Why the media don’t understand money

This is a recent talk I gave to the annual conference for the non-governmental organisation Positive Money.

A word to make clear my interests: Positive Money is an organisation whose work I greatly admire and for whom I have done some volunteer work in the last year or so and for whom I may do more in the future.

I choose to do that work, while also being a journalist, because I think the structural failures of our governance systems are such that they are an integral part of any story political journalists should be covering. That is true of debt-based money, the issue raised by Positive Money, but also of other issues such as poverty, inequality, incessant Western war-mongering and environmental despoliation.

Our leaders’ feeble attempts at regulating banks, international finance and global markets have totally failed, leading to ongoing financial crises since the global meltdown of 2007-2008. The false debates created with regard to conventional economics, and our policymakers’ fixation with a sterile definition of prosperity as determined by economic growth, are major barriers to change. Conventional media themselves fail to convey the extent of these governance problems, or even to appreciate that governance issues are the problem.

The question I was tasked to answer was why conventional media don’t “get” the idea of debt-based money. My answer could be easily adapted to fit these various other issues, as I make clear in Fraudcast News – How Bad Journalism Supports Our Bogus Democracies.

Graphics journalism as real journalism

I tried but failed to register a comment this morning on an article carried by the Global Editors Network about how the Guardian covered US elections.

Something to do with captcha errors that I couldn’t be fussed to wrestle with. The piece was all about the whizzy things done by Gabriel Dance and his team, which seemed fine enough as far as they went but hardly very illuminating politically.

So this is what I said in reply:

“fun”, “interesting”, “creative”, “engaging”, and “different” – these are fine things in the race to capture eyeballs but they’re only of any use, from a journalism perspective, if the work informs and illuminates the audience about the underlying political realities. Otherwise it’s just showbiz.

So be all these things to get people to pay attention to the elections but also take some more steps back from the razzamatazz of the two main presidential candidates, their parties and the campaigns for all the other elected posts. Don’t get carried away with the wrapping, remember the substance.

I would like, for example, to see the real-time graphics comparing pledges in presidential debates to the realities. Obama or Romney says “security” – I want to see the graphics asking the question: “who’s security” and pointing to areas of US military actions around the world, including drone strikes and detentions. Inviting tweets from people in those countries might produce some interesting dialogues. Get beyond narrow debate parameters set by the candidates, remember your journalistic responsibility to people, not just US voters either.

The candidates mention budget priorities – I want to see graphics about the numbers of US voters in poverty and how that has evolved in recent years, next door to graphics showing subsidies to banks and financial markets (including bail-outs), to fossil fuel companies, to agro-industries and the military-industrial complex as well of estimates about the scale of tax evasion by individuals and companies.

Also, as backgrounders, I want to see graphics showing the running totals of campaign spend, Democrat and Republican, official and de facto, and where that money is coming from, where it’s being spent (TV adverts, etc) and which media conglomerates benefit. You could also invite people to tweet in about how they think winning and losing candidates might go about rewarding their sponsors after the election.

Graphics innovations and their delivery over the internet, not least via social media and to mobile devices worldwide, open up the possiblity of some fascinating global conversations that could better inform people about the realities of US politics, any politics in fact. They could be a great tool in bringing about what Dan Gillmor talked about in “We the Media” – of grassroots journalism turning old media’s lecture into a conversation. Your commenters and tweeters are part of those grassroots.

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.

Postcard from SW France

It’s days to go before the first round in the 2012 French presidential elections. In Montbrun Bocage, a rural backwater south of Toulouse in the Pyrenean foothills, the atmosphere is hardly crackling with excitement.

People here certainly know their politics but generally fail to find much passion for politicians. Given the bluntness of occasional votes for individuals – the essence of Western representative democracy – it’s hard to blame them.

Graffitied campaign posters are not the most scientific indicator of local votes though they reflect what’s happened here in the past. When France chose Nicolas Sarkozy last time around, Montbrun’s few hundred voters wound up on the losing side.

The villagers should have more luck in this year. More rigorous polls suggest Sarkozy will survive the first round on Sunday and lose the second two weeks later to his Socialist challenger François Hollande.

Sarkozy’s poster in Montbrun has dollar signs scribbled over his eyes. His campaign slogan of “La France Forte” is cheekily switched to “Morte”, transforming a strong France into a dead one with a single letter. The addition of: “Don’t vote, that suits me fine” completes the picture. Hollande’s is untouched.

Marine Le Pen, the National Front candidate, has a felt-tip Hitler moustache and a blacked out suggestion of the Führer’s slicked-down hair. Though she won’t score much in Montbrun, national polling puts her projected share in the mid teens. Running her close will be Jean-Luc Mélenchon, his poster untouched. François Bayrou, sporting a clown nose on his picture, is slightly behind them both.

A straw poll of exactly two women voters, one 35-years old and the other close to double that, wouldn’t stand up to conventional pollsters’ rules. But so what? It certainly shows the sort of frustrations typical of voters all over the world. The idea that whatever voters chose, nothing much changes. The power of corporations to dodge taxes and flit from one country to another for the cheapest workers is one major problem. Another is the ever-present fear of countries getting skewered by global financial speculators.

Neither woman supports the main candidates, the younger one’s main issue being how best to register her protest. How do you say the whole system sucks, that whoever gets in won’t alter the threats to France and its euro-zone partners? Should you not turn up at all, leave your ballot unmarked or write “screw you” across the lot of them?

Whoever wins faces immediate pressure from the financial markets, a dynamite stick both Hollande and Sarkozy have juggled in campaigning. Each jabs at the other’s competence to meet the threat yet neither nails the fundamental question of why we’re all at the mercy of bankers and markets.

Which is why Montbrun tends to go its own way in politics.

The local mairie recently backed the school director in her refusal to put pupils’ names to an intrusive national database. An association runs the local weekly market, including a volunteer-run café whose proceeds funds other activities in the village. Regular documentary screenings and debate bring in views from around the world and a chance to talk about putting their lessons into practice here. People grow vegetables and swap seeds that don’t meet absurd EU rules, they trade work, buy wholesale food collectively, barter and generally dodge the system any way they can to live their lives.

As a native Scotsman resident here since 2005, I have no vote in national elections. I’m totally not bothered. Given what’s at stake and what influence even the natives have, I prefer the promise of acting truly locally while looking and thinking globally.

A campaign poster for French President Nicolas Sarkozy has an additional few flourishes added by a local graffiti artist in a rural village in SW France.

No holiday in Cambodia but rather catharsis

I watched the extraordinarily moving documentary Brother Number One last night, one I’d meant to catch when covering the recent Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London.

It tells the story of a New Zealander who was captured, tortured and executed by the Khmer Rouge. The film’s great success is to use one person’s tale, a foreigner’s what’s more, to guide the audience into the bigger picture of how the Cambodian regime’s survivors and their families are trying to heal their traumas.

The Khmer Rouge and its followers killed nearly 2 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979 according to the Human Rights Watch publicity accompanying the film. In 1978, Kerry Hamill and two friends disappeared without trace while sailing from Australia to Southeast Asia. Via Kerry’s youngest brother Rob we learn how a Khmer Rouge cell attacked their boat, killing the Canadian Stuart Glass and arresting Kerry and the Englishman John Dewhirst.

Film-maker Annie Goldson skilfully skirts the potential trap of giving too Western a slant on what is Cambodia’s story. The risk she took paid off thanks to Rob’s resplendent qualities as a human being, ones that transcend all country and ethnicity.

In Rob’s agonised journey to the Khmer Rouge Tribunal he shows great sensitivity towards the Cambodians who survived the dictators’ reign or lost countless family members to their crazed ideology. In court testimony he addresses directly the Tuol Sleng (S-21) prison camp interogator – Kang Kek Iew or Duch – who oversaw his brother’s killing. We hear many Cambodian victims’ stories along the way.

Rob is brutally honest in showing his own grief as he retraces his brother’s last days, collecting snippets of memory from those who’d seen him in prison. He deciphers on camera the impish coded messages Kerry left to his family in the final “confession” preceding his certain execution.

I have wondered before about the true worth of international trials processes for murderous tyrants and the balance to be struck between revenge and justice. This film left me with a deeper understanding of how trials are vital not just as attempts to right wrongs but also as vehicles for victims to explore, express and honour their grief for slain and tortured family members.

The many victims of the 2003 Iraq invasion deserve just such a process though I fear they’ll never get one. Nor will the families of Cambodian civilians killed by the US war-making that helped the Khmer Rouge rise to power.

War crimes tribunals are as yet limited only to the captured tyrants of geopolitical minnows such as Cambodia. Potential candidates from the world’s more powerful states, such as US ex-president George W. Bush and British ex-prime minister Tony Blair, have only their own consciences to wrestle with for now. More’s the pity.

Thankfully this film was not about such men but rather a rare moment for the victims. It is a fantastic piece of work I highly recommend you find time to watch. Bring tissues.

Advice for independent journalists covering violent demos

Journalist Mark Covell was beaten unconscious by Italian police during the 2001 Genoa G8 summit.

He speaks here about the power of independent media and how independent journalists should buddy up, train and prepare to cover potentially violent demos so as to keep safe.

He was speaking before a screening of Black Block, a documentary about demonstrators attacked in cold blood by Italian riot police. It was shown as part of the Human Rights Watch Festival 2012 in London.

I did the interview with fellow independent journalist Glenn McMahon, who used an iPhone and iRig mic to shoot a no-edit video interview based on the visionOntv mobile phone interview template. The idea is to shoot short videos that can be rapidly uploaded to the internet with minimal hassle, vastly increasing the chances of making media that gets seen.

If you’re interested in the Black Block the film, which I highly recommend, you can get a sense of its shocking story in the following trailer.

The divided brain – what does it mean for democracy and journalism?

A friend of mine recently put me on to RSA Animate, an animation app for iPhones, iPads and Androids. He suggested it might be a useful tool to illustrate the arguments I put forward in Fraudcast News.

I soon found the following film, whose quality and vision convinced me my friend was right. It summarises some ideas by the psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist about how humans’ ‘divided brains’ – and our faulty understanding of that reality – have profoundly influenced our behaviour, culture and society. The work is part of the RSA’s 21st Century Enlightenment Project, which is full of such gems as this.

The film’s subject matter has direct relevance both to democracy and to journalism, with implications for the way we are governed, or govern ourselves, and the way we talk about the way we are governed.

This is 11 minutes and 48 seconds I don’t regret having spent watching something on  the internet.

Bragg channels Guthrie into Occupy London

Learning how to do live TV interviewing with visionOntv is a laugh, you never know who might walk into their instant pop-up studios. I found myself interviewing the songwriter Billy Bragg this week down at the newly squatted Bank of Ideas, having dropped by to lend a hand.

Bragg is a veteran of political activism and song-writing, blending folk, punk and protest into his work over several decades. He recently reworked the lyrics to the classic “Which Side Are You On?”, a song written by Florence Reece in 1931, using ones inspired by Occupy London.

“Those who’ve been fighting for a fair and compassionate society in the 20^th century feel that the wind is blowing our way now and we are very, very excited by what’s going on with the Occupy movement,” he said during a video interview at the newly squatted former offices of Swiss bank UBS.

He spoke after running a free song-writing workshop.

“What we are doing is Woody Guthrie’s work,” said Bragg, crediting the American singer-song writer as having inspired him and the work of a whole generation of other artists such as Joe Strummer of the Clash and Bob Dylan.

So what did I pick up about TV interviewing from all this? Sit still, don’t swing in your swivel chair, chill out and, most of all, switch off your damn mobile phone before the no-edit interview begins. All useful lessons learnt thanks to the fantastic platform and energy offered by the fine people of visionOntv. (The mobile phone incident is in the second featured video below)