and Sterling, which, say, covers the cost of petrol for a lift to the airport or materials for a DIY job.

Popular in hard times

Lets was started in Canada in 1983 by Michael Linton. But the concept has been around for much longer. During the Great Depression, communities across America relied on their own local currencies as a means of helping each other survive.

Nowadays, according to the Chicago Tribune newspaper, experts estimate that there are some 2,000 local currencies in the world - and they tend to multiply during economic downturns.

But membership of Harrow Lets has remained fairly constant at around 60.

Jenny thinks this is partly because people do not know about the scheme because it is not-for-profit and cannot afford to advertise. The £4 joining fee is only enough to cover the cost of postage of the Lets catalogue.

People are also more likely to turn to a Credit Union than a Lets scheme, Jenny thinks. Many people “cannot get their head around a separate currency”, and have got too used to borrowing money to pay for goods, she says.

Financial system crashes

Jenny, who has never been in debt, thinks Lets is superior to what banks can offer.

“In the Middle Ages, to lend money for interest was called usury, and that was considered to be a sin,” she says. “Nowadays, of course, lending money no matter how much interest is considered a virtue, not a sin. I still think it’s a sin. But you see, there you are, I’m very old fashioned perhaps. But it didn’t work, did it. It hasn’t worked. It has come crashing down now.”

The scheme works better in provincial towns than in “a sprawling great big mass of people” such as in Harrow, says Jenny.

“I don’t know that there is that much of a community feeling here,” she says. “On my particular road I know a few people. But I don’t know as many as I would if it were a country town. My idea of a community is in a village or a small town where nearly everyone knows everybody else.”

There is a “huge” Lets scheme in the “smallish town” of Stroud in Gloucestershire. “Not just a little directory like we have here,” says Jenny. “But a huge catalogue – about five inches thick.”

Appealing to the ‘greens’

She thinks environmental people gravitate to Lets because they get the concept of helping yourself and helping your fellow people at the same time. Stroud is very “green” politically, as is Jenny who is Secretary of Harrow Green Party.

But she stresses: “Lets is completely and utterly apolitical. It cannot be political. We want as many people to join no matter who they are. I keep the two completely separate.”

Jenny holds regular “bring and share” parties where members of all ages can get to know each other better over salads, pizza, canapés and cakes.

“We’ve had some lovely young couples but unfortunately they tend to move around a bit more,” says Jenny. “[Age range] varies really. It’s a mix altogether. Quite a lot of retired people. It’s very good for retired people because there are certain things that they need that they couldn’t have any other way really.”

Jenny would like to see Harrow Lets attract many more members – though she would need more administrative help to run it. But she would not want to change the feel of the group.

“It’s all done in a kind of shoe string way,” she says. “We’re not glossy and if we could afford to be glossy we wouldn’t want to be because that’s not what it’s about. We keep everything basic and minimal really.”

To find your local Lets group, go to www.letslinkuk.net

Do you think Lets is a good alternative economic system?

By Marianne Halavage

Dental visits falling

Daniel Duncan went to the dentist and was told he needed a filling and other dental work carried out but two years on, he still hasn’t had the work done.

The 23-year-old from South London says: “I had a pain in my tooth, went along for a check-up and was told I needed a filling. The cost was around ₤100, which I could not afford at the time and certainly can’t now.”

He says he has had no choice but to leave it, and bear the pain. He adds: “ It’s a nightmare trying to find an NHS dentist and when you do you’re lucky to even get on the list. NHS prices are bad enough, let alone the cost of going private.”

His story is not uncommon, and with the UK in a recession the problem looks set to worsen.

Recent figures from the NHS information centre show, since March 2006 to September 2008, the percentage of the adult population who had seen an NHS dentist in London dropped from 48.4% to 43.8%. Although a relatively small drop, visits to the dentist are predicted to plummet further, the longer the recession continues.

Decline in regular checks

The decline in the number of regular visits to the dentist does not necessarily mean there is a drop in dental work that needs to be carried out.

Research by the Conservative Party shows there has been a 13 per cent rise in hospital admissions relating to tooth decay in children in the last five years.

The implication is that people are only seeking treatment when problems become more severe, rather than going for regular checks which could prevent more serious problems.

A senior nurse from a dental unit in a London hospital who does not wish to be named says: “I’ve noticed a higher volume of patients recently. I think it’s because patients don’t have to pay, if for example they have a temporary filling here.

“They should go to their regular dentist afterwards to get a permanent one fitted, but if they can manage with their temporary filling for a while you can understand why some people avoid the substantial cost of a permanent one.”

Some patients find the costs of treatment confusing, Duncan says: “It’s bizarre because you can go in for a check-up and leave having made a follow up appointment for a list of dental work costing hundreds of pounds. Who can afford that at the moment?”

He believes that’s why many people “avoid it like the plague”.

The British Dental Association (BDA) believes there has been an overall improvement in dental health care in the last 30 years, but accepts there are “still inequalities between those with the best and worst oral health”.

The BDA says dental awareness should start at a young age with parents making sure children look after their teeth. A spokesperson says: “Regular visits to the dentist, brushing twice a day with fluoride toothpaste and a healthy diet all help to maintain good oral health.”

Story By Sade Laja

Review: Avenue Q

If you are one of those people who have nothing but contempt for the la-la land of the musical, then Avenue Q is the show for you.

Far from the romantic melodies and powerful operas one usually associates with this genre of theatre, Avenue Q songs, such as ‘Everyone’s a little bit racist’, ‘The internet is for porn’ and ‘There is life outside your apartment’ offer a deliciously funny realism.

The story is about Princeton, an unemployed English graduate looking for his purpose in New York City. Upon moving to Avenue Q, he becomes friends with local residents Brian, Christmas Eve, pervert Trekkie Monster, closet-gay Rod and his roommate Nicky. He also meets Kate Monster, the girl of his dreams – but is she more important than his own personal fulfillment?

Combining a mixture of puppets and real actors, the show is a kind of adult Sesame Street hybrid – although certainly not for children.

It may sound bizarre but the puppets swearing, being promiscuous and getting drunk makes the whole thing even more hilarious, particularly in comparison to their human counterparts.

From the moment the curtains opened, the audience was in stitches. The cast of seven delivered the jokes with perfect timing and the puppet acting, both movement and voice, was simply flawless.

This is comedy, pure and simple and thus you do find yourself not particularly caring about the characters, although you can relate to them.

It is the conclusion at the end of the show, that “everyone is a little unsatisfied” that leaves you feeling relieved that problems are temporary and like most musicals, everything will work out in the end.

A modern miracle amongst a selection of traditional musicals, Avenue Q is a breath of fresh air in London’s West End.

Rating ****

By Helen Varley

No peace for victims of Iranian revolution

Dealing with deceased and their relatives’ grief is always a sensitive issue. Brigitte Istim explores why Tehran is disturbed after Iran announced it wanted to turn mass graves into a park.

The reports began to filter through in January this year. Reports of families finding their relatives’ graves bulldozed and obliterated, covered with mounds of earth and newly-planted trees. These vanished graves have apparently fallen victim to a plan designed to turn part of Kharavan cemetery in southern Tehran into a park.

Creating a park sounds like an innocent act, a way of improving the environment in a city which, until recently, was notorious for its polluted air. But for many people in Iran and overseas the landscaping activities in Kharavan are both distressing and sinister.

Kharavan is the burial place for thousands of political dissidents, most of them executed in the 1980s. Their graves are often unmarked as the government prevented families from putting up headstones or other memorials. It is this part of the cemetery which seems to have been picked out for ‘redevelopment’.

Grave destruction

Babak Emad is a softly spoken man who walks with a limp – the result of beatings received under two regimes, those of the Shah and the Islamic Republic. He now lives in Sweden and is international president of the Association of Iranian Political Prisoners (AIPP). Babak is extremely concerned by reports about Kharavan he has received from contacts in Iran.

“The destruction seems to have started around 6th January this year. There were earlier attempts to destroy the graves but they were resisted, very courageously, by the families. But this time the authorities seem to have been more organised. For about six months they have been preventing friends and relatives from going anywhere near the cemetery.”

Babak’s concerns have been backed up by Amnesty International who issued a public statement on 20th January, calling on the Iranian authorities “to immediately stop the destruction of hundreds of individual and mass, unmarked graves in Kharavan, south Tehran”.

The mass graves mentioned by Amnesty probably date back to the late summer of 1988 when the authorities organised a purge of political prisoners. Although, it is difficult to compile accurate figures Amnesty estimated that at least 4,500 to 5,000 political prisoners, men and women, were executed over the course of a few months.

Memories of persecution

Ahmad Mossavi, a liberal critic of the regime, spent 10 years in Iranian jails. He remembers the summer of ’88 only too well.

“I was in Rasht prison and I estimate that around 90 of my fellow political prisoners were simply dragged out of their cells and then shot or hung. I remember the sound of cell doors banging, then the silence which seemed to get deeper and deeper as the killings went on and on.”

For Kaveh Shahrooz, a young lawyer who has written about the 1988 executions in the Harvard Human Rights Journal, survivors like Ahmad and the people who lie buried in Kharavan are victims twice over. Speaking at conference organised by AIPP he said: “In the summer of 1988 the Iranian government committed two crimes - first a campaign of terror and murder and second the effort to completely erase this from historical memory…I believe this is almost a textbook example of crimes against humanity.”

If the reports about Kharavan are correct the Iranian government is far from being the first to try to rewrite history. The most famous example is perhaps the ‘disappearance’ of Trotsky from various photographs documenting the Russian revolution, after he fell out with Stalin.

Of course, Iran is not Stalin’s Soviet Union, but Kharavan cemetery does seem to be the site for memories and hopes the current government would like forgotten.

Gholam-Hossein Mahmoudi, Press Attaché to the Iranian Embassy in London, said he has no comment to make at present about Kharavan cemetery.

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