On Jimmy Savile

Waiting for you, Jimmy…

If only Vladimir Nabokov were alive at this time. The BBC could ask his opinion about Sir Jimmy’s antics.

That said, Bill Wyman’s still around, isn’t he? I know he’s more into older artefacts these days, being interested in archaeology and selling metal detectors and all, but I’m sure he could provide a few interesting anecdotes about the time when he was interested in uncovering fresher meat than Roman Republic Silver Denarius coins.

Service has been resumed…

Sorry for the prolonged break. This has been caused by an unprecedented – and to me, unaccustomed – lengthy stint of  freelance work, complicated by a paroxysmal fit of laughter brought on by reading a Polly Toynbee article in the Guardian, which caused me to suffer complications to an old war wound and led to me being laid up for about a month or so.

I’ve recently noticed a lot of pingbacks to my blog from over a year ago about the Christchurch earthquake and the Guardian’s reporting on it (https://louseandflea.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/the-guardian-newsblog-and-the-death-of-journalism). Has this become some part of a journalism course or something? I’m nearly famous…

Coming up: my thoughts on 24-hour TV news. Give me a day or so to think out my thinks on this.

The anti-Leveson backlash begins!

Well, it was only a matter of time.

The tedious, long-running, press-bashing, minor-celeb tufty hunt that is the Leveson Inquiry has finally wrought a backlash.

And leading the charge are the lefty-libertarians at spiked, which has launched The Counter-Leveson Inquiry.

In his article announcing the launch, spiked editor (and Telegraph blogger) Brendan O’Neill notes that ones re-opening the inquiry on Monday, Lord Leveson mention he found ‘publicly expressed concerns’ about the inquiry ‘troubling’.

O’Neill comments:

The most remarkable thing about Leveson’s admission to feeling troubled by public criticisms is that, sadly, there has been very little public criticism of his showtrial of the tabloids. You could count on one hand, or at a stretch two hands, the number of journalists and politicians who have dared to question the right of one judge to marshal celebrities and coppers to the cause of redefining the ethics of the press.

Quite so. There has been the usual drooling over the attacks on the Murdoch tabloids by the more totalitarian-inclined of our “liberal” lickspittle media – The Guardian, The Independent, the BBC etc – but the rest of the mainstream media has generally cowered in the corner, with only the Mail‘s Paul Dacre putting up any semblance of a fight in what is really a kangaroo court.

And it is a kangaroo court. Witnesses line up and grab their allotted 15 minutes of fame – or, the case of faded celebrities and failed politicians, to grab another 15 minutes of celebrity – making whatever allegations fits their agenda of vengeance, outrage, paranoia and shamelessness. There is no forensic cross-examination of these allegations such as would occur in a court of law, either criminal, where the criteria is beyond reasonable count, or civil, where the criteria is the balance of probabilities.

Instead, they are met with gentle questions eliciting their feelings, impressions and thoughts more appropriate for a student counselling session than a formal, quasi-judicial inquiry. For many of the witnesses, this is true nirvana: not only do have a spotlight of a softer, more flattering hue cast upon them, they get a free ego-massage thrown in too.

One troubling aspect of the Levenson inquiry that O’Neill doesn’t comment on in his article – strangely, since it’s one of his hobby-horses – is that by almost solely attacking the tabloids, this is really just another extended prole-bash. The tabloids cater for a sizeable readership who loves celeb gossip; some of the tabs catered to this demand by nefarious means, by illicit phone-hacking or paying cops for tip-offs of celeb shenanigans etc. Of that there’s no doubt.

But hang on: during the Leveson recess, we had the unedifying sight of the usual suspects – the aforementioned Guardian, Independent, BBC etc – drooling over “hacked” documents “proving” that the right-wing US Heartland Institute, which takes a robust anti-man-made global warming line, along with many other activities, was plotting to use the untold millions it gets from Big Oil to foil pro-climate changee scientists by “dissuading teachers from teaching science”.

The fact the central “strategy” document was a crudely cobbled-together fake and that the genuine documents – which were blandly routine meeting reports that hardly showed Heartland wallowing around in Big Oil bucks like Scrooge McDuck – had been obtained by fraud by pro-climate change activist, Peter Gleick, who has since confessed to the phishing, though not to the faking.

That they had tacitly supported and thereby endorsed illegal activities because it suited their news agenda in this instance did not seem to faze then usual suspects. Indeed, the Guardian even ran an extraordinary piece by The Ethics of Climate Change author James Garvey in which he said:

Was Gleick right to lie to expose Heartland and maybe stop it from causing further delay to action on climate change? If his lie has good effects overall – if those who take Heartland’s money to push scepticism are dismissed as shills, if donors pull funding after being exposed in the press – then perhaps on balance he did the right thing. It could go the other way too – maybe he’s undermined confidence in climate scientists. It depends on how this plays out.

So: the ends justifies the means, eh? But only if it’s the Guardian’s ends, it would seem. It certainly doesn’t apply to those filthy red-tops’ ends. Some may call that moral relativism. I call it rank hypocrisy.

But don’t expect such high-minded shenanigans to get even a mention at Leveson. It’s the tabloids which are in the firing line, and while it’s them, the usual suspects will happily cheer the inquiry on.

But O’Neill is surely right to note that whether they are active cheerleaders or cowering curs, mainstream journalists are oblivious to the bonfire which is being built under their feet:

It is alarming that, in a country where the poet John Milton demanded freedom of the press more than 350 years ago, and where many other writers and activists subsequently fought tooth-and-catapult to expel state forces from the worlds of writing and publishing, so many should now acquiesce to an inquiry which gives a judge and his chums the power to tell the media what its morals should be.

O’Neill ends his call to arms with another fiery quote from Milton which I urge you to check out for yourself. Because whatever you might think of their views on other topics (which I myself have a love/hate relationship with), on this issue, the spiked gang is definitely on the side of the angels.

Movies will eat themselves

Dear Lord, why are they doing this?

Listen to this: they are making a movie about the making of a movie.

In this case, the movie concerned is Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock’s pioneering slasher classic from 1960. Scarlett Johansson is to play Janet Leigh, who starred as the short-lived Marion Caine, Anthony Hopkins is to play Hitch and Helen Mirren is to play his wife and collaborator, Alma. It has not yet been announced who will play Mother’s corpse, though the role could give Sean Penn’s flagging career a much-needed lift.

This raises the question: Dear Lord, why?

Anyone who has spent any time on a film set as an observer knows that film-making is a mind-numbingly tedious experience for those not directly involved. Even the making of a three-minute pop video – just the shooting of which often takes up to a week or more – is hardly filled with the jump-cut, flashy excitement that ends up on MTV or Viva.

The Telegraph quotes Variety magazine as saying the makers of Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho think they’re on to something “because it will concentrate on a specific untold story in the life of the director”.*

Yeah, right. What would that “specific untold story” be, do you think? Maybe that Hitch didn’t actually direct Psycho, or any of the other films bearing his name, but they were all really directed by the Earl of Oxford, or Walt Disney or even the painter Francis Bacon.

Might it have something more to do with the self-absorbed navel-gazing of some of the more conceited Hollywood types (and there are plenty of those) who think movie-goers are as fascinated with the tedious black arts of film production as film-makers are themselves?

With luck, the renowned “Curse of Psycho” will strike this production as surely as it struck Gus Van Sant with his vanity project, the doomed frame-by-frame remake of Psycho in 1998.

Further upcoming movies:

Evelyn Waugh and the Writing of Brideshead Revisited

Jack Vettriano and the Painting of The Singing Waiter

Phillipe Starck and the Designing of His Unusable Lemon Squeezer

* Actually, I couldn’t find that quote on the linked Variety story, so perhaps the Telegraph that bit up.

Leveson: wrap it up

Today I watched John Prescott appear giving “testimony” to the Leveson “Inquiry into Media Ethics”.

Prescott. “Ethics”?

Last week it was Cherie Blair. Cherie Blair? Ethics?

Time to wrap up this media-lawyer circus.

Am I the only one  who considers the “star” witnesses appearing on BBC News-24 etc at the Leveson enquiry tend to be rather faded stars who once quite famous, but are no longer so? Are they seeking, as faded stars often do, to add lustre to their less then lustrous persona. Hello,  and fellatio to you, Hugh Grant!.

They also seem to be people caught doing naughty things. Why is their testimony so insipid? Is Leveson, basically, a government-approved tufty hunter? I rather fear he is.

Polly’s forecast for your Sun this Sunday

Oh dear. Polly Dutt-Pauker does not like the idea of the Sun on Sunday at all.

Guess Rupert must be doing something right…at last. But please, spare us the Yellandist “isn’t this boy who’s been forced to dress like a girl by his mad parents just toooo cute” stuff, will you?

WEATHER: It is currently 16-deg C in Tuscany, misty, but with a sunny day with low cloud promised for tomorrow. Forecast for SUNDAY: 15-deg C, with 90 per cent chance of grumpy frosted clouds and wild, violent outbursts of tacks, razorblades and hellfire, giving way to  scattered servants and free-ranging, scudding interns. A low-level depression named MARR descends over an unknown Tory MP who doesn’t go to church. Scattered things. MONDAY: Settled boredom, with John Humphreys tweeting Alan Rusbridger about how awful the weather from Italy has been on Today (lowlights repeated ad nauseum on BBC News 24).

Twitter journalism

Via Charles Crawford comes this interesting infographic thingummy about the rise of iPhone journalism from frugaldad.com

While I think Mr Crawford is over-egging it a bit to say all this means “goodbye photo-journalism” – really outstanding photo-journalism requires much the same high level of technical skill, a “good eye” and luck as it has always done, whereas iPhone journalism really requires minimal skill and maximum good luck in being in the right place at the right time – I think Frugaldad’s comment that the huge strides being made in smartphone technology, combined with their interconnectivity with social media websites such Facebook and Twitter, make such phones a formidable weapon in the journalist’s arsenal.

But a word of warning: as Riyaard Minty of Al-Jazeera comments, the citizen photo postings of the uprisings in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and now Syria are “the primary lens” through which these events have been brought to the world’s attention – “primary”, as in “first”, not (as some befuddled editors of national newspapers and 24-hours news channels seem to think) the “only” lens.

Because just as a bunch of random tweets and Facebook messages thrown together do not a news story make, a bunch of iPhone photos from the scene of an ongoing news event, while immediately gripping, do not necessarily tell the whole story. Context is everything, and it requires a skilled journalist to pull together all the disparate, if related, elements together into something like a coherent whole.

Hitler’s son and Chaplin: The sordid truth revealed!

Today’s Daily Telegraph – rapidly stitching into its hair-weave the jester’s crown of Britain’s silliest paper – has not one, but two exciting historical revelations:

First up: Charlie Chaplin may have been …French!

Charlie - or should that be "Charlot"?

Second: Hitler had a son, Jean-Marie Loret, by a Frenchwoman he met while moseying round the Maginot Line during WWI:

Hitler only had un fils

I can’t see why the Telegraph doesn’t have the nous to put 2 and 2 together to get the real answer:

Charlie Chaplin was really the Frenchman Jean-Marie Loret – the son of Adolf Hitler!

It explains so much! Those who might quibble about discrepancies in dates of birth in my marvellous new conspiracy theory can, I feel, safely be denigrated as “birthers”, “deniers” etc etc.

Now I must go off and write a book, put together a viral YouTube video, get the backing of Al Gore, George Monbiot and the BBC, and I’ll be rich, rich, I tell you!!!

The Telegraph’s poll: no need to add impudence to impertinence

 

Today the Telegraph has an interview with the “country’s top tax man”, Mr Dave Hartnett, urging householders not to pay tradesmen cash in hand, apparently because it only encourages them to avoid paying VAT.

““Tax provides the funding to run the country: hospitals, schools and everything else,” he says. “Every time someone pays cash in order not to pay VAT, the nation gets diddled.”

Quite apart from the fact that Mr “Dave” appears to confuse the concept of “the nation” with “the government” – if a tradesman diddles the Government out of VAT, that’s money he/she can then spend elsewhere in the nation – there’s a distasteful impertinence to the unspoken suggestion that we should all act as HMRC’s informal (and unpaid) enforcer-interns.

Adding impudence to the impertinence of this special pleading, the Telegraph website also has a poll, “Is it OK to pay cash in hand to tradesmen?”, which, if  you try to submit your vote at a time when telegraph.co.uk is off having a tea-break, a quick snifter, a nice lie-down or whatever (which seems to be most of the time), comes up with this:

Who are you calling nonce, kid?

 

Really, I don’t know what the mysterious owners of the Telegraph, the mysterious Barclay twins – Gilbert and George? Gilbert and Sullivan? Eric and Ernie? – get up to all day on their mysterious island hideaway of Brecqhou, but surely they have enough time to take a break from stroking their mysterious fluffy white cats to check up on what a mockery Tony Gallagher is making of a once fine newspaper.

So, farewell then, Johann Harvey…I mean HARI

Johann Hari: The Non-Return

I guess I’m kinda sad that Johann “Harvey” Hari will not be returning to “The Independent” (dread term, as its former, most well-respected columnist Wallace Arnold would say). I was looking forward, perhaps over-gleefully, to seeing exactly what the Great Plagiarist would come up with that would in any way atone for his previous frauds to his loyal followers. Equally, I wanted to see how the Independent (“It once was. Are you still?”) would once again weasel its way around the fact they let him get away with these frauds for so long: indeed, would promote him way above his journalistic capability – which many seasoned journalists had called into question before the balloon finally went up – his intellectual honesty or  his educational ability (Tim Worstall was calling him out on his inept economic analysis long before his plagiarism came to light).

But, having returned from his New York journalism re-education camp…sorry, I mean retraining course…(hang on, he never had journalism training in the first place, so how does that work?) he has decided to cop out. Fleet Street Blues puts it kindly: “Fair play to him for falling on his sword…”  Well, far enough, except that it was a sword he fashioned himself from the ploughshare used by more honest, less ambitious and glory-seeking journalists than he.

Is there a lesson to be learnt from the Johann Hari affair? Yes, there is, and it is, in the portentous tones of Laurence Rees, it’s “A Warning From History”. The rise of Hari roughly coincides with that of Tony Blair and New Labour, and it’s difficult not to recall Peter Oborne’s verdict on the relationship between truth vs falsehood during that regime, in The Rise of Political Lying:

It is not unreasonable to speculate that the prime minister has a strong tendency to fall victim to a common conceptual muddle: the failure to understand the distinction between truth versus falsehood and truth versus error. Tony Blair, and many colleagues, consistently seem to feel that they are lucky enough to have been granted a privileged access to the moral truth. This state of grace produces two marvellous consequences. It means that whatever New Labour ministers say or write, however misleading or inaccurate, is in a larger sense true. Likewise whatever their opponents say or write, whether or not strictly speaking accurate, is in the most profound sense false.

Hari’s apologists (Polly Dutt-Pauker, Caitlin Moran etc) have all tended to forgive the Blessed Hari’s venial sins – misrepresentation, plagiarism, making up direct quotes – because he represented a Cardinal virtue: a “moral” truth, though not one supported by anything so mundane as facts, reality or common sense. It’s as though he and they have taken the example of Evelyn Waugh’s Shumble, Whelper, Pigge and Corker in Scoop and learnt exactly the wrong lesson. But then right-wing satire is always a bit too subtle for the lefties’ more clod-hopping tastes.

So Hari is off to write a book

“on a subject I believe is important and requires urgent action. To be done properly it needs international travel and …in depth focus…”

Hmmm. “The Ethics of Journalism – An International Study”, perhaps? The Plagiarist’s Progress, perchance, following our hero from the City of Destruction (a rather ungenerous way to describe the Independent, but I wouldn’t know; I’ve never worked there), up Hill Lucre, to the House Beautiful and  down into the Slough of Despond and the Valley of Humiliation? A novel called…oooh, I don’t know, something along the lines of  “The Fabulist” perhaps, about a reporter on a respected national publication who throws it all away by making stuff up? Oh, that’s already been done (and had the Hollywood treatment, too).

Maybe it’s a biography of Polly Dutt-Pauker he’s thinking of doing. Now that would require in depth focus – and international travel, of course (and Tuscany is so beautiful this time of the year, too).

Good luck, Johann, whatever you do. Just stay away from journalism, all right?

And now you’re out of the way, you snivelling little creep, it’s time to go after bigger buggers. Time to turn up the screws on Simon Kelner. Stay tuned, fact fans.