How can we get newspapers to be more truthful?

It is clear to everyone except influential members of the Conservative and Labour parties that Britain's democracy is in a desperate state. Everyone with a functioning brain can see that our electoral system is shot.

But there is more than the electoral system to be fixed.

In 2013 Ipsos Mori did a study on misperception.
Here is a summary:

Issue                           Public Belief (%)                 Reality (%)

Teen pregnancy         16%                                      0.6
Crime                         Rising                                   Falling
JSA spend                  More than pension               15x less than pension
Benefit fraud             24                                          0.7
Foreign aid                Top item in Govt spend       1.1% of Govt spend
Muslim %                  25                                         5
Immigrants %.           31                                         13

Note that the misperception is biased in the direction of the right wing agenda - itself a reflection of the fact that 3 out of 4 newspaper readers is reading a right wing newspaper.


What can we do about this? The first reaction is to despair, since even the mild recommendations of Leveson are rejected by the newspaper industry.

At present, there is no obligation on newspapers to present the truth. This needs to change, and the data presented above give us a handle on the situation. From this kind of work, we could create an Index of Public Perception (IPP). By picking up on the public's understanding of a few key and robust facts, starting with the kind of figures presented above, we can get a handle on what the public is being given. If the Index shows that the public's knowledge is getting more accurate, the media is performing better, and vice versa.

So far so good. Next - how do we get the press to improve the IPP?

In the first place, publication of the IPP will make the public more aware of media distortions. However, the media are unlikely to publish the IPP, especially if it is adverse.

So Government could  bring sanctions proportional to the IPP.
Penalties could be imposed on the industry generally if the IPP is falling. However, this would be unfair to newspapers which were trying to be truthful. Therefore the polling would have to include questions about which newspaper the respondent was taking, and penalties would be allocated on a paper-by-paper basis.  This could be distorted however, as respondents could lie about which paper they took.

Another way would be to look at the actual content of the newsprint, to see how often the true statistic is included in pieces concerning the topic.

Any and all of these proposals will be actively (not to say hysterically) resisted by newspapers, who will characterise any attempt for them to write more truthfully as a Commie style attack on press freedom. There is no avoiding this reaction, this is just how the tabloid editors will play it.  If they do not like the method suggested, let them come up with a better suggestion, because the bottom line is that a functioning democracy requires a truthful press, and democracy is the basis of all our freedoms, including freedom of the press.

Taming the UK media

In addition to constitutional and Parliamentary reform to eliminate the corruption, great and small, that infests our Parliament, we also need to reform the way the media is set up in our backwards country.

Yesterday I stumbled across the Media Reform Coalition, a group of 20 heavyweight NGOs. 

They have a worked out, reasonable Manifesto. Here is the summary:

Five main headings:

1. Controls on media ownership
2. Independent,  trusted and effective regulation of the press
3. Well funded, independent public service media (ie the BBC)
4. Protection for communication rights (against Govt and private snooping)
5. Action on lobbying and transparency 

The manifesto develops these points, so I do not need to.

So there we have it. All we have to do is turn Parliament upside down and shake all the money out of its pockets, and tame the corporate media. Then we will be in a position to bring about changes that will allow our children and grandchildren to live decent lives.

Sorted.

20mph zones cause injuries - to reputation of media

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7251/7008030307_889b659ebb_z.jpg 

You may have noticed the rather surprising story "Injuries increased in 20mph zones" carried by the BBC ("Casualties on 20mph roads up by quarter in 2011... Motoring organisations have questioned the safety success of 20mph zones"), Press Association (Road casualties in 20mph zones increased by almost a quarter in 2011, according to official figures.) Independent, Sun and many other sources.

It is well known that an impact at 20mph causes less injury than an impact at 40mph. Injury is proportional to energy, and energy is higher at higher speeds.

The news item clashes with other experience:

Wikipedia (retrieved 12 Aug 2012) By August 2002 Kingston upon Hull had introduced one hundred and twelve 20 mph zones and 190 km of roads subject to a 20 mph limit covering 26% of the city's streets which they described as contributing to "dramatic reductions in road casualties". Total collisions were reduced by 56%, Killed & seriously injured collisions down 90%, child casualties collisions down 64% and all pedestrian collisions down 54% and child pedestrian collisions down 74%.^[23]

A report published in 2008 estimated that following the introduction of 20 mph zones in London, a reduction of casualties by 45% and KSI by 57% occurred.^[24]

So what is going on?

Well in fact what is going on is that journalists are just lazily copying and pasting crap information sent to them, probably by some idiot motoring lobbyist. The excellent Joe Dunckley's blog points out that  "Back when there were fewer 20mph streets, fewer people were injured on 20mph streets, they revealed. Now that there are more 20mph streets, more people are being injured on 20mph streets. This road safety intervention, they concluded, isn’t working."

Simple as that. The journos had taken the raw numbers of people injured on the 20 streets, rather than taking the rate of injuries per mile of streets. Why did they do this? Three possible reasons:

1. The motorists lobby is powerful, hospitable and influential
2. Many journalists are thick, poorly educated and innumerate
3. Many journalists are lazy, and it takes a bit of time to research the rate at which 20mph zones have been applied in the UK.

I spent 18 minutes trying to find how many zones have been introduced. I find here at ROSPA that 450 20mph zones were introduced 1991-99, and that by 2008, no less than 2148 zones had been introduced. I could not find how many were introduced in the period 2010-2011 covered by the press release that triggered all these reports.

The data seems to come from the Department of Transport here.

What we need are stats on the total length of streets that went from 30mph to 20mph in the period 2010 to 2011. These stats may or may not be collected. Local authorities will be able to calculate them, and someone at the DfT can collect them, but that may take a year or two.

It is just possible that there are other factors in play, such as that people feel more free to run about in 20mph zones, but if anyone is going to argue that, they are going to have to substantiate it, in view of the experience in Kingston upon Hull quoted above.

As things stand, we have a major issue of misinformation based on bad handling of statistics on the part of the BBC and many other media outlets. I am going to complain to the BBC here and I hope that you will too. 

Here is what I put into the BBC complaints form, so you can copy and modify it. 

Report (carried also on radio and possibly TV) says "Casualties on 20mph roads up by quarter in 2011... Motoring organisations have questioned the safety success of 20mph zones".

However, the numbers are not related to the total extent of 20mph zones. These zones are being implemented all the time, so if they are expanding, the amount of accidents that will occur on them can be expected to increase proportionally. A more realistic statistic would be the number of accidents per length of street, or an even more sophisticated stat such as unit length of street usage by vehicles and people.

There is much good evidence that 20mph zones are safer. Your report calls that into question in peoples' minds. A correction is needed. I would also like to know who issues the press release that forms the basis for your report, which is also carried in many other news outlets.

More on this here: www.greenerblog.blogspot.com

Also I will complain to the Press Complaints Commission, even though they are well known for being not just a toothless paper tiger, but is also a moth-eaten toothless paper tiger with grubby marks where Rupert Murdoch has wiped his feet or something on it. Still, we must go with what we've got, because it is simply not good enough for the media to use statistics in such a sloppy way to mislead the public, especially in a way that puts children's lives at risk and promotes the interests of the motoring lobby.

[Update 18th August]
I have received a civil answer from the BBC complaints; It reads:

The data in the story was supplied by the Department of Transport. Prior to publication, and again since, we went back to the department to ask whether they could also supply details of the number of 20mph zones so that we could put these figures in some context. They were unable to do so. 

We are satisfied that our story reports the available facts in a measured and even-handed way without suggesting any conclusions should be drawn. In the third paragraph, we point out that most of the casualties suffered minor injuries. And in the fourth paragraph we contrast the casualty levels with the much higher figures reported on 30mph roads. We also spoke to a range of experts. 

We do accept it would have been better if we had included a line in the story explaining that the Department of Transport could not provide details on the number of 20mph zones and whether this had increased in the corresponding period. (We cannot simply assume that there has been a huge increase as we have seen many reports of 20mph zones being discontinued in the past two years.) 

We have now added this line to the version of the story which can be found in our archive. Thank you again for contacting us.

Which seems fair enough from the BBC's point of view. Why the DfT is putting out partial data is another matter. Maybe they want to stop the expense of creating 20mph zones. I will try to take it up with them.

 

UK newspaper readership: Right:Left = 3:1

I have done another calculation of the right-left readership numbers of UK papers, partly because I am always having to look for it on this blog and it is at the bottom of this post.

The data is here for the 12 months to December 2010.

By my calculations the Sun, Mail, Telegraph, Times, Star and Express have a readership of 18,756,000, and the Guardian, Mirror, Record (Scotland) and Independent have a readership of 4,722,000.

So right-wing daily papers have 75% of the market, and leftish papers have 25% of the market.
For every person reading leftish papers, there are 3 reading rightish (or rightist) papers.

This is a sorry state of affairs. In a decent democracy, we would expect a normal bell shaped curve of political opinion, reflected by a 50:50 split between rightish and leftish papers. The 1:3 skewing that we find in reality reflects the weakness of the purchase of the Right on the national opinion: the fact that general elections have only a slight Conservative bias rather than a 3:1 bias shows that if it were 50:50, the political ethos of the UK would be far more reasonable and egalitarian than it now is.

It may be argued that this is due to selection bias, that the public demand right wing crap, and so that's what they get. However, there is a huge public sentiment against the crap they are fed, as shown by the low esteem in which journalists are held, and the wave of spontaneous applause that Earl Spencer got when he criticised the press at Princess Diana's wedding.

The Leveson Inquiry is going to come out with some recommendations.
I will jump the gun here with some suggestions off the top of me 'ead.

1. Require the owner's name to be printed under the mast head of every newspaper.
2. Only one national per plutocrat, and/or 2 locals (Latter negotiable)
3. Only British domiciled persons to own British newspapers
4. If the bastards try to avoid tax, take their newspaper away
5. er...
6. any other suggestions?

It's Goodbye to Coulson, and hello to Green Party media reforms

Good. Coulson has gone. Some may think that is the end of the matter, but it's not.

Coulson remains either a liar, or an incompetent, or possibly both. He is standing by his story that he was ignorant of the phone hacks. That needs to be tested in the courts, but while at present we have a dozen witnesses who say he knew, none will speak out. There are two reasons for this.

One is the danger that if they come out of the hacking closet, they could incriminate themselves. That is why we need an amnesty, for a set period, for journos to come out and sing sweetly about what they know, so that we can clear the Augean stables. Remember that the NoTW is not alone in this; it is alleged that other papers do substantial amounts of hacking. Some may have public interest justification: it needs to be brought out into the sunlight.

The other reason is that they fear it could embugger their careers. Difficult. But. There is safety in numbers, and if journos are offered the carrot of amnesty (for a period of time) and a stick of prosecutions - (?and having their journalist accreditation withdrawn?) - we might expect a large and fairly harmonious choir of confessors.

The hacking is just one strand of the problem. Some of the other problems, and solutions, are addressed in the motion that the Green Party adopted in Sept 09, Birmingham. Here's the gist of it.


The scandal arising from illegal surveillance of public figures by the News of the World raises many important questions relating to democracy in the UK.  The influence of Rupert Murdoch's News International empire is excessive, and its relations with the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), who appear to have failed to conduct the News of the World investigation with due diligence, is questionable.
 
The Green Party, through its elected members and its press activity, calls for :

1.    An independent inquiry, whether judicial or by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Police.
2.    The MPS to  release all information relating to illegal surveillance to those affected by it
3.    A fresh investigation into the surveillance by a police force other than the MPS
4.    Mobile phone companies to review and improve their customers' security
5.    The setting up of a Media Commission, along the lines of the Banking Commission, to review and make recommendations on better journalistic practices, including the matter of undue domination of the media by a single person or corporation.
6.    An amnesty for past acts of illegal surveillance by journalists, in order to get a fresh start without an unmanageable number of individual court cases
7.    The Press Complaints Commission to be replaced by a body with real authority to correct errors within the media. 

 A few modest little reforms there. All perfectly reasonable. 

Chilean Miners: Media only does human interest, cannot handle reason

It is great that the 31 Chilean miners have been rescued. The media attention of the whole world has been concentrated on this human story, of miners being brought back from the dead.

This obsessive media spotlight on one human story should also cause us to wonder about the choices of what journalists regard as a story. Human interest is what drives the media. Everyone can identify with the families and friends of men who are alive but trapped, at risk of starving to death, but are successfully rescued.

The attention on the lives of these 31 men contrasts with the almost complete ignoral given to the lives of thousands of children, women and men who are put at risk every day by military action, and are immiserated by oppressive, dictatorial governments. Of course, if it is politically expedient, we will be treated to exquisite detail of lives ruined by the actions of a dictator who the Government has decided is ripe for invasion. Even if the stories are fantasy.

So we have a massive disconnect in proportionality. Journalists love a good human interest story, but they have almost no interest whatsoever in drawing attention to problems which in numerical terms totally overshadow the stories that they like, let alone the solutions to those problems.

I wrote a book in 1996 which showed that about 20% of NHS clinical activity is devoted to trying to treat problems associated with unemployment, poverty, bad housing and pollution. A BBC editor friend informed me sadly that there was no chance of getting this discussed on air. He said "If you could come up with one child who was hideously deformed as a result of his father being unemployed, you would have a story. But 20% of the NHS budget? That's not a story".

Basically, the mainstream media cannot handle reason. It can only handle sound bites and short human interest narratives. Get used to it. And the way to get used to it is to use the internet to pull the carpet from under the media.

Coulson, whether fool or knave, is a dead man walking. Next, hackers and the Met

Over on the Telegraph, their deputy editor makes a courageous defence of Andy Coulson.


The comment slot is graced by a fascinating insight from @Konnolsky, the Sage of Smolensk, and also by this tuppenceworth from yours truly:

Chris Huhne put it in a nutshell (audio, in March, on George Galloway radio): "Coulson is either a fool or a knave". Either he did not know of the illegal invasions of privacy on the NoTW (and did not have the expenses claims forms examined), or he is lying when he says he knew nothing. It is probably the latter:

Either way he is, as Sailor_Steve says in the Comments, Coulson is a dead man walking.

The next issue is the behavior of the press generally. It seems that the hacking is widespread in nearly all newspapers. It can be argued that some is in the public interest, but the gossip sheets have no such defence.  There is an Augean stable of illegal practice to be cleaned out. I suggest an amnesty might be a reasonable and efficient way to find out what has been happening, so that we can make a fresh start.

There is also the matter of failure of due diligence, or worse, on the part of the Metropolitan police. It is absurd that John Yates is still in charge of the investigation. Clearly, it needs to be handed over to another force.

Metgate: notes, snippets, and Theresa May tries it on.

Blimey, the Coulson affair is unfolding at dizzying speed. I am going to drop some notes and snippets here of the more important bits that are floating around.

A brief summary from the FT.

This describes the leads that John Yates  refused to follow.

This is why the police are thick as thieves with News International.

The former assistant commissioner who had headed the original inquiry, Andy Hayman, by now had left Scotland Yard and gone to work for the organisation that he had been investigating, News International.   This link also describes a meeting between the police and the Crown Prosecution service which decided that  "The appropriate strategy is to ringfence the case to minimise the risk of extraneous matters being included.""


LibDem Chris Huhne wrote "It is extraordinary that Assistant Commissioner John Yates summarily refused to look at the evidence again" in July 2009.
The matter is straining the Coalition.

Amid all the complexity, it is good to drink at the fountain of certainty. To paraphrase
@ChrisGurr and Andrew Neil;

If Coulson didn't know of the huge sums of money being paid to hackers; from a budget he controlled; he's incompetent. If he did, then he is a liar.  

The Tory response is to

1. Bluster 
2. Try to discredit the main named witness, Sam Hoare, because of drink and drug problems in the past. In fact he came across on R4 as an extremely credible witness.
3. Say there is no new evidence. In fact there are more than 12 potential witnesses put in the NYT article. What we need is a general amnesty so that journalists can come forward and talk about their practices without fear of prosecution.

Finally, the solution offered by Theresa May is totally unacceptable. It is no good the Met talking to Coulson again. The Met is part of the problem. The investigation needs to be done by an outside police force.

MetGate: Coulson is finished. Next up: Scotland Yard and News International

(Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Europe)  

So.
Farewell then Andy Coulson,
Dave's Director of Communications and Planning.
You have become  the story, not the storyteller, and you will will leave your office at Number 10 in the next few days, after Dave has expressed his confidence in you &c.
The briefest yet most damning verdict came from Charlie Whelan, Gordon Brown's spokesman, who tweeted "By Bye Andy Coulson" yesterday, as his sole comment on the affair.

Credit to the Guardian for persisting with the story, and to the blogosphere for bringing the pressure that has forced the BBC and other broadcast media to carry it too. Alan Duncan and the conservatives will be fighting their rearguard action, dissing and smearing the two reporters who have had the courage to testify that Andy Coulson promoted the "Dark Art" of illegal invasions of privacy in the News of the World. Other reporters on other papers will be coming out with the truth in the next few days.

The danger is that we sit back on our laurels. The Guardian has a useful list of other developments in the unfolding scandal, which has 3 elements:

1. Coulson
2. The Metropolitan Police, who clearly failed to exercise due diligence in their investigation of the phone taps. This requires a judicial inquiry (Tom Watson MP) or an inquiry by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of the Constabulary (Alan Johnson MP). The Police should interview Coulson. Some public figures including John Prescott are considering sueing the police.
3. News International, which is the key player. George Galloway may sue News International for hacking his phone.

Rupert Mordorch  has too much power, being overlord of too many news outlets. In the UK he owns:

1. The News of the World
2. The Times and Sunday Times
3. The Sun
4. Sky TV

Note that Mordorch's News Corporation only pays 7% tax on his UK profits.  ( pp. 300–303, 87–90, 177) 

The question is, what to do about over-powerful influence of single news corporations. There is most certainly a problem, since the media strongly influence public opinion, and public opinion is the source of power in a democracy. We need diversity in the media, otherwise we are little better off than the masses in the Soviet Union.

I went to look at the Culture Media and Sport section of the Green Party's Policies for a Sustainable Society, but there is no link to it on the Green Party website. Which means that all the toil that we carry out in Conference is to no avail. *sigh*.  I guess this is because...well, better not to say. But it is the opposite of transparency. (Now I bet someone will tell me it's there and I didn't click the right links).

So what to do about the Dark Lord?

1. Oblige all news outlets to carry the name of their proprietor. On newspapers, this would be in 10-point on the banner. On broadcast media, it would be in the credits. 
2. It would be not unreasonable to pass a law restricting any one person or corporation to ownership of only one news outlet.
3. Reclassify some organs as "Newscomics" based on the ratio between celeb gossip and hard information. Newscomics would lose any financial advantages enjoyed by newspapers.
4. Corrections to be given same position and prominence as the original incorrect article.
5. Press Complaints Authority to be reformed and given real authority.
6. A Media Commission should be set up  to examine Britain's media ownership and competition rules. (Will Hutton)

Any other ideas? I suppose I should go and mug up at the Index on Censorship website, but I need to go for a walk.
_______________________________________________________________________________

Mabingogiblog links:
http://greenerblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/why-is-coulson-affair-not-story-for-uk.html
http://greenerblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/write-to-your-mp-about-coulson-affair.html
First Mab'log on the affair.

Other sites:

Click this link to find if Andy Coulson has resigned yet.

Next Left has an interesting challenge: find a media manager who will affirm this proposition:
"Of course, Andy Coulson did not know about the phone-tapping operation which took place while he was editor of the News of the World. It is quite absurd to suggest that he might have done".

Here is an example of a Murdoch newspaper distortion 

John Pilger on Murdoch 

Why is the Coulson affair not a story for the UK mainstream media?

Image thanks to NaturalNews

The big question today is "Why the news blackout on the Coulsongate/MetGate/HackGate affair?"

The fact is that one News of the World (NoTW)  reporter (Goodman)  and one private investigator (Mulcaire) were sent to prison for hacking into Royal phone accounts.  The allegation is that the Metropolitan Police drew back from investigating the full scale of the NoTW phone hacks. Fresh witnesses to the widespread nature of the hacks, and of Coulson's knowledge, have been found by the New York Times (NYT). But in the UK, only the Guardian, Spectator and today the Independent and FT are carrying it as a story, in sharp contrast to the Twittersphere, where Andy Coulson was among the top 10 trending topics for most of yesterday

There are several reasons and possible reasons for this worrying disparity between what social media and mainstream media find interesting.

1. The competing (non-)story of William Hague's sleeping arrangements. It is of note that the vanishingly far-right climate change denialist blogger Guido Fawkes was the one who slopped out this story, and at the same time is trying to minimise the significance of the MetGate story. So much for libertarian integrity. One popular tweet asks whether Coulson somehow promoted the Hague story to divert attention from his own story - now backed by this Independent report.
2. The fact that Andy Coulson is Dave's Communications Manager (=spin doctor), which means that the wise monkeys of the Tory press are not eager to see, hear or speak about the story if they can help it.
3. Britain's draconian libel laws. This may explain why the NYT has been the one to do the investigation and reportage, being safely out of the influence of Messers Farter Cuck and their unpeasant  homophones. Sign the petition for libel law reform here.
4. The fact that there are four private legal actions being taken by individuals who believe that their phones were hacked will be used as a hedge behind which to shelter by agencies such as the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
5. The fact that police officers examining the lists held by Mulcaire found names of police officers (e.g. Ian Blair and Brian Paddick) is quoted. You would think that this would intensify their efforts, rather than cause them to give up.
6. The fact that the NoTW belongs to Rupert Mordorch, the All-Seeing Eye of international opinion. It has been alleged that the Dark Lord has influence with Scotland Yard. This is even more worrying, given that his present project is to destroy the BBC, which, for all its failings (not least in his present affair), does at least belong to the people, not to News International.
7. Last, but not least, the possibility that phone hacking is not a crime unique to the NoTW. In the NYT article it is alleged that the illegal practice is widespread in British tabloid journalism. Added to the fact that there is a code of conduct between news editors: "You don't attack me, I won't attack you".That's why there are so few scandals about the profession of journalism, as compared to the other professions. Here's another journalist: "When I worked at @dailyexpressuk phone hacking was widespread. No wonder the Coulson story isn't getting much coverage."  @simonhinde

Seven possible reasons for a news blackout. Seven reasons of varying shades of dark ugliness.

Despite the craven silence of most British media outlets, the truth will out, because of the power of the interweb. Coulson will resign, sooner or later, and the longer he stays on, the bigger will be the damage to the Cameron. An inquiry of some kind will be set up, either a Huttonesque whitewash, or a serious affair that will uncover an unsavoury nexus of quasi-corruption and foetid influence between Mordorch, police and media in the fair sovereign realm of Britannia.

In the end we may get reform of the media, obliging them to adhere to the law, and to standards of truth. We live in hope.
__________________________________________________________________________
Updates:
Helpful timeline summary from NYT here.

Chris Addison wields the sword of Truth on HIGNIFY

Journalists are the Kings of Information, interpreting the world for we ignorant peasants who know nothing.  They process through the streets, basking in readerships measured in tens of thousands, clad in the gorgeous raiment of Truth.

I have just finished watching Have I Got News For You, the one with Martin Clunes and an Express journalist and Chris Addison. Chris majored on the inability of political journalists to grasp that this is a coalition Government, which means that two different parties are included. The journalists' underlying question since the election has been "But you are from different parties aren't you?" Which is a totally inane question, because it is perfectly obvious to all that they are from different parties. 

Anyway, he got loads of applause, and a lot of approval on Twitter. Well, quite a lot. For me, it was a huge relief to hear someone else criticising journalism.   If you the need to look at 25 blog postings by yours truly touching on journalism, click here.

Of all the professions, journalism is the least criticised. Doctors are always in the news for things that we got wrong, second only to politicians. Vicars and priests get the treatment, rightly. Cheating business men occasionally hit the news. Even judges are sometimes given a telling off. There was one, I remember anyway, one in my lifetime. Hand up skirt if memory serves.

Why, even organised criminals sometimes get taken to court and reported on.

But when do you ever read of a journalist doing something wrong. Like an editor? They never get criticised. Never. OK, once or twice Mr Clever Dick Anonymous Commentator, but not in proportion to their numbers and the number of mistakes they make. 

So Chris Addison may or may not be The Man, but he certainly is the little boy who said "The King isn't wearing any clothes!"

Tory Propaganda machine moves to Get Clegg

<  Thanks to Rev Hird

The Conservative news machine is in a frenzied attack on Nick Clegg today. The Sun, Mail, Telegraph, Express and Times have a combined readership of 18 million, which is 10 (ten) times the combined readership of the Guardian and the Independent. This is an indictment of the obscene political imbalance in the UK media scene.  It will be interesting to see whether this massive propaganda offensive wave can dent the Clegg Surge in the polls. Fair play to the electorate if they can maintain their intent to align themselves with the LibDems, and even more fair play to them if they can exercise enough analysis of the local situation to use tactical voting effectively.

The media approach is not only grotesquely imbalanced politically, and constitutionally blind to the real questions, but also neurotic.

By neurotic, I mean that they think in absolute categories like right-wrong, right-left and good-bad. Nick Clegg is either Saint Nicholas, coming down the political chimney to give all good children a present, or Old Nick, a demonic figure who will cause the British economy to collapse and require the attentions of the IMF.

So far the main substance of the attack has been on some payments into a private account, which were declared, and the fact that he is a career politician. Big Deal. The LibDem figures on the economy are said not to add up, which is a bit rich coming from journalists whose favoured party has not published any meaningful figures about the economic plans, but who are majoring instead on apple-pie chunterings about a Big Society plan which is doomed by their ideological commitment to ever-increasing economic divergence.

(Picture: grateful thanks to the War Office MoD and the taxpayer)

Waiting round the corner are accusations that by blocking our Trident WMD (see left) he will let the Reds terrorists come and murder us in our beds.

Reality is not found in the simple binary analysis of Conservative media machine. Reality is a complex system of gradations between effective and ineffective activities.

I am not starry-eyed about Nick Clegg and the LibDems. I have criticised them on this blog here and here and here and here.
They tend to fight dirty in elections, the result no doubt of 100 years of being held back by the dysfunctional FPTP system.

In spite of all their failings (and no political party is without flaws, including my own Green party), the point about the LibDems is that they do stand for electoral reform. Yes, the STV form that they advocate is designed to benefit the LibDems and not the Greens, being a weak form of Proportional Representation, which is a drawback, but at least it is a weak form of Proportional Representation, which is an advantage. And in fact, the framework being set leans towards AV+ (building on Labour's pusillanimous suggestion of AV), and AV+ would be acceptable.

So PR is the main reason to seek a hung Parliament. That and Vince. Here again, Vince is not infallible, but his grasp on economics is clearly and definitely better than that of Labour or the Tories.

So the message to the electorate is - Hold your line, Defy the Murdoch/Tory press, and use your vote to bring about real political change. And the message to the Tory Media is - Grow Up.

Daily Telegraph Health Risk Shocker

Readers may have noticed that I was not blogging last week, due to a stay in France. (Took the train by the way).

France is in good shape still, though given how hot it was, it was noticeable how few solar panels they have.

One of the hardships of travel was that I had to buy a copy of the Daily Telegraph. I was astonished how heavily laden its pages are with crime reports. Stuffed with them. Loaded. No wonder people's perceptions of the risks of crime are so distorted.

Reading the Telegraph has to be bad for health, inducing anxiety, and making people take less exercise because they are afraid to go out. Maybe there should be a class action against the paper. That might help.

This is not to deny that crime is not a problem. It is. But it is not as big a problem as Telegraph readers think.

BBC Radio 4 PM on the Iran election result

Eddie Mair interviews a Dr Siabi (?sp.), a supporter of President AhmadiNajad, in America, and we are treated to a long rant against UK "interference" into Iran affairs, an admission of "minor irregularities" in the poll, and a bald assertion that the result was "irrefutable".

In the interests of balance, we then interview the BBC reporter John Leyne, who quotes a couple of pieces of evidence, beginning with the impossible rapidity with which the Iranian authorities declared that the vote went to AhmadiNajad.

It is a great pity that despite its enormous research resources, the BBC is unable to collate and evaluate the available evidence about the poll. I have drawn together what I have seen here, and it all backs up John Leyne's view that the idea that ANajad won is "incredible".

Democracy is vital to the sustainable quality of life for every human on the planet, and indeed for life itself, since dictatorship destroys the environment as well as its citizens. The BBC belongs to the people who pay the licence fee, and its remit is to educate and inform (and entertain). It is not doing its job well. It joined the rest of the world media in underplaying and ignoring George "Idiot" Bush's cheating in his elections, and now it is under-reporting and obfuscating the issue of the Iran election.

The BBC is falling down on the job. It need to be reformed and brought back to its basic task. Its leaders should be subjected to the same scrutiny to which the MPs are subject.

We should be told how much people like Eddie Mair receive in salary and expenses.

Mousavi "defeated" - not ; Guardian limp - true

To the Editor
The Guardian

Will the Guardian please stop calling Mousavi the "defeated" candidate in the Iranian elections? There is good evidence that the poll was rigged, and in days gone by Guardian journalists would have collated and published this evidence. Now it is left to citizens to do this work.
Richard Lawson

This is my third attempt to get this point across, and clearly it is not going to get in this time. I have seen no letters about Iran in the Guardian letters page - I may have missed them, but I don't think so.

The Guardian editorial lnie seems to be flaccid and immobile, unsure what to do, confused because they are not sure if it is OK to be "for Iran" or "against Iran".

Guardian Policy Committee meeting: Agenda Item 3: Policy on Iran: Bush was "against Iran" so the Guardian should be "for Iran". Problem: Iran is against women, so do we hate Bush more than we love women? Put it to the vote. The majority hates Bush more than they love women. So that's it. Mousavi was defeated. Next Item on agenda: Journalist expenses. All agreed? Ok. Next item...

The Guardian, like most others, clearly does not understand the difference between a people and its government. AhmadiNajad no more speaks for the Iranian nation than Brown speaks for the British nation. A nation is a complex system of alternate and conflicting interests. Sometimes those interests can be summed up by a leader; sometimes not, and for Iran, this is one of the times when the leader most clearly and definitely does not speak for the nation.

So on the issue of the Iran elections, the Guardian is as crisp and strong as the outer leaf of a limp lettuce that has been left out of the fridge for three days in a warm room. Just as the media generally were when George Idiot Bush stole the American election in 2005.

I must say it gives me immense pleasure to criticise the media in this way. Before the days of blogging, when the media fell down on the job, we thought the thought but dared not talk the talk, for fear that they would ban us totally. Now, I do not care that they do not publish corrective or critical letters. The Web is here to correct the uncorrected power of the Fourth Estate, and eventually, in the end, dead tree journalism will be all the better for the compteition coming from its younger sister.

Electoral Hooligans? I blame the papers!

Euro-Parliament elections 2009. Low turnout. Tories benefit. Ukip booms. BNP 2 MEPs. Somebody must be to blame, so I blame the media.

Well, not entirely, of course. There is never any single cause for any event, because everything is interconnected. We live in a wondrously complex nexus, a system. But it is right to examine the role of the media.

First, the Euro-elections were vastly under-reported in the British media. Just compare the reportage with the wall to wall coverage of the USA Presidential elections, where we had no vote. The Euros must have been given, ooh, at least 1% of the US election. OK, the US president is a bit more important than the European Parliament, and we should certainly have been informed of the results of that election, but not the blanket coverage that we were given. And despite the amount of coverage of the US elections, I am still not confident that I understand what a caucus is, and what it does. Which illustrates another point - the media are not good at communicating facts; they just do stories.

Given the lack of coverage, the low turnout is no surprise. 60% of the electorate made no use of their power. They threw it away. MPs and Government must accept their part in this pervasive voter disengagement, but the media must also accept their part in the fiasco.

What would the result have been in a 100% turnout? Who would the abstainers have voted for?
Maybe it is good that they stayed away - they might have voted more for the BNP. We do know that they were Labour supporters mainly, and many of those supporters who did vote went for the BNP.

We need to have an opinion survey of non-voters to discover precisely what their motives were, and what would induce them to exercise their democratic power. I wonder if the Green Party could commission such a survey. I have a strong feeling that we should emphasise that the Green Party is just as disaffected with the political system as are non-voters, and they would best express their disgust by voting Green.

We do know that a lot of the voters were hacked off with the Westminster parties. So they voted for Ukip. Ukip. Protesting against MP venality, they boosted the party that has the worst record in the European Parliament in terms of not turning up for work, not opposing waste, and opposing transparency.

There is no excuse for the media on this one. They knew the facts about Ukip in Brussels. I know they knew, because they had a press release about it, and also I phoned all the major newspapers and broadcasters, made contact with a reporter, and emailed the facts to them.

In any case, they are the professional journalists, and they should have researched MEP records for probity.

Why did they not test the Ukip programme? I asked the Ukip candidate (and also the far left No2EU candidate) when I met them what their programme was for withdrawing from the EU. What were the mechanics? Would we have to buy our way out? What would happen next? Would we then start re-applying for membership, because our trade would plummet? Answer came there none. The Paxmen should have been pressing them on this. They did not. They fell down in the job.

Our local paper used to give candidates 300 words apiece, unedited, in the weeks running up to an election. Not for this one. OK, they are donating costly space which would otherwise have been devoted to vital stories about cats trapped up a tree or cats stuck down a drainpipe, but even so, democracy calls for sacrifices. Party activists give masses of time to democratic process. Even voters give time in walking into the polling booth. Why do newspapers not give a little space to democracy. They shour remember that in the end, democracy is a guarantor of the free press.

Is it worth making a formal complaint to the Press Complaints Association and the BBC board and whoever it is that covers the other broadcasters? Probably not, because it is a systemic failure, not a specific failure, and so is probably "outwith the remit".

In any case, the Green Party would not make such a complaint, because we would get even less coverage than we get at the moment if we complained. So the official position has to be that we have the best journalism in the world. Along with having the best wild rodent population in the world, as Steve Bell once showed.

Also, the media watchdogs are toothless tigers. The Fourth Estate is effectively in charge of its own monitoring. They moan constantly about doctors closing ranks when a medic is up on charges before the GMC, but how often do we read about an editor being arraigned for unprofessional conduct? Not a lot.

So along with the Parliamentary system, we need a root and branch reform of the media. Easier said than done. The blogosphere is a promising tool, but we have to confess that our readership, although more intelligent and perspicacious than the newspaper readers, is not quite as numerous. We need a revolution in the way the media conducts itself, but the problem is that this particular revolution is definitely not going to be televised.

How can we hit back at the media? People are addicted to their daily fix of falsehoods. But maybe we could send a shot across their bows by persuading people not to buy papers on April 1st.

One of the metaphysical poets wrote of censorship

"I can say only this,
that I can nothing say"

A chinese poet (I am not having much luck this morning with identfying my sources) wrote:

"Oh bright wind,
You cannot read;
Why do you turn my pages?"

The Ming emperor cut his head off for writing that, because the Chinese word for bright is Ming.

I do know who wrote this:

Owed To The Press

If your mother doesn’t need yer
Get a job within the media.

If you're regularly pissed
You could be a journalist.
Want to lie without redress?
Get a nice job in the press!

If you like to cast ordure
You could be an interviewer.
If your thing is smearing poo
Broadcaster's the job for you.
If you'd like to be a Nazi
You can join the paparazzi


Don't let them fool you all the way -
Make April First your No News Day!

I wrote that.

Caroline Lucas on Question Time

Our Caroline sparkled on Question Time last night, getting several rounds of heartfelt applause.

One recurrent theme from the audience was the abysmal coverage of the European Elections. It really is totally unacceptable, compared with the obsessive coverage of the American Presidential elections, in which we have no vote whatsoever. What is going on in the minds of the programmers to come up with such a massive imbalance? Nothing, I suspect. Nobody home. Lights out. On autopilot.

Of course, Caroline could not say that, because you become a non-person if you dare to criticise the media. But it is true nevertheless, and blogosphere is the right and only place to do it.

The last question was a gift for Caroline "What real choice do we have between the morally corrupt parties and the BNP?". Unfortunately, Caroline was left until last, and told by Dimbleby that she had just one minute "without hesitation, repetition or deviation" to answer. Her innate modesty seems to have prevented her from pointing out that she came joint 10th out of 785 MEPs on the OpenEurope Index of MEP's transparency and effectiveness, the greens generally were in the top decile, while Ukip was languishing at the bottom. She spoke for 16.02 seconds, summarising what people were voting for in voting Green, with the Dimbleby making little hurry-up noises. Then he had to witter on, repeating himself, because there was loads of unused time.

We have to get this message about Green probity across. The Green Party put out a press release on this matter yesterday, but I can find no coverage of it in a Google News search today. Again, in their infinite wisdom, the news controllers have decided that the electorate have no need of an objective survey of how MEPs perform.

Stephen Fry on MP (and journalists') expenses

Stephen Fry does not think the MP expenses claim is all that important.

He is wrong about the MPs, but the attack which he makes on journalists is rare and delightful.

Let me clarify that (following a pained prompt from a journalist of integrity).

Not all journalists are worthy of Fry's attack, just as not all MPs fiddle their expenses.

But it is noteworthy that although politicians are always under criticism, and although the manifold mistakes of my profession, the medical profession, is rarely out of the papers, and although absurd decisions made by judges are regularly reported, and judges are sometimes criticised for inappropriate behaviour, and although even the police are sometimes criticised in the papers, if for instance, they are caught on film assaulting someone who subsequently dies, and although bankers are in deep doo-doo, the one profession about whose mistakes and wrongdoings we rarely read about is the journalistic profession.

Back in the day, when I was speaker for the Green Party in 1990, we never criticised the media. Nobody did. It was suicide to criticise the media. Only Tony Benn criticised the media, and he got done over for it.

But now we have the Internet, and the monolithic power of the media conglomerates is beginning to crack. This is a tiny little such crack that you are reading right now.

Way to go, Stephen.

Sustainability? Never mind the reasoning, just feel the poople!

Good luck to the Sustainable Development UK 09 Conference which is taking place today in London. They say "Soaring oil prices, global food shortages and rising carbon emissions mean now is the time for decisive action by all those concerned with the role that sustainability plays in the future safety and security of the UK".

This attracts the attention of the Today Programme, and our John interviews Prof Beddington.

John Humphreys takes the line that there is nothing we can do about population increase, energy, food and water. I know he does not mean it (or maybe he does), he is just being adversarial, which is presumably in his job contract: Para3.5.4: "If an interviewee makes any statement, you are obliged, not to seek clarification, but to put the opposite point of view".

The result of adversarial interviewing is a sense of confusion and frustration in the listeners, going on to nihilism. This, in my view, is not helpful especially when dealing with serious global problems. We need to be solution-oriented.

How much better it would be if John Humphrys had said,
Population is a very emotive issue, but would it not be sensible for Governments to say to their citizens, "We will undertake to feed you, if you will undertake to restrict your offspring to replacement levels".

Even this would draw criticism from some listeners, but at least it is a constructive approach that suggests the idea that we are not all doomed, and there is nothing we can do.

Prof Beddington said, first, recognise there is a problem. This in itself is difficult enough. Denialism is rampant, whether primary denialism, not wanting to face up to the fact that humanity is in deep doo-doo unless it makes radical changes in the way it goes about things, or secondary denialism, because the radical changes required clash with deeply held beliefs regarding the need for the privileged few to live their individual live lives free of any restraint on doing exactly what they want to do.

We face a clash between logic and emotion, reason and ideology.
Logic says that since the trends on water, food, and energy show that we are on a course that ends in disaster, it follows that we should take action.
Emotion says that to change the habit of a lifetime is a drag, and it would be better to continue as we are doing, and hope for the best.
Reason says that decarbonising our economy is possible, but will take a huge effort, so we had best start today.
Ideology says that decarbonising our economy is a challenge to free market fundamentalism, so should be deferred as long as possible.
Logic says that human population cannot expand forever into a finite space, but ideology says that the Pope and the Hadith both agree that God/Allah want Catholic and Muslim populations to expand forever, even if it means widespread starvation, eco-degradation and war.

It would be easy to get a bit depressed and cynical over all of this. However, it takes a long time and many nautical miles to turn a supertanker around, and this may explain why it is taking so long to get any action on population, water management, food production and distribution and global warming. I have been in the Green Party for 30 years, and I can say that never have our concerns been so high up on the political and scientific agenda, nor at so high a level of the political pyramid. The Green Party in the UK is still to a very great extent shut out of the political and mass media process, but our time will come. Politicians and corporate media can feel some of the poople some of the time, and they can poop on some of the fools all of the time, but they cannot pop all of the feebles all of the time. Something like that.

Anyway, it's a lovely day, and I'm off out to plant some seeds.

Cancel your TV licence DD!!

I have just been speaking to the TV licensing Authority, who wrote asking why I cancelled my Cancel your TV licence Direct Debit please, in protest at the BBC's refusal to play the DEC appeal on behalf of Disaster Emergency Council Humanitarian Appeal.

I spoke to the young man at the BBC. I told him it was because of Mark Thompson's decision to ban the DEC Humanitarian appeal. The young man in Blackburn was polite, but said I was the first DD cancellation for that reason he had heard of.

Shocking.

Maybe most humanitarians do not pay their TV licences by DD anyway. If you are, and do, please lose no time in canceling your DD, and get your friends to do the same. Hopefully the BBC will have a new Director General by the time it falls due. Or we may decide that we can live without the TV anyway.

An Amish, giving a talk, was asked "What is the essential difference between the Amish and ordinary folks?"
He said, "Who here has a TV?"
All the hands went up.
He said "Who here thinks their life would be better without a TV?"
Most of the hands went up.
He said "That's the difference. We don't have TVs".

Canceling the DD is not illegal, will not cost you anything, but will cost the BBC because they have to send out reminder notices.

All you have to do is to contact the bank and tell them to cancel the Direct Debit.
[update: how I did pay in the end]