… 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.

Pic: Click for credit

“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.

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?

The Birmingham News Room – a well-executed information hub managed by Birmingham City Council has been launched and there’s a good write-up from Nick Booth over at Podnosh.

I don’t have much to add to his account of it, and I’d urge to to have a good look around and think about the idea., but the execution is very good.

From a personal point of view, it’s also very timely as I’ll be organising a session at the PICamp strand of Reboot Britain on …

Hyperlocality, active citizenship and disintermediated local newspapers

As local news titles close and community-run websites step into the gap, there is a new way for local government to converse with the public at a grass-roots level? Are community-run websites up to the job? How do these sites help the collective addressing of neighbourhood problems? Do online neighbourhood communities create new excluded groups? Do they improve or diminish democracy?

Introduced by: Kevin Harris, Nick Booth, William Perrin, Edward Walsh (Head of Press, LGA) 12.30-1.30pm, The Faraday Room (capacity – 70)

I’ve already posted something here on the question of active citizenship and local sites, but I think the Birmingham project foregrounds the issue nicely.

You may recall from that post that Will Perrin isn’t keen on the idea of local authorities publishing their own newspapers. Birmingham isn’t doing that, but in establshing an online newsroom of this kind, it’s doing a number of things.

Firstly, the newsroom is a transparent exercise. It’s a significant step away from the idea that the information providers – a small number of comms professionals – have a narrow set of channels that they communicate with. The press release that gets faxed to a couple of dozen named journalists on long-established newspapers. The hack that is briefed over a stiff drink in the back room of a boozer very early in the day (*sigh* there are some bits of my work as a political press officer that I miss….).

It also is a step away from the exclusive briefings that journalists were used to.

The newsroom is plainly set up, at least partially, with bloggers and other citizen journalists in mind.

A relationship such as this – between the politicians, the officials and the people that write up the council’s work – is going to be very different. Councillors will no longer be able to bargain with the press. There may be fewer deals and less tortuous media manipulation.

On the other hand, it may result in poorer policymaking as the council feels obliged to show it’s working and unable to slip in unpopular little trade-offs to make bigger schemes happen.

This also raises questions of impartiality. Council press officers could usually discharge this duty using journalistic scepticism as a filter.

If they did slightly oversell the work of the leading group on the council, the hacks would soon sniff it out and make them regret it.

This site sort-of works on the principle that the public are more savvy than they used to be. Who needs to read the journalists’ take on things when you can read the press release that was the main source?

And who’s going to trust a professional hack when you can get peer-to-peer scrutiny from People Like You?

For years, councils have bemoaned the lack of local journalism. As local papers have retreated, councillors have complained about out-of-town journalists who have failed to engage with the local authority, instead writing sloppy sensationalist stories.

Councils will be reaching the public thorough different filters – this site illustrates how – and it may change local government very significantly. Filters that are sometimes less systematically cynical than under-resourced journalists perhaps? But also ones that are less effectively sceptical. Will it be a positive change?

A few weeks ago, Roy Greenslade picked up on a growing opposition to Council-run free newspapers.

As he notes, the opposition comes both from smaller political parties locally, and from commercial rivals that are being edged out – as they see it.

Elsewhere, we are seeing growing demands for a journalistic ‘bail-out’ – and not just from bug-eyed Marxist fanatics either. Certainly, a lot of the clearly drawn ethical lines that have protected the near-monopolies of some local newspapers are being challenged from many quarters.

On the one hand, a strong local democracy requires a powerful independent journalistic voice, and if the Council does anything to damage this ecology, then it would be difficult to defend.

However, I think that there is an opportunity here. The National Union of Journalists are firmly of the view that some local newspapers are cutting back on journalists – not because they can’t afford them, but because their current business model allows them to make sufficient advertising revenues without much investment in original content.

At a very simple level, the boundaries that newspapers market themselves at are often different from the administrative boundaries of local government. As a result, councils have the choice of spending hefty advertising budgets across a range of titles in order to publish statutory notices or job vacancies.

On this level alone, it is often quite simply cheaper to print a newspaper every now and again, than to spend the expected advertising ratecard costs.

We have to add this consideration into the mix of the democratic arguments: one of the biggest causes of political centralisation has been the retreat from a responsible and energetic standard of coverage of local government.

Under these circumstances, surely councils are within their rights to ask for evidence that papers are employing experienced and competent journalists, and that these journalists are giving a fair coverage of the council?

There’s a fine line between ‘fair’ and ‘soft’ and councils need to think about how this is brokered. But simply only employing cub reporters and providing superficial coverage of local issues – and it’s widely accepted now that many local newspapers do this – is very damaging to local democracy, and if councils are to be asked to resist the temptation to go into this space, they should ask for something in return.

Councils could – and in my opinion, should – be challenging local newspapers saying that ‘we won’t compete with you if we think that you are providing a public good’.

Councils can also stay out of that space in return for free / cheap advertising of essential services. Local newspapers could provide citizenship information to local residents. Councils can put pressure upon them to do so.

It’s time to start thinking this through – from a political, journalistic and administrative perspective.The kind of free-market arguments that have traditionally been made against this kind of approach are unlikely to continue to be the staple of any British political party for much longer.

One of the founding questions behind this blog is this:

Is the decline in local journalism damaging local democracy?

Well, the consistently good Polis blog managed by Charlie Beckett is addressing it with some energy here. Charlie worked at ITN, C4 News, LWT and the BBC. The post linked to here is a guest post by George Brock.

It’s a good general answer. For me, the big question is the local one. If democracy’s salvation is only viable at a nation-state level, will this make work on local democratic renewal all-but pointless?

Jeremy Paxman - The BBC's Newsnight anchorman

I’d like to look at how the requirement that is placed upon public broadcasters to be impartial impacts upon the quality of democracy in the UK. It’s a complex question, and I’d like to explore it over a few posts.

‘Impartial’ can mean many things. The most obvious expression of it is in the guidelines that ensure that correspondents are not imposing their own views on a story, and are instead attempting to assemble the facts – only the facts – for the viewers to review and draw their conclusions. The contrast between a fairly activist newspaper such as the UK’s Daily Mail (or perhaps, even better, Fox News in the US) and the BBC illustrates this very well.

Impartiality is also understood, at least in part, as a relative term – locating oneself at a ‘mid-point’ between the various mainstream political poles. Impartial journalists in the UK until recently would be expected to ensure that the current political centre of gravity – the variations upon the post-Thatcher consensus – are reflected in all debates. Similarly, in the early 1960s, they would have done the same for the Butskellite consensus. Now, in the post-Lehmans / Obama age, perhaps we will see another such shift?

Also, when we watch a news report, we can’t avoid looking at the people delivering it. They offer all kinds of nuances – either those of their social class or their political background.

It would be fair to say that few people arrive in a TV studio with their political virginity intact. They may attempt to be balanced on-camera, but the colour of their vests often shine through. The BBC’s Nick Robinson was a Conservative student activist. Andrew Marr edited a slightly left-liberal newspaper, and so on. Newsnight’s Paul Mason is thought to have a background in left-of-Labour politics and was certainly known as a fairly enthusiastic trades unionist when he edited Computer Weekly.

In order to report political issues, the BBC (wisely perhaps) hires people who have a rapport with politicians. This presents problems of its own. A very concrete challenge to the sociological make-up of the BBC was offered a while ago by an Irish Republican writer – Jim Gibney. Here, he called for the BBC to hire journalists to reflect the views of the electorate.

It may not be a view Gibney would have held a few years ago, but you can see why he’s on this one now. Because Sinn Féin have enjoyed a relatively rapid period of political growth over recent years, they may have a right to feel that the BBC isn’t stocked with ex-Shinner activists – and that this works against his party.

Is it possible for journalists to really mask their preferences? Should we be asking public broadcasters to go for a ‘diversity’ model of impartiality instead? Would we not be better served by lots of named correspondents with fairly well-known prejudices calling things as they really see them – rather than attempting the charade of even-handedness?

I would like to explore this in more detail, and I’ll be picking it up shortly as part of a wider questioning of how the word ‘impartial’ regulates democratic discourse – often with questionable results.

Update: Slugger O’Toole has picked this post up and the comments there are worth a look

Here’s quite an old link I stumbled across while googling something else. It doesn’t do to only link to very new posts, does it?

“I don’t believe the intention is to destabilise democracy but that is the effect in many communities where the coverage of local politics has been downgraded by a loss of experienced staff with a real knowledge of the places where they live and work.

It is too easy to say the decline in local and regional coverage is an inevitable result of the move away from print to the web, social change, TV and radio. They are all true but the “bean counters,” as Dear described the press owners, have to take a lot of the blame. They are not investing in the quality of journalism we need either in print or online.

They are not the only ones to blame. I have said before that local government has been emasculated by centralising government, making local coverage of councils less relevant to the readers.”