This is a guest cross-post by Tim Davies – originally posted on the Political Innovation site here:

The communication revolution that we’ve undergone in recent years has two big impacts:

• It changes what’s possible. It makes creating networks between people across organisations easier; it opens new ways for communication between citizens and state; it gives everyone who wants it a platform for global communication; and it makes it possible to discover local online dialogue.
• It changes citizen expectations of government. When I can follow news from my neighbour’s blog on my phone, why can’t I get updates on local services on the mobile-web? When I can e-mail someone across the world and be collaborating on a document in minutes, why is it so hard to have a conversation with the council down the road? And when brands and mainstream media are doing interactivity and engagement – why are government departments struggling with it so much?

Right now, government is missing out on significant cost saving and service-enhancing benefits from new forms of communication and collaboration. But the answers are not simply about introducing new technology – they are to be found in intentional culture change: in creating the will and the opportunity for interactive government.

There are three things we need to focus on:

• Culture change. Although there are pockets of interactivity breaking out across the public sector, it’s often counter-cultural and ‘underground’. Most staff feel constrained to work with tools given to them by IT departments, and to focus on official lines more than open conversations. Creating a culture of interactivity needs leadership from the top, and values that everyone can sign up to.
• Removing the barriers. There are literally hundreds of small daily frustrations and barriers that can get in the way of interactive government. It might be the inability of upload a photo to an online forum (interactive government has human faces…), or consent and moderation policies that cover everyone’s backs but don’t allow real voices to be heard. Instead of ignoring these barriers, we need to overcome them – to rethink them within an interactive culture that can make dialogue and change a top priority.
• Solving tough problems. Public service is tough: it has to deal with political, democratic and social pressures that would make most social media start-ups struggle. We need to think hard about how interactive technology and interactive ways of working play out in the tough cases that the public sector deals in every day.

The Interactive Charter is a project to explore how exactly we go about making government into interactive government. It’s got three parts:

• Creating a pledge – The ‘Interactive Charter’ will be a clear statement that any organization (or senior manager within an organization) can sign up to say something along the lines of “I want my organization to get interactivity; and I’ll commit to overcoming the barriers to interactive ways of working”. With a promise and commitment from the top removing the barriers should get a lot easierOf course to just hand down a pledge wouldn’t be very interactive, so we’re drafting it on Mixed Ink.
• Naming the problems…and overcoming them – We’ve already made a start over on the Interactive Charter wiki, but we would love you to join in suggesting practical challenges, and practical solutions, to interactive and digital working in government.
• Putting it into practice – We want to pilot the approach: getting top-level support, and removing the barriers to interactivity from the ground up. Could your organization be part of that?

So, if you’ve got a vision for more interactive government, you can share it by redrafting the current pledge. And if you’ve faced or solved problems around interactive government, help shape the body of knowledge around each of the barriers and their solutions on the wiki. Of course, you could also just drop in comments over on the Political Innovation blog…

About Political Innovation

We’d be very interested to hear any ideas that you have for an essay of your own – we’ll need an email and we’ll want to discuss it with you before it goes on the site. All contributions will be archived on www.politicalinnovation.org – along with details of what we’re looking for from essayists and a bunch of FAQs and a guide to how we hope the whole thing will play out.

I hope you’ll get involved in this as a commenter, participant or maybe even as an essayist. Make sure you don’t miss anything by joining our Google Group, subscribing to the blog RSS feed, getting each post emailed to you and, of course, following us on Twitter andFacebook.

I’ve tried to boil down the killer argument in the whole ‘blogger v journalist’ debate, and it runs something like this:

Take the best article you’ve read in a newspaper recently. The one that was well-written and argued and the one that met a particular need that you have personally. You can be almost certain that a better article was written somewhere on the blogosphere. The only problem is finding it. As social bookmarking and ‘collaborative filtering’ improves, you will increasingly be able to access a personalised stream of these articles that will partly negate your need for a newspaper.

To illustrate the point, here’s a great post by James Cridland on how you can weave your own personalised radio station together. That’s the sort of innovation I’ve been awaiting for years (more in ‘innovation’ below). And then, to add a bit of flavour to the argument, here’s something on how journalists can build their own reader-communities. And while we’re on the question of the media, here’s some breaking news; Murdoch’s paywall idea isn’t suicidal after all. Murdoch isn’t stupid and isn’t afraid to think differently and take on big beasts. Who knew?

So. Great blogging: take the last couple of days as an example. I’m interested in how far politics is about the clash of social forces rather than the public discourse around the ishoos. Here, Peter Hetherington (admittedly, writing for the evil MSM) has a post on how local v central is a cross-cutting issue. Ingrid has a very perceptive question: Hang on, isn’t there a local election happening at the moment as well? And wasn’t teh Hinterwebs supposed to create a space that allowed the local to re-emerge? My only quibble with Ingrid is buried in the notion of the availability bias.Surely well-targeted local coverage is only seen by local people? It reminds me of the popular misconception among politicians about Facebook. It looks like a mirror – after all, you only see your friends – people who wish you well. So for Labour politicians, it looks like The Guardian and for Tories, it looks like The Telegraph. But, it’s actually a two-way mirror with all of those vindictive Express and Mail readers behind it – rubbing shoulders with … well, the list that Fremania has draw up (see below).

Hugh Flouch of the verygood Harringay Online will be partially addressing this question on these very pages shortly.

The other day, Chris Dillow highlighed David ‘Two-Brains’ Willetts really fascinating-looking book on an inter-generational conflict of interests. Chris’s concluding question ….

“Isn’t there an unavoidable tension between intergenerational justice and democratic politics?”

… is, I suspect the mask for a much much bigger question. Insert ‘long termism on climate change’, ‘global social justice’ or any one of a dozen other issues to see what I mean.

Oh – and in my highly-cultivated collaboratively-filtered stream of bloggery and journalism, I’ve noticed that there is an inverse relationship between the focus on Climate Change and the nearness of the election. What does that tell us (apart from something about the failings of my own filters)?

What else? Oh yes: The Power 2010 campaign. I have no words the express my irritation at the quality of demagogic simplification that underpins this whole campaign. Think Martin Bell in his white suit tied to Esther Rantzen and times it by ten. Thankfully Sadie – a returning exile from the blogosphere – has dug into the whole question. Warning: There’s wit as well as wisdom in that one.

Not content with a brief return, Sadie is also on Left Foot Forward here writing the post that this blog should have carried about the objectively anti-democratic nature of the superficial Tory appeal to invite us all into government. Freemania goes one step further and lists the specific individuals within Cameron’s proposed new government that he specifically objects to. Again, funny and perceptive stuff. It includes…

My boss

My boss’s boss

Kerry Katona

Piers Morgan

Cab drivers

Estate agents

Bankers

Disgraced former MPs

Nick Griffin

My weird neighbour

That kid I hated at school

Those bastards who still haven’t been convicted of Stephen Lawrence’s murder

People who find the ITV early evening news too complicated to follow

People who apply for all those incomprehensibly-titled public sector jobs in the Guardian but get turned down because they’re too petty-minded

The tenor in the Gocompare ads

… and many more.

What else? Oh yes – there’s a couple of good points about the impact that social media is having on public debate – one from 21cfix and one from Hopi (again) – that last link is on the diminishing power of journalists.

Changing the subject, here’s a great report my Martin of Currybet on what people really want from the word ‘innovation’:

“People don’t actually want innovation ….. everyone thinks they want a hover board, but actually they want the same thing they had before but actually works.”

Read it all though.

Back to the MSM (just to prove that I have lingering doubts about my own arguments here) Jenni Russell has an excellent article on Ed Balls’ disgraceful treatment of Sharon Shoesmith in Haringey. This raises a massive question for me: If Balls had refused to respond to the tabloid witchhunt, would Shoesmith still be in her job? Would Balls? What are the implications for the whole ‘politics should be about ishoos and not personalities’ question?

And there’s loads more that I’ve not included, but that I have read and enjoyed. I’ve spent the last couple of days traveling without the need to buy a newspaper. You can see what I read and shared on my phone on these two feeds.

Confused? You will be! Stay tuned to the next exciting episode from the bloggers. Better than the newspapers since people started using Google Reader properly….

Here’s a reminder of how it works if you’ve not tried it:

Anyone who follows the BBC News site, or who reads a newspaper, will be familiar with a good few interest groups and think tanks. Where their news releases aren’t the entire basis for the story, they are invited to comment at length, in the name of political “balance”, or on the basis of an often-undeserved authority.

The TPA: Corporate shills?

A great deal of our time as bloggers is thus spent exposing the same old partisan front groups – the left are interested in the TaxPayer’s Alliance, – corporate shills, and organisations that exist purely and simply for the promotion of a particular set of views. Right-wing bloggers hunted down a significant scalp last year, taking out the earlier incarnation of Labour List – a site that appeared to simply be a political attack dog, and one that wasn’t embedded in the better instincts of the blogsophere.

While individuals can always change their mind on an issue, interest groups cannot, and will not. Moreover, their neatly packaged set of proposals can be tempting for governments running short of ideas, and short of friends.

Whether the groups are ostensibly on the left or the right, their influence can only be bad for politics. In the name of “balance”, the essential politics within a debate – the key issues and arguments – is drained away, or rechannelled to the financial benefit of one organisation.

Why should we – as bloggers – put up with seeing the same discredited arguments trotted-out again and again, and which we have argued over and over again, when we have – at our disposal – a vast resource of evidence, argument, and opinion to call upon?

What I propose is a collective – and non-partisan – organisation of political bloggers, which will challenge the interest groups in the name of honest and open politics, and provide newspapers and online news sites with a central resource that allows them to dispense with the services of self-interested think tanks and self-styled experts.

These bloggers would come together whenever required, putting aside their partisan interests, to tap the blogosphere’s collected wisdom – and, just as importantly, its memory – to fisk, rebut, and generally trump groups that are used to thinking in relative isolation. Bloggers will have many advantages, not least access to background information about the groups, via SourceWatch et al.

Of course I don’t propose that bloggers attempt to produce consensus. Not only is this implausible, but it would be dishonest, and would drop us into the same trap as the BBC and others. While artificial disputes help no one, genuine disagreements must come out. The public must have access to the full range of political opinion – no political cause benefits in the long run from anything different.

All in all, by shaking up lazy journalism, exposing lazy thinking, and by undercutting the “go-to” groups and “experts”, the reputation of the political blogosphere – as simply the best resource for distributed thought and opinion we have – must surely increase.

Please join the Positive Political Blogging campaign on Facebook, and help spread the word!

If you get a moment, pop over to OpenlyLocal and have a look around, will you?

It’s a very good start – showing how all of the investment in data standards is beginning to find it’s own tipping point.

It is beginning to be possible for more of us to get really useful comparative data on local government. For the non-techies among you, this means that – when information is added to a local authority website, the tool that assembles the site adds a bit of code to it that describes what the website is telling you. For example, if you update a table on your website when a new councillor replaces an old one, it is done in such a way as to allow another website to access yours, ask for a list of councillors, and then import that list into their own site.

It can then also pull across information about that councillor’s role in committees, meetings that they are due to attend, contact details, etc.

These data standards enable a quiet quick exchange of information that has a huge amount of potential to increase efficiency and allow us to crunch information and numbers to tell us things that we didn’t know. At the crudest level, we can find out who the councillors are in lots of different councils by looking at one site, but have a look yourself to see what other insights you can gain.

OpenlyLocal is a neat example of what is possible now that data standards are beginning to be applied more consistently.

If you’re not following this one (do keep up!) the latest buzz among people with funny-shaped heads is Augmented Reality. This is where you use a technology application to tell you more about the locality you are in than your eyes can work out. There are, of course, opportunities for local authorities to ensure that more people know more things about their localities.

Charlie Brooker has an entertaining piece on it here today:

“By 2013, it’ll be just another customisable application you can download to your iBlinkers for 49p, alongside one that turns your friends into supermodels and your enemies into dormice.”

More on this – especially what it means for adding data about the people you meet –  later perhaps?

A good blog doesn't have to put up with too much 'graffiti' (click for pic credit)

Sandwell Councillor, Bob Piper, has a good post here about his recent trip to Bruges, raising questions about graffiti. It seems there may be a case for a high level of short-term investment to make the problem go away?

“One aspect of the City that distinguished it from so many places I have visited in the last few years, in this country and abroad, was the total absence of graffiti. Apparently the City Council has a policy that they remove graffiti free of charge, usually within one hour of it being reported. A few years ago they used to charge private dwellings and people thought, what the heck, pay to get it removed now, and tomorrow it could be back. Since it became a charge-free service, and instantly removed, the spray painters got fed up first and decided they were wasting their time and effort on their ‘art’ which would never be seen. Hence Bruges is free of the scruffy mess which blitzes so many cities. I think I’ll suggest Sandwell gives it a try. Does anyone know if this instant removal service has been tried anywhere here, and to what effect?”

I’m currently working on a project (all will be revealed soon – I promise) that will help people be able to adopt a similar approach to their comments boxes. Anyone who has written for a high-volume blog (and the Telegraph or Guardian blogs are a great case-in-point) will be familiar with the way that trolls lurk in the comment threads waiting to make their same repetitive ad hominem spEak You’re bRanes points. People with something worth saying often avoid the blogosphere because of this – quite rationally in my view.

My view on dealing with trolls is similar to the City of Bruges view on dealing with graffiti. Delete early and often – a bit of up-front investment makes life easier in the long run. The counterargument that this is ‘censorship’ is nonsense. Blogs have trackbacks. If you want to spEak You’re bRaines you can do so on your own site in minutes using Blogger or WordPress.com among many others.

In the context of this, I think that Kerry McCarthy MP has made the first step along a road that I think that a lot of MPs should follow. There is a fairly nasty shrill faction of bloggers who seek to harass her personally online – constantly demanding apologies and feigning outrage.

“Anyway, Iain Dale got upset, as he often does, and bandied around words like ‘petty’ and ‘pathetic’, at which point I blocked him. For non-Twitter people that means he can’t see my tweets and can’t send tweets to me. In other words, in the words of his idol, Cliff Richard, “we don’t talk anymore”. (And no, that’s not a feeble attempt to smear; he loves Cliff, which is his prerogative, if a little weird.)

Some might think this rather an overreaction. Cue all the usual stuff about ‘MPs are supposed to be thick-skinned’ and ‘you’re obviously not willing to engage’ or ‘you only want to talk to people who agree with you’, which is patent nonsense, if you look at the number of people I do follow on Twitter and the amount of to-ing and fro-ing I do in conversation with them.

So why did I block him? Partly it’s just because he caught me at the wrong time. But also because it seems clear to me that the Tory strategy on Twitter is to try to provoke me into spats, so that I end up spending all night arguing with them rather than engaging with ‘real’ people. This has the dual purpose of drawing attention to themselves (and most of them are rampant self-publicists), and of making me look like I’m someone who spends all her spare time in undignified online squabbling. It looks especially bad if people come to the argument late, and wonder what on earth is going on.

I therefore have two choices – try to ignore them, which means they’re still there as an irritant, or block them so that I can use Twitter for enjoyment and engagement, which is how it should be used. In the case of Iain Dale (and Shane Greer and Tory Bear before him) I’ve decided to block because, frankly, I’m fed up with them. That’s allowed, isn’t it?”

Anyway, this project that I’m not ready to tell you about yet: It will help MPs who previously didn’t want to blog to do so without having to constantly run this trollish gauntlet. Details to follow!

Local democracy: Not being pitched very hard on council websites

It seems that The Electoral Commission have decided that it is a basic human right for us to have ballot papers that make sense to us. Usability – not just regulatory box-ticking is, it seems the key here (I posted on ballot design here a while ago)

Measuring usability may also be the key to ensuring that a big opportunity on the horizon is taken seriously.

As I mentioned the other day, the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill (pdf) (text version) is likely to get royal assent in the not-too-distant. I covered the question of petitions the other day (and I’ll come back to this element briefly in a moment), but there is a bigger – even more interesting question about how far local authorities may thwart this obligation by a resort to box-ticking.

In summary, councils have to promote an understanding of…

• the functions of the authority and other local authority bodies that are connected to it
• the democratic arrangements that govern it
• how members of the public can take part in those democratic arrangements and what is involved in taking part
• how to become a councillor
• what members of the principal local authority do
• what support is available for councillors
• the functions of authorities which are connected with the principal local

It’s something of an indicator of the level of self-confidence within local government that such a role should be mandated by central government, and I suspect that – when we look back on how these obligations have been implemented in a few years time, we may see just how enthusiastically local authorities actually embrace this opportunity.

As every civil servant knows, you can either give your political masters what they want, or what they say they want. You can understand their aims and seek to meet them, or you can tick the boxes that they put in front of you.

A glance at many local authority websites will give you some idea of this. Here’s a way of looking at it:

Give some schoolkids a look at their local council website. Then ask them to do a comprehension on it – and see how enthusiastic they are about getting involved in local democracy at any level.

OK. This is a big ask. But I’m certain that some council websites would get much better results than others – so to check this hunch, I had a look at a few:

Here’s the first three I looked at – purely randomly (I picked the local council of the last three people I spoke to on the phone – choose your own method and pick three of your own?)

Colchester Council: ‘There’s a council meetings and decisions’ occupying one of the less prominent parts of the website. If you click on it you’re offered a range of unstructured unprioritised pages in alphabetical order. If you know what you’re looking for, you may click on the Your Council link, but even then, there’s no attempt to offer any structure, any narrative or to persuade visitors that there is a worthwhile democratic process in place. Information on Councillors is poorly laid out and hard to navigate. If there is a postcode search that allows you to find out who your councillor is if you don’t know the name of your ward, I can’t find it. If you click on the ‘how to become a local councillor’ page, the result can best be described at regulation-speak. 3/10

Broxtowe Council: If anything, it’s a good deal worse. None of the language matched what I would expect to look for if I was trying to find out about my council decision-making processes. The front page has a link to ‘Cabinet and Committees’ but you have to dig around in the ‘About Us’ section to find any reference to councillors. The information provided is sparse and grudging (I suppose that the small amount of info is as good as Colchester’s site which offers more info, but renders it almost useless by it’s structurelessness) 2/10

Camden Council: Much better. There’s a ‘Council and Democracy’ link in the main menu and it takes you through to a not-bad set of information that has plainly been written for purpose, rather than patched together in a document-management-system-to-content-management-system way (information techies will know what I mean here, and what shortcoming I’m alluding to. Once you’re in, there’s a big webcasting link that shows you how to view council meetings and reasonably well-written content on how decisions are made. It could offer more of a sales-pitch, but the intent is there. You are left with the definite impression that Camden wants to promote it’s democratic practices and that the forthcoming bill may even get them to raise their game further. 8/10

These are, admittedly, snap audits. But in many cases, perhaps there is a case for the provision of this content – the information – it’s structure, layout and language – to be taken out of the hands of permanent officials at local authorities. I don’t want to re-open the question of whether it is in the interests of council officers to do anything that increases the prestige of elected members, but…. maybe it could be done better by schoolkids who have looked at Camden’s site than the people who were paid to write content for Broxtowe?

Finally, on the question of petitions: The take-up of these e-petitions (and the measurements of how many people arrived on the ‘petitions’ page and how many completed the process), will provide us with metrics. Comparative metrics. We will be able to see which councils have used all of the resources at their disposal to drive up interest in local democracy. I wonder if anyone will pull this information together?

Tell councillors what RSS means, willya?

Apologies for the light posting here lately – even bloggers go on holiday, y’know?

I’ve not collected my thoughts for any original posts yet, though the ‘Duty to Promote Democracy’ and the obligation to offer petitions will be on the statute book shortly providing plenty of new material in the coming weeks.

For now, Dave Briggs has an interesting guest post up – ‘Ten Top Internet Tips for Councillors‘ – written by Mark Pack.

I’d argue that there is a real cultural problem around the way that local authorities manage their relationship with councillors. Councils could offer leadership to their councillors – saying that they believe that they have a duty to encourage councillors to be more effective people. In my experience, this approach is the exception rather than the norm, with too much handwringing about providing ‘political’ support to councillors.

In the absence of such support, if I were offering a short course to councillors, I’d start with those lovely Commoncraft videos. As Mark Pack says in that post on Dave’s blog, feed readers are very useful productivity tools.

But my hottest tip to councillors would be to challenge the attitude that local authorities adopt towards councillor development. One argument that I found to be briefly successful ran like this:

q: But surely, if we use council resources to help councillors become more effective communicators using the internet, we’d be giving the incumbent an advantage, damaging democracy, and breaking all sorts of local government codes of conduct?

a: Do you really think that you are providing every one of your councillors an advantage by giving them greater exposure to the voters? Would greater exposure to voters result in more councillors retaining their seats at election time? Or less?

I’d argue that this invisibility of individual councillors actually contributes to the way that political parties dominate local politics at the expense of strong individual representatives.

Promoting a use of social media at a local authority-wide level could be a good laugh – something that councillors would enjoy. I wonder if Commoncraft could come up with a video that would show councils how to do that?

I’ve been out and about again this week and speaking to Council’s about their social web strategies. Its interesting (to me at least!) to note a couple of the ideas which seem to have the greatest resonance as it would be good to know if these are themes which are emerging anywhere else:

• Government should not be building social networking platforms when this is already done so successfully – no-one wants to be friends with a council and trying to recreate FaceBook is an expensive waste of time as councils try to act corporately in a space which is designed for individuals
• Council years are slower than internet years – which are faster than normal time. To accommodate these differential you need to build a permanent online civic space which will outlast the next big fad
• You need to find ways to connect to people in the wider social web and invite them to the civic space – you can’t expect them to move their conversations there and you can’t expect them to turn up spontaneously
• You need to focus around the citizen is the same way as transactional service are focused around the customer in the one stop shop

Anyway – this is starting to sound like a manifesto but would like to know what you think. Am I stating the obvious or barking up the wrong tree?

PS  Once again I tried to think of a picture to go with this – but I just can’t – sorry to those of you that like something to liven things up – next time I can always add one of the dog if I get stuck I promise!

Does the sceptical journalist solve the problems that we thought they did?

As local newspapers retreat from providing anything like a good quality of news coverage, local authorities are wondering what their response should be.

On the one hand, there’s the model that Birmingham City Council have taken – providing a much more user-friendly information gateway that is designed to provide resources to citizen-journalists and bloggers.

Other options include beefing up the council’s information department with a view to turning the fairly skimpy info circulars into fully-fledged newspapers or being more in tune with hyperlocal sites of the kind that Will Perrin is promoting at the moment.

It’s a question that raises a number of important philosophical questions about the role of the state and the bureaucracy in providing information about itself. Stripping bureaucracies of the monopoly position that they have in describing their own services is a potentially game-changing idea that could, in some ways, redefine the state as we know it.

But what about the idea of ‘public service journalism’? The Press Association have a slightly opportunistic proposal to position themselves as the hub for ‘public service journalism’ – as far as I can see, the BBC do it with an efficiency that other media players can only dream of.

But all of these changes help to foreground one of the real problems that the BBC has faced for some time. And not only the BBC, but the very concept of ‘objective reporting’ itself.

In the past, journalists have provided a nice work-around for the problem of bureaucratic neutrality. The deal runs something like this:

• Local politicians are not expected to be neutral
• … but the officers are
• … and it’s the officers job to disseminate information about the local authority in a way that doesn’t compromise the next election (incumbents shouldn’t benefit from ‘spin on the rates’)
• Practically, this is a problem because a positive message about a council service implies an endorsement of the ruling group
• … but thankfully, journalists apply their scepticism and neutralise any spin that is being applied by the council press officer

Without journalists, the objectivity has gone. But was it ever there in the first place? And if so, was it of any real value?

In Northern Ireland, Slugger O’Toole deployed its bloggers far and wide to cover the Orangefest celebrations. The reporting was truly eye-opening, and it brought observations that haven’t reached the dress-rehearsed coverage of this highly contentious period in the Northern Ireland calender.  Mick was particularly scathing about the BBC’s attachment to ‘neutrality’

“…the BBC at least, was possessed of a bizarrely split personality: juddering between tourist board schmalz and an utter distaste for the whole thing. If I were to venture a guess I would say it was less a case of being conflicted than the modern BBC utterly loathing the whole thing within their very hearts and souls. I’ve nothing against Walter Love, but he retired from the BBC years ago as a working journalist. Mark Carruthers’ series of tough questions on Evening Extra last night were all sharp and relevant, and Drew Nelson, one of the ablest men to hold his post of Grand Secretary in modern times, was able to field them with some alacrity.

But you are left with the feeling that at the very least there is a huge emotional vacuum within the BBC. It gave the impression that no one of any ability or talent inside the modern BBC wants to do the job of publicly being nice to the Orange Order. To return to JP’s acute analysis, the Orange Order exists almost entirely as a negative valence in BBCNI’s inner emotional life.

Because the BBC holds a public service broadcasting remit, it has to cover things that perhaps its producers and journalists feel at best ambivalent about, and worst find inimical. It is, to follow Heath, incongruous for the BBC to cover an Orange parade which is not responsible for all the trouble it attracts. And if it does not attract trouble, like the parade in Dromore where demonstrators took their pints in three nationalist owned pubs bedecked with Tyrone flags, it is not news.”

Slugger’s correspondents offered a powerful counterweight to the neutrality of the BBC by offering, instead, pluralism (oddly, the way that BBC’s Newsnight has handled it’s strong commentary role is to employ regular correspondents from accross the spectrum over the years, though the pretense of neutrality is imposed upon semi-Trotskyists like Paul Mason or closet Tories such as Evan Davis).

I’ve just seen this post - ‘Transparency is the new objectivity’ (via my American friend Nathalie on Facebook):

“…transparency subsumes objectivity. Anyone who claims objectivity should be willing to back that assertion up by letting us look at sources, disagreements, and the personal assumptions and values supposedly bracketed out of the report.

Objectivity without transparency increasingly will look like arrogance. And then foolishness. Why should we trust what one person — with the best of intentions — insists is true when we instead could have a web of evidence, ideas, and argument?

In short: Objectivity is a trust mechanism you rely on when your medium can’t do links. Now our medium can.”

Is the objective journalist really as useful as we assumed in the past? And in an age when a cynical media is seen as being corrosive towards democratic processes, have we given them a tribune role that they’ve never been cut out for in the first place?

Is ‘transparency through pluralistic coverage’ the better option?