The news that a blogger who filmed a meeting of a local council in Carmarthenshire was arrested for “breaching the peace” raises an interesting question that could have a slightly unfashionable answer.

Flip-cams: The sword of transperency or an engine for selective reporting?

My friend, David Allen Green, writing in the New Statesman has a supplied a detailed trawl of the legal evidence along with some good journalistic legwork to conclude that…

“…Carmarthenshire Council and Dyfed Powys Police have simply acted in an altogether hapless, illiberal, and alarming manner. A person, surely, should not be arrested and detained just for filming a public council meeting, and a council should not be able to prevent someone from doing so in this manner. In my opinion, all the councillors, officials, and police officers involved in this sad sequence of events really should be ashamed of themselves.”

I’m in two minds over whether the flip-cam will improve the quality of local democracy, and I think this highlights some of the tension between liberalism and the good practice of liberal democracy.

On the one hand, all of David’s arguments stand – and then some. Surely a good democracy should remove any barriers that stop people from viewing democratic proceedings? Transparency will result in less corruption, better decisions, a greater sense of participation, and so on.

On the other hand, there are a few snags. Firstly, if individuals are doing this selectively – on issues that they care about, we will naturally expect to see a bias towards issues that small groups of individuals care about. These may be (but not always will be) subjects that effect people who have more time/resources on their hands. If this becomes the main way that Council meetings are covered, it can expose councils to more pressure group politics.

This may be at the expense of the decisions that many of us – people with mild preferences and a need to see policy serve the interests of the whole community – would expect to see from local authorities. I know I trot it out a lot, but the example of a more direct democracy provided by California should be a shocking example to us all.

So, is a balanced view of proceedings going to be distributed by citizen journalists? Or will it inevitably result in selective reporting?

Blogger arrested for filming council meeting http://t.co/4CpUfyN MP and public barred http://t.co/wwwR6Gs who do these ppl think they are?

June 12, 2011 12:16 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@bengoldacre

ben goldacre

Another question: Does this drive up the quality of deliberation (i.e. do Councillors raise their game?) or does it result in either a more guarded approach or, conversely, a more soapboxy style?

We expect councillors to behave in a disinterested way and there must be some parallel here with the jury room: Would juries make better decisions if they were selectively recorded?

Then there’s the question of professional journalism. I know this is a moot point at the moment, given the headlong retreat from half-decent reporting among local newspapers. But we expect pro-journos to cover issues in an even-handed way, catering to mild preferences of a broad audience rather than the narrow views of a deeply interested one.

Will this kind of guerilla coverage drive this kind of reporting out? I posted here a couple of years ago about the negative impact that opening Parliamentary proceedings out had – the conclusion was that newspapers stopped covering it because anyone who was really interested could get the real thing on the radio or (later) TV. Will this apply to local authorities, or are we in a different ballgame with local politics?

In my experience, the answer may be that councils should routinely film all proceedings and index them professionally. This will reduce the scope for selective coverage and allow visitors who follow the links the option to hear all of the points (and the context provided by professional local government officers) to the proceedings. It will also allow people to drop randomly into a council meeting and see a broad range of issues being discussed responsibly (or not).

A firm in Brighton called Public i (declared interest: I’m personally friendly with a few of the team there) have been offering a web-casting service aimed at local authorities for some years – it indexes each speaker which saves you ploughing through whole meetings if you’re only there for a particular reason [random example here].

Surely councils need to pro-actively promote a public awareness of the whole of their work? Given the low interest in local politics, it will make it easier then for local journalists to report procedings and may result in more broad coverage. Unless they do this, we can expect selective reporting to dominate agendas more and more.

For some reason, I’ve managed to miss the very-good Bad Conscience blog up until now. It’s worth a visit, if only to read this post on Max Weber’s notion of plebiscitary Caesars. They are, it seems, the kind of political leaders that we yearn for:

Max Weber

“Weber believed that mass democracy held out the promise of ensuring new kinds leaders emerged; not privileged notables or landed gentry, but men with charisma who could carry the trust of the masses and be propelled forward to exercise genuine leadership in the face of state and party bureaucratic nihilism.”

And, while I know that avoiding the global love-in with Obama is both the hip thing to do, and therefore the right thing, I can’t help thinking that he fits this template more than anyone. Not only was Obama charismatic enough to overcome enormous odds over the last few years, he also practically reinvented the notion of the party machine.

He redefined it – attracting large numbers if low-ticket donations rather than the narrow patronage that political parties have come to rely upon.

There’s another thing to pick up here as well. Google the term ‘post-bureaucratic age’ and you will find that it’s something of a common feature in the speeches of senior modernising Conservatives in recent years. Spookily, it has all of the convenient political utility that the notion of ‘The Third Way’ had back in the 1990s.

I suspect that some Conservatives would argue that Obamas ability to almost reinvent a political party in an organic way made him the first post-bureaucratic President? If so, how come Weber  found an Obama-shaped space in his understanding of bureaucratic government?

If you’re able to brace yourself for a long read, this is really worth a look. It picks up a lot of threads found in Bobbio’s Liberalism and Democracy though it is written from the libertarian end of the argument. It is, however, deeply critical of the way that libertarians engage with their opponents and it focusses a great deal upon the shortcomings of libertarian arguments.

“…if libertarian-style politics seems especially unnatractive to members of formerly oppressed and disenfranchised groups, maybe that’s because it is reasonable to suspect that a politics that focuses relentlessly on the inviolability of property rights in a system that once treated people as property, and for centuries denied much of the population the chance to accumulate any property, is a politics meant to protect those who reap the gains of a still-rigged and unjust system.”

And if you’re not in the mood for reading a good long post, just skip down to the comments – comment number five from ‘anonymous coward.’

(Via Stumbling & Mumbling)