A requiem for fine journalism

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

RONALD L. Haeberle was a combat photographer with the US army whose pictures exposed the horrors of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1969. Military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, at peril to his life, leaked the papers revealing the cover-up of US perfidies in Vietnam. Mordechai Vanunu was an Israeli scientist who shared his country’s nuclear secrets with a British newspaper. Israel kidnapped him and put him in jail. US soldier Chelsea Manning handed over 750,000 secret military documents to WikiLeaks and was court martialled for it. She went to prison.

There’s no end to ill-informed media chatter about Vladimir Putin’s KGB past. But it took KGB master spy Vasili Mitrokhin to hand over a treasure trove of Kremlin’s secrets to the Western media. Likewise with Edward Snowden, living in exile in Moscow after exposing the US government’s illegal surveillance of its own citizens.

If there were no journalists, it seems, the truth would somehow still come out. That is one’s best bet for Ukraine. Somebody will blow the whistle, almost inevitably, after pattern, as it were, and the world would know a little more than what the media wants us not to know.

It’s a strange war out there in which columns upon columns of enemy tanks were lined up for days without stirring from their highly visible location a short distance from the capital city, and no one took a pot shot at the sitting ducks. Is there something one is missing? It’s a strange war in which the besieged capital of the invaded country should be running low on critical daily resources but its citizens are able to keep their mobile phones charged and these work very efficiently.

An Israeli analyst says the Russians are allowing the phones to work to be able to listen in. It’s tempting to believe that. But then, why couldn’t the Israeli wizard advise his friends in New Delhi to keep the mobile phones running in besieged Kashmir. Not for days or weeks, but for months, till the courts intervened, did Kashmir have no internet. It’s nice to have an Israeli expert talk about phone tapping.

It’s a strange war also, in which leaders and politicians from friendly countries wade into the heart of supposedly besieged cities to cheer on the fighters they are arming to the teeth and return home unscathed. In football matches, the team managers shout out orders from outside the arena. Here you have them walking to the goalkeeper to plan which way to dive to stop the curving ball.

The Ukraine war looks set to reset the world order. It has in the bargain already exposed the overstated claim of objective journalism the West had credited itself with. The claim lay in tatters, of course, for the most part since the US invasion of Iraq. Many in the media covering Ukraine had purveyed brazen lies that provided the fig leaf for the destruction of a robustly secular country like Iraq.

The overwhelming impression being created is that the Russians are being chased out of Ukraine if they are not being drawn into a trap. Frustrated by their failure, the retreating troops are committing war crimes. It would be difficult to regard any army, Western or Eastern, as a saviour of human rights. It could be a great point to start a discussion. Who is going to try whom for the massacres? The US refuses to be a member of the International Criminal Court that is reported to have initiated its probe into the Bucha killings. And neither is Russia looking interested in blessing the court with acceptance. The worried world and the ICC can only persuade but not prosecute a non-member.

The basic question many are keen to ask is this: is the West on top of the situation in Ukraine, or is Russia winning the war, as non-Russian, non-journalist analysts are beginning to assert. Any journalist should be interested in both parts of the question, but asking the latter would be deemed tantamount to betrayal. Or are we heading towards a long-drawn stalemate dipped in even more innocent blood? The even-handed, old-fashioned school of journalism with cautionary words like ‘alleged’ and ‘claimed’ and ‘could not be independently verified’ etc is becoming sadly extinct.

As a South Asian journalist, one grew up admiring the probity and diligence of Western journalists. There was a time when the BBC in all the South Asian languages would be way ahead of domestic news services in credibility and speed. Z.A. Bhutto’s execution and Indira Gandhi’s assassination, for example, were first announced on BBC and only later reported by the national media outfits. Mark Tully and Satish Jacob were household names during the Punjab turmoil. Dalit leader Ram Vilas Paswan told me that he respected Western journalists more because they were honest in describing the injustices of the Hindu caste system. Indian journalists, he said, were mealy-mouthed about caste inequities.

Tully’s dispatches from New Delhi were broadcast in Hindi, Urdu, Bangla, Sinhalese etc. They found audiences in remote villages. One day, Mark Fineman of the Financial Times was travelling with me to a village near Mathura where a Jat girl and two Jatav boys were lynched by a kangaroo court in a typical love story that went tragically wrong. Fineman decided to flash his press card at the village octroi to get past the barrier speedily. The village boys took one look at him and said: “Oh! Mark Tully! You may go.” Incensed, Fineman promptly thrust a five-rupee note into the toll collector’s hand — more than twice the octroi fees and shouted: “No, I’m not Mark Tully. I can never be.”

Likewise, there cannot be another Robert Fisk who died in 2020. However, John Pilger and a few others of the old school are still around to give us a sliver of hope about an otherwise fatally stricken profession.

John Pilger on Journalists, BBC, NHS, Amnesty and State Murder

 

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The west is gripped by Venezuela’s problems. Why does it ignore Brazil’s?

Reporters ask Jeremy Corbyn if he will condemn Nicolás Maduro. But the undemocratic abuses of Michel Temer aren’t flashy enough for the news cycle

Julia Blunck in The Guardian


 

‘Brazil has carried on as most stories about Latin America do: unnoticed and uncommented on.’ Riot police monitor protests against the government of Michel Temer in Brasilia, May 2017. Photograph: Evaristo Sa/AFP/Getty Images




Venezuela is the question on everyone’s lips. Rather, Venezuela is the question on reporters’ lips whenever they see Jeremy Corbyn: will he condemn the president, Nicolás Maduro? What is his position on Venezuela, and how does it affect his plans for Britain? The actual problems of Venezuela – a complex country with a long history that does not start with the previous president Hugo Chávez and certainly not with Jeremy Corbyn – are largely ignored or pushed aside. This is nothing new: most of the time, Latin America’s debates are seen through western lenses.

Of course, the situation in Venezuela is deplorable and worrying. But it’s easy to see that concern about Maduro’s undemocratic abuses don’t necessarily come from actual concern for the welfare of Venezuelan people.

Nearby neighbour Brazil has not been analysed or debated at length, even as it demonstrates similar problems. The country’s president, Michel Temer, recently escaped measures that would see him put to trial in the supreme court by getting congress to vote them down. The case against Temer was not a flimsy or partisan one: there was a mountain of evidence, including recordings of him openly debating kickbacks with corrupt businessman Joesley Batista. That a president put into power under circumstances that could be, at best, described as dodgy, manages to remain in power by buying favours from Congress, even as he passes the harshest austerity measures in the world should be enough to raise a few eyebrows internationally. But that has not happened, and Brazil has carried on as most stories about Latin America do: unnoticed and uncommented on.

Part of this discrepancy is of course the bias toward what is flashy. Stories about sordid Congress deals are not that interesting to foreign audiences, and even many exhausted and demoralised Brazilians felt this was simply another addition to a long list of humiliations that began in 2015 when the economy started to sink.

Meanwhile, Venezuela has human conflict, the thing that produces exciting photography and think-pieces, sparks debate and crucially, draws clicks. There’s only so much attention to be gained talking about Temer’s undermining of democracy as it happens without noise, through chicanery and articulation by Brazil’s traditional power: the “Bible, beef and bullets” caucuses in Congress. Venezuela’s situation, however, is urgent, with tanks on the streets and opposition arrests.

Yet there is a subtext to why Brazil’s democracy is not as interesting, and why even Temer’s introduction of the military on to Rio de Janeiro’s streets to address a crime wave has prompted little response. Temer’s rule is one of hard capitalism and an ever-shrinking state. He has established a ceiling on public spending, slashed workers rights, and imposed a hard reform of retirement age.

Temer’s rise to power came as it became clear to big business that his predecessor, Dilma Rousseff, would not go far with austerity. They financed and stimulated protests – largely by rightly angry middle-class Brazilians at what they saw as widespread corruption – while Congress blocked Rousseff’s bills or sabotaged her agenda in other ways.


Latin American suffering is being played out as a proxy for debates in the UK

While Temer did not seize power through a violent coup, and the alliance between Rousseff’s Workers’ party and his notoriously dishonest and chronically double-crossing party was a largely self-inflicted wound, it bears remembering that Rousseff was ousted on a technicality so that Temer could solve the economy’s woes by making “difficult decisions”, a platform for which he had no electoral mandate.

And yet the economy continues to sink, as the unemployment rate soars to 13%. That narrative isn’t very convenient, though, and nobody is interested in making Brazil the representative case of how capitalism is an undemocratic system doomed to fail. And that is quite right: capitalism cannot be exclusively defined by Brazilian failures. The same should be true of socialism in Venezuela.

Somehow, though, the conversation about Venezuela is actually a conversation about something else. Latin American suffering is being played out as a proxy for debates in the UK. As the rightwing media claim, Jeremy Corbyn might not care very much about the thousands going hungry by Maduro’s hand – maybe he too thinks it is simply a consequence of American meddling – but it’s hard to believe that the British right is sincerely committed to the region’s stability and democracy. There has been very little said about Temer.

The failures of Temer do not, and should not be used to, excuse Maduro’s. Nor should we equate the two men in brutality. Yet, if you live in Brazil where public servants are teargassed for not being paid for five months, where indigenous rights activists and others are killed by rich farmers in unprecedented numbers, where several states declare bankruptcy because of a crash in oil prices, where the army is called upon to tackle protesters, you may wonder when your situation will be worth debating.

The answer is whenever it becomes politically convenient. In the end, British commentators and politicians on both the left and right aren’t just opportunistic when it comes to Latin American suffering, they are glad when it happens: it proves their point, whatever that may be. Our lives are just a detail.

On the English Cricket Board and insider journalists

What the papers say

by Maxie Allen  in The Full Toss • June 19, 2015

Over at our friends Being Outside Cricket, there have been some interesting discussions about the nature of the mainstream cricket press, its relationship with the cricketing public and its attitude to those of us ‘below the line’. You can read the pieces here and here.

At the risk of committing plagiarism, I thought I’d take the liberty of penning a few thoughts of my own. What follows is inspired by, not a response to, the thoughts of Lord Canis Lupus and The Leg Glance. I thank them for that inspiration, not to mention their wisdom and insight.

The misadventures of the cricket media are hardly new territory in our tier of the crickosphere. Many of the key points may already be very familiar to you, echoing hundreds of your own comments on both blogs during the last eighteen months. But we’ve not touched on the theme here on TFT for some time, and it’s worth updating our perspectives in the context of the here-and-now – the new mood of optimism and concord subtly washing over English cricket.

I believe there are three misconceptions about the nature of the cricket press. Firstly, I doubt all the principal correspondents have total editorial control over their copy. The editor is in charge of the paper, and beneath him or her is the sports editor. It’s they whom the correspondent is trying to satisfy, not only the reader. The bosses may ask for a particular editorial line, or at least a tone – upbeat, angry, patriotic, kick them while they’re down.

The space allocated for their reports will fluctuate according to the news agenda, with copy truncated by the sub-editors overnight if need be. If Jose Mourinho gets sacked by Chelsea, there will be less room for nuances about the third ODI. The words below the correspondent’s name will not always entirely be written by them.

That said, the more senior the hack, the more sovereignty they have. Mikes Selvey and Atherton, or Scyld Berry, are less likely to have their copy reworked than a junior reporter.

Secondly, the mainstream press do not write specifically for people like us, who read and write cricket blogs and follow the minutiae of every story. They aim at readers with a passing-to-serious interest in cricket, who have little spare time and probably read only a single paper. A city trader on the Tube. A van driver on his lunch-break.

This means complex stories get simplified – as happens in all branches of news. It also explains why journalists often put a postive spin on events, to the disgust of bloggerati sceptics. In their eyes, punters follow cricket for fun, as an escape from the drudgery of work. So hacks write about good news, and feats of derring-do, with an appeal to patriotism. They suspect too few readers are interested in the Byzantine plot-twists of ECB politics.

Thirdly, newspapers and websites (but not the BBC) are under no obligations to anyone. They are private publications, unsubject to statutory regulation which mandates fairness, balance, and specific editorial standards. If you don’t like a newspaper, so the logic goes, you don’t have to read it.

And we can’t always regard the cricket press as a uniform entity. Its exponents occupy a fairly broad spectrum, possessing a range of attitudes and approaches. Some have been more sympathetic than others to the laments of those below-the-line. A few have listened to, absorbed, and reflected our (often disparate) views.

All of this may sound like excuse-making. But there are a multitude of hefty ‘but’s. On the whole, the response of the established cricket media to the turmoil triggered on 4th February 2014 has fallen so far short of adequacy that no caveats amount to exoneration.

Newspapers and mainstream websites, along with broadcasters, enjoy many privileges. The ECB award them the status of ‘accredited’ media. This means their correspondents are appointed as the public’s eyes and ears, and receive seats in the press box, as well as interview access to players and staff, and off-the-record conversations with officials. Neither bloggers not readers are afforded such accreditation.

With privileges come responsibilities – chiefly, the duty to hold authority to account. You can’t have one without the other, especially when many papers regard themselves as ‘newspapers of record’. The inky press generally exudes a sense of entitlement and officialdom. “Because we’re the Daily X, we should be able to do y and find out z”. Once again, that right brings a responsibility.

With the Pietersen affair, the cricket media signally failed to hold the ECB to account. The ECB lied, and covered up their lies. It was as clear a case as you could imagine of misconduct and moral corruption by a public body. Yet this was barely explored and never properly investigated. Even material in the public domain was poorly studied. The ‘due diligence’ dossier passed by largely unremarked. Pietersen’s book was skim-read for lurid slurs while his serious accusations of ECB bullying and hypocrisy were ignored.

When vocal members of the public complained about this dereliction of duty, some pressmen replied by saying, ‘well we asked them, but they wouldn’t say’. This was a ridiculous excuse. In other spheres of news, the silence of authorities during a scandal becomes a story in itself. Front pages scream for answers. Newspapers ratchet up the pressure by cajoling third parties to provoke a response.

There were plenty of options available to the cricket press, had they been more tenacious and inquisitive. They could  have highlighted the blatant contradictions in the ECB’s own testimony. They might have striven for a whistle-blower. They should have piled pressure on the DCMS, Sport England (who give the ECB funding), and England sponsors Waitrose and Investec, to demand answers.

Unless I’ve missed something, none of this happened. Some journalists tried. A few tried hard. But no one tried hard enough. Too many approached the saga with all the forensic analysis of the lazy-thinking, cliche-reliant golf club bar-bore. They couldn’t see past Pietersen’s bad-egginess to the real story, and misconceived the saga as a debate about Pietersen the man, instead of what it was, a powder-keg of ECB malpractice and mendacity.

The recent explosion of the FIFA scandal provides an instructive parallel. While there is no suggestion the ECB or its officials have engaged in financial corruption or bribery, the misconduct of each organisation has common strands.

Both the Pietersen affair, and the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, gave off an overpowering miasma of fishiness. In each case a bizarre decision was taken but never convincingly explained. Attempts at scrutiny were met with bluster, evasion, and arrogance. What had actually happened was not what was officially presented.

The British press, rightly sensing the truth, refused to let FIFA off the hook. Uncowed by Sepp Blatter’s snarls, they plugged away tenaciously, month after month, even after the original story faded from the agenda. The Sunday Times led the charge, their detective work uncovering a web of brown envelopes emanating from Qatari-FA linked magnates. The hacks kept up the pressure, and eventually the levee broke. Look where we are now.

When Blatter appeared at press conferences and argued black was white, the hacks tore him to pieces. By contrast, what happened in cricket? In April 2014, when Paul Downton emerged from hiding at the Moores press conference, and met questions about Pietersen with a risible stew of lies and obfuscation, the cricket correspondent of The Independent famously gave us this. 

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Stephen Brenkley @stephenbrenkley

It took 10 minutes for Pietersen issue to be raised at Moores' press conference. Downton handled it with aplomb, as did Moores.

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If the likes of Brenkley or Mike Selvey had covered the FIFA story, we’d have probably read something like this:

It is time to cease asking such impertinent questions of Mr Blatter, a good man who has suffered much unwarranted personal abuse.

The FIFA scandal demonstrates more than simply what can be achieved by tireless journalistic inquisitiveness. It proves that tales about corrupt sports administrators can be major box office and appeal to passing readers. And it shows the merit of pressmen fighting for their stories. There must have been times during the FIFA investigation when editors lost confidence and threatened to pull the plug and save resources.

But back to Pietersen. Not all journalists failed to ‘get it’. But too many did. And no one closed the deal. Why?

It wasn’t because readerships lost interest in Pietersen, judging by the sheer quantity of copy written about him. In some instances, editorial diktats, from above, could provide partial explanation. But surely no editor would have turned down a juicy story about skulduggery in the corridors of Lord’s if offered up a scoop on a plate.

The real reasons are several and over-lapping. Some pressmen were lazy, others too gormless to realise what all the fuss was about. A few were deterred by fear of losing access to the inner circle. But many were simply out of their depth. It’s one thing to write about batting technique or line and length. It’s quite another to cut through a dense thicket of political intrigue and obfuscation. A previous career as a professional cricketer does not in itself an investigative journalist make.

A number of hacks were guilty of blatant bias, which took various forms. They had a personal dislike of Pietersen. They were friends or former team-mates of Paul Downton, Andy Flower, Graham Gooch or James Whitaker. Correspondents were often reporting on the conduct of people they’d known personally for years. Within this incestuous bubble, objectivity was impossible. Broadcast interviews were suffused with matiness. It was the equivalent of Alastair Campbell hosting Newsnight.

Just as influential was a subtler and less conscious form of bias. Many former players now inhabiting the press box are cut from the same cultural cloth as the ex-pros who became administrators: workmanlike county stalwarts who never amounted to much at international level. Even if they didn’t realise it, those correspondents were always likely to empathise with the likes of Downton and Whitaker, see things from their point of view, and fail to probe.

By the same token, they were unlikely to view the story either from the readers’ perspective, or Kevin Pietersen’s. Pietersen, with his vast success, huge wealth, brazen ambition, and buccaneering flamboyance, became everything they never were. Unable to relate to him, the ex-pros naturally viewed the ECB’s position as plausible, inhibiting their curiosity. And it wasn’t only about empathy. It’s easy to sense in their copy their feelings of distaste for Pietersen’s brash and unclubbable angularity. But it went further. They resented him for his success – a success which held up a light to their own mediocrity. It’s not going too far to suggest that in several cases their journalism was corrupted by envy.

In the main, the press allied to the establishment, a total inversion of their proper role. They sympathised with authority instead of putting it under the microscope. This response stemmed from an inherent emotional alignment, between media and ECB administrators, for reasons more profound than the limited emotional imaginations of ex-professionals.

Journalists, players, ex-players, ECB apparatchiks, and mandarins, together form the Cricketing Class. All these people have far more in common with each other than with any of the spectating public. They inhabit the same biosphere, sharing press boxes, hotel lobbies, bars and airport lounges around the world. They mutually provide each other with parameters and reference points of conduct, acceptance and vindication.

The incestuousness of the cricket circuit explains much of the Pietersen failure, but also plenty more. Many, especially the ex-players, have little experience of professional life beyond cricket. Insulated within this cosy cocoon, a tranche of the cricket press long since lost touch with the people they’re writing for – members of the public who follow cricket as a pastime.

When was the last time any of them paid their own money to attend an England match? Mike Atherton, say, probably hasn’t since he was a teenager. How many of them queue up for a soggy £7.50 burger, when they can rely on the courtesy sponsors’ lunch, while watching every ball of play from the best seats in the house, not only for free, but paid to be there.

This being the nature of their working lives, for years or decades on end, it requires conscious effort to see things from a punter’s point of view. This is no more than a journalist’s duty, but few achieve it.

So they often fail to share the public’s healthy scepticism of the motives of those in charge, exemplified by their constant talk of “good men”, “working hard”, in “difficult jobs”. They lose track of vital consumer issues central to the supporters’ experience, from ticket prices to free-to-air television coverage. Mainstream mediacrats can’t imagine a world where you must pay £80 for a ticket, or £400 a year for a TV subscription, from limited means, just to watch the game in the first place.

I suspect this also explains why virtually no-one in the press box understood, and barely discussed, the impact of the ECB’s “outside cricket” jibe. When push came to shove, the hacks also regarded themselves as “inside”, treasuring their insider status and mounting the barricades against the revolt of the great unwashed.

This explains their defensive hostility towards readers who dared complain about their misconceived analyses and flawed reporting. Rattled by the impudence of outsiders questioning their judgment, a few openly insulted their own audience, in what must be a British media first. Several of Mike Selvey’s Tweets became infamous

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mike selvey @selvecricket

Social media was a good way to pass on information. But the trolls, idiots and know-nothings make it unpleasant. So I'm out of here. Sorry.

mike selvey @selvecricket

Often hard for journos to remember they are read by many many more people online than few bilious inadequates who dominate comment section.

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Selvey’s generation had failed to grasp the reality of twenty-first century media interactivity. In return for their custom, today’s consumers expect an equity share and a seat at the discussion table. They – we – visit mainstream websites to participate as much as to read. Cricket followers trust their own knowledge and judgement. They expect to hold the work of professional correspondents – who have chosen to put their heads above the parapet – up to scrutiny. And they can publish views themselves, via blogs or Twitter. You no longer need a job on Fleet Street to enter the public domain.

Every other branch of journalism realised this years ago. In cricket, though, few accepted the new deal and most were slow to realise how radically the interface has changed. Grandees raged against the dying of the light, firing arrows from their ivory towers towards the peasants storming the drawbridge. Their rhetoric of entitlement spookily echoed the ECB’s ‘outside cricket’ press release, with its bleats of “uninformed…unwarranted and unpleasant criticism”, which “attacked without justification” their “rationale…and integrity”. These patrician correspondents expected deference by virtue of their position alone, and met irreverence or opposition with pompous sanctimony and sour self-importance.

Others, however, were happy to engage with the public in a generous, constructive and cordial manner, on terms more – but never fully – equal. There lingered a loose sense of masonic, closed-shop sniffiness, which implied a belief that a human being is elevated to the rank of Approved Commentator on Cricket only through an elite process of divine selection.

In reality, cricket punditry is not akin to medicine or law, in which only hard-won professional qualifications confer authority. You can be right about English cricket even if you don’t have a badge on your lapel. This is ordained by the internal logic of the profession itself. If cricketers with no journalistic training can waltz into Fleet Street jobs, and journalists with no professional cricket experience can write about foot movement and bowling actions, why can’t any lifelong cricket follower have something equally useful to say?

The division between writer and writee was akin to clergy and laity. The common man could not be trusted to read the Bible in English because he was too simple to understand the word of God. Emblematic of a common press attitude were responses you could characterise as follows:

If you knew what I knew you would think the same. But I’m not going to tell you what I know. Why should I? In your position, you take my word for it. I am right because of who I am. You are wrong because you are on the outside. You are ignorant and uninformed, unlike me.

Such ripostes were usually fortified by reference to “sources”. In other words, the hack trumped a rebuke by claiming an insider had imparted to him an earth-shattering revelation, without ever saying exactly what. But what if that source was, without the hapless correspondent realising, telling them a load of complete bollocks? During the Pietersen nuclear winter, plenty of “sources” with agenda had every reason to spin a yard to their advantage. Because the press identified neither the sources nor the content, nothing could be scrutinised for its true worth. In the final reduction, anonymous vagaries were passed off as empirical evidence.

This story was not just about Pietersen, by any stretch. The competency of Paul Downton. The merits of Peter Moores. The legitimacy of Alastair Cook. Free-to-air television. Time and again, the agglomerate press circled their wagons of legitimacy and insisted they were right, whatever the evidence to the contrary. They branded as rabid freaks anyone foolish enough to reject their authority and disagree.

The more they lost touch, the more stubborn they became. And when opportunities arose to prove their good judgement, they gleefully taunted their own readers with boasts of one-upmanship. Desperate straws were clutched at. While thousands of sober, thoughtful critics, on BTL boards and Twitter, were dismissed as a baying, irrelevant, mob, a few hundred paying Ageas Bowl spectators who applauded an Alastair Cook innings were seized upon as representatives of the nation’s soul.

This wave of condescension and antipathy, directed by writers, and some broadcasters, at their own audiences, is unique in the history of British media. When bums start leaving seats, every other branch of journalism and entertainment responds by updating their product and raising their game. If X Factor viewers complain or switch off, Simon Cowell replaces the judges and refreshes the format. In cricket, if you don’t like what they do, they tell you to fuck off.

During the last few weeks, everyday life has calmed down. England’s exciting ODI performances, an opiate for the masses, have soothed the sceptic-hack relationship, at least for the time being. Victories are very difficult to disagree about, and the side’s upturn in fortunes since the removal of Cook and Moores has provided an (unacknowledged) vindication for the legions of BTLers who’d argued the duo’s inadequacy all along. Test cricket is another matter, though, and should Cook fail in the Ashes, trouble will flare up again.

In each of English cricket’s three estates – the administrators, the press, and the public – there is a decreasing appetite for conflict and strife, although this must not distract us from the vivid scrutiny the ECB’s conduct still demands. Contrary to what many journalists probably think, readers desire a positive relationship with the mainstream press. After all, we largely rely on them to provide our news from the front. They have access to people and events which we don’t. And ex-players will offer technical and experiential insights we may not spot with the naked eye.

But the relationship can only work if it’s bi-directional. In return for the vitals provided by journalists and pundits, we bring crowd-sourcing: millions of independent minds, views, and critical faculties, borne of millions of lifetimes spent watching cricket, playing cricket, and thinking about cricket. It’s a win-win. And to lay the first stone of this new Jerusalem, I suggest a little job-swap. A random punter should be granted a week in the press box, with all the trimmings. And during the same test, a Fleet Street correspondent should buy their own tickets and watch every ball from the stands, in the crowd. A change of scenery is good for the soul.

Our ‘impartial’ broadcasters have become mouthpieces of the elite

If you think the news is balanced, think again. Journalists who should challenge power are doing its dirty work

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 20 January 2015 20.07 GMT

'Every weekday morning the BBC's Today programme grovels to business leaders.' Photograph: Graeme Robertson

When people say they have no politics, it means that their politics aligns with the status quo. None of us are unbiased, none removed from the question of power. We are social creatures who absorb the outlook and opinions of those with whom we associate, and unconsciously echo them. Objectivity is impossible.

The illusion of neutrality is one of the reasons for the rotten state of journalism, as those who might have been expected to hold power to account drift thoughtlessly into its arms. But until I came across the scandal currently erupting in Canada, I hadn’t understood just how quickly standards are falling.

In 2013 reporters at CBC, Canada’s equivalent of the BBC, broke a major story. They discovered that RBC – Royal Bank of Canada – had done something cruel and unusual even by banking standards. It was obliging junior staff to train a group of temporary foreign workers, who would then be given the staff’s jobs. Just after the first report was aired, according to the website Canadaland, something odd happened: journalists preparing to expand on the investigation were summoned to a conference call with Amanda Lang, CBC’s senior business correspondent and a star presenter. The reporters she spoke to say she repeatedly attempted to scuttle the story, dismissing it as trivial and dull.

They were astonished. But not half as astonished as when they discovered the following, unpublished facts. First, that Lang had spoken at a series of events run or sponsored by RBC – for which she appears, on one occasion, to have been paid around 15,000 Canadian dollars. Second, that she was booked to speak at an event sponsored by the outsourcing company the bank had hired to implement the cruel practice exposed by her colleagues. Third, that her partner is a board member at RBC.

Lang then interviewed the bank’s chief executive on her own show. When he dismissed the story as unfair and misleading, she did not challenge him. That evening she uncritically repeated his talking points on CBC’s main current affairs programme. Her interests, again, were not revealed. Then she wrote a comment article for the Globe and Mail newspaper suggesting that her colleagues’ story arose from an outdated suspicion of business, was dangerous to Canada’s interests, and was nothing but “a sideshow”. Here’s what she said about the bank’s employment practices: “It’s called capitalism, and it isn’t a dirty word.”

Canadaland, which exposed Lang’s conflicts last week, found that other journalists at the broadcaster were furious, but too frightened to speak on the record. But after CBC tried to dismiss the scandal as “half-truths based on anonymous sources”, Kathy Tomlinson, the reporter who had broken the story about the bank, bravely spoke publicly to the website. The following morning, staff in her office arrived to find this message spelt out in magnets on their fridge: “Jesse Brown snitches get stitches”. Jesse Brown is Canadaland’s founder.

CBC refused to answer my questions, and I have not had a response from Lang. It amazes me that she remains employed by CBC, which has so far done nothing but bluster and berate its critics.

This is grotesque. But it’s symptomatic of a much wider problem in journalism: those who are supposed to scrutinise the financial and political elite are embedded within it. Many belong to a service-sector aristocracy, wedded metaphorically (sometimes literally) to finance. Often unwittingly, they amplify the voices of the elite, while muffling those raised against it.

A study by academics at the Cardiff School of Journalism examined the BBC Today programme’s reporting of the bank bailouts in 2008. It discovered that the contributors it chose were “almost completely dominated by stockbrokers, investment bankers, hedge fund managers and other City voices. Civil society voices or commentators who questioned the benefits of having such a large finance sector were almost completely absent from coverage.” The financiers who had caused the crisis were asked to interpret it.

The same goes for discussions about the deficit and the perceived need for austerity. The debate has been dominated by political and economic elites, while alternative voices – arguing that the crisis has been exaggerated, or that instead of cuts, the government should respond with Keynesian spending programmes or taxes on financial transactions, wealth or land – have scarcely been heard. Those priorities have changed your life: the BBC helped to shape the political consensus under which so many are now suffering.

The BBC’s business reporting breaks its editorial guidelines every day by failing to provide alternative viewpoints. Every weekday morning, the Today programme grovels to business leaders for 10 minutes. It might occasionally challenge them on the value or viability of their companies, but hardly ever on their ethics. Corporate critics are shut out of its business coverage – and almost all the rest.

On BBC News at Six, the Cardiff researchers found, business representatives outnumbered trade union representatives by 19 to one. “The BBC tends to reproduce a Conservative, Eurosceptic, pro-business version of the world,” the study said. This, remember, is where people turn when they don’t trust the corporate press.

While the way in which the media handle the stories that are covered is bad enough, the absence of coverage is even worse. If an issue does not divide the main political parties, it vanishes from view, though the parties now disagree on hardly anything. Another study reveals a near total collapse of environmental coverage on ITV and BBC news: it declined from 2.5% (ITV) and 1.6% (BBC) of total airtime in 2007 to, respectively, 0.2% and 0.3% in 2014. There were as many news stories on these outlets about Madeleine McCann in 2014 – seven years after her disappearance – as there were about all environmental issues put together.

Those entrusted to challenge power are the loyalists of power. They rage against social media and people such as Russell Brand, without seeing that the popularity of alternatives is a response to their own failures: their failure to expose the claims of the haut monde, their failure to enlist a diversity of opinion, their failure to permit the audience to see that another world is possible. If even the public sector broadcasters parrot the talking points of the elite, what hope is there for informed democratic choice?

On writing a column - Credibility of political pundits is low but voters’ need for punditry high

By Vinod Mehta in The Times of India

Soon, the NDA government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi will chalk up 100 days in office. For some mysterious reason this magic figure is considered an appropriate moment by the media to take stock. It is a rite of passage.

One expects that the verdict on his performance will be sharply divided. One take on the report card will show BJP scoring a century in as many days. The other take will give the party half a ton, and another will award the government less than pass marks. In a robust democracy with a lively media, all three perspectives must be seriously examined before final evaluation is made. The difficulty for citizens is they lack the tools and instruments to make an informed judgment.

So, what options does the voter have? He can speak with friends. He can go online. He can tap a person who has a reputation for being knowledgeable in such matters. But most, i suspect, will rely on the media pundit in the shape of the opinion page writer. I would go so far as to say that political commentary is the main resource available to most people to help them make up their mind.

So far so good. Unfortunately, at this precise moment a problem arises. Recently, i was talking to an old colleague, and i told him i had read an article by Mr X which i liked. “Oh, he is not to be believed,” he replied. “He gets all his information from xxx” And he then mentioned the name of a minister in the present government. My interlocutor added that the gentleman we were talking about had an axe to grind, an `agenda`. Accordingly, what he wrote needed to be taken with a shovel of salt.

Frankly, we live in such ‘interesting’ times that it is virtually impossible to locate a commentator without an agenda. An agenda-less commentator is an endangered species. Which brings us back to the luckless citizen looking for views and positions he can put his faith in. Who does he turn to if all public affairs gurus are openly partial?

I will not be revealing any secrets when i say the credibility of the pundit is at an all-time low, if you exclude the Emergency. The prevailing atmosphere of suspicion and conspiracy theories is so toxic we should not be surprised by the strong inclination towards negativity in the people. As a result, even while he is perusing a 900-word column, the reader is wondering, “Why is this lying bugger lying to me?”

These days anyone who has spent a couple of years in the profession feels qualified to become a pundit. Nothing wrong with that, but the question is, what preparation did the said journalist make before he walked into the hallowed editorial space? When i became an editor in 1974, for over a decade i never dared to write an opinion piece. I was terrified because i felt too raw and too naive. Instead, i embarked on a course of self-education.

Sadly, there were, and are, no textbooks on column writing, no mass communication institutes which can teach you the craft. The sole guide: read pundits you admire — those with a standing for honesty and objectivity.

By objectivity i am not suggesting you abandon your prejudices and preferences, but keep them in check. And, sometimes, restrain them if the message on the wall is too clear. Pseudo-secularists and assorted Modi-detesters could not ignore the hawa blowing in his favour across the country in 2013. Whatever your predilections, you had to take note of the wind whose intensity was growing by the week.

If i can identify one quality the reader is looking for in an opinion column it is ‘trust’. The reader is aware from where the columnist is coming from, what his leanings are. Despite that, he needs to ‘trust’ the writer. He must feel confident the column, at the least, will acknowledge reality, not deny reality. In my 40-odd years of editorship the highest compliment paid to me, among zillions of abuses, went, “I don’t like your opinions but i don’t think you will deliberately mislead me.”

At a time when the entire media is increasingly perceived with suspicion, why should the column-writer remain uncontaminated by partisanship? After all, the pundit is a creature of the environment we all inhabit. He does not live on Mars.

The challenge for those privileged to contribute to the ‘heart of a newspaper’, then, becomes even more daunting. In a society where columnists and editors play favourites, the victim is the reader. Who looks after his interest? Media people day in and day out affirm their commitment to the reader, and the reader alone. Alas, the commitment doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

In short, truth and readability are essential for a column. Remember you don’t want to tell the truth in a way which puts your reader to sleep.

Is there any solution for the present depressing situation? I cannot easily think of one. However, if a solution exists it lies in the hands of the reader. He must reject those columnists (and the papers they write for) that flagrantly violate the basic canons of trust. The reader will be doing the media a favour and also the pundit, who must know he has been caught out.

Lies, damn lies, and Fleet Street stories about Kevin Pietersen

by Maxie Allen in The Full Toss• June 11, 2014

For months now, most of the mainstream cricket press have patronised and belittled England supporters who’ve dared to question their line on Kevin Pietersen.

We’ve said that too many hacks are:

(a) Prejudiced against Pietersen.

(b) In hock to the ECB.

(c) Far too ready to accept the ECB’s anti-KP spin as gospel truth.

(d) Instead of asking proper questions, have just believed any old rubbish Paul Downton has told them off the record.

They’ve not liked it one little bit. “Keyboard ranters” is how Derek Pringle describes the likes of us bloggers and Tweeters. The fourth estate see us impudent, paranoid, deluded, and in the grip of conspiracy theories.

They say we should shut up and be grateful for their privileged insight into the real workings of English cricket. In their minds, we must accept that KP is a bad man because…because they say so. They know the inside track, goes the claim – although they couldn’t possibly divulge the details.

Unfortunately for Her Majesty’s Press, the whole charade has today blown up in their face. The edifice has collapsed.

Yesterday, Sun cricket correspondent John Etheridge boasted this exclusive:

EXCL – Kevin Pietersen so upset with England treatment that he has returned his 100th Test gifts http://t.co/ckdPsP6tVe

— John Etheridge (@JohnSunCricket) June 10, 2014

But there was a tiny problem: it was complete bollocks. As KP himself quickly made clear, by producing a photo of himself with the very presents he had supposedly forsaken. 

Kevin PietersenVerified account‏@KP24

LIES from @JohnSunCricket this morning! Who briefs you, John? Care 2 check ur facts instead of misleading the public? pic.twitter.com/jn5fH3mT0r

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11:41 pm - 10 Jun 2014

Caught red-handed, Etheridge had no option but a humiliating climb-down:

John Etheridge @JohnSunCricket

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@KP24 Was told categorically at Lord's yesterday that gifts were returned and in ECB offices. Weird - will investigate. Can only apologise.

8:46 AM - 11 Jun 2014

No word yet from Ethers about the progress of his inquiry – he’s not Tweeted since.

And Pietersen had another salient point to make:

Kevin Pietersen        ✔ @KP24

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2/2 @JohnSunCricket whoever is briefing the cricket press has an agenda...aren't you intelligent enough to have realised that by now?

9:56 AM - 11 Jun 2014

When Etheridge was presented with the strange claim about the gifts, why didn’t he ask KP for a response before publishing?

This story is surely just the tip of the iceberg. Remember, Etheridge was the chief hack behind the dossier tale – the absurd and as yet wholly unsubstantiated notion that the ECB had compiled a four-page document listing all Pietersen’s misdemeanours in Australia. He also reported vivid allegations about KP’s remarks in the near-mythical Melbourne team meeting.

Until he can convince us otherwise, we should assume that the ECB have repeatedly given Etheridge fictional stories about Pietersen, and he’s then obligingly printed them, verbatim.

And I bet you my house it doesn’t stop with the Sun man. This probably goes back years and has spread like a cancer across the entire mainstream press. Since 2009, where have all the anti-KP stories come from? ECB leaks, obediently served up as truth by the papers. For all we know, none of them at all were true.

But now the music has stopped. They’ve been caught with their hands in the cookie jar.