Don't burn the platform - social media, ad fraud and regulation

Look I know you don't like advertising (or at least lots of you say you don't) and get irritated by men in ill-fitting suits and bad shirts telling you that "the brand must be a hero" or some such nonsense, but can we stop shooting the messenger please? Advertising is not the reason why Google and Facebook dominate social media, advertising is not the reason why kids are fat (if indeed they are), and advertising is not some sort of sinister manipulative force responsible for all the evils of capitalism. Nope - advertising is just businesses talking to you.

Even the FT, what was once capitalism's leading journal, is at it:

The need to sell advertising is at the heart of the toxic behaviour of many of the social media companies. The online ad market is dominated by Facebook and Google, and appears to be fraught with bots and fraudulent clicks. Hence France, Germany and Australia are all conducting inquiries into online advertising.

First let's get one thing clear, online ad fraud is a problem and one that is more of a threat to the advertising business than to us as consumers (and because of this - it's a threat to Google and Facebook's revenue streams as well):

According to a 2016 report from The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and WhiteOps, the loss from ad fraud was $7.2 billion in 2015—primarily from bots. To put that into perspective, total spend on display advertising, according to the 2015 report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, was only $12 billion, excluding Google and Facebook.

Note the last part of this - the largest part of online ad fraud takes place elsewhere than Google and Facebook (or for that matter Twitter, LinkedIn and so forth) because these are 'walled gardens' - closed platforms - that control what you and I see. That's not to say there's none of this stuff on Google and Facebook - online advertising (operationally and in terms of regulation) is still in its infancy with the technology options and the creativity of fraudsters running ahead of those policing the system. It's probably more important to focus on the shared interests of advertisers and consumers (neither of whom like fraud) rather than seek to break up, control or regulate the platforms.

One of the issues here is that regulatory regimes for advertising vary enormously and there is very little international cooperation - ICAS (the International Council on Advertising Standards) was set up in 2008 but only formalised with an independent secretariat in 2017 and, as yet, doesn't include China or Japan (the biggest source of on line ad fraud). Moreover, advertising standards regimes have historically been far more focused on advertising content - 'legal, decent and honest' - than on the sort of technological deception that is undermining online advertising effectiveness. This is made more difficult by the fact that much ad fraud is not illegal (or it's hard to prove ill intent):

One of the biggest reasons fraud is so rampant is simply that it’s not illegal. Unlike credit card fraud, nobody is going to jail for ad fraud, and it’s not exactly the sort of activity that elicits a crackdown from law enforcement, which means there is significantly less risk involved. And yet it’s extremely lucrative.

Imagine a bad actor is weighing their options. On one hand there is credit card fraud, which has modest rewards and very high risks. On the other is ad fraud, which is very lucrative and very low risk. It’s a no-brainer.

Partly this is because of online purchasing models (PPC and variants) but mostly it's because governments have focused attention on other online risks (terrorism, pornography, communication with minors) rather than on advertisers getting some of their payments scammed. As the FT observed governments are now conducting enquiries into ad fraud but this has got little or nothing to do with allegations of "toxic behaviour" levelled at social media companies. That makes for a cool headline, gets you (ironic) clicks but completely misses both the problem and the solution. Regulators and governments need to be working with the platforms rather than seeing them as the problem - they have as much interest in dealing with ad fraud as any government.

In calling (foolishly I believe) for a "publicly funded model" to compete with Facebook, the FT and Diane Coyle confuse two issues and in doing so suggest that Facebook, Google and other 'walled garden' platforms are at best turning a blind eye to fraud and at worst complicit in that deception. Coyle further confuses the issue by talking about using "competition powers" to 'break up' Google and Facebook - quite whose competition powers she wants to use escapes me - when the issue isn't competition but public confidence and the lack of effective legal recourse against fraudsters (after all the BBC, Coyle's much-loved institution, enjoys a de facto news monopoly in the UK).

And, to cap it all, the online market is international so requires international responses - setting up some sort of taxpayer-funded mini-Google in the UK simply isn't the answer. Perhaps a thoughtful government (this may already be happening) might consider using the WTO - or some other international body - as a means of looking at how to coordinate online advertising regulation? Google and Facebook are not angels but it is misleading to suggest that they are complicit in online fraud - more than anything they stand to lose out from fraud as advertisers look for different ways to engage online.

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Fake news, filter bubbles and the failure of the BBC

A couple of days ago The Times splashed its front page with a story about a leaked 'Cabinet Office Memo'. You all saw the story, either in its original Times incarnation or else the retread from The Guardian, The Telegraph, Sky News or the BBC. The content of the memo and the argument it informs is not relevent to what I'm going to say but rather the provenance of the memo. The argument is merely the victim of the news story.

Within a few hours of The Times splashing its story, there were doubts about its veracity. Was there really a government memo or has there been some sort of creative interpretation of something else. The government helpfully told us there was no such memo but then whoever believes anything a government tells us?

In the end the story was shown as a more-or-less complete fiction. Rather than a memo produced by a government department to advise the Cabinet, we had instead a polemic created on the authors' initiative as a pitch for consultancy business. The 'truth' presented in that Times story turned out to be quite a lot less than actual truth. Fleetingly one wonders how a great newspaper can make such a cock-up even to the point of asking whether it's not a cock-up but essentially a commissioned leak designed to embarrass the government - a sort of Brexit version of the Zinoviev letter?

Oddly - or maybe not oddly at all - alongside this example of misleading news reporting there has been a story about how 'fake news' was responsible (I exaggerate but only slightly) for Donald Trump winning the US Presidential election:

In particular, there are those who argue that Facebook fueled Trump’s rise by circulating a host of fake news stories about political topics, and these stories helped tip the scale in his favor.

Coupled with the filtering algorithm used by Facebook all this fake news resulted in a 'post-truth' election result. Others, including Facebook itself, have kicked back at this argument by pointing out that most (like 99%) of the content on Facebook isn't fake news. What's odd - to me at least - is that very few people have pointed out that Facebook isn't a newspaper, it's content is user-generated, unmoderated, unedited and therefore essentially untrustworthy. But bluntly the problem isn't fake news on Facebook it's the selective presentation of news, even false news, by trustworthy media.

And this problem - what I might call the "mainstream media filter" if that didn't sound too much like the wilder fringes of left and right wing blogging - is why here in the UK, we were all so utterly shocked and surprised at Donald Trump's election. Every news story on every channel told us that there was absolutely no chance at all of Donald Trump winning. When I went to the excellent Bradford Politics in the Pub everyone, panel and audience, believed that Donald trump was toast.

Why is this? Partly it's about the failure of opinion polling - US polling has hit the same wall as polls in the UK, but I don't think this explains all that failure. It's easy for us to lean back, smile and say. "I know I was wrong but so was everyone else - look at the polls". You'd have thought that, after the 2015 election and the EU referendum, us Brits would have developed a healthy scepticism about predictions based on opinion polling?

No, the reason for us getting it so comprehensively wrong (and looking at the US popular vote, those national polls weren't so wrong any way) is that the media we trust - BBC and other broadcasters, broadsheets newspapers - created a narrative that failed entirely to reflect the actual debate in the US election. We got an easy-to-swallow caricature of Donald Trump - racist, sexist, homophobic, bonkers - set against an equally shallow picture of Hillary Clinton. The election was light and dark, good and evil, saint versus sinner - there was no way Americans would vote for a man as bad as Trump especially as it would mean we wouldn't have the first female US president.

Watching events before and after the election - especially on the BBC - we can see the shift from smug certainty to incredulity and incomprehension. The BBC's narrative - indeed the narrative of almost the entire UK press corps - collapsed under the shallowness of its analysis, the prejudice of its presumptions and the degree of its ignorance about the USA and its demographics. It's not just that some of the anti-Trump stuff might just be crying wolf but that we'd not spotted that a whole lot of people in the USA actually looked at Trump's agenda and concluded they'd have a go with that.

After all, Trump's message out there was about jobs, immigration, patriotism, ending corruption and giving a voice to the voiceless. It's true this is a deceptive agenda - the economic policies will make America poorer not greater and in a land of immigrants attacking immigration seems dumb and just a bit racist - but when the counter is shrill attacks on the candidate's character rather than a debate about the issues, should we be so surprised when a whole bunch of people gave Hillary the proverbial finger?

So when the BBC and others point at Facebook, accusing the social medium of spreading fake news and creating filter bubbles, perhaps they need to examine the massive beam in their own eye - after all Facebook doesn't pretend to be a news medium, the BBC does. And, if we've learned anything over the last two years it's that the voting behaviour (and, I don't doubt, the opinions and attitudes) of a lot of folk simply doesn't fit the liberal* narrative that our national media promotes. Whether there's anything that can be (or indeed should be) done is a matter for debate but one thing is certain, the search for different news sources on-line suggests that a lot of people out there have rejected that liberal world view and are seeking alternative news sources.

The growth of fake news - as well as polemical sites like Vox or Breitbart and conspiracy sites like Infowars or the UK's own Canary - reflects the utter failure of the main news organisations and, in the UK, especially the BBC. I watched an interview by a BBC reporter of a man from 'Gays for Trump' (this might not have been the exact name of the group but it describes it precisely). The reporter may have been tired - it was the morning after Trump's election - but what came across was utter contempt for the young man being interviewed: how dare he challenge the narrative of trump as gay-hating (he isn't) and appear as a pleasant, personable bloke rather than the cartoon version of the Trump supporter as a one-toothed, baseball-capped, wall-eyed, racist redneck!

Next year, we have elections in France. They're pretty important, not least because Marine Le Pen leads in the polls and the BBC and others will be building themselves up into a funk at the possibility of her election. What we might hope for is a slightly better narrative from the BBC and other national media, one that actually reflects the debate rather than "oh my god, no, please, not Le Pen, not a fascist, fascists are bad" repeated over and over again. It may be true that the French run-off system makes it very difficult for Le Pen to win (we saw this in Austria where they very nearly elected an old Green communist in preference to the Freedom Party candidate for president) but we deserve something of a better analysis that we've had in the last three campaigns the BBC has covered.

The selective nature of BBC news-making, the prejudice of mainstream sources and the inability of London-based reporters to appreciate a fundamental cultural difference between city and country, capital and provinces - these things have created a filter bubble around the BBC, other broadcasters and the main broadsheet newspapers that is far more damaging than 'fake news' sites on Facebook. Just as social science academia needs to actively recruit conservatives, so do the main media outlets, newspapers and broadcasters - not as superstar columnists or presenters but in the bones of the organisation as programme planners, producers, directors and researchers.

Right now a growing part of the population - radicalised by Brexit (to use the sort of divisive language the BBC valorises) - is more and more distrustful of our national news media and especially the one they pay for, the BBC. We know The Guardian and its ilk are biased but we now know that this increasingly applies to the BBC - the liberal media filter bubble just means that people at the BBC haven't recognised just how they're no longer meeting the public service remit given them in their charter. The incomprehension we saw in May 2015 became wilder in June 2016 and frantic in November 2016 - the UK's national media didn't see any of this coming because it was looking in the wrong places. Mostly its own navel. This is the problem not fake news stories on Facebook.

*Please note that where used the word 'liberal' is meant in its perjorative American meaning not its sane, noble and decent English meaning
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Assassination is not a joke (or why the BBC should sack David Attenborough)

Political assassination isn't a joke. This year a British Member of Parliament was, quite literally, assassinated. Jo Cox was gunned down in the street while doing her job. We were shocked, perhaps more shocked than with assassinations and attempted assassinations elsewhere in the world. Benazir Bhutto, Indira Ghandi, Yitzhak Rabin - assassinated. Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II - shot but survived.

Political assassination isn't a joke. Unless that is, you're Sir David Attenborough:

Sir David, 90, who returns to BBC screens in Planet Earth II this weekend, was quizzed on current affairs by Emily Maitlis, the Newsnight host, for Radio Times.

Asked how he would feel about America electing a President who believed that climate change is a “Chinese hoax”, Sir David buried his head in his hands.

“Well, we lived through that with earlier presidents – they’ve been equally guilty… But what alternative do we have? Do we have any control or influence over the American elections? Of course we don’t,” said Sir David.

Adopting a quieter tone, he said: “We could shoot him, it’s not a bad idea”

A giggle suggested Sir David, who was invited to the White House by President Obama to discuss the planet’s future, was not being entirely serious.

Can you imagine if some less savoury (i.e. right of centre) figure had suggested, even hinted in a humorous way, that some sainted leader of the left should be killed off? Yet Attenborough has escaped unchallenged - would Emily Maitlis have brushed aside such offensiveness had it been James Delingpole or Nigel Farage she'd been interviewing?

Now while I dislike Attenborough intensely - the values he presents to us are disgusting - I don't think he meant his comment as anything other than a crass dinner table, bien pensant, smug aside. Nor do I think he should be sacked. But if the BBC is true to its oft expressed progressive values they they should be sacking him or, at the very least, getting a suitably grovelling apology out of him.

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Racism, recruitment and the myth of 'white privilege'

Yesterday evening finished with a couple of glasses (large ones of course) and a little engagement with one of the stranger on-line communities - American racists. Today, as with everything, these racists have adopted a new and shiny ideological designation - alt-right. As if, somehow, this will distract us from their racism and apply a sort of pseudo-intellectual polish to white supremicism.

I won't bore you with the details of last night's exchange of views except to say that I tried to get them to define what exactly they meant by 'white'. Given that whiteness - 'white rights', 'White America', 'white genocide' and so forth - is central to their philosophy you'd have though our alt-right on-line agitator would have a clearly set out exposition as to what 'white' means. Now, in part, I was trying to trip them up on the matter of whether or not Jews are white (dealing with their desire to place anti-semitism as a minor crime because "it's a religion not a race") but the truth here is that the inability to define what we mean by 'white' destroys the entire basis of this extremist ideology.

Zip forward twelve hours or so from my exchange of pleasantries with the American racists and this pops into my Twitter:

We have an amazing opportunity for an aspiring current affairs journalist to receive training from Newsnight’s presenters, producers and reporters and learn more about how to embed social media in the reporting process.

First broadcast in 1980, Newsnight is the BBC’s weekday current affairs programme, which specialises in analysis and often-robust cross-examination of senior politicians.

The team at Newsnight are looking for a Trainee Researcher to join their team for this comprehensive, 12-month placement.

The successful intern will receive training from an experienced team of producers and journalist on broadcast and online content ranging from written features and video journalism to social media and live broadcasts.

Fantastic opportunity for, let's say, a working class kid from Barnsley just setting out in journalism. Or a young Polish immigrant who has just finished her journalism MA? Except, um, nope.

All roles advertised through Creative Access are only open to UK nationals from a black, Asian or non-white ethnic minority.
Only applications via Creative Access will be considered – please DO NOT contact companies directly.

The problem here is that the public school educated child of a successful black businessman is getting priority over other less privileged young people simply because that child is black. Now I'm prepared to believe that there might be issues with the 'diversity' of the BBC - they keep telling us there is:

The BBC is struggling to meet its own targets on increasing the diversity of its workforce, with a tiny increase in minority employees over the past year and an actual decline in the number of disabled employees.

The number of black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) staff employed by the BBC rose by just 42 to 2,405, an increase from 11.9% to 12.2%, according to figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Broadcast magazine.

The 2011 census tells us that 12.9% of the UK population is from 'non-white' backgrounds (although this includes 'Gypsy/Traveller/Irish Traveller' most of whom look pretty white to me) suggesting that the BBC is close enough to par for it not really to be an issue.

The BBC is justifying an overtly racist recruitment policy on the basis that it is 0.7% (really 0.6%) short of its target. And please don't insult my intelligence by trying to suggest that saying "sorry mate, you're white, you can't apply for the job" isn't racist.

If you want to understand the pig-ignorant racism of the alt-right, you need to look at the establishment racism of the BBC. How do you suppose that working class white kid feels when he sees a job go to someone else - not because that person is brighter, better-qualified or more experienced but because the working class white kid was excluded from applying in the first place.

This goes straight to the heart of the reasons for that racism - the idea that the rules are different for minorities. And so long as this isn't understood, so long as we treat the white working class as a bunch of thick racist losers (and we do) they will stay angry and excluded. And the sort of approach used by the BBC - and other organisations - in recruitment really doesn't help resolve the problems.

It's not just those American racists who struggle to define 'white' it's our public authorities - indeed 'white' is defined by who defines as 'not white' meaning that the skin colour of the UK majority, in all its glorious varieties becomes a simple binary definition. This covers over a host of variations - some of those US white rights folk weren't prepared to see southern Europeans as white because they - in American terms - are Latinos. And we know that the current president of the National Union of Students describes herself as black - which will come as a surprise to all her Arab brothers and sisters.

I could carry on categorising - putting everyone into a little racial box like the government seems to want. But what purpose does this serve except to valorise racism? To feed an overweening industry built on playing endless games of equalities top trumps? All those human rights lawyers, diversity officers, race relations consultants and ethnic monitoring form designers.

We're a better place for saying that it should be illegal to make decisions - in jobs, schools, housing, whatever - on the basis of someone's 'race' (whatever that might mean). And it's great that we've carried on welcoming people here regardless of where they're from, what they look like and what their beliefs are. It's this stuff that makes us a great nation.

And we've still more to do. Black people are still stopped by the police too often, still make up too much of our prison population and still do worse at school. But we've got to open our eyes, to look at those people we stereotype as chavs or pikeys, dismiss as thick racists, and ask whether we should give them the same sort of attention we give to equally excluded non-white communities? And perhaps speak less about white privilege and more about economic advantage - there are too many white people who simply don't feel in the slightest bit privileged or advantaged.

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Mantel's 'Assassination of Margaret Thatcher' remains a work of utter bigotry - and the BBC should know this...

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When there was an earlier brouhaha about Hilary Mantel's deliberately egregious story, 'The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher' I wrote how it revealed more about Mantel's bigotry than about the character of Maggie:

What we see here from Ms Mantel is something that, in truth, is foreign to those of us who share Margaret Thatcher's lower middle class background. Taking the trouble to construct a fiction based entirely on your hatred of a caricature of a women you have never met is something peculiar to the bien pensant left. What this short story tells us about Hilary Mantel - bitter, bigoted, ignorant - is far more important than any flicker of insight into the motives of the Provisional IRA or the character of Margaret Thatcher.

The kerfuffle has return as the BBC chose this (to be fair the Thatcher story is just one in a series of short pieces) for broadcast as 'Book at Bedtime'. Again, in and of itself, there's no problem with this except that the BBC will have known exactly what the response would be. This is the 'official' response (I gather):

“Book at Bedtime offers the best of modern and classic literature and, in doing so, presents a wide range of perspectives from around the world. The work of Hilary Mantel – a double Booker prize-winning author – is of significant interest to the public and we will not shy away from the controversial subject matter that features in one of the four stories read across the week.”

Here we see 'Booker prize-winning author' being used in the same manner that the tern 'Nobel prize winning scientist' is sometimes used. Mantel didn't win (and isn't going to win) the Booker prize for 'The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher' - any more that Sir Paul Judge got his nobel prize for stuff about climate change - yet the fact of her winning said prize for a different book is presented as some sort of defence by the BBC.

The BBC chose this book in order to provoke. It really is as simple as that - rather than any one of a thousand other books of great merit (including some by celebrated winners of book prizes) that could have been chosen, they chose this rather second-rate story; a thing of shallow stereotype, bias and bigotry rather than something bringing insight or understanding.

If, dear reader, you can suspend disbelief for a paragraph or two imagine this. I'm an award-winning writer and I write a brief polemic masquerading as literature about a conversation between a lawyer and a politician, a conversation leading to the execution of Nelson Mandela for terrorism. And a conversation that is sympathetic to those who held - or hold - the view that Mandela was indeed a terrorist. Do you think that any newspaper would publish such a story in full? And would there be any chance of it being chosen - from all the literature available - for broadcast on a national broadcaster's flagship speech radio channel?

This wouldn't happen. Yet we're told by the BBC that:

"...our audience is sophisticated enough to accept a broad range of viewpoints, and we are loth to censor or avoid significant works of literature because they might be controversial.”

What we know - from the discussion of climate change, from the manner in which some people are given sainthood and from the presentation of the arts in general - is that the BBC will only entertain controversial views if they either attack the BBC's cultural enemires or conform to the rather snide and certainly bigoted world view of the bien pensant left.

The BBC knew exactly what is was doing when it chose this book. That is exactly why it made that choice. And exactly why the decision reveals the corporation's bigotry.

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Who won Nigel or Russell? The x-factorisation of politics

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Like most of the British population I didn't watch the Nigel Farage and Russell Brand show on last night's BBC Question Time. I have now watched the popular clip of a bloke in the audience asserting that if Brand was so keen on changing things maybe he might consider standing for parliament. And I've also read selections from the avalanche of commentary about this occasion.

However, I remain - politcally at least - depressed about the whole thing. Not because of the opinions that Nigel and Russell express - I like people to have opinions, even wrong ones. My sense of gloom stems from the nature of the programme and the way in which our national (and state-owned) broadcaster presents politics. Question Time is the BBC's flagship political debate show, yet they run it as if it was part of their light entertainment offering. Which is why getting Farage and Brand on the same show was important - not because they offer thoughtful and considered analysis of complex questions but because they have a 'brand' (pun entirely intended).

And the media entirely buy into this x-factorisation of political debate - the reporting of Question Time isn't about what anyone said except where it's couched in terms of who 'won' between the two personalities. In the Metro, that throwaway newspaper we read on the train the report even ends with a vote!

Won what exactly? The argument - surely the point of the show isn't to have a winner but rather to allow politicians (and people who aren't politicians but have something to say - like Brand, I guess) a place to respond to questions from an audience. Indeed there were five panellists not just the two - or should I call them contestants?

Even the questions selected last night played to this artificial contest - starting with the 'petty, adversarial nature of politics' (a deliciously ironic question given the petty and adversarial nature of this edition of Question Time) we then ran through privatising the NHS, immigration and grammar schools. A set of question designed to provide some entertaining exchanges between our two protagonists.

Yesterday was a particularly stark example of how politics is treated as a branch of entertainment but we shouldn't think that it is unusual. Indeed the majority of political discussion that we see is either so brief - a two or three minute interview on the Today programme or Newsnight or else structured so as to guarantee contest and confrontation - even when people are crammed onto a too small sofa. The result is that nearly all of political debate is conducted on the basis of sound bite, posture and slogan, which rather explains why a jack-the-lad comedian like Russell Brand finds it so easy - there isn't much different between his political exposition and his stand-up.

On one level I guess this doesn't really matter - we get the politicians and the political debate we deserve. But we should consider what we are losing. In the dumbed down, lights-flashing, show biz world of today's politics there isn't any place for nuance, for looking at the actual evidence (other than trite 'fact-checking') or for trying to explain complicated systems, situations or proposals. And there is no time given for developing ideas, exploring options or properly examining proposals. I know this stuff happens because I do it every day as a councillor but the politics we're presented with by the media is almost entirely one of personalities, of who's up and who's down, gossip, tittle-tattle and the machine-gunning of listeners with carefully crafted slogans.

Which is why I don't watch BBC Question Time, seldom see Newsnight and can only manage very brief snatches of the Today Programme - all they offer is argument without substance, snarky interviewers and the constant idea that all these interactions must somehow have a winner and a loser. The political parties - and the gossip-mongers of the media - pour over the utterings of every politician looking for the clumsy phrase, the hesitation or the words than might offend some group or other. We're routinely presented with allegations of sexism and racism constructed on the flimsiest of grounds. Why? Because it's another win for the opposition or for one or other newspaper or website.

This game - slogans, soundbites and poses mixed with back-biting and character assassination - makes politics seem like, as Paul Begala observed, show business for the ugly. It doesn't matter much whether the actual policies actually work, that can be glossed over. What matters is who wins and who loses. Not just at the election (at least that's a real contest) but in every engagement and encounter. We pull down the opponent - focus on their silly face, their school or their resemblance to Parker from Thunderbirds - rather than engage with what they are saying.

Whatever the truth, it really is pretty sad that the presentation of politics has reached this point - a sort of x-factor for the political anorak rather than a way of helping the public understand what politicians are actually proposing. Perhaps Russell Brand and Nigel Farage - inconsistent, flash blokes from the edges of London with the gift of the gab and a degree of likeability - really do represent the future of politics. After all they don't offer positive policies, just lists of things they don't want and people they don't like.

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(Dis)owning the news...

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There was a time when I bought two newspapers every day. In the morning I'd buy the Daily Telegraph in the shop over the road, walk to Kent House station and complete the crossword on the journey to London Bridge (the aim was to get it done before reaching Herne Hill but this seldom happened). On the way home I'd buy the London Evening News and do its three crosswords - the worst of these was the so-called children's crossword.

I write this because, back then, other than the evening news on the TV, that was the sum total of our news consumption. Almost everyone bought one or other of the national papers and in doing so maintained a huge industry of paper boys, paper stalls, newsagents, journalists, advertising executives and sales people. Not to ignore the legendary - or should I say notorious - printers with their closed shops and 'spanish practices'. Living in South London I knew a few printers - my friend in the YCs, Ian was from a whole family of Fleet Street printers (Tory voters every one). They all had private print shops and, when they needed some extra cash, would do a shift or two on the Sundays - whether this actually entailed any work was something I never fully discovered.

Newspapers were big business and they were important. Ownership mattered and those papers could and did set the national agenda, influence the outcome of political debates and make a difference to the way people voted. And the legacy of all this remains - the media is still slightly obsessed with the ups and downs of the newspapers especially that part of the media not owned by Rupert Murdoch or Lord Rothermere.

The most recent manifestation of this obsession is the idea that we can crowdsource the funds to buy one or two of the national titles off Rupert Murdoch:

Hardly surprising, then, to see the groundswell of support for a new campaign, “Let’s Own the News” which launched this week and is inviting pledges from people who like the idea of buying The Times and The Sunday Times from Rupert Murdoch.  Backed by The Young Foundation, Let’s Own the News say that “80% of the national newspapers we read are controlled by 5 families, this is not a free press and it undermines our democracy. Our vote is worth little if a few people control the information we read. ”

So far the campaign has raised a little over £250,000 which probably isn't enough to buy the two titles right now. However,  setting aside the vanity of this project, the truth about news - or rather newspapers - is that ownership is of little relevance. We the people have, in the main, disowned newspapers.

Back in the 1970s sales for daily newspapers were around 16m and for Sunday newspapers around 20m - this is more-or-less one per household (there were about 19m households in the UK in 1975). By way on contrast, in 2000, there were 25m households and sales for daily and Sunday papers stand at around 10m apiece. This suggests that at least half - and probably more - of households did not buy a newspaper at all. This trend continues.

A hard business look at the Times and Sunday Times might suggest that these titles simply aren't viable (or likely to be viable). It makes sense for a large conglomerate to own them - they provide gravitas, have a brand that can be used elsewhere and provide an influential platform for opinion. On their own - without the protection of News Corp or a deep pocketed private trust such as the Guardian's owner - the prospects for creating a sustainable and profitable newspaper business is, to put it mildly, pretty slim.

But that's the business of the folk trying to buy the newspaper. What bugs me slightly is their argument that the change is needed to reduce the concentrated control of the news and hence the news agenda. The argument that the newspapers are owned by only 5 families completely misses the point. The real problem isn't with newspapers but with the organisation that controls nearly 40% of media output in the UK and which has a wholly disproportionate influence over the news agenda.

Changing the ownership of the Times wouldn't make a jot of difference - fewer than a million folk buy the papers and, since they disappeared behind a paywall, they don't get the millions of online visits that the Telegraph, Mail and Guardian enjoy. But reforming the BBC would make a difference. Our news consumption is via the TV, computer and mobile phone and it is here that the change must come. Put simply the case for having a state broadcaster that dominates UK online news and is funded via a poll tax is now almost impossible to justify. Rather than trying (and probably failing) to raise £100m to buy the times, the Young Foundation would serve the cause of a more open news economy much better by campaigning to scrap the licence fee.

As consumers we have disowned newspapers, they are increasingly marginal and it is hard to see a future for them in their traditional role or format. The future of news creation and distribution is online and mobile and right now the BBC is making it hard for choice and independence to succeed in this new news market. If we want to reduce the concentration of media power then the place to start is with the BBC not the Times.

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Is it time to scrap the licence fee?

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The nature of technology means that the license fee - unless the basis for its collection changes - is a diminishing return as people switch to self-programmed TV and media consumption. In effect, only big live events would make the cut and these will be on at the local pub, on big screens in the town square and probably in new venues like village halls or community centres.

And the public rather understands this and, increasingly supports scrapping the fee:

Half (51 per cent) of the UK want the BBC licence fee scrapped and the corporation to fund itself, a study of 2,049 Brits by ComRes has found.

Of course the BBC is having some sort of apoplexy at the temerity of the public and refers to its own (unpublished) research on the matter. Research that, naturally, shows a majority supporting the license fee.  What we need to appreciate here is that the BBC start by establishing that the licence fee is value-for-money (which it probably is) and then move to argue that this justifies its continuation. I find that, quite the contrary, the value-for-money defence undermines the rationale for a licence fee - if the fee is such good value then people will surely be happy to pay it voluntarily?

I am also uncertain as to the sense or purpose in having a state broadcaster. In the infancy of TV this rather made sense as did getting the income from licensing the hardware - after all it was only in the 1970s when near universal ownership of TVs was reached. Now, in a world of multiple, competing broadcasters the case for a state system collapses as does the compulsory approach to funding. If government wishes to use part of available output for its messages then, rather than owning the biggest chunk of broadcasting, it should purchase such coverage on the market.

And the way to guarantee the independence of the BBC - something we treasure - could be to take away the government's control of the Corporation's financing. So long as the funding for the BBC is via a state mandated poll tax then it remains a state broadcaster. I see no reason why the majority of people, through one route or another, wouldn't carry on subscribing to the BBC's coverage on a voluntary basis. And we would maybe see a reduction in the Corporation's indulgence in casual financial waste such as sending nearly 400 people to Brazil for the World Cup Finals and similar numbers to cover the US elections and Glastonbury festival.

None of the arguments here are about attacking the BBC. Rather, such an approach would make the BBC a more potent force since it would lose it's 'part of the state' tag and get a defence against being simply dismissed as 'establishment'. The Corporation might be smaller and some of its programming may move to orthodox advertising-based funding models but I believe it would be strengthened by such independence not weakened.

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On the BBC's definition of crank...

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crank¹ [krangk] noun

1.Machinery . any of several types of arms or levers for imparting rotary or oscillatory motion to a rotating shaft, one end of the crank being fixed to the shaft and the other end receiving reciprocating motion from a hand, connecting rod, etc.
 

2.Informal. an ill-tempered, grouchy person.
 

3.an unbalanced person who is overzealous in the advocacy of a private cause.
 

4.an eccentric or whimsical notion.
 

5.a strikingly clever turn of speech or play on words.

The BBC is on about 'crank' scientists and has set about re-educating its programme makers and producers:

BBC journalists are being sent on courses to stop them inviting so many cranks onto programmes to air ‘marginal views’

The BBC Trust on Thursday published a progress report into the corporation’s science coverage which was criticised in 2012 for giving too much air-time to critics who oppose non-contentious issues. 

Not surprisingly the BBC has turned to its coverage of 'climate change' as an illustration of the problem. Indeed, three of these so-called 'cranks' are described:

Andrew Montford, who runs the Bishop Hill climate sceptic blog, former children’s television presenter Johnny Ball and Bob Carter, a retired Australian geologist, are among the other climate sceptics that have appeared on the BBC. 

Now, despite me being sceptical about climate change scepticism, I'm prepared to listen to what well-informed people have to say about the subject. So let's look at a couple of these folk.

Montford has a chemistry degree and has written extensively on the subject of climate change, his books are informed and comprehensive (if a little polemical). I do not have to agree with him to appreciate the contribution he has made to an important debate. He has as much knowledge of climate change as, for example, Paul Nurse, the geneticist who has often been used as a front man for promoting the case for anthropogenic global warming.

 Bob Carter - "retired geologist" according to the BBC? Here's a chunk from his wikipedia page;

He has published over 100 research papers on taxonomic palaeontology, palaeoecology, the growth and form of the molluscan shell, New Zealand and Pacific geology, stratigraphic classification, sequence stratigraphy, sedimentology, the Great Barrier Reef, Quaternary geology, and sea-level and climate change.^[5][6] Carter has published primary research in the field of palaeoclimatology, investigating New Zealand's climate extending back to 3.9 Ma.

So this 'crank' is, in truth, an academic who has actually done primary research into climate change during the world's history. The only 'crank' bit is, of course, that Carter doesn't agree with the approved position on man-made climate change.

It seems to me - and I watch with incredulity as the media push real pseudo-science in health - that the definition of crank being used here is ideological. Essentially you are a crank if you disagree with the defined and accepted editorial bias of the BBC.

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Update: Saw this article by a climate change chap called Bob Ward - presumably the very sort of scientist that the BBC wants to put forward on its programmes. The article is an extended ad hominem attack on Nigel Lawson but I checked out Ward's credentials. Let's be clear, Ward isn't a climate scientist, indeed he's barely a scientist at all certainly compared to Bob Carter. Ward is a PR man for a climate change research institute.

On the power of the media...

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We are reminded by Alex Massie:

Speaking of which, we might, when considering over-mighty media moguls remember that Murdoch is not the main player in the British media landscape. That honour belongs to the BBC. Nearly six times as many Britons watch BBC1 than read The Sun. The BBC’s website has more readers than any Murdoch title. And across all platforms, online, on television and on radio, the BBC does more to shape and mould public attitudes than any other media enterprise. This is so even if it also often takes its lead from the newspapers.

This is a central - and important - point in an excellent article on the lynch mob chasing Rupert Murdoch.

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The BBC is completely out of control...

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Yesterday I noted that the BBC had sent 140 people - at the cost of over £1m - to South Africa following the death of Nelson Mandela.

Today a couple more examples of our state broadcaster's egregious waste of tax money:

The BBC is spending up to £500,000 on a major refit of its £1 billion new headquarters because staff have complained their state-of-the art surroundings ‘lack character’.

The high-spec London HQ was only opened in June – four years behind schedule and £55 million over budget.

But the Corporation has already decided to revamp two floors of New Broadcasting House to make them ‘more creative and vibrant’ – following a string of gripes from staff.

And...

The corporation said it had no choice but to have two studios, which are expected to cost it close to £500,000 in building costs and rent...

That's right the BBC is not only lavishing money on the sports coverage of next summer's World Cup finals in Brazil but is planning on sending a whole news team over to Brazil as well. And building them a studio (apparently because of some nonsense about 'broadcasting rights') - in Rio where England aren't even playing!

Accountable? Not in the slightest.

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The BBC really is a joke....

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...a cruel joke on all those poor folk in council houses coughing up for the license fee (and filling up magistrates courts when they struggle to pay it):

The BBC sent 140 crew members to cover Nelson Mandela's memorial despite receiving more than 1,000 complaints over its 'excessive' coverage of his death. The number of staff dedicated to the iconic leader's death was far greater than its rivals, including ITV which reportedly despatched just nine staff to South Africa.

I'll grant it's a leading news story, I concede that it merits high profile coverage but this scale of indulgence - it has cost the BBC over £1m to cover just this one story - is an insult to all the people who fund the BBC.

Apparently this degree of coverage was justified because Mandela was:

 “the most significant statesman” of the last 100 years. 

Seriously - not Churchill who led Britain through the war, not Kennedy who started the space race, not Gandhi who help create the world's biggest democracy, not Thatcher and Reagan who with Gorbachev brought the 'Cold War' to an end, not Roosevelt who led America through depression and war, not Kohl who unified Germany, not any of these people.

I give up with the BBC. And so should the rest of us, it doesn't serve us, it just exploits our credulity and indulges its own bias. At an unnecessary cost in taxation.

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In which the BBC trolls Councillors for a story...

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I got a nice email from polling company ComRes asking me to answer a few questions. As Guido reports, these questions amount to trolling for a story:

The questions include:

• asking if they think “climate change is not happening”
• whether “Immigration has had a negative impact on Britain”
• whether “legalising gay marriage will cost my party more votes than it gains at the next Election”
• whether they support a ban on the burkha
• whether Cameron and Osborne are “arrogant”
• whether they support an electoral pact with UKIP

I suppose it's funny in a way - and there will be some colleague who hold some pretty whack views - but the BBC, who commissioned this, really should be ashamed of such a blatant attempt to troll for a nice silly season story using an opinion poll (paid for with tax money).

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Quote of the day - Charles Moore on liberals

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Or rather ' liberal progressives':

The answer, I suggest, is that one of the most important elements in the creed of “liberal progressives” is that they are fair and open-minded, and the rest of us aren’t. 

Moore is speaking in the context of the BBC in explaining how, despite it contortions around the concept of balance, it persists in portraying an essential 'liberal progressive' world view sustained by only employing people who share that view.

Liberalism is an important idea that has been captured and corrupted by people who are essentially Fabian social democrats. People whose first point of argument - as we've heard from Nick Clegg and Vince Cable today - is that something must be done and it will be done by government. However fair-minded this may be, however caring and open, it isn't what the political ideal of liberal means.

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A good thought...

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Imagine a news service that NEVER employed the words ‘might’, ‘could be’, ‘it is feared that’, ‘campaigners claim that’; would you really mind paying 40p a day for such a reliable trustworthy service? Boring, for sure. Way down in the ratings – and why should it even appear in the ratings? But a ‘verified Wikipedia’, a place where you could be sure that what you read had actually occurred, and here were the facts.

What? A real news service? From the BBC? Won't happen.

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The BBC's new class system - a vanity project of no value or purpose

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When you’ve been involved with direct marketing, marketing planning and profiling for as long as I have, you will know that every so often another ‘radical’. ‘ground-breaking’ and ‘innovative’ new scheme of social classification is launched. Usually this is from an advertising agency, a data management business or something called a “strategy consultancy” and is essentially a jolly good wheeze to get lots of press coverage and thereby to promote the business launching the classification.

To make this work we have to have funky names for the classes – none of that ABCDE malarkey, that’s far too boring. Instead we get value-loaded words that play on our stereotypes of certain ‘class’ groups – terms like ‘proletariat’ or ‘elite’ pop up thereby summoning up either gap-toothed ‘Shameless’ wannabes or waistcoated Bullingdon Boys. Such designations do not help in our understanding of social class and such studies do not guide our knowledge of how society changes over time.

Indeed, the BBC – who seem to think spending money on such work is what we pay a licence fee for – have fully understood the point. This creates some jolly headlines, a load of people on Twitter trill about which class they’re in and it fills in some gaps in an otherwise quiet week.

So folks, a great deal of fun has been had by everyone with the BBC’s new class system:

The BBC teamed up with sociologists from leading universities to analyse the modern British class system. They surveyed more than 161,000 people and came up with a new model made up of seven groups

This, says the BBC, replaces the three group system - the three group system that was replaced in the 1950s by a five group system of social class (ABCDE) and then, in the 1960s, with a six group system (ABC1C2DE). Apparently this is some sort of great advance in our understanding of social class in Britain, we are blinded by fancy on-line tools and the involvement of professorial types and told that this is so much better because it involves surveying 161,000 people!

The problem is that it’s nonsense. The size of the sample doesn’t make it better than, for example, a social classification system based on census data or one using transactional and behavioural data from millions of people. More to the point, the system encompassed information (cultural choices, for example, that more reflect affordability than class per se). Indeed, this wonderful new seven class system really doesn’t improve on the established and widely used six class system – a six class system that is used all over the world not just in the UK.

Compared to the well-known geodemographic systems – ACORN, MOSAIC, etc. – this new classification is useless. It is inflexible – fine for targeting mass market television advertising – but worse than useless if you want more precise analysis, say for retail location choices or direct marketing. For academics that system is interesting, there’s a lot of data to play with and it may contain some genuine insights. But it won’t replace the established social class classification (for all its flaws) because it largely fails to improve on that classification.

Let’s make that appraisal by matching the seven BBC classes to those traditional six socio-economic classes:

• Elite - the most privileged group in the UK, distinct from the other six classes through its wealth – this is wholly indistinguishable from Socio-economic Class A
• Established middle class - the second wealthiest, scoring highly on all three capitals – ah, yes, this would be Socio-economic Class B
• The next three groups Technical Middle Class; Emergent Service Workers and Newly Affluent Workers fit less well but are essentially the old Socio-Demographic Classes C1 and C2
• Traditional working class - scores low on all forms of capital, but is not completely deprived Here we have Socio-economic Class D
• Precariat, or precarious proletariat - the poorest, most deprived class. That would be Socio-economic Class E

It’s not a precise comparison but it’s plain to see that this expensive piece of taxonomic research is essentially an indulgence that sheds almost no light at all on the issue of social class and how it affects the economic, social and cultural development of the nation.

Of course, it goes without saying, that the system ranks me as part of the "elite". I suspect this reinforces the system's daftness!

It really is a vanity project of no purpose and with the validity of a horoscope.

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Free press?

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I caught a few moments of the ever crazier arguments promoted for regulating - they call it "statutory underpinning", which sounds like a 19th century dressmakers regulation - the press.

Of course, once you regulate the press you get:

1. A press that isn't free and where politicians and their pals can keep their bad deeds away from the public
2. A slippery slope - each year there'll be calls for changes, a little more control (mostly "for the children" I don't doubt)
3. A supine, spineless, risk-averse media - imagine if it were all like the BBC?

This is why we shouldn't listen to a floppy-haired actor and some bloke who likes his bottom spanked. And why we shouldn't play silly political games with fundamental rights - like free speech.

Unless, of course, you're the Labour Party!

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Can we have more BBC strikes please?

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I understand that the BBC's journalists went on strike today.

And there was a refreshing change to my morning listening. Normally the news is interrupted by Nicky Campbell's writhing, self-indulgent metroliberalism or overly aggressive interviews by Humphries.

This morning we got none of that - just news and interviews presented pleasantly and professionally. I felt informed and my annoyance was limited to the content of the news not the outlook of the news presenter.

Perhaps more strikes might continue to raise standards!

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Ah that BBC impartiality...

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Via the honourable Mr Fawkes this from a BBC news editor:

Who or what do you hate and why?
Tories. As Aneurin Bevan said: ‘No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.’ 

Now what were you trying to tell me about the BBC being balanced and impartial?

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Ah that pesky science stuff...

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As ever, it proves tricky for the BBC's Health Correspondent. Here's Raedwald explaining:

...the science really 'proves' that a child in North London in a non-smoking house is exposed to over 8x the particulates level of a child in Aberdeen who spends an hour a day in a car with a chain-smoker.

Yet again we're shown how the mere presence of numbers, calculations and that science stuff confuses the hell out of the BBC reporter. Credulously this reporter just reproduces whatever prohibitionist nonsense the nannying fussbuckets want to get across.

One day maybe a BBC health reporter will actually challenge some of the rubbish peddled by public health people. As I said to a colleague on Council today (in a conversation about shisha), it really does public health no favours when its practitioners use pseudo-science, statistical manipulation and, to be blunt, outright lies to make their case.

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