The Fall of Public Man

The mayhem at yet another of our key public institutions is adding to the sense of living through deeply unsettling times. It is also an example of when we need to read between the news, partly because political forces are at play, and partly because journalists are especially unreliable when they are reporting on their own.

I have been waiting for the time when news as gossip began to cause problems: the child abuse panic is, it seems to me, the first serious outcome of the confusion between social media and journalism. We have always known that journalism is about opinion as much as truth, but before the burst of electronic information there was some editorial control over the use of information. Once BBC correspondents began reading Tweets, collecting information from the internet, and broadcasting films from anonymous mobile phones - sources of information whose provenance they had no way of establishing - news lost any claim to being reliable or in any way attached to Truth.

In a democratic society this is problematic. We cannot possibly afford to obtain or sift all the information available to us: we need to rely on trusted channels. When the trusted channel we ourselves fund for this purpose has resorted to gossip we are really in trouble. It was back in 1974 that Richard Sennett wrote about the loss of distinction between public and private, but his theories have demonstrated themselves in ever-widening circles as we are encouraged to take an interest in the views of low-grade celebrities that would far better be kept to themselves. As he wrote back then:

'Masses of people are concerned with their single life histories and particular emotion as never before; this concern has proved to be a trap rather than a liberation', he wrote. Given that each self is 'in some measure a cabinet of horrors, civilised relations between selves can only proceed to the extent that nasty little secrets of desire, greed or envy are kept locked up'.

We should also be deeply suspicious about the timing of all of this. With the Leverson Inquiry due to report soon,  and to call for political regulation of the media, those who seek to maintain their unaccountable power are manoeuvring against any control. We should be asking why the Savile story emerged when it did? Who knew about the cancelled Newsnight story? And how did they obtain that information? The gutter press have a role here, but so also do the police, who are implicated in both the North Wales paedophile ring and the failure to investigate it fully.

We have seen the fall of George Entwhistle, generally regarded as a decent chap of the old school: a real journalist. He has been replaced, if only temporarily, by somebody who has no journalism experience and apparently is a marketing and management expert. The BBC has been under considerable political and financial pressure by those who would seek the fall of public broadcasting. I hope we can rally to the corporation's cause and defend our right to information with as much determination as we defend our right to health.
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Ferguson Lays Reith on the Tomb of BBC Credibility

I keep thinking that I have reached the final straw in my relationship with Radio 4, by my addiction is strong, and I hang on to my cultural comfort blanket through politically biased explanations of the banking crisis and trite commentaries on the issues of the day. While, in spite of the decision to give Niall Ferguson the extroardinary accolade of Reith Laureate this year, I am still listening, I have managed to prevent myself from downloading the podcasts of the talks. I caught one accidentally late at night and it completely ruined a night's sleep.

Who is this Niall Ferguson? A historian of moderate reputation who, having confessed that he did not receive the attention he felt his ego deserved in the UK, emigrated to a job at Harvard, where he made the common mistake of thinking that his rapid rise to fame was the result of his innate genius, rather than his views serving the financial elite. I am not sure where along the way he became accepted into the inner circles of the Bilderberg conspirators, but their official list says he was in attendance at the recent meeting at Chantilly in France. I assume this website is for real: since Bilderberg conspiracy theory became Bilderberg publicity it is really hard to know.

While I have political objections to these unaccountable elite gatherings, in this case my gripe is intellectual. My question is why Ferguson is called on to opine on economic matters, when his training is in history. His poor level of competence in the field is made clear by a very elementary mistake exposed by Paul Krugman on his NY Times blog. Ferguson has misinterpreted US historical data to reveal his mathematical mediocrity and drawn mistaken conclusions about how national governments should tackle the recession.

So why was Ferguson chosen for the most prominent annual lecture series the BBC has to bestow? Perhaps a brief glance at the Corporation's Executive Board will help us to answer this question. Marcus Agius, disgraced former Chair of Barclays, is a senior independent director on the board: Ferguson's views can be expected to find favour there. The four non-executive directors appear to be a fairly incestuous bunch. Robert Webb is a non-executive director of the London Stock Exchange as well as Chair of Autonomy. The CEO of Autonomy, Mike Lynch, is also on the board. Between 1998 and 2009 Robert Webb was General Counsel at British Airways, who also employed BBC non-exec. Val Gooding for 20 years. Simon Burke seems out of place, having worked for neither Autonomy nor BA, but he has been involved in venture capital activities.

My daughter is hoping to study history at UCL next year and so I find the prominence of Ferguson as historian role-model almost as unhelpful as the high level of fees she is expected to pay. She is receiving a clear message: debt is good and deceit pays. Rather than speaking peace unto nation, I would appreciate it is the BBC could just stick to spending my money speaking truth, preferably to power.
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What the Fukushima is Going on?

Well how could we possibly know? The major consequence of the Fukushima disaster in this household is that we now have a dish aerial so that we are no longer reliant on the BBC's coverage which, in this case, I can only designate as propaganda. The truth is beginning to emerge from Tepco, who are now admitting that three of the Fukushima plant's reactors melted down within days of the tusnami. Those presumably were the days during which the BBC was engaging a range of pro-nuclear stooges to reassure us that there was no problem.

While the internet appears to be ephemeral it can in reality provide a trace, and we can use this trace to assess exactly what we were being told by the BBC. On 14 March BBC churnalists were reporting the view of 'international nuclear watchdogs' (presumably the IAEA) that there was no sign of a meltdown, balanced by the comment of an unnamed minister that the 'melting of rods' was 'highly likely'. On 27 March the BBC reported that workers were 'trying to cool the reactor core to avoid a meltdown' at a time when we now know that three meltdowns had already occurred. Perhaps strangest of all was the constant repetition of the bizarre phrase 'partial meltdown', as though nuclear fuel could somehow resemble a chocolate fondant pudding.

We were, throughout the early days of the disaster, when people were still listening to the stories, being reassured that this was an old plant whose design is no longer used. This is, as made clear in a film made for the BBC by Adam Curtis back in 1992, when it still had a degree of independence, to entirely miss the point. The real question is why these plants were still running if they were not safe: and that is a question about politics not science.

The BBC's inability to provide clear information about the nuclear threat is no doubt a consequence of the increasing political pressure it has been under in recent years, making the inference that we no longer have an independent national broadcasting channel a sad but inevitable one. No wonder, then, that there has not been a reaction against nuclear power in Britain, compared to Germany, where the tide of revulsion from a better informed public has led to the closure of the entire nuclear industry by 2022 and the election of green governments in a number of the country's regions. Tweet

British Broadcasting Co-operative

There is something intensely depressing about the way Labour politicians seem so much more comfortable in opposition. As though they collude in the Tories' long-held view that they are the natural party of government, even the ruling class? Suddenly, now that they no longer have the power to do anything about it, Labour seem to have all the answers.

The lastest example is the suggestion by David Milliband and Tessa Jowell that the BBC should become a co-operative. How disappointing that Tessa Jowell didn't think of this excellent idea when she was Culture Secretary, and so had the power to make it happen. Are we to assume that if, by some miracle we were to have another election and Labour were to win, she would forget the idea again as she moved through the revolving doors into her department?

Cynicism aside it is an interesting idea and could be taken in a number of directions. Will this be a worker co-operative, where decisions about programming will be made by journalists and producers? Or will we all be offered shares and then enabled to stand for election to the board which will decide what we will be watching. Could it be, and I admit I am going out on something of a limb here, that I could put myself forward to be part of a monitoring panel to check the balanced nature of reporting about Palestine?

Ed Mayo, of Co-operatives-UK welcomed the news in typically measured tones:

'It is brilliant to see such senior Labour voices raise the stakes in terms of the potential for co-operative action. This proposal does address the current weakness of BBC governance, which leaves the BBC open to the unedifying spectacle of growing bullying over recent years by government. If the BBC were answerable to members and license payers in a democratic way, its independence would be strong.

'Making this happen could only take time, because co-operative membership is built from the bottom up, not the top down, and should be voluntary not compulsory, but it would be inspiring to see the public trust and sense of ownership of the BBC turned into a genuine engagement and co-operative ownership stake.'

Since we pay the licence fee directly we might be argued to have already paid for our ownership stake in the Corporation. Translating it into a Co-operative and giving us control as well might be seen as the natural next step. Perhaps Mr/s Milliband and Jowell should turn their attentions to the banks next? Tweet