Panel discussion: Conventional media have failed us – the case for and against

I’ve pitched this panel discussion idea to the Global Editors Network 2013 News Summit, to be held from 19 to 21 June 2013 in Paris.

Cat’s chance in hell is the expression that comes to mind. Well miaou!

The case for:
Conventional media have woefully failed to dissect the lack of any true, public accountability in all layers of modern western government, from local to global levels.

This collective failure plays out across all major areas of government. It encompasses the vast bulk of reporting on governments’ economic and fiscal thinking, their responses to serial financial crises and pitiful efforts at regulation of global banks and finance. The problem extends to the superficial news treatment of political inaction over growing poverty and inequality, accelerating climate change and species and habitat loss.

Media literacy concerning the realities of representative democracy, versus politicians’ rhetoric, is spectacularly inadequate. That makes existing media part of the governance problem, not the solution.

Patrick Chalmers, an ex-Reuters reporter himself and author of Fraudcast News, will dissect the media’s failure to highlight people’s powerlessness. He will argue that journalists and their employers, far from being popular watchdogs, suffer the same problems of elite capture as politicians and governments themselves.

Yet he remains a dogged optimist, suggesting there are alternatives. They include mass training of ordinary citizens to help them revolutionise their democracies by revolutionising journalism, building from the grassroots upwards.

The case against: I’m sure you can find someone!

Demand the impossible – sounds like the least we can do

‘We’ve created some feminists!’ … A study group on the Demand the Impossible course at Goldsmith’s. Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian

I’ve just come across this Guardian report about a free, five-day course at Goldsmith’s College in London on activism and radical politics.

I commented on the piece, criticisng the piss-taking style in which it was written while also including an offer to help out with future courses or with spreading the idea elsewhere.

Just in case such shameless self-promotion gets stripped off the comments section by the moderators, I’m pasting it here

Sounds great – shame the author had to pepper his article with leftie this, leftie that cheeky, chappy stuff.

This sort of teaching shouldn’t be classed as radical at all but part of a balanced, thoughtful education that teaches people to think for themselves rather than turning them into consumer automatons. Our existing system is all capitalist-, profit- and economic-growth driven.

You don’t get accompanying “rightie” this, “rightie” that when it comes to articles about Alan Sugar or Dragon’s Den as they vaunt the benefits of loadsamoney lifestyles that ignore what a complete mess we’re all in as a result.

That would be too “radical” for prime-time entertainment – too many people might get “the wrong ideas”. You’re not allowed to add together one + one to see the result of such thinking as consumer craziness and excess, tottering debt mountains, poverty, inequality, climate change, loss of green spaces, war etc. all that fun stuff which would make crap reality TV, piss off the professional politicians and frighten the business advertisers away. Oh no.

I would love to help out with this course – giving some insight from my own career as a Reuters reporter to talk about how our governance systems fail us and how conventional journalism is generally blinkered to those failures. On the upside, the good news. There are genuine, grassroots alternatives sprouting up around the world that could address both of these problems. There are some Creative Commons materials on my website you can take for free, if you want. I haven’t posted the address for fear of comment removal but I’m sure you can work out how to find it.

What would be interesting is to think about how to seed the ideas of Demand the Impossible to make it deliverable all over the place, not just in the UK.

Creative Commons How to manuals and accompanying video journalism reports made by participants and uploaded online would be good places to start.

Stand aside George

People’s budgets

The Chancellor George Osborne was talking of his plans to cut a further £10 billion from the UK’s annual welfare budget as I drove through rush-hour traffic to Kingston-upon-Thames.

News of his crowd-pleasing speech to the Conservative party conference spouted from the radio as I wondered how such questions might be decided with more accountability to the public.

Just what might UK finances look like if ordinary people had greater say over how much money gets raised in taxes and where to spend it?

Read on here….

William Cobbett – dead radical, dead relevant

Artful self satire? I fear not

Face to face: satirist and journalist debate the state of British politics. Photograph: Suki Dhanda for the Observer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I couldn’t help but feel the Observer political columnist Andrew Rawnsley was totally arse-about-face in his line of questions and comment during this interview with TV political satirist Armando Iannucci.

I read the piece and commented on the website, as per below. What do you think?

Is Rawnsley brilliantly satirising his own work in this piece? I fear not.

What a lot of tosh, as per this…

I want to investigate whether he feels any responsibility for the fact that so many of the British do hold politics in a deep contempt, a contempt that is often richly deserved but which can also be indiscriminate, lazy and ultimately poisonous for democracy.

I want to investigate whether Mr Rawnsley feels HE has any repsonsibility for the same, he and a landslide majority (which means 3 men and a dog under UK first past the post system) of mainstream political journalists.

The deep contempt people feel for “democracy” is because anyone who thinks for a moment about our system of government knows it offers us only joke influence over the people who run our lives. If we like a satirical TV programme it’s because it reflects the true, sorry state of our political systems, local to global, far more than anything Rawnsley and friends ever produce.

Iannucci can have his OBE as a comedic act if he wants though it’s no way his funniest.

Satire is a weak weapon if you dream of radical political change, which I do, but at least you get a laugh.

What role for government in changing our behaviour?

Very little, I say, as I explained in a video recorded for a GlobalNet21 debate held in London on Tuesday, July 31.

Not least of the problems is the gathering, multiple crises in government legitimacy, at every level from the local to global.

There was an interesting array of opinions expressed on the night, judging from the visionOntv smartphone interviews posted afterwards. You can view them all via this link.

My contribution was purely by pre-recorded video interview, having left England for my usual home in SW France the day before.

This GlobalNet21 blog post gives more details on the evening’s discussions.

Food and land: base camps for community building

Pogo Cafe in Hackney, London (Copyleft photo by Patrick Chalmers)

I wrote this blog entry for Stir magazine, which has a kickstarter campaign underway to raise funds for printing offline versions of the wonderful work it does already online. Have a think about the stuff you usually fritter your money away on, petrol for the Porsche, a Lear jet flight to Monaco, private banking advice and so on, then consider giving some of that money to Stir instead.

The Pogo Café in Hackney is everything we’re told modern Western consumers aren’t capable of doing, which makes it a treat to visit. The place serves great-quality vegan food, it’s staffed by enthusiastic volunteers who host a space that nurtures alternative culture, co-operative working, exhibitions and events.

Just the place for an evening themed on Land & Liberty! — stories from communities across the world that are trying to control where their food comes from and how it’s grown. London food-growers recounted tales from their visits to like-minded souls in Ljubljana Slovenia, Jaos Palestine, Chiapas Mexico and Havana Cuba.

For the rest of this post, read on here.

Crunch time for Grow Heathrow in land occupation case

Crunch time for Grow Heathrow in land occupation case.

via Crunch time for Grow Heathrow in land occupation case.

Ireland Yes, Ireland No – is that really the only option?

(Photo by the Blue-haired lawyer)

Irish voters have a chance to vote between paying more or less for their public debt today, according to their Prime Minister Enda Kenny. Put that way, I can imagine the temptation to vote “yes”.

It’s a pretty rubbish choice.

That Irish citizens have a formal right to express their opinion on EU issues is a great thing, in theory. There’s no such option guaranteed in Britain. The reality, though, is that if Irish voters choose the option politicians don’t want, like when they rejected the Lisbon Treaty, they get asked to vote again.

Ireland’s experience is the clearest sign you could get that the EU project is a busted flush. Nice idea that different countries cooperate – awful implementation. We need root-and-branch reform of the European Union or the project’s scrapping.

I say that as a former europhile, someone who spent five years as a reporter in Brussels following the twists and turns of policy as a freelance and then with Reuters. Having now studied more about what “democracy” is meant to mean, which is government by the people or by representatives of their interests, I can’t help but conclude the EU is a democratic disaster. Our politicians do not represent our interests and we have no way to influence their day-to-day decisions. This is true at the national level and far more so in European policy.

The euro is the most pressing and obvious example of EU failure, there are plenty of others. We must understand these issues better or continue to suffer their fall out. Dismissing it all as too boring is total self-sabotage.

Chapter 2 of my book Fraudcast News tackles the issue with more specific examples. It explains how this issue has nothing to do with the “us and them” of different countries but much more the 1% and 99% of the Occupy movement, the few very rich versus the rest of us. It is one of five chapters that lay out the problems of how bad journalism supports our bogus democracies. You can download it for free or buy a paperback or eBook via the link above.

It has ideas and examples of positive solutions too, built upwards from the local level, meaning this is a work of optimism.

My advice for conflicted Irish voters today, for all my fellow EU citizens in fact, is not to despair or to get lost in anger, as understandable as that is. We need to get active. So grab a copy of the book to find how we can all start doing something about ordinary people’s chronic lack of influence over politics and finance.

No weddings, no funerals – phone hacking victims lay out case for media reform

Actor Hugh Grant tells a public rally for media reform how press problems go way beyond Murdoch. Photo by Patrick Chalmers

The crimes and misdemeanours of large sections of the British media were aired by their various victims during a public rally for Media Reform at Westminster Central Hall in central London on Thursday evening. The question on people’s lips was what will be their punishment and whether the ongoing Leveson Inquiry will be able to bring meaningful reforms either to British journalism or the political establishment it pretends to watch over.

Marc Barto and I elbowed our way through the crowds to land a series of video interviews with some of them, though Hugh Grant proved adept at dodging our efforts to engage him. No matter with the likes of former Crimewatch presenter Jacqui Hames and others on hand to give first-hand accounts of their thorough maulings by the media.

Rounding off the evening, Labour MP Tom Watson explained how grassroots pressure for reform will be critical once the inquiry reports later this year, when pressure on MPs to water down proposals is likely to be intense.