Mass Appeal
Blimey, Twitter has been in the news this week. First of all it strikes the greatest blow ever for freedom of speech, thereby annoying Trafigura and their pesky toxic waste dumpin' antics. Then, after Friday's "spiteful bitch writes homophobic article in the Daily Mail" shocker, Twitter burst into action; it article about which the Press Complaints Commission received the most complaints, advertisements started to vanish from the page, and Jan Moir issued a graceless non-apology.
The result is that the papers are talking about the power of Twitter again, although whenever a newspaper mentions Twitter my heart sinks. They don't seem to be able to mention Twitter without mentioning Stephen fucking Fry, the World's Most Boring Man? Apparently he was at the core of both movements; weird, since I haven't seen a single re-tweet of his. If Fry really was the king of Twitter, I wouldn't be on it; unless maybe I'm pissing quietly in the corner of a Fry-less rogue state, which will be annihilated if it ever comes to His attention.
Anyway; the Trafigura affair is really rather heart-warming. If anything, it's difficult not to feel sorry for Carter Ruck; they actually thought that, by preventing the Guardian reporting on parliamentary questions (in which an MP asked whether it was a good idea to let Carter Ruck go around gagging the media on behalf of Trafigura), they would actually make the story go away. The response was predictable and glorious; a few bloggers went through the parliamentary questions for the day, the offending question was posted, and before you could say "140 characters or less" more or less everyone knew what the story was and Carter-Ruck and Trafigura had managed to publicise their presence in a way they couldn't have dreamed of.
The point is this: nice and all as the Twitter action was, it really wasn't the most important factor. The Guardian had been injuncted as early as September 11th, after it had received a copy of the damning Minton Report. The Guardian, and the BBC, had been using their considerable resources to fight a legal action for weeks. By far the most important part of the whole affair was a pretty old standard - if you can't publish, get an MP to ask about it under Parliamentary Privilege and then report on that. Trafigura's gagging order on reporting parliament was a bizarre and stupid action; even if the Guardian hadn't run with its "we can't report parliament on Thursday, and we can't say what it is we're not reporting on, and we can't tell you who's stopping us from doing it (P.S. maybe you kids can work it out)," then the story would - in all likelihood - have come out anyway. Private Eye went ahead and published the question in any case, because that's the sort of thing Private Eye does.
There are links to the (vile, shocking, appalling) Minton Report here (gu'on, read it, it's only 8 pages long). It has been on the Wikileaks site since mid-September. Nobody knew about it then, and Twitter didn't make a blind bit of difference.
This isn't to say that the Twitter campaign wasn't vastly more public than anything that could have been achieved were Twitter not in existence, and that it wasn't a tremendous thing to see; just that attempts to characterise it as a new weapon in the campaign for freedom of speech is a slightly shallow understanding of what happened. It was only when a law firm made a ludicrous and unsustainable attempt to gag parliament that Twitter sprang into action. Would a link to the report itself have gone viral? The real victims in this affair aren't "freedom of speech" but 30,000 innocent people, and there doesn't seem to be much talk on Twitter because of them.
As for Jan Moir's Daily Mail article; it was a nasty piece of journalism. Speculating about Stephen Gately's death was ghoulish and distasteful. Extrapolating your guessed causes-of-causes-of-death and using it to make some sort of point about civil partnerships is plain vile, and she undobtedly deserved the shame and approbrium that she got.
But: what has this really achieved? As David Simon once said: "One guy who was an asshole hhas had his hand slapped. Congratu-fucking-lations." Moir's home address was posted on Twitter; she became a hate-figure, a cardboard cut-out homophobic beeatch. Just because Twitter was right in these circumstances, it was difficult not to see it as a mob. The fact is that one person writing bollocks in a paper isn't what's wrong with the world. What's wrong is:-
a: that making shit up in a UK newspaper is still possible. Moir cast doubt on the coroner's report without any evidence at all, but this is by no means the worst example that has appeared in print. The Press Complaints Commission, which received tens of thousands of complaints, is still a lame duck that can't police the most blatant contraventions of journalistic standards. Read Nick Davies' Flat Earth News - everyone should read Flat Earth News - and you get a spectacular portrayal of their uselessness.
b: That people still listen. This is a broad social problem with god knows how many causes and no easy answers. Yes, it's true that mass appeals now carry more weight than ever before. One of the benefits of a consumer society (oh good god, I can't believe I typed that) is that companies are hyper-sensitive to their public profile. The adverts disappearing from Moir's page was the most powerful thing that happened... still, even if Moir is sacked and never works again, it's of no real benefit. It's not possible, or right, to silence all the Clarksons and Littlejohns and Myerses; another will appear, and will have yet another rant about Political Correctness and The Left Wing Conspiracy. Yesterday, after a bout of mass self-congratulation on Twitter, it didn't seem to occur to Twitter what those who agreed with Moir would be thinking. You see, you can't say anything in this country. You can't open your mouth without the PC brigade jumping down your throat. It's censorship, that's what it is.
Moir ventured an opinion. It was hateful and shameful and wrong, but she's quite entitled to do it. People are also free to orchestrate a campaign of complaints to a hopelessly ineffectual governing body, and good luck to them. However, more and more people across the UK will be using that campaign to sustain their cockeyed world-view. They aren't cartoon Nazis or oh-so-English tally-ho bigots, they are low-income families who feel that the world doesn't need them, have been culturally trained to hate anything different, and feel that they haven't been listened to. Now they've got one more tale to prop up their belief-system; they have one more reason to see themselves as a demonised people. If Twitter achieved anything, it was in strengthening the line between orthodoxy and those left behind.
The result is that the papers are talking about the power of Twitter again, although whenever a newspaper mentions Twitter my heart sinks. They don't seem to be able to mention Twitter without mentioning Stephen fucking Fry, the World's Most Boring Man? Apparently he was at the core of both movements; weird, since I haven't seen a single re-tweet of his. If Fry really was the king of Twitter, I wouldn't be on it; unless maybe I'm pissing quietly in the corner of a Fry-less rogue state, which will be annihilated if it ever comes to His attention.
Anyway; the Trafigura affair is really rather heart-warming. If anything, it's difficult not to feel sorry for Carter Ruck; they actually thought that, by preventing the Guardian reporting on parliamentary questions (in which an MP asked whether it was a good idea to let Carter Ruck go around gagging the media on behalf of Trafigura), they would actually make the story go away. The response was predictable and glorious; a few bloggers went through the parliamentary questions for the day, the offending question was posted, and before you could say "140 characters or less" more or less everyone knew what the story was and Carter-Ruck and Trafigura had managed to publicise their presence in a way they couldn't have dreamed of.
The point is this: nice and all as the Twitter action was, it really wasn't the most important factor. The Guardian had been injuncted as early as September 11th, after it had received a copy of the damning Minton Report. The Guardian, and the BBC, had been using their considerable resources to fight a legal action for weeks. By far the most important part of the whole affair was a pretty old standard - if you can't publish, get an MP to ask about it under Parliamentary Privilege and then report on that. Trafigura's gagging order on reporting parliament was a bizarre and stupid action; even if the Guardian hadn't run with its "we can't report parliament on Thursday, and we can't say what it is we're not reporting on, and we can't tell you who's stopping us from doing it (P.S. maybe you kids can work it out)," then the story would - in all likelihood - have come out anyway. Private Eye went ahead and published the question in any case, because that's the sort of thing Private Eye does.
There are links to the (vile, shocking, appalling) Minton Report here (gu'on, read it, it's only 8 pages long). It has been on the Wikileaks site since mid-September. Nobody knew about it then, and Twitter didn't make a blind bit of difference.
This isn't to say that the Twitter campaign wasn't vastly more public than anything that could have been achieved were Twitter not in existence, and that it wasn't a tremendous thing to see; just that attempts to characterise it as a new weapon in the campaign for freedom of speech is a slightly shallow understanding of what happened. It was only when a law firm made a ludicrous and unsustainable attempt to gag parliament that Twitter sprang into action. Would a link to the report itself have gone viral? The real victims in this affair aren't "freedom of speech" but 30,000 innocent people, and there doesn't seem to be much talk on Twitter because of them.
As for Jan Moir's Daily Mail article; it was a nasty piece of journalism. Speculating about Stephen Gately's death was ghoulish and distasteful. Extrapolating your guessed causes-of-causes-of-death and using it to make some sort of point about civil partnerships is plain vile, and she undobtedly deserved the shame and approbrium that she got.
But: what has this really achieved? As David Simon once said: "One guy who was an asshole hhas had his hand slapped. Congratu-fucking-lations." Moir's home address was posted on Twitter; she became a hate-figure, a cardboard cut-out homophobic beeatch. Just because Twitter was right in these circumstances, it was difficult not to see it as a mob. The fact is that one person writing bollocks in a paper isn't what's wrong with the world. What's wrong is:-
a: that making shit up in a UK newspaper is still possible. Moir cast doubt on the coroner's report without any evidence at all, but this is by no means the worst example that has appeared in print. The Press Complaints Commission, which received tens of thousands of complaints, is still a lame duck that can't police the most blatant contraventions of journalistic standards. Read Nick Davies' Flat Earth News - everyone should read Flat Earth News - and you get a spectacular portrayal of their uselessness.
b: That people still listen. This is a broad social problem with god knows how many causes and no easy answers. Yes, it's true that mass appeals now carry more weight than ever before. One of the benefits of a consumer society (oh good god, I can't believe I typed that) is that companies are hyper-sensitive to their public profile. The adverts disappearing from Moir's page was the most powerful thing that happened... still, even if Moir is sacked and never works again, it's of no real benefit. It's not possible, or right, to silence all the Clarksons and Littlejohns and Myerses; another will appear, and will have yet another rant about Political Correctness and The Left Wing Conspiracy. Yesterday, after a bout of mass self-congratulation on Twitter, it didn't seem to occur to Twitter what those who agreed with Moir would be thinking. You see, you can't say anything in this country. You can't open your mouth without the PC brigade jumping down your throat. It's censorship, that's what it is.
Moir ventured an opinion. It was hateful and shameful and wrong, but she's quite entitled to do it. People are also free to orchestrate a campaign of complaints to a hopelessly ineffectual governing body, and good luck to them. However, more and more people across the UK will be using that campaign to sustain their cockeyed world-view. They aren't cartoon Nazis or oh-so-English tally-ho bigots, they are low-income families who feel that the world doesn't need them, have been culturally trained to hate anything different, and feel that they haven't been listened to. Now they've got one more tale to prop up their belief-system; they have one more reason to see themselves as a demonised people. If Twitter achieved anything, it was in strengthening the line between orthodoxy and those left behind.
posted by Nyder O'Leary at
11:07
11 Comments:
Regarding the so-called "gag" on reporting Parliament, it turns out that this was "tabloidism" by "The Guardian": see http://short.ie/traf.
Briefly, there is no basis for alleging that anyone sought an injunction to suppress a report on parliamentary proceedings, much less that a court actually granted it.
If you feel that you have been made a fool of by sensationalism on the part of the so-called "quality press", then join the club - it's a big one
Correct about Trafigura - it's complex and I think you nail it pretty well. And yes, it is tabloidism, and no, they cannot for the life of them mention twitter without Stephen every-catholic-Pole-is-an-antisemite fucking Fry.
I read the Daily Heil article, and it's so far off kilter that it deserves a good public doing. It erroneously links promiscuity with tragic death in a lazy, dirty way - and then goes on to link the unrelated tragic death of the Little Britain star's partner in order to insinuate that gay marraige causes early death.
There's a point where 'venturing an opinion' has it's limits, especially when a young man has yet to be buried.
To apply your own criteria from last week, this woman totally did a Ron Atkinson, failed to apologise, and cannot see where she went wrong. By your own rules she deserves what she gets, mob or no mob.
Dont you go to the cinema anymore?
Fergus,
Thanks for that. Puts another spin on things, don't it?
To be fair to the Guardian (having gone back through their press releases), their primary articles don't say that the gagging order was specifically in relation to the parliamentary. However many of the comment pieces say exactly like that (Charlie Brooker's opinion piece today, for example) and they certainly conveyed that impression with their headlines "Guardian gagged from reporting on parliament."
Something of a PR exercise, by a paper who actually understood what "social media" (as everyone insists on calling these things) can be capable of.
Unusually Will, you've missed the point.
I don't care about Moir at all. She's your average right-wing columnist, of which there are many. If she gets a few nasty letters, then them's the breaks. Her home address being posted is unpleasant, but not the main issue.
First of all, there's the question of her readers. Given that standard right-wing narrative revolves around their being a left-wing mafia who stop anyone saying what they think, it doesn't exactly do that narrative much harm if thousands of people start shouting 'bitch' and 'cunt'. Reason gets lost in that kind of frenzy; as in the PCC receiving 21,000 complaints, when it doesn't even process complaints from third parties. How exactly can anyone now complain about a right-wing mob of Daily Mail readers complaining to OfCom about the Threat To The Fabric Of Society Of The Week, when they've shown they're just as happy to do the same thing?
Second of all; let's accept that's not really important, and it's just a columnist getting shouted down. What happens next time, if Twitter gets it wrong?
Oh, and to confirm:
- I deleted yer extra post, just 'cos.
- Yeah, but everything's shit. And not even in an interesting way. The exception is Gilliam's latest, the Imaginarium of thingummy doo-da, but that's so uneven and so batshit crazy I don't know where to begin talking about it.
Regarding Fergus' link - I suppose it provides a balancing piece of contrary evidence, although my own prejudice prevents me from seeing a Carter-Rick press release as intrinsically more trustworthy than the Guardian's account. See also some more thoughts on the G's possible jujitsu/dissembling, albeit from someone sympathetic to their actions.
I do think with the whole Moir furore that there's a danger of a slightly lazy backlash-against-the-backlash. (My own unoriginal internet maxim for truth-telling columnists: just because everyone disagrees with you, doesn't mean you're right.)
While I don't have statistics, I suspect the retweeting, with or without abusive commentary on Moir's piece, was a lot more diffuse and multiply-connected than any kind of campaign with Fry or Brooker as foci. (I found the piece through this, or one of several similar around the same time.) So while in principle I might share some of your worry about the next time Twitter Goes Tribal, I don't think it's as imminent or as likely a problem as you suggest - the nature of RTs means that nuclei of dissent can form quite rapidly, usually involving someone with enough online presence (attained either by merit or brown-nosing or the luck of the fad) that the baying of any mob fractures. Volatile, but with some negative feedback.
Point taken that a mob is a mob, whether under a "liberal outrage" banner or a "traditional decency banner" - something I think Brooker himself tweeted. On the other hand, and this goes for your David Simon quote, sometimes it is just worth kicking a particular piece of rubbish, if only to say what should be bleeding obvious but seems to go unsaid. Something I think even Simon would acknowledge, in between his more strident talking up of The Wire's nihilism - otherwise why would he, Burns, Pelecanos et al. have bothered making the show?
To borrow a phrase from a skilled borrower: sometimes it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. Until you can find a flamethrower, that is.
Start with the images - we can all assume there's no plot and the script is a mess. What do you you get to see?
Just arrived here via Campion's link. That Carter-Ruck press release is interesting: under the bolded paragraph that appears to exonerate Carter-Ruck, there's another paragraph which says that the order they did have in place would have prevented the Guardian reporting Farrelly's question after all. I don't think that's an unintended consequence of the injunction - it's what C-R specialise in.
A quick reaction (I may have more later) to comments referencing mine above: the original injunction wording did cover the PQ, but as the PQ was not asked for some weeks afterwards, it's stretching it a bit to attribute such foresight to C-R. However,I now note that the Grauniad claim to have sought a clarification from C-R as to whether the PQ was covered and to have received an emphatic confirmation. C-R has so far failed to answer my request to explain.
Cripes - where did all these comments come from? Is this what happens when you actually write about "some stuff that's happening now", as opposed to "things that just occurred to you about stuff that happened six weeks ago"?
I wouldn't mind, but everyone's comments seem much better-considered than my post. Seems I need to write something all new & consolidated about the Carter-Ruck thing, but post-pub sure as hell ain't the time to do it.
And fine Will, I'll try and review The Imaginarium of blahdeblah before the week's out. Happy?
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