Another victory for the blogs?

A recent spat between the Guardian newspaper and a number of prominent blogs has once again highlighted the both the increasingly international reach of the mass media, and the fractious relationship that exists between online media and the world of traditional print.

It started on July 13th, when the Guardian printed an article in its Comment section by trainee journalist Dilpazier Aslam. Entitled ‘We Rock The Boat’, it offered a young, Yorkshire-born Muslim’s reaction to the bombings in London. While acknowledging the “sadness” of the act, it sought to highlight the dissatisfaction that is endemic within many Muslim communities over the British government’s actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and suggested that imams are out of touch with the vehemence of disgust towards the US and British governments that is commonplace on the Muslim street.

So far, so distasteful, you may think; yet the Comment section in a national newspaper is reserved just for that, rather than unbiased reportage, and readers have the inalienable right to disagree if they wish.

However, two things occurred that have blown this whole story out of all proportion. Firstly, a number of prominent bloggers were incensed enough to take action, particularly in the US, where the newspaper is notorious following its controversial and ill-advised campaign to swing last year’s presidential campaign for John Kerry. Scott Burgess - a London-based American who runs a blog entitled The Daily Ablution that is often critical of the Guardian – quickly uncovered the fact that Aslam is a member of the controversial Islamist group Hizb-ut-Tahrir. Although legal in Britain, Hizb-ut-Tahrir is banned in a number of other countries, including Germany and Russia, for its radical outlook and perceived anti-Semitism and anti-Western rhetoric. It favours the overthrow of Western society and its replacement with an Islamic caliphate although it does not advocate violence, believing that this revolution will come about peacefully. Furthermore, Aslam had contributed to a controversial website called Khalifa.com. Realising he had hit paydirt, Burgess eagerly posted his findings, which were quickly picked up by other bloggers. The story made its way into the print media. Shiv Malik covered the story for the July 17th edition of the Independent, and also published a hastily written addition to an article for last week’s New Statesman.

The Guardian responded by saying that its Comment editor, Seamus Milne, was unaware of Aslam’s political affiliation, and launched an enquiry that resulted in the trainee journalist’s contract being terminated on Friday. The bloggers claimed the scalp as their own work, whereas the Guardian stated that Aslam had breached one of their conditions of employment – that he had not previously stated his affiliation with a political organisation – and that the termination would have happened regardless.

This episode illustrates once again the savage joy with which the blogosphere likes to attack the mainstream media. The hounding of CBS’ Dan Rather last year, when he exposed a military report critical of the young President Bush that subsequently proved to be a forgery, was heralded as a watershed for the tenacious nature of blogs. It led to the veteran broadcaster taking early retirement, and the show’s produced being fired. A more recent example occurred earlier this year following a speech by Eason Jordan, then CNN chief news executive, at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In discussing the accidental killing by friendly fire of journalists in Iraq, Jordan suggested that it was part of US military procedure to target the media. What he actually said remains unclear, as no taped recording exists and those in attendance differ with their recollections. However, within hours, blogger Rony Abovitz had posted the comments – although he did so contextually, noting that Jordan quickly backed down from his stark assertion. Still, the news quickly spread across the Internet, with right-wing bloggers using it to fuel their assertions that the American media is inherently liberal. A few weeks after his speech, Jordan took the decision to step down from his post, saying that he didn’t want to damage the reputation of CNN further.

So do online blogs act as a sort of undisciplined fact-checking service, filtering the mainstream media’s content and looking for slights and omissions? It is a nice thought, but the reality is that – as in many areas of the media – it has already become dominated and distorted by the right. They are all too willing to denounce those ‘liberal’ outlets that they deem as irresponsible, such as the Guardian, CNN or CBS. However, another case – that of the White House correspondent Jeff Gannon / Guckert, a male prostitute who worked for a negligible online news organisation yet was given a White House press pass so that he could ask softball questions of the President – reached nowhere near the level of outrage, for arguably a more serious matter, that of White House press access. The left have, so far, failed to establish themselves in quite the as effective a way amongst the blogosphere.

While the Guardian was undoubtedly right to sack Aslam, the case of Eason Jordan and Dan Rather show that in the conflict between online and traditional media, it is the bloggers who appear to have taken the early lead.

How we learned to hate our kids

One of the great ironies of our nominally centre-left government has been the extent to which it has sought to encroach on civil liberties. Arguably, it stems from the fear that the right-wing Conservative opposition, given any sign of Labour weakness, would decry that the government was ‘softening up’ on crime and safety issues which traditionally poll high in the electorate’s concerns. Thus, one of the government’s most popular pieces of legislation in recent years has been the ASBO, or ‘Anti-Social Behaviour Order’. Introduced in 1999 as part of the Crime and Disorder Act, the ASBO acts as a catch-all punishment for minor offences that don’t legally rate as crimes, but fall under the malleable description of ‘anti-social’. They generally involve the offender being banned from a particular area, or from doing a particular activity, for a minimum of two years. A person issued with an ASBO must conform to the particular rules that it specifies or risk arrest and possible prosecution.

All well and good, and no doubt a source of relief to the middle classes who diligently believe what the tabloids tell them about crime waves and terrifying “yobbos” terrorising their neighbourhoods. Yet in only a couple of years the humble ASBO has become a virtual weapon in a battle being waged, principally, against the nation’s disaffected and increasingly stigmatised youth.

ASBOs are now regularly handed out for the most innocuous of ‘offences’, and increasingly, activities that are not illegal or even offensive. Swearing, playing football, being sarcastic; these are some of the ‘crimes’ committed for which ASBOs have been issued. One young man in Teeside has been barred from wearing hats. A seventeen-year old is banned from his own street, forcing him to access his house via a side alley.

The legislation was supposedly introduced as a means of re-assuring a sceptical public that the civil disobedience perpetrated by young people was under control. Instead, it has succeeded in victimising our youth to a ridiculous degree. Instead of calming the situation, ASBOs have promoted fear and loathing of teenagers wearing hoodie tops and caps, with the result that anyone wearing such items are stigmatised as potential criminals. My grandmother regularly sneers at the kids round her neighbourhood who walk past her house, and describes them as “troublemakers” and “scum”; yet when asked what egregious crimes they had committed, she was unable to come up with a clear example, saying only that they sometimes “make a bit of noise”. Illogical fears such as these – which are well-stoked by the tabloid media - are common. They are beginning to coalesce into more concerted action. The huge Bluewater shopping centre, located just outside London, recently issued a ban which restricts anybody wearing baseball caps and / or hoodies from entering the premises. Other such centres are considering similar policies.

Yet while we live in perpetual fear of the offspring of others, at the same time in Britain we have become increasingly overprotective or our own. A handful of high-profile child murder cases over the past five years have seeped into the national consciousness and convinced people that children are inherently at risk from paedophiles and murderers. Thus, parents now rarely let their children outside the house, preferring to keep them on a sedentary but safe diet of television and video-games. Mindful of the tragic tale of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman – ten-year old friends, abducted and murdered in their small village by the school caretaker – parents are loathe to let their children out to play, and ferry them from school to after-school activity to home in air-conditioned cars.

How to reconcile these two reactions towards childhood? As we convince ourselves more and more that the world is a place of perpetual danger, a bunker mentality prevails, and we seek to protect our own whilst disregarding those outside our immediate circle. It can be seen in microcosm in our treatment of children, and in macrocosm in our attitude towards other cultures – particularly the Islamic world, which (we are perennially told) we are experiencing a ‘clash of cultures’ with. If only we could mature enough to see that we all share the same hopes, fears, concerns and aspirations as those whom we would demonise as the enemy.

Bush's 'War On Journalism' finds new victims

In four and a half years of government, the administration of George W. Bush has turned the avoidance of blame and the eschewing of culpability into a fine art. Last October, when asked if he could think of anything that he had done wrong, or regretted, over his first term, the President was unable to come up with a single instance. This refusal to countenance blame has become a hallmark of Bush’s entire government, and is demonstrated succinctly in the latest scandal to have engulfed Washington which has seen an innocent journalist sent to jail.

Judith Miller, a reporter for the New York Times, was this week sentenced to 120 days in jail for refusing to reveal her sources for an article in which she wrote of the unmasking of a covert C.I.A. agent. While Miller was not the first to break the case, she is the only one so far to be punished for it. The ramifications have sent shockwaves throughout the media in the US and beyond, yet it is only the latest twist in a story that – in a just world – should have resulted in the dismissal and possible incarceration of one of the White House’s most senior operatives.

The tale began in George Bush’s State of the Union address of January 2003, when he made the unsubstantiated claim (passed off as a piece of ‘British intelligence’) that Saddam Hussein had been attempting to procure uranium from the African republic of Niger. Joseph Wilson, a diplomat who had previously investigated such a connection, disputed the claim in an article published in the New York Times. Almost immediately afterwards, on July 14th 2003, conservative journalist Robert Novak revealed that Wilson’s wife, a woman by the name of Valerie Plame, was a covert C.I.A. operative and former overseas agent and an expert in weapons of mass destruction. In one stroke, Novak had ruined Plame’s career, thrown away years of intelligence networks, and quite possibly endangered the lives of agents and liaisons still operating in the field.

The immediate suspicion was that a White House insider had provided Plame’s alias to Novak, in retaliation at her husband’s refusal to toe the official party line. The name of Bush’s right-hand man, Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, became attached to the story. This increased the complex legality of the case. While Novak would be exempt from prosecution for revealing classified details – the law states that the leaker must have direct access to secret information, and be attempting to use it for harmful purposes – Karl Rove would not necessarily be immune. And yet, in a quite marvellous obfuscation of the true crime being committed here, the White House has skilfully managed to deflect the blame onto largely perfunctory journalists.

The jailed reporter, Miller, and a journalist for Time magazine, Matthew Cooper, wrote articles similar to the Novak report that offered up precious little in the way of new details. However, Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald, investigating the case, ordered Cooper and Miller to reveal their confidential sources or face jail time. Novak was not asked to make the same revelations, for reasons that remain unclear. In June of this year, the Supreme Court voted not to involve itself with the case. Miller refused to reveal her sources, and is now in jail; Cooper was days away from suffering the same fate, before his source – by now revealed to be Rove – invoked a previously-unmentioned waiver that authorised prosecutors to speak to reporters, and his notes were handed over to Fitzgerald by his employers at Time.

To have turned the case of a possible felony committed by senior White House official, into an investigation of journalistic integrity in an already embattled media, is a piece of sophistry that David Blaine would be proud of. Yet the story refuses to disappear, and this week two reports have added to the heat on Karl Rove that could still force him out of the White House. Newsweek quotes Karl Rove’s attorney, who attests that his client did indeed tell Cooper in July 2003 of Valerie Plame’s role, but reportedly did not disclose her name. Instead we are asked to believe that the timing of this informal conversation – three days before the Novak piece hit the newsstands – was coincidental

Democrats in Congress are trying to pressure Rove into coming clean and possibly implicating himself, but it seems likely that he will walk away unscathed – despite the promise in 2003, by White House spokesman Scott McClellan, that the administration would immediately fire anyone involved in the leaking. The idea of Bush ridding himself of the architect of his two electoral successes is a tantalising one, but completely unrealistic. Meanwhile, we are left with another journalistic mea culpa. The Bush administration’s war on the media has been well documented. Earlier this year, Newsweek came under severe criticism for a botched report – that was later proved correct – about abuses of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay. In 2004, the New York Times saw fit to print a list of omissions and mistakes that it had made in its coverage of the lead up and aftermath of the invasion of Iraq; were the Bush administration to print such a list, paper suppliers in Washington would need to order extra supplies in bulk. Meanwhile, the propaganda spilling out of Fox News complains again and again of a ‘liberal bias’ to the country’s media, a suggestion rendered ludicrous by the very success of the Fox News itself. If anything, the American media has become more and more cowed by the pressure heaped upon it by the government, and this latest case is likely to encourage further self-censorship by reporters and editors who have quickly learnt that the price of journalistic integrity could well be their liberty.

The aftermath of "07-07": a rush towards judgement

In the immediate aftermath of a disaster such as the one that struck at London’s rush hour yesterday morning, there is little point, little moral reason, to examine the whys and wherefores, to delve into the geopolitical manoeuvrings that may or may not have been the causes. It can be too easy to rush into judgement, and engaging with it at such an early stage can be a painful lesson, one that often backfires. The example of Ward Churchill’s infamous post-9/11 essay, “On the justice of roosting chickens”, is instructive: although some of his arguments were valid, at the time the proximity – and psychological resonance – of the attacks was too great for the piece to be approached fairly and honestly.

So it was disheartening – although not particularly surprising – to hear the comments by George Galloway yesterday. In the hours after the attack, while the bodies were still warm and traumatised survivors were brought up from the dark sarcophagus of the stricken Tube train, the Bethnal Green & Bow MP delivered his verdict, a classic piece of opportunistic political grandstanding in which he claimed:

“We argued, as did the security services in this country, that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners have now paid the price of the Government ignoring such warnings."

Tariq Ali, in a piece in Friday morning’s Guardian entitled “The price of occupation”, argued a similar line, noting that Britain’s actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its unstinting support for the White House-led ‘war on terror’, quoting the London mayor Ken Livingstone who once said that our Middle East policies “jeopardise security and peace everywhere”. I confess to sharing the sympathies of both men, although Galloway’s comments – made so swiftly, and with the Glaswegian clearly seeing terror and tragedy as points to be won on a political scoring card – were unnecessarily crude. It just seems to me that in the aftermath such reasoning is callous and callow, and does no service to those of us who wish to offer up a more reasoned, objective opinion. Many of us, too, who argued against the crackdown on civil liberties in Britain may well be re-examining our earlier positions in lieu of the country’s worst ever terror attack. These things take time to absorb.

All I’d like to say for now is to commend both the spirit of the city, and the response of the emergency services. For such a brutal attack, Londoners showed a remarkable resilience, and as I walked around the Aldgate area shortly after the bombs had exploded there was a sense of calm and fortitude that was a testament to the city’s character. As for the emergency services and transport workers, who knows how many countless lives their rapid actions saved? Millions of pounds have been spent planning for this kind of attack, and it showed in the way that ambulances, firemen and police were dispatched with incredible speed. The London Underground workers who evacuated the entire network in record time should also be commended. It appears they were informed that an explosive device had gone off, and yet still went down into each station and marshalled people out of there as quickly as possible. We in this city love to complain about the transport network, but yesterday’s response showed how lucky we really are to have such a robust system in place when disaster strikes.

So far there has been no sense of a backlash towards the city’s large Muslim population. This is something to be proud of, and we can only hope that the calm serenity that has so far prevailed will continue. Muslims will have been killed and injured in the blasts, and to persecute them – as, no doubt, the right-wing media will continue to do – will only exacerbate the situation and target those who are victims of these crimes as much as anybody.