The Media: be careful what you wish for. Or complain about

You cannot hope to bribe or twist
(thank God!) the British journalist. 
But, seeing what the man will do 
unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

Journalism attracts a lot of criticism for its seamier side. 

Just as ferocious as this verse by Humbert Wolfe from the 1920s is the powerful 1931 denunciation by then Tory Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, of the press barons who were, in his view, seeking:

…power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages

Clearly, the British press has had a lousy press for a long time.

For a contrary view, the journalist Guthrie in Tom Stoppard’sNight and Day tells us:

I’ve been around a lot of places. People do awful things to each other. But it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark. It really is. Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything, is light.

The Press: even the best can be irritating or infuriating
but would we really be better off it without it?

Information is light. Indeed it is. If you want a counter-example, just take Saudi Arabia. There too there was annoyance with a journalist, Jamal Kashoggi. So he was assassinated inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Five Saudis have been sentenced to death and three to long prison sentences for the crime, all of them junior figures.

The suspicion is that they are scapegoats for a crime ordered far higher up in Saudi government, quite possibly by the Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman himself. But with strict censorship in place in Saudi, there’s no way those suspicions can be tested there by public debate in the media, any more than they can by the government-controlled courts.

In Britain, there have been two significant events concerning the media this week. First, the government excluded certain outlets from a press briefing, a move which at least was met with resistance by other journalists, who walked out. The British journalist can, it seems, also behave in a principled way.

The second significant event was the announcement that the government is looking at changes to the licence fee system that finances the BBC. Whatever those changes are, and however plausibly they may be justified, it’s clear they will lead to a reduction in funding.

Nicky Morgan, Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, has made it clear that:

As the world around us changes, our laws must change too. It will require the BBC to be innovative and to move with the times.

When the government starts telling the BBC that it needs to move with the times, it’s hard not to suspect that what it’s asking for is a move towards considerably less scrutiny of what government is doing.

That suspicion would be less strong if the government hadn’t already done so much to reduce scrutiny in the past. In the autumn, with the debate over Brexit raging in the House of Commons, Boris Johnson decided that Parliament should be prorogued. Suspending it in that way would indeed have greatly reduced the inconvenient oversight of government that Parliament was insisting on. Fortunately, the move was eventually judged to be illegal in the courts.

Today, with a more than comfortable majority in the House of Commons, Johnson no longer has to worry about parliamentary scrutiny. So now he’s rounding on the Press and the BBC.

Anyone interested in preserving an open society based on democratic values, should be opposing his moves. But there we have a problem of our own creation. The Left has been vociferous in its denunciation of the BBC and of the Press generally, contemptuously written off as the ‘MSM’ (mainstream media). That only plays into Johnson’s hands.

There’s no doubt that the BBC could be improved in many ways. That’s even truer of the Press: things certainly haven’t progressed much since Humbert Wolfe penned his lines and Stanley Baldwin denounced the Press Barons.

But “they say things I disagree with” isn’t a good enough basis for attacking the media. Especially when the effect isn’t really to drive them towards reform, but merely to reinforce attempts to muzzle them completely. When a right-wing government with autocratic inclinations is preparing a hole for the media, it would be a good idea for the Left not to help dig it any deeper.

Just remember: “Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything, is light.”

Things are a lot worse in the dark.

Letrice in Beirut, or how we like to turn a bad situation into something far worse

It was Paris on the Mediterranean. It was sea-bathing in November, it was visiting Roman ruins in a blouse, it was sitting with colleagues on a sunny café terrace when at home everyone was indoors or wrapped in coats and scarves. It was no wonder her visit to Beirut left my mother, Leatrice, with indelible memories that she was still sharing with me 70 years later, not long before she died.

Leatrice in Baalbek or at the beach
She was a pretty 24-year old, but maybe already a little uptight...

It was 1948. A single trip abroad as a child had been followed by the thirties in London, then the air raid warnings and the bombs of the war, then the harsh winter of 1946, the bomb sites on every street, the rationing, the general gloom of the past-war years.

Leatrice, as I’ve mentioned before, got out just as soon as she could. In 1948, she was working as a typist for UNESCO in Paris. It organised a conference in Beirut and, to be a success in those pre-Word processing days, a conference had to have a legion of low paid assistants along, to record the words of the important or self-important, and to produce the documents without which no one would believe they’d actually been doing very much.

For Leatrice, it was a sheer joy to be there, to see the sights, to go for a swim, to visit the ruins at Baalbek, to enjoy the pavement life. I was reminded of that when going through another bundle of old photos, as part of a task that is probably going to take most of my retirement even if I have a long one, and came across more pictures of that trip.

What made the pictures all the more poignant was that I was looking at them just as I’d learned that Donald Trump, in what passes for wisdom in that orange head of his, had decided that the best action he could take in response to new threats from Iran, was to launch a drone-borne missile strike to assassinate the senior Iranian General Qasem Soleimani.

Now Soleimani was a ruthless autocrat and his hands are stained with the blood of thousands killed in combat or simply murdered in cold blood. The world is absolutely is arguably better off without him in it. But the same could be said of Saddam Hussein: we’re better off freed of him, or at least we would have been, had what followed in his wake not been far worse. Indeed, one of the most toxic consequences of bringing down Saddam was the rise of Soleimani.

It seems we don’t like learning from our mistakes (or, for those like Trump, perhaps we’re unable to learn), and keep thinking that a quick fix – the invasion of Iraq, the murder of Soleimani – is likely to deliver a long-term solution.

The reality, of course, is that Iran will avenge the death. It may do so directly itself, or it may use a proxy force, perhaps in Yemen attacking Saudi Arabia once more, perhaps in Syria attacking Israel, or indeed perhaps through its client militia, Hezbollah, in Lebanon. Whichever option they eventually select, it’s going to make the Middle East a still more tragic region than it already is.

Especially as whatever action they take, there will almost certainly be further retaliation from the US or its clients in Israel or Saudi Arabia. So things will ratchet up. Which, you may remember, is rather how things went after the invasion of Iraq.

Looking at my mother’s Beirut photos reminds me how far we’ve come.

Clockwise: the venue for the UNESCO conference;
Leatrice third from left at a pavement café; a street scene; the seafront.

Leatrice agreed with the description of Beirut as ‘Paris on the Mediterranean’. She regarded it as a sliver of paradise. But that was before the US and Russia, Israel and Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria, to say nothing of its own internal conflicts, started interfering the life out of it.

I’d like to say that they’ve turned a paradise into a purgatory, except that purgatory is supposed to be where souls are purged ready to enter heaven. Sometimes, the Middle East looks more like a soul condemned to hell, from which there is no hope of escape. Certainly, none while its destiny is being set by Trump or Soleimani, Netanyahu or Assad, Putin or Mohammad bin Salman.