Category Archives: Asides

How to regulate a free press

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The FT’s (and Oxford’s) John Lloyd is a thoughtful commentator on media issues. He is also an early entrant into the debate about what should succeed the Press Complaints Commission with a modest proposal published in today’s FT. The nub of it is:

So we have a dilemma. State-backed regulation is seen as illiberal, and would be opposed (on liberal grounds) by all of the press. Yet self-regulation – paid for by the newspapers, dominated by News International and Associated Newspapers – has proved self-serving and supine.

The answer to this dilemma is not to create a new regulator with statutory backing. Instead it is to increase the group’s base of stakeholders – and to include in the number of institutions making up that base the government itself, as a representative of the public interest.

How would this work? When the PCC is replaced, a new organisation should be established, which I would call the Journalism Society, in a similar vein to the Law Society, the representative body for solicitors in England and Wales. This body should be open to being as global as the media are fast becoming. And it should be independent.

The Journalism Society’s stakeholders should include representatives of the government; the educational establishment; civil society (for instance relevant non-government organisations and policy institutes); industry and finance; and the news media. All of these would be committed, under its charter, to pluralist, independent, opinionated news media, working within the law.

All of which is fine and dandy, but avoids at least two thorny problems.

1. The most important is the question of sanctions. As I understand it, the Law Society (through its Solicitors Regulation Authority) can suspend a lawyer’s right to practise, just as the BMA General Medical Council (GMC)* can ‘strike off’ a medical practitioner.

Would the Journalism Society have similar powers? If so, how would it define a ‘journalist’ — always a tricky problem and one that has become insuperable in a networked age? Legal regulation works because, in the end, the state delegates the right to license legal practitioners. John Lloyd’s idea would only work if the state did likewise with journalists. I’d be very surprised if this is what he has in mind.

He claims that a Journalism Society would do a lot of good. For example,

It would allow journalism to take itself seriously as a trade claiming a democratic mandate. It could set and patrol ethical standards, monitor training and qualifications and above all be a forum within which journalists could map out the nature and future of their craft at a time of rapid change.

Agreed. But in the end effective self-regulation requires formidable sanctions that can be applied as a last resort. And that’s where the real problem lies. Regulation works in broadcasting because the state has a monopoly control of a scarce resource (electromagnetic spectrum). But — at least in democracies — the state doesn’t have monopoly control over the intellectual or ideological spectrum, which is why the very idea of regulation is so problematic.

2. The Law Society (and the BMA GMC) models work because they are tied to specific legal jurisdictions. John Lloyd’s vision of a Journalism Society that is “open to being as global as the media are fast becoming” means that it wouldn’t be confined to a particular jurisdiction, which in turn means that it would be totally ineffective.

*Correction: Thanks to Jonathan Rees for pointing out that it is the GMC and not the BMA which is supposed to regulate medical practitioners. But its difficulties and limitations merely serves to reinforce my argument.

How to write

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So I decided to try to write the book I wanted to read. I wasn’t at all sure how to go about it. One evening, in New York, at a gathering of writers and historians interested in the West, my boss, Alvin Josephy, pointed to a white-haired man across the room. He said, That’s Harry Drago. Harry Sinclair Drago. He’s written over a hundred books. I waited for my chance and walked over. Mr. Drago, I said, Alvin Josephy says that you’ve written over a hundred books. Yes, he said, that’s right. How do you do that? I asked. And he said, Four pages a day. Every day? Every day. It was the best advice an aspiring writer could be given.

And, on avoiding the trap of the Whig Interpretation of history:

Thornton Wilder talked, in that Paris Review interview, about the difficulty of recreating the past: “It lies in the effort to employ the past tense in such a way that it does not rob those events of their character of having occurred in freedom.” That’s the difficulty exactly—how do you write about something that happened long ago in a way so that it has the openness, the feeling of events happening in freedom? How to write solid history and, at the same time, give life to the past and see the world as it was to those vanished people, with an understanding of what they didn’t know. The problem with so much of history as it’s taught and written is that it’s so often presented as if it were all on a track—this followed that. In truth, nothing ever had to happen the way it happened. Nothing was preordained. There was always a degree of tension, of risk, and the question of what was going to happen next. The Brooklyn Bridge was built. You know that, it’s standing there today, but they didn’t know that at the start. No one knew Truman would become president or that the Panama Canal would be completed.

From a marvellous Paris Review interview with David McCullough.

NoW Editor: “It woz the Web wot made me do it, yer honour”

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Simon Jenkins, a former newspaper editor and one of the Guardian‘s most prominent columnists, has a rant today about the revelations of how far the News of the World’s hacking went. (They included hacking into the mobile phone of a murdered teenager — and deleting some messages in her voicemail — thereby encouraging her distraught parents to think that she might still have been alive.)

At first, Jenkins’s rant seems predictable. “Editors on a paper whose stock in trade is human anguish”, he writes,

appeared to lose all respect for the law, let alone self-control. The hacking into Milly Dowler’s phone was part of a culture of intrusion that seemed to know no bounds. It now appears to have extended to the Soham murder victims’ families. This stretches any public interest defence beyond credibility and taunts politicians to react with scourges against press freedom, for which there will now be strong public pressure”.

Quite. But now comes the extraordinary bit:

Pressure on editors and newspaper owners not just to “dumb down” but to abandon all scruple and restraint has been intense. The handling by the press of the Joanna Yeates murder case, now subject to contempt of court proceedings, shows the degree to which the web has eroded newspaper discipline.

[emphasis added]

Eh? I had to read that a second time to be sure that I wasn’t dreaming. Suddenly it’s the web’s fault that an occupational group (print journalists) which is forever bleating (or ranting) about the untrustworthiness and unreliability of the web — compared with the gold-standard of old-fashioned journalism — should have been forced to abandon their high ‘professional’ standards.

At this point one wonders if dear old Jenkins (who, perhaps not incidentally, was a giant of old-style print journalism) might not be losing his marbles, or at any rate his capacity for joined-up thinking. The moral zombies who run the News of the World and newspapers like it do not see themselves in competition with the web, but with other print publications. They’re caught in a circulation war. It may be that the online world makes them even more frantic to get an exclusive angle on big stories, but blaming the web for grotesquely unethical and illegal behaviour is like a jewellery thief blaming rich women for his crimes.

Twain’s attic

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This is getting ridiculous — two terrific book reviews in one weekend. First Mary Beard’s dissection of Robert Hughes’s Rome. Now Michael Lewis on The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1.

At the very least, great writers are supposed to think that writing is an important, if not a sacred, activity. When Twain set out to write the story of his life, he found the written word wanting (“too literary”), and elected instead to dictate it. The book in question has been advertised and sold as the autobiography that Mark Twain wrote and declined to publish in his lifetime because the material was simply too shockingly honest. There are enough hoaxes in this claim to make Tom Sawyer blush. Twain didn’t write it; hardly any of it is shockingly honest; just about all the material in it has seen print in one form or another, either in biographies of Twain or in Twain’s own magazine work. The book weighs in at 736 pages printed in a microscopic font, which gives it the feel of a serious and deeply felt venture. For its editors, it clearly was; but for Twain, I’m not so sure.

Twain’s dictations make up only about one-third of the book; the rest is excerpts from newspaper articles that Twain found interesting, transcripts of Twain’s after-dinner speeches, end notes, footnotes, notes on the text, explanatory notes, and so on. Even the putatively autobiographical bits are less autobiography than an elaborate exercise by an extremely crafty writer to avoid writing his autobiography. It is impossible to imagine anyone who isn’t being paid to do it reading the thing from start to finish. Even I, who still hope to be paid, hauled the book around for six months on business trips and vacations, and spent vast amounts of time staring at Twain’s random ramblings in minuscule type feeling resentful and vaguely duped—roughly the way I felt a dozen pages into the Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc-before I could summon the energy to wade deeply into it.

But taken for what it is, rather than what it pretends to be, the book is great. What we have here amounts to the contents of Mark Twain’s attic: all the stuff that didn’t fit in the living quarters and that the man tossed upstairs, where for a century it gathered dust, cobwebs, and rumors. A team of editors at the University of California, Berkeley, moved by a passion for accuracy wholly alien to their subject, went to work on this mess and have rendered it, if not comprehensible, at least inspectable. Here is the headline: if you thought Mark Twain’s character improbable for a Great Writer, wait until you see what he left in the boxes upstairs. Or, to put it another way: if all you knew of Mark Twain was this curious self-presentation, you would never believe that any grown-up person would be interested in his literary output a century after his death…

It’s a very good, perceptive review which fastens unerringly on the way Twain, like all celebrities, became trapped by his public persona.

Writing with one eye on the audience is certainly a handicap; but the worry that the audience might rise and leave the auditorium at any moment pushes the writer to be clear, and brief, and obviously worth listening to. He is forced to pay special attention to the sound of his words. A distinctive literary voice is a bit like a talent for wiggling your ears, or for holding your breath underwater for two straight minutes. It’s not fair that some people simply sound particularly themselves and others do not, and it’s really not fair just how particularly himself Twain sounded, even when he lay in bed and rambled to a stenographer. But Twain’s voice is the reason people still read him. His voice is the reason you feel as if he is talking to you. And the crowds he played to in his lust for fame and fortune helped him to create that voice.

On the other hand, it takes a lot of effort to sustain a voice without becoming trapped by it. Not long before he committed suicide, I met Hunter S. Thompson at his home, late one night. He sat in a kitchen pulling on a half gallon of tequila straight from the bottle, surrounded by giant placards inscribed with various outrageous things that he had said or written. He had become less a writer than an actor trying not to forget the character he was meant to be playing. By the end of his life Twain was obviously grappling with this problem, too.

When in Rome…

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… best avoid Mary Beard, who sets about Robert Hughes in a severe review of his new book about Rome.

Reader, be warned. Skip the first 200 pages and start this book at chapter six, “The Renaissance”. By the time Hughes reaches this point, he is well in command of his material and is on characteristically cracking form. He offers some delicious pen portraits of the artists and architects who designed and made what are now the tourist high-spots of the city: the Sistine chapel, the Piazza Navona, St Peter’s basilica, the Campidoglio. Particularly vivid is his discussion of Bernini, “the marble megaphone of papal orthodoxy” – who was loathed by most visitors in the 19th century (“intolerable abortions” was Charles Dickens’s description of Bernini's monuments), but increasingly admired in the 20th. And he nicely captures the spirit of the 18th-century grand tour. The desire of the young milords to discover the grandeur of ancient culture was only one side of the story. Sex tourism was the other. Rome was, as Hughes observes, the Thailand of the period, and he includes plenty of revealing stories about the brash bigwigs who turned up in the city: Lord Baltimore, with his harem of eight women, or Colonel William Gordon, who (if Batoni’s famous portrait is anything to go by) pranced around the Mediterranean in a kilt and swaths of his family tartan. What on earth did the locals make of these people?

In his epilogue, Hughes, the modern cultural critic, elegantly savages the mass tourism and commercial culture of Berlusconi’s Italy. A visit to the overcrowded Sistine chapel has become, he insists, close to unbearable, “a kind of living death for high culture” – which can only get worse “when post-communist prosperity has taken hold in China”, and the Chinese flood in by the million. The same, he might have added, is also true of St Peter’s basilica itself. It may be large enough inside to hold huge numbers of visitors in relative comfort, but they now have to go through a metal detector to get into the place. When I tried to visit one afternoon last December only two of these machines were working, and people in the queue winding around the piazza would have been waiting for more than an hour.

So far, so good. “In fact”, writes Beard, “the second half of the book is an engaging history of this wondrous city, very much in the tradition of The Shock of the New, packed full of sharp observation and trenchant one-liners, artfully and fearlessly told”.

But:

The first half of the book, especially the three chapters dealing with the early history of Rome, from Romulus to the end of pagan antiquity, is little short of a disgrace – to both author and publisher. It is riddled with errors and misunderstandings that will mislead the innocent and infuriate the specialist.

Hughes, it seems, has made “more than a few pardonable slips”.

The “ancient” parts of this book are littered with howlers. Sometimes, for example, CE and BCE are confused (so that Julius Caesar’s Gallic enemy Vercingetorix is said to have been beheaded in 46CE, almost a hundred years after Caesar himself was assassinated), or the correct chronology is flagrantly reversed (“a succession of autocrats, starting with Augustus himself and continuing onwards through Pompey and Julius Caesar”, he writes, when in fact Pompey and Caesar preceded the emperor Augustus). On other occasions, the identity of the characters is hopelessly muddled. Hughes clearly has not been able to distinguish “Pompey the Great” from his (very different) father, also inconveniently called “Pompey”.

Tut, tut. I still love Robert Hughes, though. He writes about art like Hemingway wrote about bullfighting.