Today’s Observer column:
I never thought I’d find myself writing this, but the Daily Mail has finally done something useful for society. Mind you, it’s done it unintentionally: it didn’t know it was doing good. But still… It would be churlish not to acknowledge its achievement…
Sounds improbable? I know. But read on
“I prefer uplifting lies to demeaning truths”.
Charles de Gaulle
Sick of the appropriation of Magna Carta by clueless and authoritarian British governments? So am I. And so is Tom Ginsburg:
Magna Carta has everything going for it to be venerated in the United States: It is old, it is English and, because no one has actually read the text, it is easy to invoke to fit current needs. A century ago, Samuel Gompers referred to the Clayton Act as a Magna Carta for labor; more recently the National Environmental Protection Act has been called an “environmental Magna Carta.” Judges, too, cite Magna Carta with increasing frequency, in cases ranging from Paula Jones’s suit against Bill Clinton to the pleas of Guantánamo detainees. Tea Party websites regularly invoke it in the battle against Obamacare.
Americans aren’t alone in revering Magna Carta. Mohandas K. Gandhi cited it in arguing for racial equality in South Africa. Nelson Mandela invoked it at the trial that sent him to prison for 27 years. We are not the only ones, it seems, willing to stretch old legal texts beyond their original meaning. Like the Holy Grail, the myth of Magna Carta seems to matter more than the reality.
PS You can buy the Magna Quacka rubber duck from — I kid you not — the British Library.
PPS The Economist takes it seriously, though.
Cambridge, 2014.
This morning’s Observer column:
When, in the summer of 2013, Edward Snowden began his revelations of the shocking scale of the electronic surveillance currently practised by the NSA and its overseas franchises in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the big and obvious question was: is this just another scandal; or is it a real crisis?
Until this week, I’d have said that it was just another scandal…
Nigel Dodd’s Inaugural Lecture.
… was the timeless tabloid headline devised by Vinnie Musetto, a former editor at the New York Post, who recently passed away and was accorded respectful obituaries in various newspapers. It ranks with “Small Earthquake in Chile. Not many dead”, which Claud Cockburn claims once won a competition at the London Times for the most boring headline.
Writing in the New Yorker, John Cassidy sees a new role for the late Mr Musetto as “the Godfather of Clickbait”. He’s right.
… is the headline on a NYT story. Well, of course it is, given what we now know as a result of a leaked State Department memo which gives a frank assessment of the fiasco so far.
WASHINGTON — An internal State Department assessment paints a dismal picture of the efforts by the Obama administration and its foreign allies to combat the Islamic State’s message machine, portraying a fractured coalition that cannot get its own message straight.
The assessment comes months after the State Department signaled that it was planning to energize its social media campaign against the militant group. It concludes, however, that the Islamic State’s violent narrative — promulgated through thousands of messages each day — has effectively “trumped” the efforts of some of the world’s richest and most technologically advanced nations.
It also casts an unflattering light on internal discussions between American officials and some of their closest allies in the military campaign against the militants. A “messaging working group” of officials from the United States, Britain and the United Arab Emirates, the memo says, “has not really come together.”
“The U.A.E. is reticent, the Brits are overeager, and the working group structure is confusing,” the memo says. “When we convened meetings with our counterparts, I am certain we all heard about various initiatives for the first time.”