First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

Reviews are starting to appear of Flat Earth News by Nick Davies—an exposé of the narrowness and insubstantiality of much modern “news” culture—but I would challenge you to find a better account of its significance than John Lanchester’s recent piece for the London Review of Books.

Lanchester, channelling Davies, gives a devastatingly precise account of the situation faced by anyone seriously interested in what’s going on in Britain today. Put simply, the print media are drawing ever-more trustingly on an ever-narrower and ever-less-verified spectrum of sources that, in many cases, amounts to little better than a glossy repackaging of Press Association briefs. And who are the “baddies”? No-one in particular. The cultural pressures are far too pernicious for that easy a get-out:

Flat Earth News breaks down the specific ways in which pressure is exerted on the practice of journalism, on a daily basis. Stories need to be cheap, meaning ‘quick to cover’, ‘safe to publish’; they need to ‘select safe facts’ preferably from official sources; they need to ‘avoid the electric fence’, sources of guaranteed trouble such as the libel laws and the Israel lobby; to be based on ‘safe ideas’ and contradict no loved prevailing wisdoms; to avoid complicated or context-rich problems; and always to ‘give both sides of the story’ (‘balance means never having to say you’re sorry – because you haven’t said anything’). And conversely, there are active pressures to pursue stories that tell people what they want to hear, to give them lots of celebrity and TV-based coverage, and to subscribe to every moral panic. That’s the effect on the texture of journalism, the culture of the newsroom. Of course, the pressure on costs has other, simpler effects too. There is more space to fill—in the British papers, three times as much—but no equivalent expansion of the resources to do the work. Elsewhere, the pressure on resources is just as bad. In 1970, CBS had three full-time correspondents in Rome alone: by 2006, the entire US media, print and broadcast, was supporting only 141 foreign correspondents to cover the whole world.

I would, however, venture one up-side that Lanchester doesn’t feature (although he has written along related lines elsewhere). These days, every citizen with a broadband connection is their own investigative reporter. And, increasingly, we’re learning to use the daily newspapers and the news channels as stopping off points rather than definitive records: first ports of call in an information culture that thrives elsewhere on probing every gap, contradiction and untruth the mainstream simply regurgitates.

If this is starting to sound a little too much like a conspiracy theory, well, consider the bogus hysteria that has trailed everything in recent years from the millennium bug to Martin Amis’s “racism,” and whether this remotely constitutes “news” in the sense of verified information about the world. Yet one sector’s loss is other’s gain. Providing a longer and more sceptical look at what is being claimed as news—where a story started, where it’s going and who wants you to believe it—is the prerogative both of magazines like Prospect and those legions of dedicated online amateurs whose investigations are, increasingly, setting the standard for people who wish to be fully informed. As the mainstream ratchets its commercial culture in ever more tightly, it may find the real action has begun to take place elsewhere.

Those who have been enjoying the debate stirred by Trevor Phillips’s article on Barack Obama in our current issue (on this blog and elsewhere) may be interested to read his response to some of the criticisms that have been levelled at him, printed as a letter in the Independent today:

Sir: I was a little surprised to see the front page of The Independent (28 February) and my somewhat apocalyptic claim that “Obama will do nothing for black Americans”. Strangely, I don’t recall saying that.

My article in Prospect, on which The Independent’s coverage was based, was not a personal attack on Mr Obama or whether he would make a great president. The actual focus of my ire is those who are attempting to use Mr Obama’s arrival as signalling the dawn of a post-racial Nirvana in America; those who would use his success to say “job well done” and ignore the hard work of tackling that country’s deep divisions.

A high-profile black figure who gets the whole world talking about race, politics and the mix of the two should never be dismissed in the off-hand way yesterday’s coverage suggested I had. Mr Obama may indeed be a worthy American president. What he won’t be is a solution to that country’s racial divide.

Trevor Phillips
Chair, Equality and Human Rights Commission, London SE1

Following the furore that Trevor Phillips’s piece on Barack Obama has provoked, we’ve now made available online a companion piece from the current issue by Robert Reich—US secretary of labour under President Bill Clinton—which argues that, although Obamania may not signal a significant shift to the left in American politics, it does indeed represent “a new political chapter” for the US. Obama, Reich argues, manages to be both a realist and an idealist, and in this he recalls JFK—who stood on a platform not of radical politics, but of a tireless projection of America’s founding principle that “above all, that all men are created equal.”

As ever, let us know what you think here.

As ITV have a quick reshuffle, including bringing in Peter Fincham (ex-BBC 1) for Simon Shaps as director of television, it’s worth recalling one key fact. ITV’s audience share has fallen inexorably since 1981 regardless of who was running the shop.

In 1981, ITV’s audience share was 49%. By 1991 it was down to 42%. A significant fall but not catastrophic. But after 2000 the audience share started to full more steeply. By 2001 it was below 30% for the first time, down more than 2.5% in a year. In 2006 it had fallen below 20% for the first time. Last month (January 2008) it was barely 19%. Two weeks ago (week ending 17th February) it was barely 18%. In other words, in 26 years ITV’s audience share was down from almost half (49%) to less than 20%.

Of course, all the channels have taken a hit since multichannel TV took off. In 1981 Channel 4 didn’t exist. In 1991 the four channels had 96% of audience share between them. Now it’s down to less than two thirds according to BARB. But of the five terrestrial channels there’s no doubt which has been hit most in the last few years. In 1996 ITV still had 35% of audience share. It has declined by almost a half in barely ten years. During that period, BBC 1 has gone down by one third (33.5%-22%, 1996-2007). The smaller channels have done much better: BBC 2 from 11.5%-8.5%, Channel 4 10.7%-8.6% and Five has actually risen from 2.3%-5.1% (1997-2007).

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Bored beyond tears by the kind of pieces that begin “we asked a hundred people what they thought about…,” I’ve asked myself and the two people who sit nearest me what the best surveys of the last ten years have been. It’s a bold, crowded field, but on the basis on exhausting and massively inconclusive analysis conducted sporadically when I have nothing better to do, I’m now in a position to reveal our very own top five:

5. God tops list of most-desired phone-calls.

4. Japanese women’s hair predicts economic downturns.

3. Ugly people flock to Philadelphia.

2. Americans suspect Scotland may not have microwaves or the internet.

1. 27% of people think that it’s stupid that it’s illegal to die in the houses of Parliament.

And 100% of journalists are grateful that there’s a foolproof method for turning opinions into facts simply by counting them. Vote now to let Prospect know your own favourite…

It’s been doing the rounds on the internet this week, but the comic genius that is Garfield without Garfield is such that we’d be doing you a disservice not to link to it.

The idea is simple—Garfield comic strips with Garfield removed, leaving us just with the images, words and thoughts of Jon Arbuckle, a man who in the absence of his pet cat is revealed to be a desperate loner, a crazed psychopath—or possibly even a Zen master.

The American journalist and writer William F Buckley died yesterday at the age of 82. Buckley founded the influential conservative magazine National Review in 1955. He published over 50 books (including one about his interactions with National Review readers called Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription) and hosted the political TV talk show Firing Line for over 30 years. Buckley famously supported segregation, opposed women’s liberation and advocated the compulsory tattooing of HIV-positive people (but favoured legalising marijuana). In Prospect’s January 2006 issue, James P Pinkerton assessed Buckley’s legacy on the occasion of his 80th birthday.

Poor old ITV. Channel 4 had ‘Cheers,’ ‘Friends’ and ‘Roseanne’, the BBC had ‘Seinfeld’ and has the very cool-looking ‘Mad Men’ coming up (BBC 4, Sunday, March 2). Even Channel 5 had ‘House’. And what does ITV get when it sticks its new-look toe into the US import business? A peculiarly unfunny, very un-ITV series about a psychopathic serial killer who helps the police hunt psychopathic serial killers.

You can’t say ‘Dexter’ doesn’t try. The series was adapted for TV by Emmy Award-winning screenwriter James Manos Jr (he won his Emmy for the “College” episode of ‘The Sopranos’). It stars Michael C Hall (David Fisher in ‘Six Feet Under’) as Dexter Morgan, a serial killer who works for the Miami Metro Police Department as a blood pattern analyst. And it pushes back the boundaries of good taste to a place that Mary Whitehouse would not have thought conceivable.

What is interesting about ‘Dexter’ is not the idea or the shock, but what it represents. First, Dexter is a descendant of Hannibal Lecter. he is inconceivable without ‘Silence of the Lambs’ — the charming psychopath who does terrible things to bodies (we’re hardly talking about people). The first episode is all about people being cut up for the gratification of others. Dexter captures two murderers — one a serial killer who does terrible things to boys, the other who does terrible things to women and is into bondage and S & M. This is part of an important new trend in Anglo-American culture: a fascination with tortured and dismembered bodies.

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In this month’s cover story, Mark Leonard addresses a question that has been largely neglected by even the most ardent admirers of China’s rise as an economic superpower: what exactly are the ideas shaping the growth of this potent challenger to western hegemony; and who are the people thinking them?

China has a very different political and intellectual tradition to those of Europe and America—but throughout history, and since long before Europe began to claim itself a civilized place, it has been at the heart of global technological and educational innovation. As Leonard explains, China’s intellectual class is now growing at an astonishing rate, in tandem with a huge expansion in its universities and think-tanks, whose memberships already outnumber those of any other nation. Free thought in the western sense may remain distant in many areas, but modern China enjoys a level of national debate inconceivable even a decade ago—and one that nourishes a distinctly Chinese model of economic development and political legitimacy which is increasingly proving a global alternative to the attractions of western market democracy. Over 3,000 Chinese-style “special economic zones” are now to be found around the world, for example, in addition to its own expanding multi-billion dollar trade hubs in Africa.

Will the “China model” be to the 21st century what the American way was to the 20th? Mark Leonard presents us with a vivid picture of a nation still in transition, yet determined to bring the results from its formidable laboratory of social experiments to bear on the world. Let us know what you think here (and for those wishing to find out more, Leonard’s book What Does China Think? has just been published by 4th Estate).

In Prospect’s lead opinion piece this month, Trevor Phillips—chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission and one of Britain’s foremost black political figures—explains why he believes Barack Obama’s emergence as a credible US presidential candidate has actually put back the arrival of a post-racial America.

Obama is, Phillips explains, both a charismatic and a ruthless figure, and one “whose African ancestors never endured transatlantic slavery.” Unlike “challengers,” such as Malcolm X, Obama is a “bargainer” who has tacitly agreed not use America’s history of white racism as a political weapon, and who in return expects his own race not to be used against him. Obama, Phillips argues, is a politician, not a saviour or even a liberator: his job is to win elections (which he may well do), but he is no harbinger of a revolutionary inter-racial harmony.

EDIT 1: As some of you may have noticed, the Independent are running a piece by Andrew Grice today reporting Phillips’s Prospect article, while the Times have coverage from Hannah Strange. To all and any who’ve arrived at this page via the papers, welcome—and do join in the discussion.

EDIT 2: As our publisher has noted in the comments below, those seeking a counterpoint to Phillips’s arguments should turn to Robert Reich’s piece in our current issue, which can now be read for free online—and can be discussed on the blog here.

EDIT 3: Trevor Phillips has responded to some of the criticism his article has received in a letter in today’s Independent.