Tuesday, September 30, 2008 

On knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.

For all the undoubted benefits that the internet has brought, one of its most malign effects has been on the state of journalism in this country. The big bloggers can moan all they like about the dead tree press, but without the dead tree press those self-same bloggers would have far fewer stories to write about. For that, without question, is what the MSM does: it provides the facts; the bloggers provide the views, very rarely indeed breaking stories, or at least stories that penetrate into the mass media.

More on which in a moment. Something that can also be linked to the rise of the internet, but more resultant on the multi-channel digital/satellite/cable boom and the decline in advertising is today's announcement
by ITV that it will be cutting an astounding 430 staff working in regional news. Just last week Ofcom rubber-stamped this apparent inevitability, disregarding completely a slight thing like the public interest. ITV is to condense its 17 separate news regions down to just 9, with the massive area which was previously the Border region, Tyne Tees North and Tyne Tees South to be"rationalised" into one, with those in the Borders region not unreasonably protesting vigorously about the likely outcome. Additionally ITV will only have to give over 15 minutes a week to regional programming in England, or a derisory 13 hours a year, all part of an attempt to save £40 million a year.

These cuts would not be so bad if there were other organisations that could pick up the slack. The "rationalisation" process however is not just limited to TV, with both the BBC and ITV cutting back on both local and national news, but also to the local press and the wire agencies. Where once local papers ran training schemes, with reporters subsequently spring-boarding to nationals, these have almost entirely dried up. Instead graduates are thrown in almost entirely at the deep-end, on pitiful wages and with excessive, monotonous hours spent in the office, rather than out cultivating the sources which are vital for any reporter to be able to present an accurate picture of their respective patch.
Nick Davies ably describes how this came about in Flat Earth News, with the benevolent families that previously owned the regional press selling out to the "grocers", whose only instinct is to make a profit, endlessly cut costs and make payouts to shareholders. The wire agencies which once had dozens of reporters covering the courts and elsewhere have either disappeared entirely or been cut to the bone, while vast areas of the country such as Greater Manchester are now covered by just five reporters for the Press Association, while Scotland has just 15. It's worth also pointing out that the local journalist and their sources are even further threatened by the prosecution of Sally Murrer and Mark Kearney, ostensibly on the grounds of "aiding and abetting gross misconduct in a public office", but almost certainly because of their role in uncovering the bugging of Sadiq Khan MP whilst visiting Babar Ahmed at Woodhill prison.

In an apparent attempt to add insult to injury, Ofcom justifies the cuts on the basis that it will provide "credible means to sustain quality national and regional news services on ITV1." In other words, ITV was laughing at the regulator which has no clothes: it can't do anything about ITV cutting back, and so provides apologia on the basis that these cuts will allow it to keep broadcasting quality services despite reducing the funds to them. Confused by such contradictions? You're supposed to be. You're also supposed to be glad that this guarantees local programming until 2012, when the digital switchover will be complete and presumably the waste of time and money on such mundane things as local news will be abandoned altogether.

After all, aren't there other things that ITV could cut back on rather than on news production, which provides a undoubted public service? ITV has for example 3 digital channels, which for the most part broadcast block repeats. Possibly the two most notable original productions for ITV2 are
Secret Diary of a Call Girl, the ludicrously shallow, badly acted glamorous prostitute drama starring Billie Piper, and a "reality" show which turgidly and stupefyingly follows around Katie Price (aka Jordan) and Peter Andre as they showcase their mind-numbing stupidity to the world. It makes BBC Three look like BBC Four by comparison. Who knows how much could be saved by shutting down just one or two of these channels, let alone all three, and instead concentrating on just one brand, but the first casualties are always the worthy things that are considered expendable, while the stuff which gets media attention and the one-handed brigade excited are untouchable. ITV could also cut back on its "superstar" pay packets: fittingly, Ant and Dec, stars and culpable in the "fixing" scandals of last year signed up to a £40,000,000 contract, while Simon Cowell has a three-year £20,000,000 deal. Not bad money for humiliating those with delusions of fame with scripted put-downs.

The National Union of Journalists seems to be ready to strike over the cut-backs, but their chances of forcing a rethink are tiny to non-existent. This is the way that both TV and print journalism is going, typified by the thinking of the likes of Richard Desmond who upon buying the Express and Star thought that posts such as health correspondent could be filled by someone getting all their stories off the internet.

The irony is that is exactly what is now taking place, as Davies' rules of production are increasingly followed. You'll have probably noticed it on news sites: the latest decree from on high is to go big with celebrity stories, which draw in massive amounts of hits and and boost sites
up the ABCe tables accordingly. Up until very recently the Guardian website for example punched way above its weight because of its early investment in the internet; since then the Daily Mail has come out of almost nowhere to reach very nearly the highest reaches in terms of hits. This is partially because Paul Dacre famously originally said "bullshit.com" to the idea the internet was the future, something he has since changed his mind over. It's also though because the Mail Online concentrates on celebrity and entertainment stories which can be quickly copied off wire services, and which gain most of their hits from overseas. Seeing this was working, the idea has since been pilfered not just by the other tabloids, but by the likes of the Telegraph as well. Even the Independent is currently running the Britney Spears sex tape story which was the front page splash on today's Daily Star, economic news being far too depressing and boring for paper's demographic. Again, this wouldn't matter so much if other resources were still being placed elsewhere, but increasingly this is where the funding is going.

A case in point was the recent revival of the Satanic panic, this time in Russia.
The Mail, Sun, Times and Telegraph all published the gruesome details of a group which had apparently murdered four other teenagers and eaten some of their remains, having stabbed their victims exactly 666 times. The natural sceptic will immediately wonder about the truthfulness of such claims, and a quick search for an original source proves futile: there doesn't appear to be one, neither a news wire source or one from Russia, so where on earth had they came from? An investigation suggested that the story had in fact originated on that notoriously factual Russian newspaper site, Pravda, but the story has even disappeared from there. Searching Google now still doesn't turn up a Russian source, and searches on the Moscow Times and Russia Today sites also turn up nothing. Wherever it came from, no one actually seems to have done any checking whatsoever other than repeat the claims completely verbatim. After all, contacting the authorities in Russia would doubtless be costly, and if it turned out the story wasn't accurate, that would mean that a sensationalist story that would naturally bring traffic to a website couldn't be published. The changing rules of journalism now in fact mitigate against the original purpose of the craft: to report facts. Ninja turtle syndrome, where if somewhere else is reporting something, everywhere has to report it, is becoming the norm.

One Telegraph hack has become so concerned with what they are now tasked to do that they wrote to Roy Greenslade with their anxieties:

The growth of blogs and online communities seems to be contributing plenty in the way of opinion, of which there's already plenty and not much in the way of facts. This is creating a brand of journalism in which it doesn't really matter if you get things wrong.

Again, it's becoming all too clear at the Telegraph, whose online business plan seems to be centred on chasing hits through Google by rehashing and rewriting stories that people are already interested in. Facts are no longer the currency they used to be.

I don't have a particularly rosy view of the past and I am all too well aware that many of the things I've loved about papers, particularly the craft of putting them together, are becoming obsolete.

But I do worry that without the professionalism of the career journalist, society will be much less well equipped to hold the powerful to account and that serious and intelligent debate will be lost under a global shouting match between anonymous partisan supporters of particular opinions or interests.

As the journalist also relates in a paraphrase of C.P. Scott's quote, comment is cheap but facts are expensive. To pull out and slightly paraphrase another quote, this time one of Wilde's, we are in danger of knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing. As the media becomes ever more "rationalised" around London, those outside the bubble become ever more enraged by media which they find no longer represents them or even tells them anything that they are interested in. All politics may be local, but the news no longer is. There was no golden age, but what is certain is that now is as far away from that as it seems possible to get. As the Telegraph journalist states, this isn't based on parochialism, it's based on the fact that as news retreats every further into the obvious and cheap, while the comment becomes ever louder and brash, we risk completely losing the ability to hold the powerful to account, and fundamentally, democracy itself is and will be undermined. The really depressing thing is that things, especially with the "credit crunch" and the increasing flight of advertising to the web, are only likely to get worse.

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Friday, May 09, 2008 

How to defraud millions and get away with it part 2.

Credit where credit's due - all of the tabloids featured yesterday's news about ITV's fine on their front pages in some way or another, most likely because of the additional revelation that Ant and Dec took the people's choice award that was in fact rightfully Catherine Tate's. The Sun even managed to not mention the BBC once in their leader comment on the fine, something that must have taken real determination.

Most laughable and hypocritical reaction must go to the Daily Mail however, which screams "CAN YOU BELIEVE A THING YOU SEE ON TV?" Firstly, they must hope so, because the Mail's parent company owns 20% of ITN. Secondly, yet another incident involving the Mail and a blogger suggests that you can't in reality believe a thing that you read in the Mail:

On April 30th just after 3.30pm, I snatched up my phone and bit the bullet. I called up the journalist that had 'interviewed' me (I say this loosely) and expressed my upset at her not actually stating that she was interviewing me and my concern that I would be included in a feature about revenge, which is not what I, or this blog are about. I told her quite shrilly (I was stressed for fecks sake) that I did NOT want to open the paper and see something like "Blogger gets revenge on ex with her blog!" or some other pathetic headline.

I went onto the Daily Mails supposed section for women yesterday and actually nearly threw up in shock!

"Don't get mad, get E-VENGE!"

It's even worse in the paper where just in case the Daily Mail hadn't quite put the full boot into misrepresenting me and featuring me in article full of TWENTY SIX inaccuracies about me, they added a sub header of "It's the new mantra for women using the internet to take revenge on cheating men".

While obviously the best way to not get misrepresented by the Mail is to have nothing whatsoever to do with the stinking rag and her blog is the kind which I wouldn't even make my worst enemies read, getting twenty six separate things wrong about someone surely deserves some kind of award.

Doubtless tomorrow though the boot will be back on the other foot, due to the BBC Trust announcing that the corporation wrongly kept over £100,000 worth of money which should have gone to charity, even though the investigation by the Trust found that:

Lyons made it clear that senior staff within BBC Worldwide and the corporation did not know about the problem and nor did staff who worked on the affected programmes.

and the director general Mark Thompson said:

there was "no evidence" of any "impropriety or intention to defraud", adding that the £106,000 represented only 1.3% of the approximately £8m raised for charity through BBC telephone votes during the relevant period.
"All the money has been paid to the charities involved, with interest," Thompson added. "The oversight has been remedied. Clearly, this must never be allowed to happen again."

All very different to ITV's deliberate interference with competitions so that the most lively contestants would get on, or that only those in an already pre-decided area had a chance of winning. Don't expect that to come over in the reporting, however.

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Thursday, May 08, 2008 

How to defraud millions and get away with it.

Ofcom have fined ITV £5.675m for their scandalous abuse of premium-rate phonelines to some of their most popular programmes. Last year, when it was reported that ITV had in all conned those who had rang in out of £7.8 million, the same newspapers which had gone crazy at the BBC over their own fakery scandals, almost all of which were with the intention of keeping the programme going rather than deliberately misleading the public for fraudulent purposes almost entirely ignored the story. The Mirror was the only one to lead with it; the Mail instead ran with "BBC TO SCREEN MORE REPEATS", the schedule apparently being more of an outrage than ITV wilfully lying and stealing from its viewers.

It'll be instructive to note if the pattern is repeated tomorrow, especially seeing that the publishing of Ofcom's ruling has exposed another even more serious deception: the public vote at the 2005 comedy awards for the people's choice award being completely ignored, with the gong going to err, ITV's own Ant and Dec rather than the real winner Catherine Tate because Robbie Williams would apparently only present it if it went to them. The real issue here though is obvious: if the BBC so much as puts a foot wrong, it gets savaged by those diametrically opposed to almost everything it does, even if no one really lost out, the corporation apologies profusely, as it did over the ridiculous "Crowngate" affair which wasn't even its own fault and if those ultimately responsible lose their jobs, as Peter Fincham did. How different to ITV, where no one has been sacked and no one has resigned, and everyone simply just wants to move on, including apparently the newspapers so disturbed by the BBC's offences against the general public. As Ian Hislop once said, if this is justice, I'm a banana.

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Monday, October 22, 2007 

They took 7.8 million of YOUR MONEY and who do we blame? Err, no one.

Back a little later than I expected, so I'll get back into the swing of things properly tomorrow. First, if like me you missed FCC's dissections of tabloid garbage, his posts last week following the government's publishing of its own report into immigration (PDF) are essential reading.

Next, here's a scandal that it seems wasn't. The report by Deloitte into ITV's various phone-in scams discovers that at least £7.8 million was defrauded from viewers who had no chance of winning competitions or influencing public votes. Peter Hain described it as "daylight robbery". One of the most egregious examples of how money was taken under false pretenses was on Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway, where those who weren't within an hour of where the show was filmed or suitably excited/telegenic/charismatic never had any chance of winning, which also has Ant and Dec (or is it Dec and Ant?) as executive producers. Like Manuel, they "knew nothing". Despite Michael Grade's previous bowel movement which declared that there would be "zero tolerance" towards any examples of fakery or deception of viewers, no one has resigned, and it seems likely that no one will be sacked, as Grade has now decided there shouldn't be a "witch-hunt". ITV have said that the money will be paid back, while Ant and Dec have promised that the money from the phone-ins on the next series will be given to charity. Never mind that Richard and Judy's attempts at giving the money fraudulently made back were far from successful: the problem has been solved.


Or at least that's the message that the middle-market tabloids have given off. While the Daily Mirror was the only one of the tabloids to give it a full-splash on Friday (the Sun cleared the front page to go with the suicide bombing targeting Benzair Bhutto in its final edition, previously having the ITV scandal in a sidebar, then featured it again the following day, again in a sidebar), the Mail had more important things on its mind, like the ring that Dodi never gave to Diana prior to them both coming to a sticky end. (Oh, and a suitably fruity photograph of the tennis coach who sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl. She "seduced" her; you can imagine what the Mail would say if it was a man in the same circumstances.) The Express isn't worth even looking at: Madeleine, where there hasn't been any new developments for weeks, still occupied the front page every single day.




How very different to the Mail's coverage of the BBC's own recent travails. When the BBC published its own findings into examples of fakery, none of which involved any defrauding of the viewer, but did involve some slight deceptions, the Mail declared it the "SHAMING OF THE BBC". After Blue Peter admitted that Socks the cat should have been named Cookie, only for it to be changed after they wondered about the suitability of the name, the Mail splashed with it, screaming "NEW LIES FIASCO SHAMES THE BBC". On the very day that the ITV report was the published, the Mail was shattering windows with its shrieking of "BBC TO SCREEN MORE REPEATS", despite for years calling for the BBC to be radically slashed and cut down to size. The Mail had previously splashed on one example of ITV alleged "fakery", that involving the death of a man in a documentary which it turned out wasn't, but that was during the silly season.

Just how do we explain this apparent attitude to ignore ITV's far more serious offences, which may well amount to fraud and definitely show a contempt for their very viewers? It can't be put down to the fact that the BBC is funded by every single one of us; ITV was taking the money off the public too. Is it just snobbery on the behalf of the Mail, thinking that its readers' won't have "wasted" their cash on such frivolities? If it is, this is incredibly blind: those who buy the paper might not have done, but their children are a different matter. Far more likely is that the Mail fears the effects of what a purge might well mean to newspapers themselves if they were held up to the same degree of scrutiny.

You don't have to read this blog or FCC to know that the tabloids lie on a daily basis; polls have consistently shown that the public holds around the same amount of trust in tabloid journalists as they do with estate agents, lower even than that in politicians. How often do journalists get the sack for getting it wrong? Apart from Andrew Gilligan, who ironically was completely in the right, you'll be hard pressed to find any such examples in recent memory or even history. If ITV were to go by the letter of zero tolerance, as Grade said, it would set a precedent also in the City itself. So far, just one member of the board of Northern Rock has resigned. No one at ITV has, or seems to be likely to. At the BBC, the Blue Peter editor's gone, as have others involved in the various bits of fakery. It's a weird scale when you add it all up: you can play naive, economically unsound games with the money of thousands of people and not have to face the consequences when it all goes wrong; you can defraud the public and cynically take their cash when they have no chance of appearing with Ant and Dec; but if you change the name of a cat that kiddies have voted for the name of, then you may as well hand in your notice straight away. So is the logic not just of media and their decision on what constitutes an outrage, but that of the market itself.

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Wednesday, March 07, 2007 

Scum-watch: Ripping the readers off.

Today's Scum leads on the "TV rip-off" phone-lines, which are meant to have overcharged or cheated viewers through their votes on reality shows or on competitions on others.

Fair enough, it's a worthy subject to be investigating. Just one thing worth pointing out: 5 of the shows the Sun features on the front page are ITV programmes, the network that BSkyB (39% of the shares in which are owned by News Corp) has just bought 17.9% of the shares in. The Scum's TV editor is apoplectic:

THE one key factor that lumps all of Britain’s top TV firms together in this sorry scandal is TRUST.

Whether you are voting for your X Factor favourite or trying to win cash on Richard and Judy’s quiz, you TRUST that your money is not going straight down the drain.

Or indeed into TV companies’ coffers.

You TRUST that your phone call is making a difference.

Lifting the lid on our favourite shows has revealed a massive swizz.

It’s almost as bad as the US scandals of the 1950s, when top quiz shows were rigged.

Our trust has well and truly been breached.

The fact that ITV have come out with their hands up and suspended all their phoneline and interactive services is commendable.

But their in-depth probe is only going back TWO years. Is that far enough?


Seeing as the Sun doesn't seem to think so, shouldn't it be using the influence its owners now have over ITV to make sure that it does go back further? Or would the Sun rather that its new association with ITV goes without comment?

The Scum's leader is on much the same tact:

ITV’s quiz operator Eckoh is said to have carried on charging callers even when computer breakdowns prevented votes from registering.

The TV networks, meanwhile, are merrily giving their phone-in shows a clean bill of health.

We suggest they look more closely.


Then again, seeing as Wade and Kemp have now broken up and she no longer has to get the galley slaves to plug her husband's dire programmes on ITV, it may be that she's just past caring, at least until the Dirty Digger tells her to start the brown-nosing features.

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