Sunlight, not PDF, is the best disinfectant

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So Parliament has finally published the data on MPs’ allowances. Except, of course, that it hasn’t, really. Here’s an example: a part of the ‘return’ for Margaret Moran, the MP for Luton South:

Note that there’s no way of determining where her second home is. It’s the same story as one wades through her ‘receipts’. For example:

The more I look at this stuff, the more I appreciate how much old-style journalistic digging the Telegraph did. Knowing the address of Moran’s second home was just the starting point. So to denounce the Telegraph revelations as mere ‘cheque-book journalism’ is spectacularly to miss the point.

Oddly enough, this is also a case where networked journalism would have worked — if the data had been out there in non-censored form then we could have crowd-sourced the investigation of individual MPs.

UPDATE: The Guardian is already crowdsourcing the job. I’ve just spent a happy hour poring through the expenses returns of Ben Wallace, the Tory MP for Lancaster and Wyre. Wonder why he spends so much money on (a) IT services and (b) ‘executive’ cars.

Only connect

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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.

  • First of all, they avoided the traps of older lines of inquiry which focussed on either production (how journalism engenders or repels public trust) or consumption (how audiences receive and evaluate the news) and looked at both production and consumption.
  • Secondly, rather than asking audiences how much they trust the news and journalists how much they feel they should be trusted, the researchers asked audiences: what is news? How should the news media be expected to perform? “By shifting our investigation from trust, as a measurement of accpetance, to expectation, as a register of how the public thinks it ought to be served, we have allowed the public to elaborate a basis for confidence in the news”. They apply a fancy social-scientific label to this approach — ‘constructivist’ — to denote that the definitions of trust and the news were ‘constructed’ by participants in the study rather than by the researchers. They argue that this approach reveals “that trust in the media amounts to rather more than confidence in journalistic accuracy. It involves feelings of a kind that accord the media a legitimate place in the social ordering of the world” (whatever that means). The researchers declare, in a superior tone, that trust in the veracity of the media — measured by the extent that people think they are telling the truth — is “a relatively trivial exercise in understanding”. What is required, they say, “is a critical examination of how people construct the function of the news media”.
  • The third point of departure from Ye Olde Researches, they declare, is that their study is “contextual”. By this they appear to mean that the focus groups meetings on which the analysis rests were discussing three big news stories: the Obama-Clinton battle in the US presidential election primaries; the ‘disappearance’ of Shannon Matthews; and Mohammed al-Fayed’s bizarre conspiracy theories about the death of Princess Diana.

    • 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.

  • The first is a nagging suspicion that journalists and the media are, so to speak, on an ‘inside track’ — inside what BBC DG Mark Thompson called “the charmed circle of knowledge and power” (aka the ‘Westminster village’?) This convinces citizens that an unbridgeable gap exists between them and the centres of power in our society.
  • The second trend is the influence of networking technology — “peer-to-peer knowledge-sharing, user-generated news content and grass-roots mashing-up of official information at the democratic epicentre of public knowledge”. [Hmmm… this is windy verbiage: how can you have an ‘epicentre’ of a distributed phenomenon?] The report contends that “The traditional Production-Distribution-reception model of news transmission has been radically disrupted by notions of co-production, dispersed circulation and vernacular rearticulation”. However, this seems to pose a problem for the focus groups. “The vastness of the internet, the abundance of news sources and the fragmentation of online public space has left them more ucertain than ever about their capacity to access or act upon the kind of information that might help them to become free and self-governing citizens”.

    • 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”:

  • between contextual back-stories and current events
  • between citizens and institutional processes of policymaking
  • between citizens and the confusing mass of online as well as offline information sources
  • between communities and communities

    • 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.

    Anonymous blogging? Forget it

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    Important legal judgment.

    Blogging is a public activity with no right to anonymity, the high court ruled today in a decision expected to have far-reaching repercussions for thousands of bloggers who keep their identities secret.

    Richard Horton had obtained a temporary injunction against the Times after a reporter discovered he was the officer behind the NightJack blog, which attracted hundreds of thousands of followers to its behind-the-scenes commentary on policing.

    Horton, a detective constable with the Lancashire constabulary, prevented the Times from revealing his identity after arguing the paper would be putting him at risk of disciplinary action for disclosing confidential information about prosecutions within the force.

    However, in a landmark judgment Mr Justice Eady overturned the injunction, stating that Horton, whose blog at one time had around 500,000 readers a week, had "no reasonable expectation of privacy".

    "I do not accept that it is part of the court's function to protect police officers who are, or think they may be, acting in breach of police disciplinary regulations from coming to the attention of their superiors," Eady added…

    In his ownwords…

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    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.

    Pathetic faith: the dismal science and its models

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    Interesting article from the Wharton School asking why economists didn’t spot the glaring flaws in the global financial system.

    Of all the experts, weren’t they the best equipped to see around the corners and warn of impending disaster?

    Indeed, a sense that they missed the call has led to soul searching among many economists. While some did warn that home prices were forming a bubble, others confess to a widespread failure to foresee the damage the bubble would cause when it burst. Some economists are harsher, arguing that a free-market bias in the profession, coupled with outmoded and simplistic analytical tools, blinded many of their colleagues to the danger.

    “It’s not just that they missed it, they positively denied that it would happen,” says Wharton finance professor Franklin Allen, arguing that many economists used mathematical models that failed to account for the critical roles that banks and other financial institutions play in the economy. “Even a lot of the central banks in the world use these models,” Allen said. “That’s a large part of the issue. They simply didn’t believe the banks were important.”

    Over the past 30 years or so, economics has been dominated by an “academic orthodoxy” which says economic cycles are driven by players in the “real economy” — producers and consumers of goods and services — while banks and other financial institutions have been assigned little importance, Allen says. “In many of the major economics departments, graduate students wouldn’t learn anything about banking in any of the courses.”

    But it was the financial institutions that fomented the current crisis, by creating risky products, encouraging excessive borrowing among consumers and engaging in high-risk behavior themselves, like amassing huge positions in mortgage-backed securities, Allen says.

    As computers have grown more powerful, academics have come to rely on mathematical models to figure how various economic forces will interact. But many of those models simply dispense with certain variables that stand in the way of clear conclusions, says Wharton management professor Sidney G. Winter. Commonly missing are hard-to-measure factors like human psychology and people’s expectations about the future, he notes.

    This theme about credulity towards models is surfacing again and again. The Wharton article points to another report by a group of mainly-European economists which makes the same point:

    The paper, generally referred to as the Dahlem report, condemns a growing reliance over the past three decades on mathematical models that improperly assume markets and economies are inherently stable, and which disregard influences like differences in the way various economic players make decisions, revise their forecasting methods and are influenced by social factors. Standard analysis also failed, in part, because of the widespread use of new financial products that were poorly understood, and because economists did not firmly grasp the workings of the increasingly interconnected global financial system, the authors say.

    They go on to say that

    “The economics profession appears to have been unaware of the long build-up to the current worldwide financial crisis and to have significantly underestimated its dimensions once it started to unfold,” they write. “In our view, this lack of understanding is due to a misallocation of research efforts in economics. We trace the deeper roots of this failure to the profession’s insistence on constructing models that, by design, disregard the key elements driving outcomes in real world markets.”

    Quite so.

    Thanks to DianeC for the original link.

    Wrong place, wrong man?

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    The controversy over Robert Capa’s famous war photograph has re-ignited. Fascinating account in today’s Observer about it.

    Capa’s dramatic “The Falling Soldier”, the photograph of a Spanish militiaman being killed by a bullet as he charges down a slope, was taken miles away from where the civil war was being fought at the time, according to a university lecturer, José Manuel Susperregui.

    Susperregui, who teaches communications studies at the University of the Basque Country in northern Spain and specialises in photography, has analysed a series of pictures taken by the Hungarian-born war photographer and claims to have discerned a common countryside in the background. He claims that the real location of ‘The Falling Soldier’ is far away from the Cerro Muriano front where Capa claimed that the picture was taken.

    Susperregui’s research, published in his book Sombras de la Fotografía, provides compelling evidence that ‘The Falling Soldier’ was photographed in Llano de Banda, an area of countryside close to the small village of Espejo, southern Spain, some 25 miles from Cerro Muriano…

    Although the land itself, which was arable when Capa was there, has had olive trees growing on it for the past three decades, the skyline created by a nearby set of hills closely matches that of the celebrated war photographer's own pictures.

    "The landscape around Cerro Muriano looks nothing like that in the photographs," said Susperregui. "I have no doubt that this was taken in Llano de Banda."

    The iPhone and the Kama Sutra

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    This morning’s Observer column.

    The big news at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference last week was that Steve Jobs is apparently still away on sick leave. So the limelight fell on subordinates. They announced a new version of the iPhone, drastic price reductions on the old model, a new operating system for old and new iPhones and the next version of the company’s OS X operating system.

    But widely-touted expectations that the company would launch a ‘tablet’ computer were not realised. Which makes sense, really: a tablet would represent a major change in direction for Apple and it’s hard to imagine Jobs leaving such an announcement to a mere underling. As far as unveiling tablets is concerned, Steve’s only peer is Moses…

    UPDATE: Bill Thompson wondered if Apple were just trying to protect us from badly-scanned versions of the Kama Sutra.

    The NYT’s verbal fastidiousness

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    Andrew Sullivan has done a neat analysis of the way the NYT has in recent years favoured Cheney-style euphemisms for torture.

    The latest NYT euphemism for torture is “intense interrogation,” another plausible translation of the Gestapo term, “verschaerfte Vernehmung”;, for torture that broke no bones, drew no blood and left no permanent marks. The NYT has even tried to turn “waterboarding” into a twilight zone, calling it a technique merely that critics call torture.

    But if you check the Nexis archives of the NYT, you will find that their terminology has not always been so supine and vague. The classic techniques used by Cheney – sleep deprivation, cold cells, hypothermia, stress positions, forced nudity and “walling” – were described by the NYT in the past very plainly, using the term “mental torture,” or in the recent obit (obviously written before Cheney p.c. came in) of an American airman, captured by the Communist Chinese, simply “torture.” In reporting on the similar techniques used Agabuse by the British in Northern Ireland in 1972, the NYT called them “torture and brainwashing”‘ which is exactly what the Cheney techniques are designed to accomplish. In 1996, the NYT ran a story on reports of “torture” in Brazil, which included “being kept naked in a cold cell,” the Gestapo specialty that Cheney made standard procedure for the US. In 1997, in reporting on the CIA’s record in training torturers in Latin America in the early 1980s, the NYT used the terms “psychological torture” and “mental torture” to describe long-time standing, stress positions, “deep exhaustion”, and solitary confinement.

    In 1998, the NYT reported on the CIA’s training of Palestinian security forces. The Times reported that the CIA had dropped all last-resort use of physical torture in 1985, but also what they called “mental torture.” In discussing allegations of torture by the Palestinian security services, the NYT noted a relevant fact as support for the claim: 18 prisoners had died in custody during interrogation. Even after a hundred deaths have now been recorded under the Cheney torture regime, the NYT refuses to call it torture. In 1999, in contrast, the NYT reported on “allegations of torture” in China that amounted to “beatings and solitary confinement”.

    Perhaps one clue to their shift can be found in their treatment of the case of Israeli torture in the 1990s….

    Great piece, worth reading in full. The takeway: torture is what the other guys do; all we do is “intense interrogation”. Interesting also to note that the NYT’s taste for euphemism seems to have surfaced around the time that the Israelis ramped up their er, interrogation techniques.

    Iran, post-election

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    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.]

    Sugaring the pill(ock)

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    One of the strangest things about Gordon Brown is the gulf between his fantasies about having a ‘vision’ and his pathetic appetite for gimmicks. The latest is his appointment of ‘Sir’ Alan Sugar as the government’s ‘Enterprise Czar’. Apart from the ludicrousness of thinking that this one-dimensional celebrity might be able to address anything as complex as industrial policymaking, there is the small matter of the way his acceptance of a post on Brown’s sinking ship compromises the independence of the BBC. So it’s good to see that the Tories are taking up the case.

    The Conservatives today launched a concerted attempt to scupper the appointment.

    Jeremy Hunt, Shadow Culture, Media and Sport Secretary, said: “Presenting a programme for the BBC and working for the Government on the same issue is totally incompatible with the BBC’s rules on political independence and impartiality. Sir Alan Sugar needs to make a choice between his role in The Apprentice and his role as the Government’s business tsar.

    “I have written to Sir Michael Lyons and asked him as a matter of urgency to explain who at the BBC gave guidance to Sir Alan and whether he had informed them that he would be a Labour peer.”

    John Whittingdale, chair of the Culture Select committee of MPs, said: “In my view it is not possible for him to continue to present The Apprentice at the same time as he is so closely identified with the Government.

    “I had assumed that by accepting the role as Enterprise Czar he would stand down from his role in The Apprentice.

    “His show is all about business and enterprise. He will be making recommendations on policy to Government. He is already a political figure – he has made no secret of his admiration for Gordon Brown.

    “Either he is an influential figure in Government or this is just window dressing.”

    If the BBC Trust dodges this, then some of us licence-fee payers might have to take some online action involving Sir Michael Lyons’s email inbox. After all, according to the Charter, the purpose of the BBC Trust is

    “to work on behalf of licence fee payers, ensuring the BBC provides high quality output and good value for all UK citizens, and it protects the independence of the BBC”.

    I haven’t yet been able to locate the Chairman’s personal email address, but for starters there’s always trust.enquiries@bbc.co.uk

    UPDATE: The Observer reports that:

    Government insiders say ministers have been wrangling about who should take responsibility for the feisty businessman and star of The Apprentice. “No one wants to have him,” said one source.

    Sugar’s appointment was announced with great fanfare by the prime minister in his cabinet reshuffle, but a spokeswoman from Lord Mandelson’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills confirmed that he would have no staff and no office there.

    “We want him to go out and meet small businesses and report what he’s seeing. He’s not in the government, he’s just an adviser,” she said.