Daily Archives: February 23, 2015

The Guardian view on journalism and advertising: selling the news short

We are all brought and paid for to a degree, I suppose. 


Powered by Guardian.co.ukThis article titled “The Guardian view on journalism and advertising: selling the news short” was written by Editorial, for The Guardian on Friday 20th February 2015 18.57 UTC

For 160 years the Daily Telegraph has been as integral a part of British life as the long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer and cycling to evensong that John Major once invoked, while paraphrasing George Orwell. You may not have shared the paper’s politics, but it was widely respected for straight, accurate news reporting of the sort that is essential to any healthy democracy.

This week the paper’s integrity suffered something of a body blow when its highly respected former chief political commentator, Peter Oborne, published a devastating attack on the newspaper’s ethical standards. Mr Oborne detailed a pattern of behaviour in which, he said, stories had been suppressed, removed, downplayed, boosted or discouraged in order not to offend – or, alternately to please – advertisers and/or financial institutions. His decision to go public with his allegations was sparked by the minimal coverage devoted to last week’s revelations – widely reported in the UK and round the world – about HSBC’s part in creating and encouraging tax evasion mechanisms. Mr Oborne believes the story was downplayed because the company’s chief executive, Murdoch MacLennan, was anxious not to lose advertising revenue from the bank. This is a serious accusation, since Mr MacLennan told the Leveson inquiry on oath that neither he nor the paper’s owners played any part in editorial decisions.

If Mr Oborne’s claims are right, he is justified in saying that the HSBC coverage, or lack of it, amounts to a fraud on Telegraph readers. A number of senior executives and former editorial staff at the newspaper have, albeit anonymously, endorsed Mr Oborne’s general critique. The paper, normally an advocate of transparency, has so far declined to answer any detailed questions about Mr Oborne’s article. A long, dishonest and callow editorial on Friday almost comically attempted to shift the blame onto the BBC and the Guardian. You would never guess that the criticism – unreported in the Telegraph – actually came from neither of these sources, but from their own much-celebrated former colleague, who until recently was writing editorials.

Many news organisations, old and new, rely on advertising. Indeed, the noted historian of British newspapers, Francis Williams, described in his 1958 book, Dangerous Estate, how the daily press “would never have come into existence as a force in public and social life if it had not been for the need of men of commerce to advertise. Only through the growth of advertising did the press achieve independence”. But the reverse can also be true – as evidenced by widespread and dismal practices in the Indian press in which editorial coverage is routinely bought, and newspapers invest in companies about which they write.

The Telegraph, as a privately owned newspaper, is not obliged to respond to questions about its editorial standards. If it wants to put up shutters and throw mud at rivals, it’s perfectly entitled to do so. But, the longer it remains silent, the more its readers may draw their own conclusions about the integrity of a great British institution.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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Suicide prevention expert pulls out of prisons talk over ‘censorship’

Sadly not surprising to hear this.   


Powered by Guardian.co.ukThis article titled “Suicide prevention expert pulls out of prisons talk over ‘censorship'” was written by Alan Travis, home affairs editor, for The Guardian on Monday 23rd February 2015 14.40 UTC

The government’s leading expert on suicide prevention has pulled out of a Ministry of Justice presentation on the rising number of suicides in prisons after being told, he says, not to make any link with falling staff numbers.

Prof Louis Appleby, who oversees the implementation of the national cross-government strategy for suicide prevention, was due to speak at the justice ministry’s “independent ministerial board” on prison suicides on Monday.

Several members of the independent board voiced their concern after Appleby, who is the national clinical director of health and justice, made public his decision on Twitter.

Deborah Coles, the co-director of Inquest, which works with families of those who die in custody, reacted by saying it was outrageous that the MoJ was trying to “gag” Appleby from making a link between a rise in prison suicides and staffing cuts.

The shadow justice secretary, Sadiq Khan, also protested: “If these reports are true, this is censorship – plain and simple,” he said.

“Ministers can’t tell a leading expert what he can and can’t say just because the truth is unpalatable. We need an honest assessment of what is driving the surge in suicides and violence in jails under this government.

“The truth is Chris Grayling refuses to acknowledge there is a prisons crisis, and will do anything he can to avoid hearing the truth about just how terrible an impact his policies have had on our jails.”

Whitehall sources suggest Appleby’s decision may have been based on a misunderstanding or misinterpretation.

They stress that the independent ministerial board, which is chaired by a Labour peer, Lord Toby Harris, and has in its membership Frances Crook of the Howard League for Penal Reform and Juliet Lyon of the Prison Reform Trust, has repeatedly discussed a possible link between suicides and prison staffing levels.

The board’s secretariat is provided by a seconded member of the justice ministry’s national offender management service and is understood to have requested Appleby keep his presentation focused on the wider aspects of the issue over which he has been an expert for more than 20 years.

The number of suicides in prisons in England and Wales has risen to its highest level for seven years with 84 self-inflicted deaths recorded in 2014 – a rise of 45% over the last four years.

Prison service staffing numbers have fallen from 45,080 in March 2010 to 32,280 in December 2014, a fall of 13,800 or 28%. After spending £56m on redundancy costs the justice ministry wrote to 2,000 former prison officers last summer asking them to join a prison service reserve on fixed-term contracts of up to nine months to help fill specific shortages.

The justice secretary, Chris Grayling, has repeatedly voiced concern at the rising suicide rates in prison and has set up the independent ministerial group to look into the causes. He has also announced his intention to make the question of mental health in prisons a priority.

But he has also insisted that there is no direct link between staffing levels and the rising suicide rate. In December he told MPs there there were sometimes “upward ticks in the suicide rate for which there is no obvious explanation”.

The justice ministry has tried to establish common factors among the self-inflicted deaths. Grayling says the work has not shown any difference in the suicide rates between prisons where there have been staff reductions and those where there have been none. He has suggested that the rising suicide rate among young men in general compared with a generation ago may be one factor in a complex picture.

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “The whole rationale behind the ministerial board is to help us to deal more effectively with the risk of deaths in custody. It is absolutely wrong to suggest there is any sort of censorship.

“No discussions are off limits, and claiming otherwise simply detracts from the efforts to understand the complexities that lie behind this difficult and sensitive issue.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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Google and tech’s elite are living in a parallel universe

I think we have always known this to be honest. Ain’t going be no trickle down from this for sure, speaking as an almost exe-tecky type.


Powered by Guardian.co.ukThis article titled “Google and tech’s elite are living in a parallel universe” was written by John Naughton, for The Observer on Sunday 22nd February 2015 00.05 UTC

Someone once observed that the difference between Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher was that whereas Thatcher believed that she was always right, Blair believed not only that he was right but also that he was good. Visitors to the big technology companies in California come away with the feeling that they have been talking to tech-savvy analogues of Blair. They are fired with a zealous conviction that they are doing great stuff for the world, and proud of the fact that they work insanely hard in the furtherance of that goal. The fact that they are richly rewarded for their dedication is, one is given to believe, incidental.

The guys (and they are mostly guys) who manage these good folk are properly respectful of their high-IQ charges. Chief among them is Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and a man who takes his responsibilities seriously. So seriously, in fact, that he co-authored a book with his colleague Jonathan Rosenberg on the care and maintenance of these precious beings. Dr Schmidt objects to the demeaning term – “knowledge workers” – that economists have devised for them. Google employees, he tells us, are much, much more impressive than mere knowledge workers: they are “smart creatives”.

In the opinion of their chairman, these wunderkinder are very special indeed. They are “not averse to taking risks”, for example. Nor are they “punished or held back when those risky initiatives fail”. They are “not hemmed in by role definitions or organisational structures”. And “they don’t keep quiet when they disagree with something”. And so on. Altogether, they are an admirable body of men and women – mostly men (70%), admittedly, but, hey, what’s a little gender imbalance in a brave new world.

Dr Schmidt’s smart creatives work all the hours that God sends, and then some. They are, to use his term, “overworked in a good way”. The concept of work-life balance can, he thinks, “be insulting to smart, dedicated employees”, for whom work is an important part of life, not something to be separated. The best corporate cultures, he thinks, “invite and enable people to be overworked in a good way, with too many interesting things to do both at work and at home”.

All of which no doubt makes perfect sense if you’re running an outfit like Google. But it also highlights the extent to which our world is bifurcating into parallel universes. In one – that populated by technology companies, investment banks, hedge funds and other elite institutions – people are over-stimulated, appreciated, overworked (but in a “good way”, of course) and richly rewarded. Meanwhile, in the other universe, people are under-stimulated, overworked and poorly rewarded. And the gap between the two universes appears to be widening, not narrowing every time Moore’s Law ratchets up another notch in computing power.

Which is why we need to make a connection between what those smart creatives in California and elsewhere are creating and what is happening in the real world. In that domain, the level of economic inequality has attained staggering proportions for reasons that Thomas Piketty set out in his celebrated book Capital in the 21st Century.

Although there have been lots of detailed arguments about Piketty’s work, his central proposition – that in the absence of special circumstances such as war or redistributive taxation, the rate of return to capital exceeds the rate of return to labour – is both simple and obvious. What it means is that if your wealth involves ownership of capital assets (like company shares), then you will inexorably get richer at compound rates.

One of the oddest things about the furore surrounding Piketty’s book was that almost nobody talked about the role of technology in all this. Specifically, there was little discussion of the strange coincidence that the recent catastrophic rise in levels of inequality has coincided neatly with the digital revolution.

When you think about it, it’s clear that this isn’t just a random correlation. The digital revolution is driving inequality, not reducing it. That’s because the technology has certain characteristics (zero marginal returns, network effects and technological lock-in, to name just three) which confer colossal power on corporations that have mastered the technology. In the process it confers vast wealth on those who own them.

But that wealth isn’t shared with the users of the platforms operated by those corporations: most of the work that generates revenues for Facebook or Google is done by unpaid workers – you and me. And folks who work in paid occupations powered by those platforms – Uber drivers, Amazon warehouse workers, to name just two – are not sharing in the wealth it generates for their owners either. Like Google’s smart creatives, these people are also overworked. But not in that “good way” advocated by Dr Schmidt.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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