Yesterday I went to London for the launch of a research report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism on Public Trust in the News written by Stephen Coleman, Scott Anthony and David E. Morrison. Because the research was part-funded by the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian and the Observer (for which I write), the event was held in the Guardian‘s posh new offices next to King’s Cross station, an area hitherto notorious mainly for whores, pimps and drug pushers but now clearly coming up in the world. On the landing outside the Scott Room (where the launch was held) is a bust of ol’ C.P. himself (author of the famous observation that ‘comment is free but facts are sacred’, often bowdlerised nowadays as ‘columnists are expensive but facts are even more so’), so we were all on our best behaviour.

The Report

The subject of the research was the hoary old question of “trust in the media” (yawn) but the investigators had done us the honour of at least trying something new.

What did they glean from these focus groups (beyond the astonishing discovery that not a single participant knew that Obama and Clinton belonged to the same political party)? Well, basically that

“people have several expectations from the news, including the provision of useful information that supports them in their personal and civic lives, reliable information that provides ontological assurance in an insecure world and amusing informaiton that offers guilty [sic] distraction from the anxieties of the serious world. News is valued to the extent that it meets some or all of these expectations. The news fails when it devalues [?] these expectations”.

The conclusion seems to be that there are two contradictory trends in the “production, circulation and reception of public knowledge” that raise issues of trust.

So what’s to be done? The report argues that journalists need to take on a “mission to connect”, a windy phrase which seems to involve constructing four principal “linkages”:

The Debate

There were three speakers — Nick Robinson, Political editor of the BBC; Nick Clegg, Leader of the Liberal Democrats (formerly the Claret Appreciation Society); and Professor Stephen Coleman, lead author of the report.

Proceedings were chaired by Alan Rusbridger, Editor-in-Chief of the Guardian.

First up was Stephen Coleman who lost no time in impressing upon us the originality of his team’s approach and the importance of their conclusions, esp in relation to the “mission to connect”.

Coleman was followed by Nick Clegg, looking natty in a sharp suit and pink tie. He candidly explained that he had conscientiously prepared for the event by making a careful study of an entirely different RISJ report, and so his remarks on Professor Coleman’s labours would have to be extempore. For this he gained many brownie points with the audience, unaccustomed as its members are to honesty from a politician. For a time he waffled, but eventually got onto firmer ground when he talked about how recent canvassing experiences had given him an insight into the extent to which citizens lived in ‘micro-climates’ of concerns undreamed-of by Westminster politicians. They are, for example, incredibly worked up about something that the mainstream media regards as a tired old story — the closure of local post offices. And very exercised about a topic long ago declared a no-go area for ‘responsible’ media — immigration. And about mental health. He cited these three areas as examples of profound disconnection between local and mainstream-media mindsets.

Finally, Nick Robinson came to the rostrum. He was terrific — no other word for it. In part this is because his job requires him to be definite and succinct. But it was mainly due to the candid and open way that he approached the topic of the research. He said that he had read the report and found himself nodding in agreement all the way — until he reached the conclusions. And he clearly saw problems in the area of ‘making connections’. How, for example, does one explain the back-story in a Ten O’Clock News item lasting, say, 2′ 45″? He used as an illustration of the problems the case of the MPs’ expenses saga. He had done the back-story — about eight months ago. How could he be expected to pack it in every time? (This point was taken up later by Stephen Coleman, who argued that TV political news makes very little use of the red button — in comparision to the imaginative uses to which it is put by sports programmes.) He also had interesting things to say about the points raised earlier by Nick Clegg. On immigration, for example, he felt that the liberal media had believed for too long that the subject was mainly of interest only to loony right-wing groups. Whether this was due to liberal ‘denial’ or sheer absence of insightful opinion research is not clear. There was polling evidence, he said, but editorial establishments across the high-IQ media didn’t like the evidence. So, he said, the media “explained but didn’t connect” on this subject.

Another case where this may have happened was that of women in the workplace.

Robinson was sceptical about the ‘crisis of authority’ thesis, citing examples of really big stories or crises when people automatically turn to trusted old-style media for information. “When the chips are down”, he said, “people know where to turn”. And in general that is the BBC.

He also said, en passant that he had given up reading the comments on his blog because they were often so rude, intemperate and unthinking. (Thinks: so much for the ‘marketplace in ideas’. But actually oafish commenting is largely a product of allowing people to comment anonymously. When people have to be accountable for what they say, they are better behaved. That’s why I’ve always thought that the BBC and the Guardian were mad to allow anonymous commenting.)

Overall, it was an interesting and worthwhile evening. For me there were eerie echoes of the arguments about the Birt-Jay “mission to explain” in the 1980s, which in turn went back to Walter Lippmann and his view about the role of the press in early 20th-century America. Like Lippmann, Birt believed that the function of journalism was not to “pick at the scabs of society” but to convey to citizens the complexities of the decisions that have to be made by a sophisticated, industrialised society. (Lippmann went so far as to argue that the function of the press was to “manufacture consent” of the governed to decisions made in their name.) He and Peter Jay articulated this view brilliantly — and implemented it in a major, well-funded, current-affairs series on LWT — but the thesis (and indeed Birt himself) ran into the vigorous opposition of journalists who were temperamentally and intellectually hostile to the notion that they had a constructive (or consent-manufacturing) role to play in the polity. My hunch about Coleman’s “mission to connect” is that it will run into the same kind of opposition — assuming, of course, that there any journalists around to have a view on this, or indeed anything else.

Happy Bloomsday! Interesting to see that the only reference to it in today’s Irish Times is to the fire aboard a New York ferry, the General Slocum, on June 16, 1904 — the original Bloomsday — whereas in the boom years of the Celtic Tiger affluent Dublin went en fete on June 16, with even property developers miming a literary sensibility and the Times always having something about the day on the front page.

Perhaps it’s all an indication that my countrymen have a lot on their minds besides literature, what with the banking catastrophe and the child abuse revelations and all. So, as this blog’s modest contribution to the festivities, here is a (rare) audio recording of the Man Himself. When I first heard it I was astonished to find that he had a broad Irish-country accent. I had always imagined him speaking as a ‘Dub’ — i.e. with the accent of most of the street characters in Ulysses.

CORRECTION: I was unfair to the Irish Times — but only discovered my error when I picked up a paper copy in town after I’d written the post. There’s a lovely Irishman’s Diary by Terence Killeen about the Professor McHugh character who appears in Episode 7 of Ulysses. He was, in fact, ‘Professor’ MacNeill, a down-and-out who spent most of his days in the paper’s newsroom.

LATER: Hmmm… Interesting developments. At some stage in the morning, the Irish Times web page was updated with this fetching image of a Sandycove publican dressed to the Joycean nines.

Wondered what triggered the change? Could it have anything to do, one wonders, with the fact that this post was picked up by BoingBoing?

Thanks to Des Fitzgerald for the tip.

And this from NBC producer Ali Arouzi in Teheran:

Initially, it was a peaceful demonstration. People were forming a human chain, saying they wanted their vote back… but the more the police came, the angrier the mob got. It became sort of a mob mentality here. Now the police have swelled in huge numbers. They are being very, very violent with the crowds.

Every young person I’ve spoken to here, I’ve asked them, “do you think you coming out onto the streets is going to make a change?” They said, no, but we have to come out anyway if we want our voices to be heard, but they’re sure this won’t make a change.

Demonstrators have been injured. People have come up to us and they’ve shown us that their arms have been bruised, black eyes, broken noses, bloody heads. But they are fighting back as well. This is, I mean, I’ve been in Iran four years here and everything here has always been contained. Today we saw the demonstrators setting on the police. An hour ago, maybe 30, 40 demonstrators rushed the police, throwing stones at them. One of the policemen fell and they were kicking him in the head and some of his colleagues had to come and drag him away.

[Source.]

Photograph courtesy of the Edmonton Journal.

Marilyn Moysa, who was one of the best and toughest reporters I’ve known, has died after fighting a long and determined rearguard action against cancer. In 1992 she came to Wolfson College as a Press Fellow, with an established reputation as a campaigner for journalistic rights. In 1989, as the Labour Reporter of the Edmonton Journal, she had gone all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada to protect her sources. She risked being sent to jail for refusing to testify at a Labour Relations Board hearing, but she wouldn’t back down.

“I think she was apprehensive about how it might turn out, but she had decided in her own mind she wasn’t going to testify,” said the Journal’s lawyer, Fred Kozak, this week. “It was more a matter of principle.”

He went on to say that the case has stood as a warning to anyone wanting to subpoena a reporter.

“To put it bluntly, since then, many, many times we have used ‘Moysa’ to illustrate how seriously the media takes the issue,” he said.

In its obituary, the Journal said that “her stand for journalistic principles continues to shield her colleagues from being dragged into court to reveal their sources. When she died Monday at age 56 after battling cancer for two decades, she left a template for courage and determination, both in life and in her work.”

I remember Marilyn as a passionate, warm, funny and intelligent journalist. She came to Wolfson to study the changing legal climate around assisted human reproductive technology. (Cambridge was a pioneering centre of research and practice in the area at the time.) After she returned to Canada she was diagnosed with breast cancer and she kept us awestruck and moved by her annual dispatches from the chemotherapy battlefield. She was one of those life-enhancing people who left the world a better place than when she found it. I feel privileged to have known her. May she rest in peace.

I’m not a BT Broadband customer. Well, not directly. My home DSL service is supposedly provided by Pipex — which, when I last looked, had been acquired by Tiscali. But I am indirectly a BT customer because (a) they provide the phone line, and (b) they are the broadband wholesaler for Pipex/Tiscali. I’m paying for a service which theoretically offers 8mbps but in practice has never delivered anything better than 3mbps — against a theoretical maximum of 4mbps because of the distance between my home and the exchange. (I live in a village.)

I find the BBC iPlayer invaluable. But it’s often flaky. And HD is completely beyond my connection. Until I read this I was resigned to putting this down to the laws of physics.

BT Broadband cuts the speed users can watch video services like the BBC iPlayer and YouTube at peak times.

A customer who has signed on to an up to 8 megabit per second (MBPS) package can have speed cut to below 1Mbps.

A BT spokesman said the firm managed bandwidth “in order to optimise the experience for all customers”.

The BBC said it was concerned the throttling of download speeds was affecting the viewing experience for some users. Customers who opt for BT’s Option 1 broadband deal will find that the speed at which they can watch streaming video is throttled back to under 1Mbps between 1700 and midnight.

The BBC iPlayer works at three different speeds, 500Kbps, 800Kbps, and 1.5Mbps, depending on the speed of a user’s connection. There is also a high definition service which requires 3.2Mbps. Sources at the BBC said the effect of BT’s policy was to force viewers down on to the 500Kbps service, which can make the viewing experience less satisfactory.

I’ve just checked the speed of my collection at 6.15pm on a Friday evening. I’m getting only 1.78mbps. Hmmm… Time to investigate further. First stop, Pipex.

Just reading one of those “How I Work” pieces by Matt Mullenweg — the WordPress guy. “I’m very disorganized”, he writes. “I’m wildly late all the time and really bad at keeping a schedule. That is one of the many reasons I love Maya [Desai]. Her official title is ‘anti-chaos engineer’, which is another way of saying office manager.”

Yep. I could use one of those.

Lovely acerbic piece in The New Republic about the Huffpost’s proprietor. Sample:

Arianna Stassinopoulos is now Arianna Huffington, and she is best known as the proprietor of The Huffington Post, and as a personification of the hyperactive up-to-the-nanosecond news-and-opinion universe of the web. Her fame now approaches her immodest ambitions. And more than Huffington’s name has changed since she wrote those early premonitory words. She is now a steely–“bleeding heart” somehow does not fit–liberal, rather than a politically incorrect conservative. She has been, as Americans like to say, on a journey. Her historical timing has always been exquisite. If she is herself some sort of institution, she is an exceedingly adaptable one. (Click here for a slideshow that tracks Huffington’s many public makeovers.)

Now comes her twelfth book, lyrically entitled Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe (And What You Need To Know To End The Madness). It is only the most recent example of Huffington’s tireless ability to inhabit different places on the political spectrum. In the early 1970s, she made herself a star by rubbing outrageously against the liberal grain. A well-turned-out young woman in articulate recoil from feminism, a woman disputing the reigning ideologies and dogmas of her day–or at least the reigning ideologies and dogmas of college and university students–was ideally suited for the role of right-wing contrarian. But that may have been the last time she moved against the wind. Now “progressivism” reigns supreme in cyberspace and in the Beltway, and noisily progressive she is. No courageous heterodoxy this time around. Now she is a “player.” A look at Huffington’s career reveals someone uncannily–no, cannily–adept at recognizing and navigating the social and political currents, a zeitgeist artist, even though she has written nothing that requires her to be taken seriously as a thinker.

Huffington’s work is not intellectually consistent, but there are two strains that run through much of what she has written. The first is her limp spirituality, which never moves beyond fatuities and banalities. (“Our purpose is to make religion a continuous living experience, to lead us toward a resurrection not of the dead but of the living who are dead to their own truth. “) The second is her frequent and caustic criticism of the Fourth Estate.

I remember her well. Our times as students in Cambridge overlapped. She was Arianna Stassinopolous then — a noisy, wealthy (daughter of a rich Greek family) and brass-necked hussy who became president of the Union (not to be confused with the — socialist — students’ union). Later she took up with Bernard Levin, who was once Britain’s best newspaper columnist, but went into sad decline for reasons unconnected with Ms S.

From ‘Hot News’ on the Apple site this morning:

The Internet turns 40, June 9, 2009

You’re so used to paying bills, getting your news and weather, and doing more and more of your purchasing online, you probably think the Internet has been around forever. But it hasn’t. As you’ll learn from this program on Open University, the Internet turns 40 this year. How did it get started? Where is it taking us next? Find out by listening to these Internet pioneers on iTunes U…

It seems that the recording of my interview is #4 in the top 100 downloads.

My post about the illusory Hawthorne Effect brought this lovely email from a reader:

“Curiously I was reminded of the Hawthorne studies just last week – I spent a pleasurable few hours with some friends at a local cinema watching Cinema Paradiso…a lovely film that I first saw one Thursday afternoon nearly 20 years ago.

As a student in Edinburgh, we had two lecturers in Organisational Psychology. One was always able to hold a theatre of 100 students attention no matter how dry the subject matter. The other spent far too long on the Hawthorne studies, and sadly for her, also lectured to us on Thursday afternoons.

Thursdays was half price for students at the Edinburgh Filmhouse.

Needless to say, in my finals, an essay choice centered around the Hawthorne studies. It was luck that I was able to choose from the others.

Almost 20 years later I am reassured that my time was not wasted.”

It’s strange to think of the colossal theoretical edifices that social ‘scientists’ have erected on such a flimsy foundation.