Hmmm… In last Sunday’s Observer I had some critical things to say about Newsnight‘s abysmal failure to help viewers understand the #ukriots. Now Helen Boaden, who is Officer Commanding all BBC journalism, has a sideswipe at us in a blog post entitled, bizarrely, “Newsnight: The facts”.

But it’s also been an especially strong summer for Newsnight though by some of the recent comment in the newspapers, you would never know that. A wholly inaccurate and unfair narrative is emerging about Newsnight allegedly “losing its way”.

Let’s look at the facts about Newsnight. Over the summer, 13 editions have attracted over a million viewers on average as people have sought out an intelligent, lateral take on the news of the day. In the last two months, 11 million people have watched Newsnight – that’s one and a half million more than for the same period last year.

Those strong audiences are not a surprise. Time and again, Newsnight‘s discussions have set the agenda and made compelling television: Steve Coogan on phone hacking; Harman v Gove on the cause of the riots; Sir Hugh Orde on political interference in policing; David Starkey on race and culture.

Newsnight‘s sharp debates, witty insights and testing interviews may challenge or infuriate. But they rarely bore.

One wonders if Ms Boaden has actually watched some of the stuff she praises. For example, Harman vs Gove was an infuriating, idiotic travesty in which two front bench grotesques parroted their respective party lines. And as for Starkey…

Boaden gives the game away, of course, by proudly boasting that Newsnight‘s “sharp debates” may “challenge or infuriate” but “rarely bore”. First of all, it’s not true that they don’t bore: au contraire, many of the discussions staged on the programme are tediously predictable. But the really important point is that challenging and infuriating has nothing to do with enlightenment. It does, however, have something to do with making sure that audience figures are up.

Still life with cattle, originally uploaded by jjn1.

A landscape in Norfolk photographed last weekend and subjected to inordinate post-processing.

Lovely spoof — “God’s Blog” by Paul Simms in the New Yorker. First post reads:

UPDATE: Pretty pleased with what I’ve come up with in just six days. Going to take tomorrow off. Feel free to check out what I’ve done so far. Suggestions and criticism (constructive, please!) more than welcome. God out.

But it’s the Comments that are the really funny bit:

Not sure who this is for. Seems like a fix for a problem that didn’t exist. Liked it better when the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep.

Going carbon-based for the life-forms seems a tad obvious, no?

The creeping things that creepeth over the earth are gross.

Not enough action. Needs more conflict. Maybe put in a whole bunch more people, limit the resources, and see if we can get some fights going. Give them different skin colors so they can tell each other apart.

Disagree with the haters out there who have a problem with man having dominion over the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, the cattle of the earth, and so on. However, I do think it’s worth considering giving the fowl of the air dominion over the cattle of the earth, because it would be really funny to see, like, a wildebeest or whatever getting bossed around by a baby duck.

I particularly liked this one:

Adam was obviously created somewhere else and then just put here. So, until I see some paperwork proving otherwise, I question the legitimacy of his dominion over any of this.

Amen

And, of course, “Putting boobs on the woman is sexist.”

One of the most infuriating aspects of the #ukriots was the comprehensive failure of media operations like BBC2’s Newsnight to rise to the challenge. Night after night I turned to it in the hope that eventually we would hear some insightful, useful, sense-making discussion. I did so in vain. Instead, night after night, we got brain-dead, sterile, staged confrontations (like the one between the Michael Gove and Harriet Harman) and the usual cast of opinionated fools like David Starkey and Kelvin McKenzie. As I watched, I remembered something that Neil Postman once said about the intellectual ‘bandwidth’ of various communication channels. It’s impossible to have a serious discussion on broadcast television, he said, for the same reason that one can’t do philosophy with smoke signals: the medium can’t bear the weight. And yet, if the folks who produce shows like Newsnight read more widely, had richer address books and better contacts across academic and intellectual communities, then there’s no reason why they couldn’t do better than they currently do. Imagine, for example, how much more intelligent a discussion would be if it had someone like Martin Hall, the Vice-Chancellor of Salford University. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a a blog post he wrote about the disturbances in Manchester.

Pendleton, the broad swathe of highrise around Salford Precinct, is a 1960s urban planning disaster. It’s one of the most challenged local areas in terms of the Multiple Index of Deprivation, which brings together street-by-street statistics on unemployment, housing, health and other key indicators of the quality of life. Salford Precinct is also a bustling, friendly cluster of shops and stalls. Everyone who I spoke to who lives in this area was appalled by what happened on Wednesday, and will do everything they can to stop it happening again. The lazy assumption that people condone burning and looting because they have low incomes (or no incomes) is both insulting and dangerous. We need to be very careful about the “sick society” line taken in other near-instant opinions, with the implication that, like a gangrenous limb, troublesome communities should be amputated from the body politic. As elsewhere in the world, viable long-term solutions will come by working within communities, and not by doing things to them.

By coincidence, a few days earlier I’d met with colleagues from Bradford University’s fine and widely admired Department of Peace Studies. They had made the point that understanding the 2001 Bradford riots had taken many months of careful work in partnership with a wide range of people and organisations. Most of the instant explanations that had been offered at the time turned out not only to be wrong, but also to be a bad foundation for appropriate public policy. Janet Bujra and Jenny Pearce’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning: The Story of the Bradford Riots, published earlier this year, shows how a closely informed understanding of what went wrong in 2001 directly informed civic leaders when they were faced with the provocations of the English Defence League in 2010. This sort of experience-based expertise will be vital over the next few years in shaping future interventions, policies and responses that can work.

Above all, this is a time for listening. All the affected cities have community organisations with close knowledge of local circumstances. In our case, these are organisations such as the Broughton Trust and the Seedley and Langworthy Trust. We need to listen to teachers from local schools, to local councillors and to police community support officers. We also need to listen to our own experts in the health and social care professions, who interact with local communities and community organisations on a daily basis. We need to appreciate the difference between criminal justice and criminalising communities.

I think it was Philip Knightley who said that, in war, “truth is the first casualty”. What the political and media response to the riots showed is that, in a public order crisis, intelligence and reflection are the first things to be jettisoned.

Fifty years ago today, the East German Communist regime started to seal off their part of Berlin from the West. This is my piece of the Wall — a gift from a friend who went to Berlin in 1989 when the wall came down. It normally sits on the windowsill of my study.

In 2003 I went to Berlin and walked some of the route of the Wall, spending a long time looking at what used to be “Checkpoint Charlie” — the official crossing point. It was strange to see what had once been a flashpoint of nuclear confrontation looked humdrum.

Today’s Guardian has a nice piece about the anniversary.

Cory Doctorow became a British citizen this morning. I was privileged to be invited to the ceremony in Hackney Town Hall. Beforehand I spent an hour walking the streets in Hackney that had been the locations of looting earlier in the week. What was astonishing was the air of quiet normality. The clean-up operation seemed to have been virtually comprehensive. Here and there some windows remained boarded up, but in general it would have been impossible for a stranger to know what had gone on. At one point I got lost and wandered into a Turkish tailor’s shop to ask for directions. He smiled and told me I was “twelve minutes” away from my destination. “How can you be so precise?” I asked. “Well”, he said, “unless you are a very fast walker that is what it will take”. He was spot on.

The citizenship ceremony was fascinating and oddly moving. In addition to Cory (attired in his special Union Jack jacket), there were about 20 other ‘new’ citizens, of whom the overwhelming majority were non-white. They were a wonderfully variegated lot, some dressed to the nines, others in what might charitably be described as “smart casual”. They came from all over the world, from Angola to Zimbabwe. We gathered in the Council Chamber, and after a time the Speaker of the Council, an imposing black woman in impressive robes entered to preside over the proceedings. She made a nice informal speech about the importance of citizenship, what a precious thing it was, and about the responsibilities and rights that it conferred on its holders. Then each new citizen was required to swear an oath or make a declaration pledging allegiance to “Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors”. Interestingly, some of the candidates elected not to read from the supplied script but asked the Registrar to say the words, which they then repeated. (From which I inferred that some of them might have literacy problems, at least in English.) Most of those who read tended to mumble a bit. The only one who was as clear as a bell was Cory (no surprise there).

After that, all the candidates stood and collectively made the second part of the declaration. They were then welcomed as citizens of this great country, and presented with their certificates of naturalisation by the Speaker. Many opted to have friends and family included in the resulting photograph. One person was asked if he had any friends or family. “Yes”, he replied, “but not here”.

It was a touching and impressive occasion, the more so because of its location. It was impossible to square what I saw and heard in Hackney today with Cameron’s odious ranting about a “sick” society. What I saw were people whom I found infinitely more preferable (and probably more valuable to society) than the denizens of Canary Wharf or Eaton Square.

Thirty years ago today, the IBM PC was launched. Not many machines can be said to change the world, but this one did.

I love New Yorker covers.

This was the term coined by Gavin Essler Esler on Newsnight last night as he struggled to comprehend the mayhem in London. What’s interesting about the media coverage — and the public utterances of politicians as well as members of the public who have been interviewed by reporters — is its demonstration of how anger disables rationality. At the moment, to even attempt to argue that this “mindless” violence takes place in a wider context is seen as tantamount to condoning the madness.

Nevertheless, here goes.

1. The looting, mayhem and arson that’s gone on is just that. It doesn’t have any political motive or justification. Some of it is hard-headed, organised theft (for example, the looting in Birmingham). We shall probably see evidence of this emerging as some looters are caught and prosecuted, because they are not people from the area where they’ve been apprehended, but incomers from outside the area who have come looking for stuff to steal.

2. But mostly what’s gone on looks like vandalism on an extreme scale — chiefly because it involves youths trashing their own neighbourhoods. Vandalism is always puzzling because it seems motiveless. But it’s socially determined, nevertheless, in the sense that it occurs only in certain contexts. (Which is why, for example, one sees so much of it in Britain and Ireland and so little in some other societies.) In Britain, vandalism is a sign that kids feel no sense of responsibility towards their environment, which in turn reflects a sense of alienation from it. The environment is not something they value, because their perception is that they get very little from it. So no matter how “mindless” their behaviour appears to be, it takes place in a context. And that context is shaped by economic and social conditions.

3. Most of what passes for “analysis” in the mass media can’t seem to grasp the point that behaviour is a multi-causal phenomenon. That’s why it’s idiotic to look for the thing that is “causing” looters to loot. There are lots of forces at work — a system of ’causes’, if you like, and the outcome at any given time is the resultant of those causes at that time.

Larry Lessig pointed out many years ago that behaviour is determined by the interaction of several things — norms, laws, markets and architecture. Norms are socially determined; laws are framed by legislatures and implemented (or not) by security forces; markets have their own impersonal logic, and are often skewed by cartels and monopolies; architecture is determined by planners and developers. Young males growing up in the poorer parts of British cities have been affected by all three: social norms that are normally shaped by regular employment, education and stable family life are warped by poverty, crime and deprivation; the law is implemented in a discriminatory way (as shown, for example, in the way young blacks are regularly singled out by the Met for stop and search); the job-market is effectively closed to thsm; and the architecture of housing estates and run-down streets is ugly, alienating, dispiriting and intimidating to a degree rarely appreciated by the middle-classes, who never visit these places.

4. The spread of rioting from borough to borough and from city to city is clearly viral. The mass media are busy blaming “social media” for this, but in fact the ‘virus’ could just as plausibly have been spread by television images (as it was, for example, in the Watts riots in LA in 1965.

Either way, it’s just a contemporary manifestation of an old phenomenon. It reminds me of the famous psychological experiment in which two identical cars were abandoned, one on a street in Palo Alto, the other in a downmarket part of New York. The New York car was vandalised and stripped instantly, but the one in Palo Alto remained untouched for a week. Then the experimenters smashed its windscreen — with the result that the vehicle was comprehensively trashed in a day. In other words, in normal circumstances, the behavioural barrier to smashing a shop window is quite high. But once one shop has been violated, then the barrier is immediately lowered. When a dozen shops have been done, then effectively all restraints vanish.

And — please note — this is not a justification for the smashing of shop-windows but a plea for a serious attempt to understand what underpins the current crisis. If we don’t learn from it then we’re screwed.

5. Finally, there’s a stink of hypocrisy in all this. Our politicians are all incensed and enraged over the torching of cars and buildings and the looting of a smallish number of shops. But they passively tolerated the looting of our entire economy by bankers — who instead of being made to feel “the full weight of the law” (to coin Boris Johnson’s phrase about the looters) have been allowed to award themselves £14 billion in bonuses this year. It makes one sick.