A prophetic voice

 politics, public debate, universities  1 Response »
Apr 182009
 

Date the following passage.

In the past, a rising class was aware of something valuable enjoyed by others which it wished to share; but this is not so today. The leaders of the rising class are consumed with a contempt for everything which does not spring from their own desires, they are convinced in advance that they have nothing to learn and everything to teach, and consequently their aim is loot?to appropriate to themselves the organization, the shell of the institution, and convert it to their own purposes. The problem of the universities today is how to avoid destruction at the hands of men who have no use for their characteristic virtues, men who are convinced only that ‘knowledge is power.’

If you said 1969 you have everything on your side except the facts. These are: that the author is Michael Oakeshott, writing in The Cambridge Magazine and that he wrote this passage in 1949.

 Posted by bruce at 11:20 pm  Tagged with: ,

Read it here second

 public debate, reading habits  No Responses »
Feb 202009
 

We hear a lot about the travails of newspapers, but this article in The New Republic details a fast-growing crisis. If enough majors collapse – the Los Angeles Times has halved, the mighty New York Times faces a debt crisis – we could be deprived, not only of the printed article, but the skills, experience and institutional strengths on which real news depends.

‘Real news’? Isn’t it all just a medium of social control? Ever hear of the Web? To which there are easy answers: yes, it’s real. For example, over 200 people died in the Victorian bushfires. But don’t take it from the press: go count. No it’s not just a medium of social control unless, like John Pilger and Noam Chomsky and most arts graduates from the 1980s, you regard the entire society, including all its opposed elements, as one gigantic and malevolent System. As for the Web, I’ve yet to encounter a convincing, comprehensive news site unconnected with a newspaper. Drudge, the Huffington Report etc are parasitic on the grunt-work of trained, full-time journalists and editors.

Here’s a chunk of the New Republic piece.

These reactions fail to take into account the immediate realities and the full ramifications of the crisis threatening newspaper journalism. This is no time for Internet triumphalism: the stakes are too high. Nearly all other news media, except for online news, are also retrenching, and–particularly at the metropolitan, regional, and state levels–the online growth is not close to offsetting the decline elsewhere. Despite all the development of other media, the fact is that newspapers in recent years have continued to field the majority of reporters and to produce most of the original news stories in cities across the country. Drawing on studies conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, Tom Rosenstiel, the project’s director, says that as of 2006 a typical metropolitan paper ran seventy stories a day, counting the national, local, and business sections (adding in the sports and style sections would bring the total closer to a hundred), whereas a half-hour of television news included only ten to twelve. And while local TV news typically emphasizes crime, fires, and traffic tie-ups, newspapers provide most of the original coverage of public affairs. Studies of newspaper and broadcast journalism have repeatedly shown that broadcast news follows the agenda set by newspapers, often repeating the same items, albeit with less depth.

Online there is certainly a great profusion of opinion, but there is little reporting, and still less of it subject to any rigorous fact-checking or editorial scrutiny. Other than news aggregators such as Google News–which link to articles from publications that still derive most of their revenue from print–the most successful news sites are oriented to specialized audiences. No online enterprise has yet generated a stream of revenue to support original reporting for the general public comparable to the revenue stream that newspapers have generated in print.

Whether the Internet will ever support general-interest journalism at a level comparable to newspapers, it would be foolish to predict.

The situation in Australia is a little better, but the decline is here, too.

 Posted by bruce at 11:03 am

Demos spits the dummy

 culture, public debate  No Responses »
Oct 152008
 

Prince Charles has been invited to appear on Dr Who, and according to some reports, turned it down. “Miserable swine” said Russell T. Davies, the executive producer and lead writer on the show. The charitable interpret this phrase as a reference to “the Prince’s favourite radio program” – the Goon Show – in which it’s a running gag.

Could be. Then again there does seem to be a feeling around that when the tribunes of the people speak, royals ought to jump. Remember the “rage” when the Queen failed to react to Princess Diana’s death by wailing and keening and rending her garments in Trafalgar Square? The tribunes on that occasion were the editors of the tabloid press. Never mind ‘the Arab street’, knock ‘em in the Old Kent Road.

Then there was the concert to celebrate the Queen’s Golden Jubilee at whose conclusion she shared the stage with a bunch of sweaty rockers. According to Fintan O’Toole (Granta, 79, Autumn 2002) this marks a turning point in the history of the monarchy. Formerly an object of deference, he argues, the Queen has now been re-branded as “a living legend, a fading icon of popular culture”.

You can be the sacred bearer of a nation’s destiny, the anointed embodiment of an immemorial fusion of blood and soil, the spiritual head of the official Protestant church. Or you can appear on stage with Ozzy Osbourne, who bites the heads off live bats. You cannot do both.

Well actually you can. Actually one picks and chooses: the late Princess – notoriously – did so, working the press for her own advantage. In this she proved herself right royal, for that’s royals have done since there was a press to work. Victoria knew what she was about when she knighted Henry Irving.

A naive illusion, this, the pop people supposing they control the controllers, and encouraged by habits of interpretation that have filtered down from ‘cultural criticism’. The world is a text; we do texts – hey, we can do the world. So after the so-called race riots on Sydney’s Cronulla beach a couple of years back, one writer decided that the Australian flag had now been ‘re-coded’ as signifying yobbish racism. Wouldn’t that surprise them down at Rotary? ‘Re-coded’, ‘re-branded’ used in passive constructions, Prince Charles in a cameo, monarchs as pop icons, the flag as fascist banner; these, if anything unequivocal, are signs of absence of mind, of a childish determination to impose one’s wishes on the world.

So as the Daily Mail might say, Put your dummy back in, Russell T.

 Posted by bruce at 9:59 pm

Insinuating nods: Obama & McCain at Saddleback

 persuasion, politics, public debate, rhetoric  No Responses »
Aug 202008
 

Here in Oz we like our believing politicians to wear their religion lightly: Tony Abbott for this reason will never be Prime Minister. Not so in the US, where all candidates for high office must be pious. Even so, the spectacle of confession and group hug at Saddleback Church was disgusting. We are inured to boasting in candidates: modesty and a proper degree of reserve are luxuries reserved for the obscure. But Saddleback took us into that dark place in which the sincere is contaminated by performance.

It’s interesting to compare the two candidates’ answers to the question about regret. Which, I wonder was the more hypocritical?? McCain spoke about his first marriage, using a ritual formula in which one party is entirely responsible for something described as a ‘failure’. Besides the obvious point – that the formula deprives the first Mrs McCain of agency – an admission in that form follows the adman’s recommendation for damage control: admit everything and apologise repeatedly.

Obama I suspect was more complicated. First we had blame-transfer. Gee, I lacked a father and consequently dabbled a bit. The audience knows all about absent fathers in the black community, so it does no harm to offer oneself as an example. You get to be a victim. As for drugs, Clinton has lowered the bar on those: after him politicians fell over themselves to confessing a tiny bit of youthful naughtiness. Which leaves only self-pity, as regular a feature of adolescence as acne.

Too cynical? Onscreen,? McCain convinced me that he really does feel lousy about whatever he did in his first marriage, not that that matters a damn. Obama reminded me of Prince Hal in the Eastcheap Tavern. This man is not knowable, either, not yet. Wait for Act V.

The whole scene brought to mind the scene in Coriolanus in which Menenius and Volumnia busily compute how many wounds Coriolanus has on his body. It was customary to exhibit before the plebeians the scars of wounds received in battle against Rome’s enemies. Oh goody, says Volumnia, ‘there will be large cicatrices to show the people.’ (She’s his mother, by the way.) He gets away with it, but only just:

Third Citizen: ? ? ? ?

 Posted by bruce at 1:56 pm  Tagged with: ,

Bad numbers add up

 blogging, persuasion, public debate  No Responses »
Jul 022008
 

The excellent (and mindbogglingly productive) Megan McArdle has a piece in The Atlantic Online about bad numbers which set me thinking again about the role of blogging. OK, all by herself Megan McArdle is a cogent argument for blogging. But what she says implies a place for anyone at all on the Web who is interested in putting out reliable and trustworthy information.

Her thesis about numbers is that they stick in the mind and distort our judgment even when we know better, even when they’re wrong or irrelevant. Despite what ought to be disabling criticisms of its methodology, the first widely-publicised estimate of the number of civilian casualties caused by the Iraq War remains influential. Why? It was first in the field and came with the imprimatur of The Lancet. So the World Health Organisation’s much lower estimate – one quarter of the number – trails in the shadows.

Ideology figures here: the anti-war Left loved the Lancet figure, and no-one committed to an all-embracing ideology ever has much regard for plain old empirical truth. But McArdle cites work in cognitive psychology that shows that we’re all prone to this error. It’s a form of the well-known and well-attested primary availability error: the first thing we see of a particular kind colours our view of that kind. I like to illustrate that one by reminding people how kids cathect proper names – ‘Ooooh yuk, Derek.’

The Web is full of junk so it’s very tempting for reflective people to dismiss it as a venue for discussion. What the phenomenon of bad numbers indicates, however, is the need for good ones.

Does the same thing apply to arguments themselves? To opinions? Anecdotes-with-tendency? I hope so. What makes me almost sure is the work on attitude formation. This shows that they are rarely formed by one event. (We do get over the fact that Derek stole our peanut butter sandwich in grade two.) Attitudes take shape gradually, solidifying out of a cloud of particles of information, events and experiences small and dramatic.

So even the tiniest blog can add a stone to the pile. Well, a pebble anyway.

 Posted by bruce at 3:19 pm

Feedback short circuits

 public debate  No Responses »
May 302008
 

Some influential and serious blogs like the one Stanley Fish writes for the New York Times attract several hundred comments for one post. (So do some that are utterly trivial.) If you’re far down in the list, would you read, let alone consider, the posts before you? A few ultra-precisians will fiercely attack post #89 from the depths of post #523, but sullen #89 doesn’t often reply, so all that scanning goes for naught. Devotees of Chinese Whispers (why Chinese?) will enjoy the outlandish tranformations of the topic that begin to show up, run their little sputtering course and are then replaced by others still more outlandish. Experienced teachers will hang their heads: this is the tutorial from hell.

So what’s it all for?

The blogs at Prospect, offshoots of their articles, have obviously been filtered and monitored, because the comments that appear are thoughtful and courteous. Whether they are representative of the responses we can’t know – it’s down to how far you trust the editors. The blog author takes the time to respond, sometimes to every post, at paragraph length.

Fish-type blog responses seem to be little more than fodder for others. Fish himself sometimes reports on them; presumably there is a growing class of academics analysing them for tenure, poor devils.

It makes one reflect again that vox pop is all very well, but subject to a melancholy limitation: the larger the pop, the weaker the vox.

 Posted by bruce at 6:00 pm  Tagged with:
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