Posts tagged 'ethics'

One of non-fiction’s most enduring ethical dilemmas is balancing the public interest against the interest of its subjects. The dilemma has come to the fore again following news that Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad has won an appeal that clears her of a claim that her book, The Bookseller of Kabul, invaded the privacy of its subject. In 2010, a court ordered the author and the publisher to pay about US$18,500 each to Rais.

The 2002 book of reportage – an international bestseller, since translated into 42 languages – was researched while Seierstad lived with Shah Muhammad Rais and his family for three months in Kabul soon after the Taliban government was toppled. It depicts Rais – a bookseller and intellectual – and his extended family, painting a portrait of an educated man who has suffered greatly as a result of government repression. It also depicts Rais as an authoritarian patriarch whose wives and children are obliged to lead highly cloistered lives.

Although Seierstad changed the names of her subjects, Rais claimed that locals recognised him in the book and that his family was made unsafe as a result. He withdrew his support of the book following its publication, claimed that it insulted him, his country and his religion, and flew to Europe to campaign against it. He wrote his own memoir, Once upon a time there was a bookseller in Kabul – which, predictably, was not an international bestseller – and in 2005 sought political asylum in Norway.

The case gained a great deal of media attention in Norway, leading Seierstad to admit that she harboured some regrets about the book. More recently, she’s retracted those sentiments. “There is nothing I would change,” she told The Guardian. “To change it I would have had to write a totally different book.”

As Italian pensioners prepare to cop the brunt of bank foolhardiness, one minister has found it all too much. Italy’s welfare minister, Elsa Fornero, was delivering news of cuts to pensions at a press conference announcing a $30 billion austerity program when – on the cusp of uttering the word ‘sacrifice’ – she began to weep, cutting the press conference short. Fornero is part of a team of technocrats who deposed Italy’s democratically elected government to discipline Italian government spending. The move was part of a plan devised primarily by France and Germany to save the common European currency and, by extension, major French and German banks. These banks hold much of the debt held by southern European governments in crisis, such as Greece and Italy.

Pensioners being impoverished to pay for bankers' mistakes is precisely the kind of paradox that has triggered Occupy protests around the globe. There’s been a glut of excellent coverage of the debate, which we’ve visited a few times. Since then, we’ve enjoyed The New Yorker’s profile of Kalle Lasn and Micah White, two key figures behind Adbusters magazine and the Occupy movement, while Business Week profiled another key occupier, anarchist anthropologist David Graeber.

Two giants of the comic book world are publicly feuding over Occupy. Sin City creator Frank Miller has dubbed the movement “garbage” while Alan Moore, of V for Vendetta fame, sees it as “just ordinary people reclaiming rights which should always have been theirs”. The Guy Fawkes-like masks he devised with artist David Lloyd for the Vendetta series have been co-opted by Occupy protesters and Anonymous hackers alike – and Moore doesn’t mind a bit. “It turns protests into performances,” he recently told The Guardian. “The mask is very operatic; it creates a sense of romance and drama.”

Meanwhile, the Archbishop of Canterbury has tied himself in knots trying to devise a theological argument for ending the Occupy London protest, which is encamped on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral in the heart of London’s financial district. In an article published in the Radio Times, Rowan Williams has written that Jesus wouldn’t necessarily have been on the side of the Occupy protesters. The Australian reports that Williams answers the question, ‘What would Jesus do?’ with, “He would first of all be there: sharing the risks, asking the long and hard questions. Not just taking sides but steadily changing the entire atmosphere by the questions he asks of everybody involved, rich and poor, capitalist and protester and cleric.” So Williams' Jesus – the same Jesus who mumbled some gobbledegook about camels and needles – is a Jesus who doesn’t take a fixed position on wealth inequality but instead asks lots of people lots of interesting questions. Perhaps then a modern-day Jesus would be a journalist rather than a carpenter, in which case he would be joining a long line of media pundits who suffer from a Messiah complex.

This is precisely not the kind of journalist that Amanda Hoh describes in her report on The Age’s website on citizen journalism in Egypt. Mostafa Bahgat is a young Egyptian videographer whose footage takes realism to new extremes. Warning: this footage is not for the feint of heart, nor for anyone who believes journalism should always represent both sides of an issue.

A Columbia Journalism Review feature called ‘Confidence Game’ has taken up the case for newspapers. Dean Starkman argues that a group of intellectuals he calls the ‘Future of News’ group, or “FON consensus”, is championing a new kind of journalism based on peer-production at the expense of the traditional news media. Starkman argues that this new kind of journalism can’t ever hope to produce the public interest journalism of the traditional news media – the kind of institution-centred journalism typified by Nick Davies, the Guardian journalist who broke the News of the World scandal. Starkman calls his preferred model of journalism the Neo-Institutional Hub-and-Spoke model. He advocates “[r]ebuilding and shoring up institutions” that can give professional reporters the time they require to produce journalism in the public interest. The reporting is published by the institution and disseminated and commented upon by social media.

At a Wheeler Centre event earlier this year, ‘Taking Liberties With the Press’, media commentator Margaret Simons spoke in defence of ‘public interest reporting’ but admitted that the notion was a difficult one to define. “Journalism relies on the unauthorised disclosure. That’s what most journalism that isn’t public relations is … The question is where do you draw the [ethical] line and why, and the answer of course is the public interest. But what I would say is that journalists in general and certainly journalists in this country don’t give enough thought to what we mean by that.”

(Click to watch video.)

The words ‘psychopath’ and ‘psychopathy’ have a chequered history in psychiatry. Widely used in the mid-20th century, they’ve become more contested in recent decades as the psychiatric community tries to define a psychopath with scientific rigour. Deborah Cameron, a Scottish feminist linguist, wrote in 1987 that the word ‘psychopathy’ has become an “infinitely elastic, catch-all category”. An article by R. Blackburn the following year in the British Journal of Psychiatry argued that the word was more of a moral judgment than a scientific category.

Around that time, a psychiatrist called Robert Hare developed a checklist to determine whether or not someone was a psychopath. That checklist became the basis for Welsh journalist Jon Ronson’s investigation of psychopathy, The Psychopath Test (previously mentioned here, here and here).

These days, psychopathy is back in vogue, largely thanks to Ronson. His research found that psychopaths, as defined by the Hare checklist, make up one per cent of the general population – but that there are four times that number at the highest levels of business and politics. (To see the video of Ronson’s recent Wheeler Centre appearance, click on the image below.)

It’s an assessment that Conrad Black, a Canadian former media baron and owner of The Age, might well agree with. Just today, in an article in the Business section of the Huffington Post, Black has published a damning assessment of Rupert Murdoch in which he labels his nemesis a psychopath: “My admiration for his boldness and acumen and our previous 25 years of more than civil relations make it unpleasant, despite his unspeakable assault on me, to have to conclude that he is, in my personal belief, a psychopath. I think behind his nondescript personality lurks a repressed, destructive malice. His is, and has been proved to be, in some measure, a criminal organization.” Of course, Black’s diagnosis is highly unreliable: he’s now serving time in the US for white collar crimes after long having been the subject of News Limited newspaper opprobrium.

(Click to watch video.)

In a feature published in today’s Age, US psychologist Christopher Ryan likens monogamy to vegetarianism, saying a monogamous lifestyle is possible but not necessarily what human beings are predisposed to adhering to.

Christopher Ryan is the co-author – with his wife, psychiatrist Cacilda Jetha – of Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality. He’ll appear at the Wheeler Centre on Thursday, delivering this week’s Lunchbox/Soapbox on the topic of ‘Sexual Vegetarianism’.

In this video/podcast of a previous Lunchbox/Soapbox on the same theme, writer/comedian Sue-Ann Post argues the case against monogamy.

Today’s edition of Crikey features a link to a YouTube video of a BBC interview with London-based independent trader Alessio Rastani speaking with unusual forthrightness, if not downright nihilism, on the morality – or lack thereof – that drives market logic: “The governments don’t rule the world, Goldman Sachs rules the world.” (Speaking of Goldman Sachs, here’s video footage of senior NYPD police pepper-spraying a peaceful anti-Wall Street demonstration on the weekend.)

Crikey also links readers to a piece in the international online edition of German daily Die Spiegel reporting on a study suggesting share traders are more reckless than psychopath. Swiss researchers have found that, according to the report, “stockbrokers' behavior is more reckless and manipulative than that of psychopaths.” The study echoes the findings of Jon Ronson in his book, The Psychopath Test, in which he found that the incidence of psychopaths in the boardroom is four times higher than that in the general population (previously covered here).

What is a psychopath? And should psychopaths be allowed to rule the world? Author Jon Ronson will be appearing at the Wheeler Centre next week. This event has already sold out, but we’ll upload the video/podcast soon afterwards. Sign up to our e-newsletter, follow us on Twitter or like us on Facebook to be kept up-to-date.

The Australian yesterday published an extensive piece by editor-at-large Paul Kelly in which the newspaper’s former editor responded to the current issue of Quarterly Essay, penned by Robert Manne. Subtitled, Bad News: Murdoch’s Australian and the Shaping of the Nation, Manne’s essay argues that the News Limited national broadsheet has had a negative influence on Australian democracy. It’s an argument Paul Kelly rejects in no uncertain terms. Under the headline ‘Robert Manne throws truth overboard’, Kelly writes, “There is another possibility beyond the realm of Manne’s mind – that The Australian has struck an effective balance of strong editorial independence within a global corporation headed by a strong chief executive committed to newspapers.”

Both Paul Kelly and Robert Manne will be appearing together at the Wheeler Centre next Wednesday evening for a moderated panel discussion exploring the themes of both the Quarterly Essay and Kelly’s response published in today’s Australian.

As part of the 2011 Melbourne Writers Festival, a two-day conference called ‘New News’ was held at the Wheeler Centre last weekend. The keynote speaker was Jay Rosen, who chairs the journalism faculty at New York University. Jay has published his address on his blog, Press Think. Here’s an excerpt.

Imagine the entirety of the political reporting and commentary produced by the New York Times or the political staff of the ABC and plot it on a grid. On the left side of the page: appearances. On the right side: realities. On the top of the page: arguments. On the bottom: facts. Appearances, realities, arguments and facts. All political news should be divided into these categories, and journalists should organize their daily report into my four quadrants.

Under appearances we find everything that is just that: the attempt to make things appear a certain way. All media stunts. Everything that fits under the management of impressions. Or politics as entertainment. The photo ops. The press releases issued in lieu of doing something. […]

My suggestion is to report appearances as just that: mere appearances. Which would be a way of jeering at them, labeling them as not quite real. So the appearances section would be heavy on satire and simple quotation. In the US, Jon Stewart has become a huge star by satirizing the world of appearances. This would be a way to get in on some of that action. Appearances, then, means downgrading or penalizing politicians who deal in the fake, the trivial, the merely sensational. In other words: “watch out or you’ll wind up in the appearances column.”

Under realities we find everything that is actually about real problems, real solutions, real proposals, consequential plans and of course events that have an integrity beyond their fitness as media provocations. This is the political news proper, cured of what Tanner calls the sideshow.

But then there’s my other axis. Arguments and facts. Both are important, both are a valid part of politics.

A new paradigm for journalism, courtesy of Jay Rosen’s blog, PressThink

So imagine my four quadrants.

Bottom left: Appearances rendered as fact. Example: the media stunt.

Top left: Phony arguments. Manufactured controversies. Sideshows.

Bottom right: Today’s new realities: get the facts. The actual news of politics.

Top right. Real arguments: Debates, legitimate controversies, important speeches.

Now imagine all of today’s political news and commentary sorted into these four quadrants. This becomes the new portal to political news. Appearances and realities, arguments and facts. To render the political world that way, journalists would have to exercise their judgment about what is real and what is not. And this is exactly what would bring them into proper alignment with our needs as citizens.

You can read the entire post here, and you can watch or listen to the video/podcast of a Wheeler Centre event of earlier this year, ‘Dumbing Down Democracy’, featuring George Megalogenis in conversation with Lindsay Tanner following the publication of Tanner’s book, Sideshow.

A two-day conference being held tomorrow and Saturday as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival is taking a look at the impact of digital technologies and culture on the business and practice of news. ‘New News’ is a program of events – most of them at the Wheeler Centre – that will explore a dazzling variety of topics and feature some of Australia’s most highly respected journalists and media commentators.

Topics will include political journalism (here and here), science writing, universities and journalism, innovation, spin, journalists and trauma, ‘democratic’ news, rural affairs and sub-editors, among others.

“If journalism and the media industry in Australia are serious about rebuilding their absolutely disastrous standing, the work starts with reforming the self-regulation media ethics system.”

Johan Lidberg at New Matilda explains there are instances of media self-regulation that have worked in the public interest.

Among our favourite moments during the televised parliamentary inquiry into phone hacking at News International was when James Murdoch was asked if he was familiar with the legal term ‘wilful blindness’ (he answered he wasn’t). Here’s a New Statesman essay on the concept as it relates to mega-corporations like News Corp.

Now, news from the UK would suggest James Murdoch, among others, might not be guilty of wilful blindness after all, but of something more serious following the publication of a letter directly implicating senior News International management in the hacking. It seems News Corp is preparing for the scandal to traverse the Atlantic, if the firepower of their legal team is any measure.

One of the more fascinating aspects of the ongoing News International saga is how the story has been reported by Murdoch-owned mastheads. Yesterday’s Australian published a piece by Stephen Brook arguing that News Limited is not as dominant in the Australian market as is commonly thought.

“I believe it has become too easy, too simple and too convenient to blame Murdoch for all the ills of society,” wrote veteran News Limited journalist Mark Day, also in yesterday’s Australian. Day was writing, in part, about his experience as a Wheeler Centre guest last week for the event, ‘Taking Liberties with the Press’.

We love a review, especially when it’s from a participant, so we thought we’d link to it today to continue what was a fascinating conversation. You can watch our video of the session below or, if microblogging is more your speed, read all the tweets related to the event here – thanks to all those who tweeted on the night.

(Click to watch video.)

“There are some people who don’t like change. For everyone else, there’s WikiLeaks.” A viral YouTube ad produced by WikiLeaks and featuring Julian Assange is using guerrilla advertising techniques to raise the funds it needs to continue operating. The ad targets MasterCard’s globally-successful “Priceless” campaign to draw attention to the banking blockade that has prevented WikiLeaks from receiving some US$15 million of donations.

“Censorship, like everything else in the West, has been privatized,” began a media release WikiLeaks published in late June to coincide with the launch of the campaign. “For six months now,” it continued, “five major US financial institutions, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, Western Union and the Bank of America have tried to economically strangle WikiLeaks as a result of political pressure from Washington… The attack is entirely outside of any due process or rule of law.”

Last week, we published an excerpt of an op-ed originally published in The Atlantic by Lowy Institute scholar Mark Fullilove. Fullilove’s op-ed claimed the News of the World phone-hacking scandal was morally comparable with WikiLeaks. Whatever the merits of his argument, financially, there is no comparison between the two: while WikiLeaks is a non-profit organisation, News International can rely on bottomless pockets to defend its interests in the courtroom, as explained by John Dean (a former White House lawyer) in The Guardian this weekend.

In a video/podcast of the recent Wheeler Centre event, ‘Does WikiLeaks Matter?’ published today, Guy Rundle argues that WikiLeaks does indeed matter. WikiLeaks, Rundle says, is “one way of doing something in an era in which the whole constellation of power, information and the state is changing as epochally as it did in the 17th century, when the modern state and political systems were born.” [Click on the link below to watch the video.]

As we recently reported, last month Julian Assange was the keynote speaker at the Splendour in the Grass music festival. Delivered on Skype due to his house arrest, Assange’s address claimed that, among other things, “This generation is burning the mass media to the ground.“ Assange will be a guest at the Sydney Opera House’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas in October, arguing that WikiLeaks has not gone far enough.

(Click to watch video.)

The Enthusiast reports that legendary US comic artist Robert Crumb has cancelled a scheduled appearance in Sydney later this month following a Daily Telegraph report he believes misrepresented him. The Telegraph report begins with the introduction, “A self-confessed sex pervert whose explicit comic drawings cannot be shown in Australia is to deliver a talk and hold a special exhibition at the Sydney Opera House.”

As viewers of the classic documentary Crumb will attest, Robert Crumb is one of comic art’s most recognised names and an emblematic figure of the US counter-culture movement. He’d been scheduled to appear in conversation with American comic book editor, publisher and critic Gary Groth as part of the Sydney Opera House’s ‘Graphic’ weekend of 21 and 22 August.

In a story in The Australian claiming he is “miffed”, Crumb says he feels anxious “about having to confront some angry sexual assault crisis group” and offers no justification for his work: “I do these crazy cartoons … I have no defence. I just have to throw up my hands.”

“Crumb might be overreacting,” The Enthusiast concludes, “but mature Australians lose out once again to a vocal, philistine minority and puritanical, puerile journalism.”

What’s the difference between WikiLeaks and the News of the World? More than meets the eye, according to Michael Fullilove, director of the Global Issues Program at the Lowy Institute for International Policy. In an Atlantic opinion piece entitled ‘The News of the WikiLeaks: Both Share a Dangerous Rationale’, Fullilove has found all kinds of connections between the two.

“Both,” he writes, “adhere to the same dangerous rationale, that no one is entitled to confidential information. As Assange said in April: "The government doesn’t have a right to secrets.” But would the world be safer or saner if governments could not hold confidences? How could wars be averted in such a world? How could peace agreements or trade deals be negotiated?

“Both hacks and hackers eschew the balancing of competing imperatives: the tabloids in the pursuit of profit; Assange in the pursuit of an ideology.

“Both institutions are blasé about breaking laws to obtain information they say we all have a right to see.

“Both are willing to play God. There is no human frailty or weakness the tabloids are not prepared to expose and judge. Rarely do they show mercy or compassion. Assange has his own capricious ethical code, which he summarized last November: ‘I like crushing bastards.’

“Both exhibit the same reckless disregard for the innocent victims of their actions. Tabloid editors are prepared to ruin bystanders for the sake of a scoop. In his early reluctance to sift through and redact the cables he had acquired on Afghanistan, Julian Assange was wilfully blind to the fate of Afghanis who had assisted the NATO forces. According to journalists from the Guardian, when they pressed him on this issue he replied: ‘These people were collaborators, informants. They deserve to die.’”

The Wheeler Centre is hosting a Talking Point event, ‘Taking Liberties with the Press’, tomorrow night at 6:15pm. Panellists will be Margaret Simons, Mark Day and Professor Rod Tiffen; the event will be chaired by Richard Ackland.

Natalie Sambhi, co-editor of the blog Security Scholar, attended last week’s Intelligence Squared debate on the merits of Australian involvement in Afghanistan. She’s reviewed the event on Security Scholar blog. This is an excerpt.

On a chilly Thursday night, we descended upon Melbourne Town Hall to listen to our friend and colleague, Raoul Heinrichs, partake in the Wheeler Centre debate on Afghanistan. We came to hear whether the war effort would be savaged, whether Australian lives would be needlessly lost, whether there was hope for the Afghan people, or whether we, as a country, were wasting our time. We came to hear a lawyer, a scholar, a prominent feminist, a retired general, a young Afghan woman, and a philosopher. We came to hear their perspectives and experiences. We came to observe the public’s reactions; to hear how everyday people received and digested narratives of Afghanistan. I wanted to see whether people still remembered we were in war.

The topic of Thursday’s debate, “There is no justification for risking Australian lives in Afghanistan”, was always going to be hard to stick to. There was a sense of mission creep; a tendency for speakers to appeal to the broader merits of foreign intervention in Afghanistan, rather than centring on the specific risk to Australians (civilian and military) serving there. The affirmative team took the view that the intractability of the conflict dictated that no further Australian lives were worth risking. While each speaker had their own spin on this theme, they all concentrated on what they saw as the dire security situation on the ground, the lack of proper resourcing, and the lack of strategic interests beyond the ANZUS treaty (which, in Heinrichs’ view, we have already satisfied). Read more.

The Sydney Opera House’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas released its program today, and for many Melbournians, the festival’s most dangerous idea is that we would have to skip the AFL Grand Final to attend. The line-up features some impressive names pushing some controverisal wheelbarrows. Julian Assange, for example, will deliver the festival’s opening address on Friday, 30 September, arguing that WikiLeaks has not gone far enough. The following day, an Intelligence Squared debate will argue the proposition that the media has no morals. Things get really dangerous on the Sunday, when Jon Ronson will speak on how psychopaths make the world go ‘round (previously covered in the Dailies) and Slavoj Žižek, dubbed the 'Elvis of cultural theory’, will argue the case for communism. Here’s the full program.

Julian Assange recently made a (virtual) appearance as the keynote speaker at the Splendour in the Grass music festival in Queensland (keynote speeches are a recent trend at music festivals). He spoke about a generational change in perspective currently underway: “This generation is burning the mass media to the ground. We’re reclaiming our rights to world history. We are ripping open secret archives from Washington to Cairo. We’re reclaiming our rights to share ourselves and our times with each other – to be the agents and writers of our own history. We don’t know yet exactly where we are, but we can see where we’re going.” Here’s a report from Mess & Noise and here’s the YouTube footage.

For more on Assange and WikiLeaks, revisit these two Wheeler Centre videos/podcasts on WikiLeaks (here and here).

“[A] reviewer is entitled to be spiteful as long as she is honest,” wrote Mr Justice Tugendhat last week in his summing-up notes of the first libel case against a national newspaper in the UK since 2009. The judge ruled that £65,000 damages ought to be paid to Sarah Thornton, the Canadian writer of Seven Days in the Art World, by the Telegraph Media Group, publisher of the Telegraph, which in 2008 published a review of Thornton’s book by noted critic Lynn Barber.

In the review, Barber referred to Thornton’s book as “pompous nonsense”, and the judge was at pains to say that Barber was well within her rights to do so. Where Barber overstepped the mark was in fibbing in the review. The book was based on a series of interviews with noted art world figures, including Barber. But in her review, Barber claimed to have been shocked (her eye, she wrote, “practically fell out of its socket”) to have seen her name on a list of interviewees. In fact, she had been interviewed, and Thornton sued. The author refused to settle out of court when an apology was offered. Here’s one blogger’s summary of the case.

In the UK, the case has revived the debate about the ethics of reviewing, which was only recently in the local news when Australian playwright David Williamson wrote to Crikey to defend his play Don Parties On, following a negative review by Jason Whittaker. How should a critic write a negative review? The Guardian’s Lyn Gardner writes, “If you really want to undermine an over-inflated production or performance, then wit and light irony are often the best weapons.”

The News International scandal, or ‘Hackgate’, set the Australian public imagination alight this week. For proof, we need only be reminded that every single television network, other than SBS, beamed the appearance of Rupert and James Murdoch before a parliamentary inquiry live into our living rooms late Tuesday night. Other than royal weddings and the 9/11 attack, there are few precedents for this kind of coverage. That it was a parliamentary inquiry into an affair that remains – at least for now – confined only to the UK adds to the extraordinary nature of the story. Is it a reflection of the strong cultural ties between Australia and the United Kingdom? Is it because the Murdochs are, at least in part, still an Australian clan? Is it because the story reflects some kind of malaise in the local media landscape? Or is it because of its tragic dimensions, in the full Shakespearean sense of the word? Perhaps a little of all of the above.

The story reached its dramatic apex on Tuesday night. It’s hard to imagine better drama than Rupert Murdoch announcing that it was the most humble day of his life, or that the term ‘collective amnesia’ was a euphemism for lying, or James Murdoch claiming to be unfamiliar with the legal term ‘wilful blindness’, or a celebrity-starved comedian copping a savage right hook from Mrs Murdoch. If only News of the World were still around to report on it all. This was where tabloid and broadsheet journalism came together in the perfect Murdoch moment, the kind of drama his empire was built on.

But the circus moves on, and how – too quickly for many of the key players. Already, the local reaction has shifted at least twice. The government, seizing the moment, took up the cudgels. So too did the Greens, calling for an inquiry into media ownership and regulation. Precisely what kind of inquiry was unclear, although a few ideas were mooted at New Matilda. Nevertheless the media’s reaction was hostile pretty much across the board. Yesterday morning on ABC 774, Melbourne’s top-rating talk-back host Jon Faine expressed fears it would lead to “third-world” media regulation laws.

Media academic Tim Dwyer was hopeful the affair might lead to more diversity in the local media landscape. “The meltdown at the News Corporation is already having positive effects on the way we think about the role of the contemporary news media,” he wrote. “First among these is an acknowledgment that media ownership diversity really matters a great deal in democracies.”

But in the course of the day the focus shifted again, this time towards regulating for privacy protection. Again, reactions have been mixed. Margaret Simons doubts hacking could happen in Australia, ironically because of the lack of media diversity. David Maguire reminds us of the difficulties of legislating for virtue while Bill Birnbauer writes, “General principles and codes that encourage independent, honest and transparent behaviour are useful but the variability of on-the-ground reporting makes it almost impossible to regulate media behavior in any way that is meaningful. In any event, rules and laws are no substitute for a moral compass.”

Image via WikiCommons

Expensive, time-consuming, redundant – and still necessary. News of the death of investigative reporting has been greatly exaggerated, if Hackgate is any barometer. The story that has dominated (some) headlines in recent weeks has been labelled a “triumph for investigative reporting”, not least for reporter Nick Davies. Nick Davies has been reporting on the failings of the global media industry for years. When Julian Assange wanted The Guardian to publish Bradley Manning’s explosive stash of cables, Nick Davies was the man he approached. They later had a much-publicised falling out.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has written for Newsweek on how the newspaper covered the story. Remembering the million-dollar damages paid to a News of the World journalist who’d been bullied by Andy Coulson in 2009 – ignored by other newspapers – Rusbridger writes, “There seemed to be some omertà principle at work that meant that not a single other national newspaper thought this could possibly be worth an inch of newsprint.” The omertà ended when it became clear that phone hacking was not just a prank played on celebrities but involved a murdered 13 year-old girl.

In today’s New Matilda, Mark Fletcher asks, has News Limited done anything wrong? For those looking for a neat summary of why the Hackgate story is such a big deal, not just in the UK but for the media in general, look no further than a piece by the Columbia Journalism Review. We recommend reading the whole piece, but here are the key points:

“For starters, executives, editors, and reporters at News Corp.’s UK unit have: bribed the police; illegally hacked thousands of people’s phones, including a 13-year-old then-missing murder victim’s; tampered with evidence while the victim was still missing. They interfered with a second murder investigation; misled police and Parliament, repeatedly, when questioned about these activities; knowingly employed an ax-murder suspect who had been convicted and imprisoned for planting cocaine on an innocent woman in a divorce case; paid millions of dollars to victims explicitly in exchange for their silence; paid large sums to former employees after they had been convicted of crimes committed at the behest of News Corporation employees; continued to pay for convicted former employees’ high-powered lawyers. It has further been revealed that a senior News International executive deleted millions of emails in an ‘apparent attempt to obstruct Scotland Yard’s inquiry’; hid the contents of a top journalist’s desk after he was arrested; stuffed documents into trash bags and took them away as detectives came into the office to investigate; put the scandal’s lead police investigator, whose inquiry was a bad joke, on the News Corp. payroll with a plum columnist job.”

How did the constabulary react? The CJR piece says the police “stuffed thousands of pages of convicted hacker Glenn Mulcaire’s notes in plastic bags, leaving them unexamined (or at least uncataloged) for years; did so while insisting publicly, and before Parliament, that the scandal was limited to two people and, crucially, that a full investigation had been performed; hired Neil Wallis, who was News of the World’s deputy editor while the crimes were committed, to advise the police on how to handle their own PR problems stemming from the hacking scandal; Wallis ferried information back to News Corp.; the police notified just a handful of people that their phones might have been hacked despite having evidence that in fact thousands had been; concealed their payments to Wallis for a year. Meanwhile, top police officials dined repeatedly with News International executives during the investigation.” Hence the resignations.

The British government has come under pressure too. This is why: “Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron hired the News of the World editor Andy Coulson, who oversaw a newsroom in which criminal activity was commonplace, to be a top aide, despite warnings that Coulson was personally implicated in the scandal; Labour leader Ed Miliband hired a Murdoch journalist to be top flack, and he promptly told the party to tiptoe around the scandal; regulators came very close to approving a massive TV deal for News Corp. that would have furthered its stranglehold on Britain’s private media, all while the scandal was continuing to worsen.”

The Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal has published an editorial defending its parent company, which the American Journalism Review has labelled “misguided”.

Tony Wilson reflects on his eerie, and entirely unintended, prescience.

My novel is coming true. It happened with my last novel too. No sooner had I written Players (Text 2005) – the story of a Sam Newman-like character pretending to have cancer to shrug off a scandal – than came the news that Sam Newman actually had cancer and was receiving treatment live on 60 Minutes. I gave my character testicular cancer. Newman’s was prostate. Missed by five centimetres.

For Making News (Pier 9, 2010), I turned my attention to the British tabloids. I’d read Fleet Street memoirs such as Wensley Clarkson’s hilarious Dog Eat Dog and Piers Morgan’s masterpiece of self congratulation The Insider, books which detail the disturbing and occasionally hilarious skulduggery of the newspaper world. Buy ups, beat ups, break ins and stake outs. Cannonball Run-style car chases between reporters chasing exclusives. Piers Morgan even writes about a royal pubic hair being sent through the post to a prospective admirer.

In my novel, the celebrity Dekker family is at war with The Globe, a notorious tabloid edited by the suave, erudite boy wonder, Anton Giles. Giles was based on the foppish and yet silver-tongued Piers Morgan, although it could quite easily have been Andy Coulson or Rebekah Brooks. All are marked by their ambition, ruthlessness and ability to curry favour with the world’s most powerful mogul.

To bring down Giles, I managed to include phone tapping, but didn’t think invasion of privacy could topple a media empire as large as News International. Nor did I dare to toss in prime ministers, press secretaries, police corruption, dynastic revolution or murdered teens. To think I spent a year bathing in the filth of the fourth estate – and didn’t get dirty enough.

The surprise has been that News of the World would extend its periscope beyond the lives of celebrities. The tide of public opinion would never have turned if the targets had remained the rich and famous. We need our toe sucking scandals. We relish those post baby bellies sagging into the surf. But the idea of leeching information from the dead and grieving at their most desperate moments, it beggars belief.

If only I could do one more draft.

In light of the News of the World scandal, Making News has received a UK release. It is available here.

The panel discussion featured in this video is the intellectual equivalent of the Big Day Out, Lollapalooza or Glastonbury. Three of the world’s most outspoken figures in philosophy and journalism appeared on stage together in conversation at London’s Frontline Club earlier this month. Journalist Amy Goodman spoke with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, described by Goodman as “the most widely published person on Earth”, and Slavoj Žižek, “the Elvis of cultural theory”, according to the New York Times. They discussed the WikiLeaks effect on world politics, the release of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, and Cablegate.

Any hope senior New Limited executives might have harboured that fallout from the phone hacking scandal might be quarantined in the UK seems to be fading. The Nation, an openly progressive weekly, has republished a 2008 report in which a former executive of Fox News, which is openly conservative, alleged that the network engaged in phone hacking.

This comes after the FBI last week announced it was launching an investigation. The investigation was prompted by allegations by a New York City police officer, who claimed he was offered payment to hack into the phone records of victims of the 9/11 attacks, and/or their families.

One fascinating contribution to the debate was made last week by disgraced media mogul, Conrad Black, who once owned The Age. Writing in the Financial Times, Black compared Murdoch to another “great bad man”, Napoleon. Black paints a vivid and ambivalent picture of a powerful man, but lays the blame elsewhere: “The fault is the British establishment’s and it must not be seduced and intimidated, so profoundly and durably, again.”

In this video of a Wheeler Centre event from February 2010, a panel of journalists, chaired by former editor of The Age, Michael Gawenda, discuss the importance of ethics to the business of journalism.

(Click to watch video.)

For as long as we can collectively remember, humans have struggled with the problem of memory. Its unreliability was compounded by the dishonesty and disingenuousness of the mind, in both its conscious and unconscious forms. But a new book – Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age – argues that, in the course of a generation, the problem of memory has been flipped on its head. (Watch a presentation by the author.)

Image via Mixy/Flickr

According to author Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, the problem of memory is simply that there is too much of it. “The overabundance of cheap storage on hard disks means that it is no longer economical to even decide whether to remember or forget,” writes Stuart Jeffries in a Guardian profile of the academic. Our digital fingerprints are eternal – and more efficiently retrieved and collated by commercial entities than they could ever be by ourselves. Once that tweet has gone out, as many have discovered to their regret, there is no retrieving it – or one’s reputation.

The book speculates that one adverse consequence of memory’s digital overload might well be that no-one says anything controversial anymore. “Will our children be outspoken in online equivalents of school newspapers if they fear their blunt words might hurt their future career?” asks the author. “Will we protest against corporate greed or environmental destruction if we worry that these corporations may in some distant future refuse doing business with us?”

Web writer and academic Jonathan Zittrain has a radical idea designed to give people a second chance. He calls it reputation bankruptcy, and some are calling it the next evolution in social media.

Will they use a condom? Cover art of an historical romance novel by Tom Miller, c1960s, courtesy anoldent/Flickr

It’s perhaps the most common controversy in the world of ideas: how does the content of art and literature change us? Do representations of violence and sex corrupt us? Is porn bad for us? And what about … romance novels?

A couple of weeks ago, writer and relationships columnist Susan Quilliam published an essay on the potentially harmful effect reading romance novels might have on their readers, who are predominantly women. The headline-grabbing essay echoed claims reported in early June by a Christian psychologist that she was treating “more and more women who are clinically addicted to romantic books”, and that these books were the cause of some of their relationship dissatisfactions.

The essay has sparked widespread debate. Strangely, a good deal of the discussion seems to hinge on… condom use. But the discourse about romance fiction more broadly seems to mirror the debate on how pornography affects men: do these representations of sex and romance – as the case may be – diminish their users?

Melbourne academic Lauren Rosewarne has another take. She objects to the presumption that consumers of art and entertainment should be such easy touches. “I don’t doubt for a moment that romance novels provide problematic information about sex,” she writes for The Conversation. “But to pretend that the only message, or even just the strongest message received, comes from steamy paperbacks is simplistic at best and conservatively deceptive at worst.”

In her Lunchbox/Soapbox address, In Defence of Trash Fiction, Toni Jordan spoke about the challenges of writing romance fiction.

In this Lunchbox/Soapbox, author and academic Sarah Maddison tackles the issue of mainstream Australia’s unacknowledged, unresolved guilt over the brutality of white settlement over two centuries ago — as well as its poor relationship with the indigenous population now. How can we redress injustice and convert our awareness of the past into a productive force?

The challenge, Maddison says, is an adaptive one — and it won’t be overcome without a painful and uncomfortable process of introspection. But, she continues, “by taking account of past injustice in this work, we may have the opportunity to experience ourselves as truly moral, rather than as defensive and anxious about the past”.

At stake is also the authenticity of our national identity, or “diminishing the gap between the values people stand for, and the reality they face”. In other words, we must reconcile our closely held idea of the fair go with our racist past.

(Click to watch video.)

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Do you believe that guilt, evasiveness and awkwardness surrounding our past hinders progress on indigenous issues?

Can we rely on public institutions to lead the way on adapting to moral truth? If not, what’s the best way to address our nation’s brutal beginnings?

An image posted on the Facebook page ‘Free Amina Abdalla’

In his 2010 book Reality Hunger, US writer David Shields argued against traditional realist fiction in favour of a new kind of fiction, one that wasn’t afraid to blur the boundaries between fiction and reality. It was a manifesto that appeared to be a theoretical mirror to the collapse of fiction and reality that is occurring in the online world, where invented personae proliferate. But when the writer of a blog called ‘A Gay Girl in Damascus’ was recently outed as being 37-year-old US peace activist, student and heterosexual male Tom MacMaster, and not Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari, reactions across the world were a clear indication that, pace David Shields, we still expect some authenticity in our authors.

While the story has slipped off the front pages, the blog hasn’t been killed off. At least, not yet. Last Thursday, a contrite Tom MacMaster published another post. Writing as himself now, he blogged about a previous incarnation of his heroine. In Amina’s former existence (which ended in 2010), he had fabricated an Amina who was, on this occasion, a married Syrian-American mother of two. This proto-Amina, MacMaster wrote, also suffered injustice at the hands of Syrian authorities: her husband had disappeared for several days during a family trip.

In response, the silence – writes MacMaster – was deafening. “She received exactly one anonymous comment: ‘That kinda sucks’. Nothing more. No one was alarmed. No one started a campaign to free him. No one sent messages of support. The blog had two followers. I deleted it. A failure. No one had noticed. I revised Amina. Now, she was single and in Syria … and openly gay … I worked on her back story for a while before debuting the new version.” Amina mark II, on the other hand, received much more attention. Perhaps it was her youth, or her good looks, or her openly transgressive identity, or perhaps it was because world events caught up with her – whatever the reason, this Amina received decidedly more attention.

As some bloggers achieve celebrity status through their blogs (albeit of a minor order), it’s no surprise that flogs (short for fake blogs) will also mushroom. But whereas literary fiction retains prestige despite dwindling sales, flogs are the blogging world’s dirty little secret. And Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari is a case in point: a figure that for a day or two became the torchbearer of an entire nation’s tortured soul turned out to be a hoax. But in an online world that thrives on concealment, is is still reasonable to expect a clear demarcation between the invented and the real?

Addendum: we were alerted on Facebook to an article in The Age suggesting MacMaster has invented another persona for himself.

Fantasy master Terry Pratchett has come under fire in the UK for his involvement in a television documentary screened on Monday night advocated assisted suicide. In the documentary, which was screened on BBC2, Sir Terry travelled to Switzerland to film a terminally ill businessman take a lethal dose of barbiturates. He himself suffers from early onset Alzheimer’s disease and is a vocal supporter of assisted dying. He’s even considering signing consent forms himself that would facilitate his own assisted suicide.

Terry Pratchett discussed his thoughts on death in a recent appearance in Melbourne for the Wheeler Centre.

The release of the American Library Association's "most challenged books of 2009" this week has created quite a stir. The Atlantic explains why the books that made it to the list are doing their job.