It may have happened fifteen years later than it needed to, but at the annual MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, BBC Director General Mark Thompson – and, presumably, his colleagues in the corporation have finally woken up to the real threat that the corporation faces: the downward pressure that is being placed upon the producers of TV content.

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That BSkyB have been allowed a free pass to make a fortune without giving anything back apart from cash for their allocation of spectrum (like so many other corporations, they’ve been allowed to get away with being socially useless) – and in doing so, they’ve created in impossible ecology for content-producing broadcasters to compete in. It’s a race to the bottom. Understand this and you’re halfway there to understanding how Sky’s marketing budget is bigger than ITV’s production funds.

Thompson is onto a winning argument here: The argument that we need to continue to produce locally-oriented content in the UK – and that there’s an overwhelming democratic case for doing so.

It’s been an issue that was addressed at EU level in the mid-1990s, and British regulators and media commentators appeared to spend the intervening decade-and-a-half either pretending that the regulations didn’t exist or that they weren’t needed (with honourable exceptions such as the former MEP Carole Tongue)*.

The concern here is, primarily, a democratic one. In his ‘Undeclared War’, David Puttnam quoted Francois Mitterrand expressing this argument succinctly:

“What is at stake is the cultural identity of all our nations…. it is the freedom to create and choose our own images. A society which abandons the means of depicting itself would soon be an enslaved society.”

At the time, multi-channel TV was an unknown quantity, there were legitimate worries that new broadcasters (a euphemism, usually, for BSkyB) were claiming that regulation would be impossible in a multi-channel broadcasting environment – and that, consequently, it should no longer be attempted. Sky particularly had in mind the rules that say that 51% of broadcast content should originate within the EU**.

Words like ‘dumping’ were wheeled out all the time. And, of course, this debate provided the perfect cockpit in which to rehearse the opposition between Froggy cultural fragility and their apparent nemesis, our crass Anglo-Saxon values. Not only did it encompass cultural interventionism (something that the French have never pretended to undervalue) – it also touched on the deregulatory agenda.

It was certainly hard to make the case for regulation in British circles at the time. Yet, though this debate was often portrayed in this way (with the UK, as ever, held up as a Yankee Trojan horse), there was a minor problem with this:

The UK is, in fact, not only the most heavily regulated broadcasting market in the world, but it also shows signs of benefiting enormously from this state of affairs.

In terms of home-grown content on TV, we produce more for our own marketplace than anywhere else in the world apart from the US. At the same time, we don’t have the clumsy regulations that used to apply to French radio and that still apply to French Cinema (I say clumsy, but their cinema regulations seem to have the desired effect). In short, we have out-froggied the Frogs without even having to make ourselves look like them.

As long as viewers in the UK can have a wide choice of new original content (particularly drama) from a diverse range of sources, we can be reasonably confident that our own stories are getting an airing. But I’m not sure how far either the ‘public service broadcasting’ intervention that we have in the UK or the other EU models can be applied in the future.

** Footnote: I should declare an interest here – I was once Carole’s researcher – this is a subject that I know inside out – and it’s a huge relief to find the chattering classes finally waking up to it. Carole assembed a huge weight of evidence in support of this argument – evidence that was largely ignored at the time.

**This is a crude rendition of the rules, but I think you get the picture.

Two stories – both from Roy Greenslade in recent days – that give cause to ponder the responsibility that the media bear.

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The first one is the old chestnut about the big lie splashed over the early pages followed by the retraction hidden under the Darts results.

Given the fuss earlier this year around academics in East Anglia and the way they were making their data available, it’s quite astonishing that the deliberately misleading way that journalists handle the same issue isn’t a bigger issue.

The second one – surely one that merits a great deal more coverage than it got – covers the moves by Icelandic authorities to acknowledge the upsides of strong guarantees and support for press freedom. These guarantees are being offered as a direct response to the perceived failure of journalists to challenge the political consensus prior to that nation’s bankruptcy last year.

George Monbiot is here writing about the Tea Party movement in the US. He argues that the European left could learn a thing or two from the US right.

It’s an odd article. It contains this sentence….

“They have been promoted by Fox News – owned by that champion of the underdog Rupert Murdoch – and lavishly funded by other billionaires.”

… yet if you were to delete that sentence and then read the rest of the article, there’s no evidence that he understands that the Tea Party movement have been…

“…promoted by Fox News – owned by that champion of the underdog Rupert Murdoch – and lavishly funded by other billionaires.”

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:

… or ‘we get the politicians we deserve, pt1′:

Via Mick, this is worth a look over at the Daily Mail for people who recycle The Independent.

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“Academics …. found that “not giving straight answers to questions” scored an average of 8.45 when people were asked how much of a problem it was on a scale of zero to 10. “Making promises they know they can’t keep” scored 8.13, the same rating as “misusing official expenses and allowances”, while “accepting bribes” scored 6.43.”

I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry about this. It ignores the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance in a way that no-one with an ounce of sense should do.

For me, perhaps the dominant theme for this election – as with many previous elections – will be the Prisoner’s Dilemma – or the BF, as outlined in this slightly homophobic post.

As Colonel Nathan R. Jessep puts it here, “the truth? You can’t handle the truth!”

Both of the UK’s main parties knew that the expenses scandal damaged politics and lost them votes. Both stoked it by shopping each other. A duck-house? I’ll see that and raise you a porno channel!

Both of the two main parties are privately committed to a nasty combination of tax rises and spending cuts shortly after polling day. Both refuse to detail where the cuts and rises will land.

In both cases, this is the Prisoner’s Dilemma at work. On the tax-and-cuts question, the voters will punish honesty without an ounce of mercy. In both cases, the media is the ultimate beneficiary. All but the most idiotic of journalists fully understand this dynamic. It is what puts bread on their tables.

Yet like a lawyer that fails to advise a client of the quick painless way to settle a case, the media refuse to frame the debate in this  way.

And this is where my inner Marxist comes peeping out. Politics is not about niceness, presentation or honesty. It’s about the clash of material interests. Politicians, commentators, pressure-groups, lobbyists, newspaper proprietors and political funders are all avatars in that conflict.

When we compare the performance of those players, in recent years, the people that we elect have been very significantly weakened.

Here’s Peter Levine on the way that the healthcare debate has been reported by the press in the US:

“…the news media spent a year feeding American citizens a steady diet of stories about Congressional procedure, the possible impact of health-care reform on elections, and quotes that falsely described the bill or denounced its critics. Americans never showed any desire to watch Congress “scratch and claw.” They would have appreciated some information about what various legislative bills would do.

Now that the bill has passed, reporters finally feel an obligation to explain it. Bernard’s story lists the major provisions, although The Times also feels obliged to run a front-page “news analysis” of Obama’s alleged strategy (he cast a “bet that the Republicans … overplayed their hand”), a separate article about political fights to come, and a panoply of one-liners: “Freedom dies a little bit today …” “It is almost like the Salem Witch trials …” The ratio of substance to horse-race reporting remains low, but I predict that weekly news magazines and metropolitan dailies will begin to run helpful explanatory pieces.”

I find it impossible to believe that politics could be treated in the same way here in the UK.

This blog, titled as it is as Local Democracy but spending a fair portion of it’s commentary on social media technology, rests on the premise that local democracy will be profoundly affected by tech-driven changes in the way that the media works, and the way that people can associate with each other.

Google Buzz: A great deal more important than anyone seems to be saying?

It will change the very character of representation and the way we make big decisions.

You either buy that premise or you don’t. If you do, I’d be interested to know what you think that the media is going to look like in a few years time.

Writing elsewhere, I’ve made a contention that I’ve not been contradicted on (yet). Please do contradict me if you want – I think that it’s a fairly important suggestion to absorb if you can’t. It’s actually two contentions – one following the other. Here goes:

1. Newspapers often have really good articles by knowledgeable writers who are writing for their audience and not themselves. They have to write to a readable length, check their facts, make issues understandable and keep up their reputation for fair dealing. As long as you monitor a few relevant titles, you can keep yourself informed and challenged on most of the issues you need to know about in order to be a good citizen who votes and gets involved in public life.

Some of you are more sceptical than others about how good newspaper journalism is, but I suspect most people would agree with that – up to a point?

Now here’s my second assertion:

2. Though newspapers cover big issues reasonably well, on almost every subject that they cover (and plenty that they don’t) there is – somewhere – likely to be a better article written by a blogger than anything you can find in a newspaper. The problem is simply how you find it.

I really don’t think either of those lines of thought are problematic. But if they aren’t, the implications are vast, aren’t they?

Newspapers exist for a number of reasons. They keep us entertained, make us laugh, satisfy our appetite for gossip, and so on. But the broadsheets (and even the tabloids and local press, up to a point) also have a very specific role – that of the fourth estate – the one that satisfies Thomas Jefferson’s slightly overstated emphasis:

“If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter.”

The most exciting innovations that the internet has brought has been collaborative filtering. In the mid 1990s, there was (for me anyway) a fabulously exciting project called Firefly. It was clunky and small-scale in a way that Facebook, Twitter and Del.icio.us aren’t, but it was basically a hugely influential idea that has set the template that all social networking sites have worked towards. The holy grail of an application that knows what you want and will go and get the best version of it for you to meet your specific personalised needs.

The thing that we have all learned since is that the combination of usability, seducability and the sheer numbers and velocity that the social web creates has made a lot of things possible. Google Buzz – unlocking a lot of the potential that Google Reader brings us – has the potential to supplant that fourth estate broadsheet role.

The implications of this are huge as far as I can see. One of them is that it may compound the problems created by Google’s monopoly status.

I’m surprised that we’re not all talking about it a good deal more than we are.

One of the advances that the long tail of the blogosphere has brought us is that some social work gets reported properly. Not the way that newspapers often report them, in their need for sensationalism. And, of course, they do it all for nothing.

One of the bloggers that does more to educate people about the realities of public service needs a new MacBook. Surely there's a grant somewhere?

Take Random Acts of Reality, for instance. The latest post is worth a look, but look around the site if you can? Some of them are quite literally eye-watering.

Try this post from a while ago for size. Brings a lump to the throat doesn’t it?

Now, it seems, Tom’s blogging has been curtailed because his laptop has packed in. I don’t know if any of this blog’s readers have access to charitable funds that are designed to promote better policymaking and democratic understanding through use of teh Internetz, but if you do, you could to worse than direct a few hundred quid towards Tom to pay for that MacBook that he’s coveting in his most recent post?

If you are an elected representative of any kind, you really must book mark this site or stick it into your RSS reader.

Here’s an interview with the blog’s author, Tom Reynolds.

Oh, and a declaration of my interest here: I’ve never met Tom, or spoken to him. I’ve just read his blog and if I had a grand to spare, I’d think of chipping into his laptop fund. But I don’t at the moment….

That’s what the Manchester Evening News are proposing to do. They’re using CoverItLive. Here’s their coverage of Trafford Council meeting on the 2nd December.

Now I’ve used CoverItLive a few times and its settings (if I recall correctly) can and usually do pick up anyone’s tweets. How long before Councillors cop on to this? And local pressure groups? And will someone come up with some stupid rule that says that councillors shouldn’t be using council-supplied phones to sent tweets? And will some tedious pressure group say that councillors aren’t doing their job properly because they’re too busy fannying around with Twitter?

Worth watching, I think?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: One Swiss national who probably would have been a bit annoyed by the Minaret ban.

The recent outcome of a Swiss referendum in which a majority have voted in favour of a minaret ban has helped to highlight a few important issue around the question of direct democracy.

Dan Hannan says that – while direct democracy is a great idea, this particular result is regrettable.

Make of that what you will. For me, the more interesting point is Chris Dillow’s return to his advocacy of Direct Democracy. He starts with a point that is, I believe, instantly problematic:

“There’s a conflict between liberty and democracy.” The Swiss decision to ban minarets illustrates this perfectly.

That’s too strong. As Norberto Bobbio argued, there is “a dialectical interplay between liberty and democracy.” But conflict? Only when you get an unmediated vote in which the majority get to impose their will upon a minority.

There is, undoubtedly an actual full-blooded conflict between liberty and the outcomes one could expect from the crudest forms of direct democracy. But the contrast between liberty and what Anthony calls ‘the larger view of democracy’ is less clear – indeed I’d argue – as Anthony does – that the larger view of democracy is the most effective guarantor of those liberties that Dan Hannan claims to be so fond of.

A while ago, Conor Gearty illustrated why democratic ‘impositions’ are clearly preferable to the tyranny of structurelessness that Dan Hannan generally advocates:

“…early democrats knew the value of government and well appreciated how the most resistant to regulation were those whose wealth and privilege were likely to be reined in by proper democratic government. To camouflage their self-interest in morality, these forces of conservatism described themselves as libertarian, in other words as committed to freedom and on that account opposed to governmental intrusion into their lives.”

… and

“If we fetishise individual freedom at the expense of our wider struggle for transformative change, we play into the hands of the right who use libertarianism as a shield with which to resist change.”

In many cases, the advocacy of crude direct democracy is simply a populist cloak for deep conservatism – or worse.

Chris Dillow’s arguments are, however, a good deal more sophisticated than ‘one-vote-per-person-on-everything’. He’s very keen (keener than I am!) on the idea that democratic decision-making often results in bad decisions. Instead, he advances the possible solution of demand revealing referendums. And Shuggy has taken issue with his ideas at length and has too many arguments against the proposition to list here.

I’d not dismiss this idea as quickly as Shuggy does though, for a number of reasons.

Firstly Shuggy is right: It’s an untried, undetailed argument with a few obvious flaws. I can’t imagine that it is a workable idea. But representative democracy has flaws as well. My hasty round up includes….

• Five years is a long time to be bound by one decision
• Emergence of remote elites – often almost a caste with various inappropriate biases
• Five years allows organisations to consolidate and monopolise – to create huge entry barriers
• Groupthink
• Crude trade-offs forced by political parties

If you lose the term ‘referendum’, demand revealing exercises may not be a bad idea. You don’t have to fully buy into the Wisdom of Crowds thesis that a large number of ironically detached stabs at a correct answer result in better judgments than those made by experts. You only need to go as far as the Clay Shirky-ish assertion that the knowledge outside your organisation is generally greater than that inside it.

It is in Burke’s often-overlooked notion that an elected representative should be in “the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents” that I think that new communications tools offer the greatest possibilities. There are reasons that representative government is the least worst option open to us. Our politicians understand trade-offs and they get together to get a more complete picture of a problem. New communications tools mean that they can involve us – and be seen to involve us – in doing all of this more effectively.

I’d suggest that, in reaching for an alternative to representative democracy, it looks to me as if Chris is actually acknowledging that direct democracy will only work if it approximates what representative democracy does while avoiding some of the flaws. Surely it would be easier to switch the argument round and say that some of the more creative direct democracy tools could overcome the flaws of our current system?

Today, politicians could actively solicit detailed descriptions of the problems that they want to solve from the general public. A partnership with the people rather than purely delegated responsibility for five years. The semantic web is gradually grappling with the question of how people may be prepared to collaborate to describe problems and propose solutions and there are dozens of emerging applications such as Google Wave, MixedInk, and Debategraph to name but a few that are beginning to try to crack this nut. It’s a long way from leaving the geeky-ghetto, but the day will come.

And there are a number of reasons why this is so exciting. Because – unlike the use of focus groups – its not about mapping our sensory perceptions in order to sell us a bill of goods. It’s about presenting us with a structured set of trade offs – what do you really want more? This or that? And how much more do you want it?

In the late 1980s, I remember looking at a survey of public attitudes in the Irish Republic and found that the cost of phone bills was a matter of acute concern while the partition of that island was one of acute indifference. It taught me more about Irish nationalism that a bookshelf of Tim Pat Coogans.

Also, it breaks the dominance of the mass media. You can reflect a package back to people and say (as Microsoft laughably are trying to do at the moment) ‘You made this.’

Unlike petitions, participatory budgeting creates processes that politicians can ride along with – rather than be steamrollered by. They genuinely learn something from it – it’s not a process that is gamed by pressure groups and busy-bodies. But – and here is the most exciting bit – if politicians can crowdsource this judgment directly from the public, there is a chance that it could revive good old partisan politics.

At the moment, public judgment is provoked and marshaled in a slightly demagogic way by the media. We have a range of poles that few of us would recognise in our own circles – the mushy even-handedness of the BBC, the shrill reaction of The Mail or …. well you get the picture. The media focus upon general concerns. My newspaper is always full of the coverage of international football and the big clubs- England, Man Utd, Chelsea and Liverpool. Never the coverage of Nottingham Forest, D*rby County and Fester Leicester City that every cell in my being yearns to read.

Similarly, the mediated politics that dominates public life focuses on abstractions and issues that people actually hold relatively lightly in their own scheme of things. If politicians were dealing with us more directly – understanding our real interests and being able to challenge and respond to us in a direct way – surely a new set of political contours would emerge quite rapidly?

When politicians can say to us ‘we asked people like you to think about this problem and describe it to us’ or ‘we asked people like you to tell us what their priorities are’ elections could become more transparent and meaningful again. In government, of course, MPs will always seek to demonstrate their willingness to represent all of the people. But elections should be about the resolution of social tensions.

Finding sophisticated ways of involving people in supporting decision-making processes can reinforce representative democracy – not challenge it.