BBC worse than the Murdoch media

More questioning of the Murdochs at Leveson this week, more righteous posturing by the BBC.

While Nick Robinson and the Westminster commentariat pore over The Family's latest evasions and manipulation of government ministers, BBC reporters have predictably little to say about their own servility and ability to spike key information.

Part 2 of an excellent Media Lens alert piece on the government's historic dismantling of the NHS asks why the BBC have failed to scrutinise the (innocuously-named) Health and Social Care Bill, investigate the corporate elites who stand to benefit from this last, mass privatisation or cover the widespread protests against it, including the alarmed objections of almost every major medical body.

It's a startling examination from Media Lens detailing the carve-up of our most-cherished public institution, with professionally-considered warnings that "people will die" as a direct consequence of the legislation now passed by parliament.

The damning question for our media is why so few people are actually aware of the bill's dark provisions and calamitous implications.

In a penetrating email, ML asked Robinson why the BBC has offered only a cursory and sanitised account of the issue. No response came back. This was despite Robinson previously contacting ML itself requesting feedback on levels of 'impartialty' within his own field of domestic reporting. Another fig-leaf 'journalistic' exercise tested and found wanting.

Besides noting the executive connections of at least two senior BBC governing figures, Lord Patten and Mike Lynch OBE, to NHS-linked medical firms, ML also highlight the BBC's more institutional reluctance to make difficult waves on key political stories.

As ex-BBC correspondent Tim Llewellyn observes (for ML), there's an increasing "climate of fear" and a deep aversion to risk-taking across the organisation:

"it has become an institution that does not like any longer to take anyone on or to challenge received ideas or vested interests or risk being seen to take sides. There is no backbone left in current affairs programmes; news operates on the principle that X says Y and Y says X and this adversarial knockabout is a substitute for real analysis and questioning."

As with its timid, negligent coverage of Palestine/Israel, the understood remit is to:

"Leave well alone, report the surface, filter any controversies through studio debates and Question Time, arenas in which, of course, "balance" can be seen to be being practised." 

It was also noteworthy, in this regard, that, while Channel 4 News (not the most radical of media outlets) were officially barred this week from entering Bahrain, the BBC were given a welcome permit to cover the Formula 1 event and connected protests. One can but assume that this royal dictatorship, like Saudi Arabia, feel sufficiently trusting of the BBC not to report the conflict in a way that over-vilifies a key Western ally.

As with Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and now Syria, the BBC can be relied upon to keep any 'investigative' questions on Western aggression to a comfortable minimum - all under the respectable fabrication of 'balanced' reportage.

But the careful marginalisation of the NHS issue illustrates how the BBC also helps keep crucial, sensitive issues at home effectively under wraps.  As with its reserved coverage of British foreign policy, people will die and suffer in hospital wards here due to political action which the BBC has served to conceal.

For all its well-publicised sins, including support for every Western-inflicted war, the influential Murdoch empire, driven primarily by the profit motive, does not command the same automatic respect and public-serving aura of the BBC, a privilege which invests in the latter the very essence of a reliable and trustworthy provider of news and information.

So, in terms of suppressing vital public information, supporting Britain's mass killing, covering the political establishment's back and maintaining a gatekeeper check on any form of dissent, which organisation is the most guilty, Murdoch's or the BBC?

The very suggestion that the BBC could even be equated with Murdoch's villainous crimes and intrigues will seem far-fetched to many - and preposterous to 'self-examining' people like Robinson.

But measured by the overall confidence placed in their respective outlets and the scale of actual distortion, omission and protection, the complicit (in)actions and propaganda function of the BBC places the Murdoch operation in a league well below the premier position of our state media.

John

Le Havre

Le Havre might have many asking for a more credible modernity when depicting issues like illegal immigration and its social reaction, but the cinematic suspension of that 'real world' is a worthy exchange for the dry humour and uplifting hope one derives from this tender, unhurried little 'fairy tale' of a movie.

Having done the implausibility check, enjoy how it meshes quirky, Keatonesque plot lines with celebrations of simple communal kindness and regard for older, gentler mores, revealing, in Finnish director Aki Kauriskmäki's droll characters and vividly-paletted scenes, a quiet, compassionate empathy for pursued immigrants, some indulgent nods to French cinema past and a nostalgia-lite yearning for more heroically-caring times.

Among the delightful oddities of dialogue and observation is an unforgettably dream-inducing bar scene with a pineapple and a wonderfully-scripted pastiche police inspector.

Beautifully human and political in its own poignant, eccentric and timeless way.

John

Bell: Secrets and spies

Ian Bell with some cautionary things to think about when posting on Facebook and other social media.

Sunday Herald
8 April 2012 

Secrets and spies

Ian Bell

According to an interview he gave a couple of years ago, Mark Zuckerberg believes that privacy is no longer "a social norm". Do people care about privacy any more?

People, he said, "have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people".

He would say that. Thanks to his fond belief – and thanks to Facebook, the company he founded – "Zuck" is a billionaire 18 times over at the age of 27. With 800 million users worldwide, each blithely surrendering personal data, his social network has made a lot of advertisers very happy. In return, they have made the anti-hero of the movie The Social Network stinking rich.

Privacy, a concept and a right several centuries in the making, isn't exactly in Zuckerberg's interest, therefore. It's not closest to the hearts of the people behind Google (one billion monthly "visitors") or Twitter (350 million users), either.  

In fact, the antique notion that some things are no-one's business but your own isn't central to the business plans of most of those who handle your online activities. Yet these are the people who are left, almost unhindered, to harvest and sell the most intimate truths about our lives. We trust young Zuck.

Isn't there something wrong with that? Put the question to the vote, concerned citizen, and you would lose. Zuckerberg would win. Anyone who is currently outraged over the latest surveillance scheme concocted by the Home Office and the spooks is almost certainly handing over plenty of data on a daily basis. The Facebook founder is right: we've "really gotten comfortable" with that.

Many won't realise what's going on, of course. They won't have heard that Google tracks a user's every web movement, often ignoring those "privacy settings" in the process. They won't know about the iPhone apps that send your entire address book to third parties without letting on.  

Most won't realise that their smartphones can be tracked by almost anyone, in any case, and that the same goes for their satnavs. They won't have heard that those hilarious online pseudonyms can be linked to their owners without much trouble. They won't know what a tracking cookie is.

The busy business executive won't stop to realise that LinkedIn is just another way to harvest information. He and she won't be aware of the number of private companies that are already far ahead of David Cameron's government in the surveillance game, cross-referencing online activities (especially the ones people would rather not talk about) to create "profiles". Most won't know, above all, that these few facts are the mere tip of a looming iceberg. All of the big data companies – Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook – are vastly expanding their information-gathering systems. That's where the money is. It amounts to precisely the sort of global surveillance of which governments can only dream. But don't think governments – our own would be a good example – haven't noticed.

For corporations, the deal is this: you get a lot of services that are useful or fun for free. You don't pay for the product; you become the product, sold to advertisers. Would the information-harvesting therefore cease if charges were levied? No-one in the online industries has ever offered that guarantee. 

For politicians, other forces are at work. One is the impulse to transform themselves from staunch civil libertarians into spymasters the instant they form a government. Suddenly, no amount of private information is ever enough in the name of public security, and no item of information is ever sacrosanct. Like the corporations they are, of course, utterly trustworthy.

One cliche has it that an obsession with security stems from insecurity. When it becomes obvious that banks, not governments, run the world, those who are supposed to govern look for other things they can control. The domestic population usually tops the list. We give huge amounts of information freely, so why not give a bit more? If it makes sense for your GP to keep your medical records, why not give MI5 the information that will keep you safe from terrorists? And if you've done nothing wrong, why worry if they want a look at your Facebook usage?

That would depend on the definition of "wrong", of course. It also depends on the belief that only the agents of government are fit to judge the information they need to know. Then comes that small democratic detail. If knowledge is power, how much knowledge should be granted to the state when it can't or won't name the uses to which information will be put?

Once upon a time I would have added privacy to that list. Nowadays, I'm not so sure. If a politician shouts "terrorism", most people won't bother to argue. Since hundreds of millions of them across the planet surrender their privacy daily to Facebook and the rest, most of them won't even care. In this century, to paraphrase Zuckerberg, privacy doesn't matter.

It's just a few photographs to share with your mates. It's just a tweet that might be a bit embarrassing on the morning after. It's just a ton of information tracing every detail of your life on a government server that is – isn't it? – absolutely secure. Paranoia makes no sense.

This begins to look like capitalism's next phase, achieved with the willing co-operation – the uninhibited enthusiasm – of the masses while governments hitch a ride. Partly it's conditioning: see how the queues form whenever Apple punts a new toy. Partly it's technological drift: try to work without access to email. The largest part of it, though, is something new. It is the belief that nothing personal matters enough to be worth protecting.

To misuse an old Lou Reed song, our children are growing up in public. Reed was singing, quaintly, about mere celebrities. Now it's everyone, the millions tweeting and blogging and, above all, "sharing". To share is to exist. To be out of contact is to be invisible. It is imperative to display yourself. If the information involved doesn't matter to you, why should you care what Mark Zuckerberg does with it? Or your elected government.

When the internet first began, its pioneers talked dreamily of global communities and virtual democracies. They didn't see Facebook coming, nor the corporatisation of the word "social", nor the day when privacy would be regarded as suspicious by elected governments. Among those truly dedicated to social media, meanwhile, a person who aims to remain private is a recluse. Zuck was right again: there is a new "norm". That's handy for the security services.

Privacy is identity. In my (non-Face) book, the private person is the person you truly are. Give that away, daily and nightly – give it away to a corporation or a government, indeed – and you disappear into the collective, beloved of SF writers. We needn't resort to fiction, though. The plain phrase "my business" sums it up. But I think I am being outvoted, and outvoted overwhelmingly.

While I have been writing, a piece of software – yes, I spot the irony – has been removing 21 tracking cookies from the laptop. It's a daily ritual, and pointless. Like Schwarzenegger, they'll be back. It's part of the price we pay for all that lovely freedom. The rest of the price has yet to be calculated.

Planetary tango - Venus and Jupiter

When all the news talk is of global conflict and climate gloom, it's wonderful to look up into the great celestial and simply observe the magnificent beauty of our stars and planets.

These past weeks have seen the close conjunction of Venus and Jupiter in brightest 'dancing' motion across the night sky.

Some of the pictures are truly inspiring, as is this interactive positioning of both planets.

Look forward also to the transit of Venus across the Sun on 6 June, one of the astronomical calendar's rarest and most exciting events.

Happy night-gazing and future planetary pleasures.

John