A PR, I’m proud to have spent a little time (shock, horror) coaching people in techniques supporting the open trade secret that you don’t answer the question that’s put. Hearing people blame a manipulated media for bias, is icing on the cake. The truth is, as Laban Tall demonstrates here, even the most accomplished interviewer cannot force an answer from a determined interviewee when they’re up against the clock. Laban’s in yet another tizzy at John Humphrys, a man bitterly criticised for rudeness, precisely because he so often does try to force an answer.

Spin is simply assembling facts (or alleged facts) in order to support a case and/or defend an interest (legitimate or not). The danger for apparently honest souls is not only that they have no defence against the ‘when did you stop beating your wife?’ questions, but that they have little chance of moving discussion onto their ground.

On being given the chance to broadcast your views through whatever media, make sure you’ve something to say. Spin doctors have responsibility for reputations, jobs, investments, the case for/against war, whatever. Yet for the journalist, it’s just another story. With a determined agenda you’re far more likely to articulate a solid line and make good copy, than a time waster giving straight answers to straight questions.

Leftwing Labans will be complaining at how Tory leader Michael Howard was let off by BBC Radio 1. If he’d stuck to the questions, he’d have no chance to list his ‘ten words for young people’ so he was right to answer in his own way. But asked by a listener ‘without slating the government, what’s the one thing you’d change about Britain today?’, Howard replied that the government had lost trust… That’s just bad technique. He had his ‘one thing I’d change answer’ all prepared and wasn’t about to be blown off course by a questioner’s constraints. Yet he was too obvious: he could have met the condition and still said ‘trust me’.

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While the central romance could be more convincing, strong characterisation ensures this is an intelligent exploration of clashing cultures. Everyone is both principled and reasonable. An elder generation tries to keep community traditions alive; a priest tries to retain integrity; young lovers just want to get on.
7.5 out of 10
Inside I’m Dancing……Coffee and Cigarettes

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Within a week of his death, Manchester Evening News columnist Andrew Grimes is poking fun at John Peel’s mourners. He claims they’ve been taken in by a ‘mickey-taker of near genius’ and a fraud. Grimes isn’t even a comedian, but an aged reactionary playing up to the older readership. His by-line photo appears to show him in a bad wig (bald and proud myself, I suspect Grimes out of wig scares even himself).

Sadly, the paper isn’t brave enough to put his words online so I’ll have to summarise. Feigning admiration for Peel the ‘subversive satirist’, Grimes claims to expose Peel the fraud. He claims Peel ‘recommended yowlings and boom-boomings’ as a joke on ‘gullible record collectors’ looking for ‘intellectual endorsement of their primitive tastes’. Peel only really enjoyed the ‘pure beatific sounds of the blues’, claims Grimes, and would have ‘laughed at the pompously-phrased reactions to his untimely death’.

You can send a simple message to the Manchester Evening News by clicking here: postbag@men-news.co.uk.

UPDATE: Poking fun at John Peel mourners 2

Farewell John Peel……Vengeful Tabloids……Before there was blogging

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Blogging’s reached its high point; it’s all down hill from now on. Not for this blog, of course, which will continue to go from strength to strength, but for the fad that’s already failing to deliver the utopian vision so many bloggers have for it.

I first gently suggested we’re at the peak over at Harry’s Place, as Boris Johnson’s and the Guardian’s news blogs launched. Blog rating service Technorati, scored both as ‘authoritative’ from day one (Boris currently beats the Guardian), because so many excited bloggers linked to them and blogs are rated by incoming links. (I’ve never done that well on this. I don’t exchange links to build ranking, choosing instead to list sites I think worth reading and only once asking for a link in return.)

Yet these instant high rankings owed everything to the new players’ reputations outside blogging. The Guardian’s enhanced its website by absorbing blogs into an existing web offering. Non-bloggers won’t notice it’s newsblog’s not an ordinary website and the absence of trackback means bloggers cannot insert links to thoughts on their own blogs. It’s just news stories with a commenting system. Some bloggers asked, ‘what blogs Boris reads?’. Yet there’s no evidence he has time to read any. A very busy man (so fair enough), he tends to leave his assistant to post copies of articles originally published elsewhere (which is why he’s not on my blogroll, so there). So rather than enhancing blogging, they’re co-opting it.

Over at the Adam Smith Institute they’re about to debate with those who propagate the blogs will revolutionise democracy myth. There’s some anecdotal evidence to suggest bloggers have a role in breaking some stories, but like Harry says, they quickly get ahead of themselves: some claim bloggers brought down the chairman and director general of the BBC, a story where blogging played no role.

It’s a young form, yet there’s plenty of academic research out there and it’s not supporting the revolutionaries. In fact, there’s evidence blogs suppress dissent. Research conducted by a number of US academics, shows how blogs can and do amplify the herd instinct as bloggers link to those they trust. They take the trusted source’s view into account when forming their own opinion to the extent that (in the face of so much linkage) any private doubts they have are forgotten. The psychology seems to say that if just two people you trust take a view, you’ll feel pressured to agree, that opinion cascades and dissent is crushed.

Political blogs have quickly divided into a small number of entrenched camps and it’s my guess that each has its own cascades. These effectively limit available viewpoints to a few often extreme views. Check out blogs on the Blogs for Bush blogroll or Kerry webring for great examples, not of reasoned debate, but endless bile. These blog owners are hardly representative of Americans (thank goodness), almost of half of whom rarely vote and who are unlikely to be persuaded to vote by vile bloggers.

Indeed, the blogging phenomenon has led to a great increase in the number of hate sites that pollute the web.

Meanwhile, some are in danger of sleepwalking into this nightmare. Over here a naïve marketing consultant lists ten trends he mistakes for principles. Yes business needs to respond to an ever changing world, but his thesis that ‘consumer generated content’ is the saviour of marketing is deeply flawed. We surely risk being washed away by a sea of bile.

UPDATE: slight correction to ASI mention, 2:37 PM October 29, 2004

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Enjoying Kelis & Andre 3000’s Millionaire at the moment; a perfect little pop record from two artists are the top of that game. But what’s intriguing me is the radio edit as Radio 1 seems to have two. It comes down to Andre 3000’s rap; ‘Wherever there are cats there are dogs / If you got the dogs you got bitches / B****** always out to put their paws on your riches’, (see how I’ve censored this). ‘Bitches’ is only offensive the second time it’s used and so should only be censored (if censored at all) on that occasion. Yet on Radio 1 it’s sometimes censored both times and sometimes not at all. Bizarre.

(BTW the Amazon track listing just says ‘radio edit’, so who knows what you’ll get.)

V Festival 2004: Sunday

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I recently came to realise that I never watch ITV, which scooped the National TV Awards last night. I guess that’s mainly because I don’t watch soaps or quiz shows. It was an event that came hot on the heals of wrong, but high level, criticism of Channel 4 for supporting ‘crap like Wife Swap’ (also picking up yet another award).

Defining ‘good’ is never easy, but there’s a giveaway comment on this story from C4’s spokesperson; ‘We have a higher ABC1 figure than BBC Two’. That is, we appeal to the higher classes and so our programmes must be good. This nonsense supposes that a programme that appeals mainly to C2DEs cannot possibly be good or worthwhile.

The criticism of Wife Swap is ever so wide of the mark. Wife Swap’s a popular programme that often generates acres of tabloid press coverage, but that’s a very superficial way of looking at it. The narrative tensions that generate all that are the same tensions that drive much social change. It’s continually explored class issues (famously swapping a benefit scrounger with an entrepreneur), it’s explored race and most notably, of course, it’s explored gender roles and the evolving family. That you can also read it as a voyeuristic exploitation of ghastly exhibitionists behaving obnoxiously, is an added strength.

All those award-winning ITV programmes are terribly safe and unchallenging, which is why I think they bore me. Good television, like Wife Swap, should entertain without falling back on yesterday’s formulae, work on many levels, innovate, challenge, document something previously unrecognised or tell us something else that’s new. Ideally it should do many of those things.

Who killed (Saturday Night) TV?…… Rubbish message from rubbish TV……Trendy Starkey’s monarchy epic dated

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The sudden death of John Peel is a real shock and his obituary is certain to dominate tomorrow’s front pages as his contribution to British music is truly immeasurable.

At school in the 1980s, Peel represented a kind of lifeline, in that his show was the only place you could hear music that wasn’t already in the mainstream. He provided the soundtrack for an alternative culture (in fact many alternative cultures), that showed there was more to life. He broke every new music genre to enter the UK music scene in the last forty years. When you listened to Peel, you knew you were glimpsing the future. You knew those kids around you, turning there noses up at anything other than sickly sweet pop, would be embracing the new in a few short years.

When I was at school, the BBC looked down on ‘youth culture’. Peel’s was the only Radio 1 show broadcast in stereo on FM as the then BBC Director General, Alasdair Milne, regarded pop culture as trash. Instead, FM stereo was reserved for Radio 2, at that time listened to by over 60s who wouldn’t have understood the benefits.

Fortunately, today’s Radio 1 is a much more diverse place, better reflecting the cultural choices available in the UK. John Peel was the pioneer that made such freedom possible. I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve been moved to tears.
Farewell Buzz……Farewell Yasser Arafat

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The last Tory PM, John Major, has been reduced to naming the National Lottery as his crowning achievement and has used its tenth anniversary celebrations to allege the government’s stolen lottery cash. The whole thing’s an excellent example of muddled politics.

Major makes a good point when he says the lottery was established to help good causes from the arts, sports and heritage, that is, worthy stuff that can’t compete with things like health and education. The latter are so important they need a sustainable and equitable funding source and that means taxation, he argues. He clearly doesn’t want the lottery to be seen as another form of tax, yet for many that’s what it is.

It’s actually quite hard to get a handle on who is actually playing. Many claim it’s only poor people, too ill-educated to realise that odds of 14 million to one aren’t worth pursuing. The National Lottery Commission has produced a little social research, that conspicuously fails to answer that key question. Mostly they worry about children. Their report on participation and expenditure fails to profile lottery players. It tells us, for example, that ABs who play, spend as much as C2s who play, but doesn’t tell us whether the player profile matches that of the UK or is skewed one way or the other. Even without such skewing, the C2s are handing over a higher proportion of their hard-earned cash. This is a very obvious omission, so let’s assume the critics are right and it’s predominantly a poor person’s pastime.

It’s a clever theft, if theft it is, because it’s done in part by asking the lottery players what they think a good cause is. Government likes to pretend it’s all about good causes and that participation, which has been slipping, will improve if the causes are right. That’s why we should let the players define a ‘good cause’. In truth, if you want your money to go to a good cause, you come up with own definition and hand over the cash directly. Nevertheless, Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, can say ‘Giving the public a voice in awarding lottery grants isn’t grand larceny, it is democracy. So is buying cancer scanners…’ and keep a straight face.

She should be laughing because she knows that if you’re too ill-educated to understand the odds, you won’t realise that cancer scanners would otherwise come from taxation. And that your weekly flutter is actually relieving the tax burden that falls more squarely (and equitably) on those wealthier than you.

Muddle will continue, as to tell the lottery players that government is taking advantage of their poor education, is to risk the wrath of those who don’t like being called stupid. No doubt they’ll continue to call for lottery proceeds to relieve the tax payer who will eventually be called upon to go back to making grants to arts, sport and heritage.
Update: National Lottery Consultation… spending the tax on the gullible

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With Nature reporting that quadriplegics can check e-mail and play computer games by the power of thought thanks to a BrainGate chip, the scary prospect of a human internet – the networked brain or Humanet – must be upon us. Okay, so it’s all pretty basic now, but so is all technology at the start. Networking human brains might enable us to share memories, skills and knowledge effortlessly. A wired new born (or even foetus) would have immediate access to many lifetimes of experience and those online might never be sure of what they’d experienced for themselves and what had been felt by others. Perhaps they wouldn’t even care. Perhaps those on the Humanet would have a single shared consciousness. And what if other animals were connected to the same network?

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Manchester’s listings magazine, City Life, had a makeover recently following a process I sort of participated in. I was one of the subscribers lucky enough to be invited to a subsequently ignored focus group. All did not go well. The dummy had turned out to be just that, a dummy, with the group consensus being that the magazine had been lobotomised. Needless to say the editor, a Liverpudlian, went ahead anyway.

But why am I writing all this now? Well the cheeky Scouser’s only had the front to attack a reader on the letters page (missing for weeks, but still dominated by criticism) for using the obvious descriptor – ‘dumbed down’ – when writing in to defend yet another reader who’d been pasted by the editor for daring to criticise the new regime in a manner he regards ‘unreasonable’.

I’ve mentioned how Manchester’s declining older population is well served by the declining and conservative Manchester Evening News. City Life used to cater for an intelligent younger audience that included those who are actually driving the city forward, while continuing to reflect and promote all Manchester cultures. The new, mono-cultural City Life, simply fails in that task.

I don’t expect all the content to appeal to me, but magazines build circulation at the margins, creating a broad coalition of readers. In City Life’s case this should reflect the broad interests catered for by our great city. Yet editorial has been cut back in a way that has narrowed the magazine’s focus, and with that, its appeal. City Life, no longer strives to cater for all who enjoy Manchester and is now modelled on Heat rather than Time Out, so stuff like books, theatre and opera look increasingly out of place. Then there’s the bizarre placing of a new gossip column in the middle of the listings…
City Life’s lobotomy reversed: I was wrong#3……Vengeful tabloids……Manchester: Original-Modern……Whalley Range rant pays off

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