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Ed Webb

Fringe interests - by Mic Wright - 0 views

  •  
    righteous anger driving piercing analysis
Ed Webb

Why we need restrictions on coronavirus surveillance - 0 views

  • As governments around the world struggle to stave the spread of the disease they are understandably harnessing the power of technology. We must ensure this is done with respect for human rights and civil liberties and that we don’t weave a surveillance apparatus that can’t be undone.
  • These technologies are being deployed quickly and, it appears, without human rights impact assessments, sufficient privacy controls, or adequate restrictions on their use outside of the current context.
  • there’s an dearth of information about who has access to the data, how long it can be maintained, what sort of privacy rights people in the databases have, what types of restrictions are in place to ensure the data is only used as intended to combat the spread of the virus, and what could be done with the technology afterwards. If there is one thing we know from technological solutions, once a capacity is built it can be used for many purposes beyond that for which it was intended.
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  • The NSO Group, for example, sells sophisticated surveillance technology it says is for fighting terrorism to governments around the world, several of which have turned around and deployed it against journalists. Its Pegasus spyware has been linked to government surveillance of journalists in India, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and the United States, including associates of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Now the company is reportedly testing in a dozen countries a new technology that matches location data collected by national telecoms with two weeks of mobile-phone tracking information from an infected person to identify those vulnerable to contagion who were in the patient’s vicinity for more than 15 minutes.
  • implementing sunset clauses on any new surveillance powers is essential if we don’t want coronavirus to undermine our rights as well as our health
Ed Webb

Exposure to news grows less fragmented with an increase in mobile access | PNAS - 0 views

  • the increase in mobile access to news actually leads to higher exposure to diverse content and that ideological self-selection explains only a small percentage of co-exposure to news
  • more than half of Internet users in the United States do not use online news
  • The abundance of media options is a central feature of today’s information environment. Many accounts, often based on analysis of desktop-only news use, suggest that this increased choice leads to audience fragmentation, ideological segregation, and echo chambers with no cross-cutting exposure
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  • the increasing divide between informed citizens and news avoiders
  • mainstream media outlets offer the common ground where ideologically diverse audiences converge online
  • more than half of the US online population consumes no online news, underlining the risk of increased information inequality driven by self-selection along lines of interest
  • Our dataset traces news consumption across different devices and unveils important differences in news diets when multiplatform or desktop-only access is used.
Ed Webb

Anti-trans rhetoric is rife in the British media. Little is being done to extinguish th... - 0 views

  • When it comes to trans rights "polling shows that the public isn't necessarily as hostile as the media, but the media [continues] to lead the conversation," Shon Faye, trans advocate and author of "The Transgender Issue," told CNN. According to her analysis, in 2020 the Times and the Sunday Times published "over 300 articles, almost one a day, and they were all negative."
  • Similar to dog-whistle racism, where coded pejorative phrases, such as "inner city" or the term "woke," are used as synonyms for Black and Brown people, constructions such as "woke mobs," "trans lobby," and "gender ideology" are uncritically used by columnists in print and reporters on live air as the British press parrots talking points by influential anti-trans grassroots campaigners, say trans advocates.
  • The British media has created an environment where "male violence is also displaced from the real culprits onto vulnerable transgender people, who are demonized collectively as abusers, rather than more accurately represented as victims and survivors of abuse,"
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  • trans people, like many minority groups, remain economically and socially disenfranchised in the UK. Excluding fraud, trans people are twice as likely to be a victim of crime in England and Wales in the year ending March 2020, according to the Office for National Statistics. They also face years-long waits to receive gender-affirming care at NHS gender identity clinics and are more likely to report healthcare discrimination, domestic violence and homelessness.
  • UK's government has leaned into the culture wars debate in a bid to appeal to its traditional Conservative Party base and new working-class voters in northern England
  • Similar to some US Republican Party lawmakers' critiques of critical race theory, "war on woke" has turned into a catchall to describe what Conservatives don't like: be it the perceived excesses of the left, conversations around racial equality, or social justice initiatives like trans rights.
  • While "there are perfectly reasonably concerns of what the implication of trans women might be for women's rights, a lot of that anxiety is based on wildly exaggerated theoretical positions rather than practical ones," Blunt told CNN. "While [trans people] have to cope with the practical reality that it is bloody tough being trans."
  • Despite those supportive words, the trans-critical dial in the media is up at full blast.
  • A 2019 study by linguist Paul Baker, a professor at Lancaster University, found the British press wrote more than 6,000 articles about trans people between 2018-19, many of them written "in order to be critical of trans people" and painted "trans people as unreasonable and aggressive," the report wrote.
  • Despite there never having been a "trans member of Parliament (MP)," and close to zero trans editors or staff writers at [British] newspapers an idea has stuck that there is an influential trans "lobby behind the scene ... and that is very much characteristic of a moral panic,"
  • At the end of September, the Council of Europe's Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination likened the UK's record on LGBTQ rights to Russia, Turkey, Hungary and Poland -- countries with appalling track records on minority issues. The report pointed out that in England and Wales "trans rights organisations have faced vitriolic media campaigns, in which trans women especially are vilified and misrepresented."
  • Problems can arise when supportive cisgender people, or corporate entities, make poor linguistic and aesthetic choices when attempting to use inclusive language for non-binary, transgender and intersex people, Faye said. This happened at the end of September, when British medical journal The Lancet featured the words "bodies with vaginas" on the cover of its latest issue. The journal later apologized for conveying "the impression that we have dehumanized and marginalized women," after the wording was widely criticized.
  • These constructions are instead blamed by trans-critical commentators on trans people
  • "Nick, you could be asking me about climate change. You could be asking me about mental health. You could be asking me about education. You could be asking me about health. You deliberately are asking me about an issue that you know does not come up on the doorstep," Lammy replied. "[You] are choosing to land on this subject that most British people are not talking about in a fuel crisis," Lammy added. "And spend minutes on this, because it keeps Labour talking about identity issues and not about the substantive policies."
Ed Webb

The media feel safest in the middle lane. Just ask Jeff Flake, John Kasich and Howard S... - 0 views

  • One of supposed golden rules of journalism goes like this: “If everybody’s mad at your coverage, you must be doing a good job.” That’s ridiculous, of course, though it seems comforting. If everybody’s mad, it may just mean you’re getting everything wrong.
  • the middle-lane approach to journalism — the smarmy centrism that often benefits nobody, but promises that you won’t offend anyone.
  • the supposedly daring, supposedly against-the-grain hires made by magazines and by newspaper op-ed pages. In their quest to run the full gamut from center-left to center-right, they are already well-equipped with anti-Trump conservatives.
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  • Even the cable news panels that purport to express opposing views are part of the damaging both-sides syndrome. A view from the left, a view from the right, and repeat. But take the average, and you’re right back in the comfortable, unilluminating middle.
  • Impartiality is still a value worth defending in mainstream news coverage. But you don’t get there by walking down the center line with a blindfold on.
  • they want to appear fair without taking any chances
  • Mostly, we have the irresistible pull to the center: centripetal journalism. It’s safe. It will never cause a consumer boycott. It feels fair without really being fair. And it’s boringly predictable. In the end, the media’s center-lane fixation puts us all to sleep. And that’s no way to drive a democracy.
Ed Webb

Thread by @jayrosen_nyu: "I am trying something new today. This thread will i... - 0 views

  • an academic concept that scholars of media and communication have found useful: the distinction between "transmission" and "ritual' views of communication
  • James W. Carey
  • even in a mostly "ritual" setting, some transmission may take place. And vice versa.
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  • "transmission." This is the dominant view. It models communication as the movement of messages across space
  • In contrast to a transmission model, where messages are sent and information is delivered across space — physical or social space— Carey inscribes a "ritual" view. Here, the point of communication is not to "send a message," but to create a shared world in which we can dwell.
  • A good sermon reminds people of what they believe, draws them together in fellowship, creates community. This is the ritual view in action
  • James Carey's most famous essay is "A Cultural Approach to Communication."
  • what fails to make sense as information may make sense as ritual.
  • the CNN panel o' pundits. Information-wise, there is almost nothing there for the intelligent viewer. No news, no revelations. Instead, an opportunity to identify — and share a belief system – with one or another speaker. Or to "hate watch," also a ritual
  • Do not under-estimate the power of ritual communication. We have many derisive names for it. Entertainment is one, "echo chamber" another. They are apt at times, but just as often the people who pride themselves on being information transmitters think their way is THE way.
  • It's harder than it looks to inform people. Delivering reliable information is not enough. You also have to deliver some sense of a shared world. News consumption is itself a ritual. The user of the news system learns what is new, but also affirms what always been true.
  • Whenever you cannot make sense of media as the transmission of information or "news," switch frames and ask if instead this makes sense as ritual.
Ed Webb

How UK journalists compare with their German counterparts - new research - 0 views

  • we compared British journalists’ professional attitudes to those of journalists in another country with a similar media landscape but a more muted press: Germany. German media tend to be noticeably more restrained in their coverage of controversial issues than British papers.
  • We used two representative surveys of British and German journalists to analyse the professional attitudes of both groups. Both surveys were part of the Worlds of Journalism Study, which brings together researchers from 67 countries, including the UK and Germany. Between 2012 and 2016 over 27,500 journalists across the world were interviewed, using a common methodological framework.
  • Our statistical analysis revealed several significant differences between journalists in Britain and Germany. Most importantly, we found that British journalists believe it more important than their German colleagues to confront those in power and hold them to account. But – contrary to expectations – we found no difference between British and German journalists’ eagerness to set the political agenda or influence public opinion. The second significant difference we found concerned how they thought they should report reality. Whereas British journalists tend towards objective, factual reporting as detached observers, German journalists see their role as more analytical.
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  • German journalists proved to be significantly more rigid in their general ethical stance whereas their British colleagues felt freer to follow their own personal judgements
  • What we found was that – despite an eye-catchingly partisan press in Britain – the country’s journalists are not more determined than their German colleagues to set the political agenda or influence public opinion. But they do consider it significantly more important than German journalists to confront those in power and hold them to account.
  • journalists such as Amelia Gentleman, who unearthed the Windrush scandal, or Carole Cadwalladr, who doggedly investigated the role Cambridge Analytica played in the Brexit vote, appear to be more typical of what British journalists think they should do: scrutinising and standing up to those in power.
Ed Webb

Most UK news coverage of Muslims is negative, major study finds | News | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Most coverage of Muslims in British news outlets has a negative slant, according to a major analysis by the Muslim Council of Britain, which concludes that news stories in the mainstream media are contributing to Islamophobia.
  • The findings come amid growing scrutiny of Islamophobia in the Conservative party and whether its roots lie in rightwing media coverage. A YouGov poll of Tory members by the campaign group Hope Not Hate found that 60% believe “Islam is generally a threat to western civilisation” and more than half believe “Islam is generally a threat to the British way of life”
  • British television stations, which are regulated for balance by the broadcasting code, were substantially less likely than newspapers to portray Muslims in a negative light, with local television broadcasts particularly likely to feature more positive stories about Islam.
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  • Versi helped to launch the Muslim Council of Britain’s new dedicated centre for media monitoring after his success in campaigning for better representation of Muslims in the British media. He has repeatedly won substantial corrections from newspapers over their reporting of Islam.
  • “This is not about censorship, this is about transparency.”
  • Although the methodology has been vetted by external academics, the organisation admits that the classification of exactly what counts as an anti-Muslim story will ultimately be a subjective decision
Ed Webb

As populists hold on to power in Poland, press freedom fears rise | Media | Al Jazeera - 0 views

  • The re-election of the conservative-nationalist group, founded and led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, has heightened fears among the journalists and academics that freedom of the press will be further restricted in the party's pursuit of a proposed "new media order".  PiS announced in its 232-page election manifesto that it wanted to regulate the status of journalists
  • The deputy culture minister, Pawel Lewandowski, has said: "[The media] is a type of state power. "We must have 100 percent certainty that everything that happens in Poland is overseen by the Polish authorities."
  • Since 2015, PiS has taken control of public companies, the courts and state-run broadcasting in its remoulding of society.  Press freedom in Poland has fallen from 18th to 58th place out of 180 countries in an annual index conducted by Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
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  • A turning point for the media came in January 2016 when Polish President Andrzej Duda signed controversial laws enabling the government to appoint the heads of public TV and radio, as well as civil service directors. 
  • More than 200 people were fired as a result, and their roles were taken over by people who support the government
  • the EU said it jeopardised the bloc's values.
  • There is greater trust in private independent media compared with public service broadcasters; only 20 percent of Poles believe the media is free from political influence, according to a study published last year.
  • Private media groups that have supported the opposition complain that they are losing advertising contracts from state-owned companies, which are increasing their spending to pro-government outlets
  • Since Gazeta Wyborcza published a series of stories that revealed corruption at the Financial Supervision Authority, forcing its chairman Marek Chrzanowski to resign, the ruling party and other state bodies have filed some 50 legal challenges against the newspaper and the lead reporter, Wojciech Czuchnowski.
  • Another major outlet that has come under pressure is TVN, a private television station owned by Discovery, Inc., a US media company.  In 2018, the government accused a TVN of promoting fascism, referring to photos taken during an undercover assignment that infiltrated Polish neo-Nazis and broadcast footage of its members holding a birthday party for Adolf Hitler.
  • Poland's media regulator issued a 1.5 million zloty ($389,000) fine to TVN for its coverage of anti-government protests outside Parliament, on the basis that it "propagated illegal activities and encouraged behaviour threatening security."
  • State media described the July anti-government protests as a "street revolt" that aimed to "bring Islamic immigrants to Poland".
Ed Webb

As a lifelong Conservative, here's why I can't vote for Boris Johnson | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • The Conservatives have become a vehicle for well-drilled fanatics who, like the Militant tendency forty years ago, infiltrate constituency parties in order to deselect MPs who offend doctrinal purity.
  • When his role came under threat in the early days of the Vote Leave campaign, Cummings boasted: “The donors are going to see them off.” Cummings is often framed as master of the dark arts. Dark money is more apt.The inside word is that big donors, some of whom have profited from Brexit instability, will soon be elevated to the Lords
  • the Conservative Party came into existence in the wake of the French Revolution as a defender of institutions – church, monarchy, parliament, rule of law – against abstraction, ideology and ultimately political violence.
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  • waging a destructive war on the British system of government
  • This government is not simply un-conservative. It is an explicit repudiation of everything that it means to be a Conservative.
  • When I was political correspondent at The Spectator magazine under Boris Johnson’s editorship at the start of this century, we mercilessly analysed and exposed the constitutional vandalism of Labour’s Prime Minister Tony Blair. Now Johnson, counselled by his amoral, dangerous ‘senior adviser’ Dominic Cummings, has been doing exactly the same.
  • Cummings and Johnson are both creatures of big money – a point persistently missed by Britain’s client political press.
  • There is no more Conservative figure than Dominic Grieve, the former attorney general. His offence? Standing up for parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. These are, it seems, hanging offences in Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party.
  • Big cheques from obscure private sources are an important part of the explanation of how the Johnson clique seized control of the Tory party late last July.
  • What do these rich and unaccountable people want in return for this munificence? Nobody in Fleet Street asks. Britain’s supposedly independent and fearless press don’t want to ask, let alone know.
  • consistently place the end before the means – which means neglect of due process; readiness to mislead; and Leninist obsession with ideological rectitude. In particular, political lying has reached epidemic proportions in the few short months since Johnson and Cummings entered Downing Street.
  • We Conservatives are careful students of history. We know that men and women are frail, imperfect, corruptible and sometimes capable of great evil. That explains why we have always paid such attention to the importance of institutions which, as Burke explained, embody wisdoms and truths which are beyond the comprehension of individual minds.
  • Michael Oakeshott, the greatest Conservative thinker of the twentieth century, noted that there was no Conservative ideology. Instead, there is a Conservative disposition which “understands it to be the business of government not to inflame passion and give it new objects to feed on, but to inject into the activities of already passionate men an ingredient of moderation; to restrain, to deflate, to pacify and to reconcile”.
  • Brexit has mutated from a virtuous and even admirable attempt to reassert British sovereignty into a brutal assault on everything we stand for.
  • there is no way that I can as a lifelong Conservative vote for Boris Johnson’s revolutionary clique this week. Decent, middle-of-the-road Conservatives have no choice but to oppose this unremitting war on everything the party has fought to save and protect over the last 200 years. History will judge us accordingly.
Ed Webb

Television viewing and cognitive decline in older age: findings from the English Longit... - 0 views

  • Watching television for more than 3.5 hours per day is associated with a dose-response decline in verbal memory over the following six years, independent of confounding variables. These results are found in particular amongst those with better cognition at baseline and are robust to a range of sensitivity analyses exploring reverse causality, differential non-response and stability of television viewing. Watching television is not longitudinally associated with changes in semantic fluency. Overall our results provide preliminary data to suggest that television viewing for more than 3.5 hours per day is related to cognitive decline.
  • Despite some such studies showing positive associations with language acquisition and visual motor skills in very young children2, many more studies have shown concerning cognitive associations including with poorer reading recognition, reading comprehension and maths3, and cognitive, language and motor developmental delays4,5. However, much less attention has been paid to the effects of television viewing at the other end of the lifespan. Indeed, despite it having been hypothesised for over 25 years that watching excessive television can contribute to the development of dementia1, this theory still remains underexplored empirically.
  • Watching television for more than 3.5 hours per day was associated with poorer verbal memory six years later with evidence of a dose-response relationship: greater hours of television per day were associated with poorer verbal memory at follow up (Table 2)
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  • When comparing the size of this negative association with other predictors of cognitive decline, watching television for >3.5 hours a day had a greater sized negative association (standardised beta = −0.034) than being in the lowest wealth quintile (as compared with the median quintile: standardised beta −0.027), while watching television for >7 hours a day had a greater sized association (standardized beta = −0.048) as being in the highest wealth quintile (compared with the median quintile: standardised beta = 0.043) or having no educational qualifications (standardized beta = −0.058).
  • associations between television viewing and verbal memory remained even when considering a range of variables relating to sedentary behaviours, suggesting that it is not just the sedentary nature of television watching that is responsible for its relationship with cognition.
  • Television involves fast-paced changes in images, sounds and action and, unlike other screen-based activities such as internet use and gaming, television is the most passive way of receiving such stimuli
  • television leads to a more alert but less focused brain
  • In addition to any potential cognitive stress created through the alert-passive interaction while watching television, the content of the programme itself can be stressful, such as through the depiction of graphic scenes, violence or the creation of suspense. Analyses of UK television from 2001–2013 (covering the country and much of the period of the data collection for the study reported here) have shown between 2.1 and 11.5 violent scenes per hour in UK soap operas, with 40% of these being categorised as moderate or strong violence22. It has even been proposed that the vividness of such experiences is greater than real-world experiences of events such as violence, conflict or disasters, as the drama is enhanced for entertainment purposes23. Chronic stress is known to lead to increased levels of glucocorticoids, which can have a direct effect on the hippocampus due to the presence of glucocorticoid receptors in that region of the brain. Consequently, stress has been shown to lead to atrophy of the hippocampus and impaired neurogenesis24, alongside impairments in cognition25.
  • excessive television could be linked with verbal memory through displacing other, cognitively beneficial activities such as playing board games, reading and engaging with cultural activities11,26. This theory implies that the relationship between television viewing and memory is not entirely down to television having negative effects per se, but rather television reducing the amount of time that people spend on more activities that could contribute to cognitive preservation
  • This study is not suggesting that watching television in older adulthood confers no benefits. Indeed, research with adults has suggested that TV dramas in comparison with TV documentaries can increase performance in tests of theory of mind, suggesting that television can enhance understanding of others27. Educational television can be an efficient way of learning when programmes are designed appropriately28. Television has also been shown to be a form of escapism from difficult life circumstances29. Further, research investing the effects of television viewing in the context of people’s daily lives has found that adults routinely report television as a means of relaxing30 (although this should be considered in relation to the potentially stress-inducing effects of television viewing discussed earlier). Nevertheless, this study suggests that watching substantial amounts of television is longitudinally associated with poorer verbal memory in older adults.
  • it remains unclear whether television viewing might affect other components of executive function
Ed Webb

Dear news media, stop covering the US as if it's a democracy - The Correspondent - 0 views

  • Liberties aren’t eliminated, they are restricted and violated – until they erode. Rights aren’t abolished, they are undermined and trampled – until they become privileges. Truths aren’t buried, they are mocked and twisted – until everyone has their own.A democracy doesn’t stumble and fall; it slides into decline.
  • Breaking news, by its nature, is ill-equipped to cover the demise of democracy – just as the weather report never really shows us the climate is changing. 
  • For four years, US news has been what you get when you combine a North Korean obsession with the head of state with Rupert Murdoch’s business model. A deranged cult of personality, interrupted only by commercial breaks. A presidential hypnosis, paid for by Procter & Gamble and Amazon. A totalitarian Twitterocracy in which we lurch from incident, to riot, to tweet, to disaster, to lunacy, to lie, to crisis, to disbelief, to attack, to mudslinging, to insult, to conspiracy theory, without facing the consequences of the pattern – the steady slide into decline.
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  • a kleptocracy
  • the first openly kleptocratic president moving into the White House marked the consummation of its decay, not its initial conception
  • Born from theft, built on slavery, held together by self-deception, the United States has grown to become the richest poor country
  • The only industrialised nation on the planet without universal healthcare, any real social welfare system or decent retirement provisions. The only free nation where 1 in 40 adults are behind bars
  • Nearly half of eligible voters do not take part in the elections. This isn’t just because of political apathy; it is also caused by deliberate voter suppression.
  • a country without a social contract
  • the Republican party is no longer a political party at all – it’s become a sectarian movement
  • It takes millions and millions of dollars to even run for president in the first place, and candidates need at least half a billion dollars
  • almost nowhere in the world is the gap between the political preferences of ordinary voters and the priorities of the elite
  • he only western economy where the richest three inhabitants hold more wealth than the poorest half of the entire population.
  • the US lacks nearly all the elements of a functioning democracy: a social contract, a representative electoral system, free and fair elections, political parties that follow democratic practices, and universal suffrage.
  • A country without any sense of the common good, grown fat on exploitation, held together by fundamental falsehoods will ultimately get a leader who suits that setting perfectly: a leader without a coherent ideology, driven by greed and self-enrichment, owing no fealty to fact.
  • Meanwhile, Trump cut $6bn from the federal budget
  • The US justice department is currently moving to shield the president from prosecution for rape, a level of political intervention in the judicial process that is unprecedented even by US standards.
  • signals point in only one direction: the US is rapidly becoming an authoritarian state.
  • Those who warn of the impending autocracy can only ever be alarmist. Either we’re proven wrong, or our warnings are already too late. For a democracy doesn’t fall, it slides into decline. Its demise cannot be predicted, only revealed in retrospect.
  • left-wing and right-wing media are talking differently about the same things. Crazy, sensational, unusual, bad things that happened today. Current affairs plus absurdity times outrage.
  • Masha Gessen, Russian-American journalist and one of the world’s leading experts on how authoritarian regimes work, argues in Surviving Autocracy that the media should cover “Trumpism not as news, but as a system.”
  • Many news media outlets are still operating on default settings, covering a democracy rather than reporting on an emergent authoritarian regime. Even now, they’re still attending the daily White House press briefings as if they were normal press conferences rather than a vehicle for systematically disseminating lies and misinformation
  • they are still broadcasting Trump’s campaign rallies live, although they know full well those rallies will contain incitements to violence, showcase conspiracy theories and pose a genuine hazard to public health.
  • An emergent autocracy demands fundamentally different journalistic standards and practices.
  • we need a journalism in which news media are united not in their shared obsession with breaking news, but in their joint defence of democracy
Ed Webb

Guardian Censorship of Judith Butler Part of a Pattern - Discourse Blog - 0 views

  • the consensus from the staffers I spoke to, all of whom needed anonymity due to NDAs and fears of reprisal
  • a newsroom dominated by transphobes who use a plethora of tactics, including using the company’s UK union to insulate their bigotry from accountability, in order to maintain control over The Guardian’s editorial direction on gender
  • In 2018, the UK newsroom published a transphobic attack on trans rights as a paper editorial. The unsigned piece, according to sources at The Guardian, was written by lead opinion columnist Susanna Rustin, who was described to me as a “militant and obsessive anti-trans activist.”
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  • in 2020, 338 Guardian staffers signed a letter to Guardian Editor-in-Chief Kath Viner complaining about the paper’s ongoing “pattern of publishing transphobic content.”
  • The letter, which was organized over the last few days in response to a column by Suzanne Moore that has been widely criticized as anti-trans, said the staff were “deeply distressed” by the resignation of a transgender member of staff who said they’d received anti-trans comments from “influential editorial staff” and who criticized the publication of the Moore’s column at the editorial morning conference.
  • transphobes are the “dominant faction” in the UK newsroom’s leadership and have used that institutional power in the “long running dispute” over trans rights at the paper
  • With all the controversy over trans rights at the paper, and the most recent flare up over her article, Gleeson told me she hopes that The Guardian US won’t bear the brunt of the heat from the so-called “editorial failure” the paper blamed the retraction on.“This seems like it might be part of pinning all the blame on the US team, when really the redaction (censorship) has clearly caused far more ‘readership backlash’ than any other possible option,” Gleeson said. “In other words, the British editorial staff need to own up to their own mistake, and change course.”
Ed Webb

National Identity Becoming More Inclusive in U.S., UK, France and Germany | Pew Researc... - 0 views

  • a new Pew Research Center survey finds that views about national identity in the U.S., France, Germany and the UK have become less restrictive and more inclusive in recent years. Compared with 2016 – when a wave of immigration to Europe and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the U.S. made immigration and diversity a major issue on both sides of the Atlantic – fewer now believe that to truly be American, French, German or British, a person must be born in the country, must be a Christian, has to embrace national customs, or has to speak the dominant language
  • Outside of France, more people say it’s a bigger problem for their country today to not see discrimination where it really does exist than for people to see discrimination where it really is not present.
  • a large majority think Muslims face discrimination.
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  • In every country surveyed, those on the right are more likely than those on the left to prioritize sticking to traditions, to say people today are too easily offended by what others say, and to say the bigger societal problem is seeing discrimination where it does not exist.
  • while those on the left and right are equally likely to say they are proud most of the time in both France and Germany, in the U.S. and UK, those on the right are more than three times as likely to say they are proud most of the time than those on the left
  • issues of pride for some were often sources of shame for others. In the UK, one such issue was the concept of empire. Those on the ideological right praised the historic empire for its role in spreading English and Western culture overseas, while those on the ideological left discussed how the UK had disrupted local cultures and often left chaos in its wake in its former colonies.
  • whereas groups composed of Republicans discussed American history through the lens of opportunity, groups composed of Democrats stressed the inadequacy of how American history is taught – and how it often glosses over racism and inequitable treatment of minority groups. Republican participants, for their part, even brought up how political correctness itself makes them embarrassed to be American – while Democratic participants cited increased diversity as a point of pride
  • While Britons are as ideologically divided as Americans on issues of pride, when it comes to every other cultural issue asked about in this report, Americans stand out for being more ideologically divided than those in the Western European countries surveyed.
  • Younger people – those under 30 – are less likely to place requirements on Christianity, language, birth or adopting the country’s traditions to be part of their country than older age groups. They are also more likely to say their country will be better off if it is open to changes. The notable exception to this pattern is Germany, where opinion differs little by age.
Ed Webb

Why, as an American transgender woman, I don't feel it's safe to visit the UK | openDem... - 0 views

  • ‘Trans-exclusionary radical feminists’ (TERFs) may be a minority, but they are more vocal and influential in the UK than anywhere else in western Europe. Their influence is felt not only at home, but also here across the pond and, I’m sure, in much of the world.And the major British media outlets are only making matters worse.
  • the podcast is a transparent attempt to undermine the influence of Stonewall, thereby dividing trans people from the rest of the LGBTQ community and making all queer people in the UK – but especially trans people – more vulnerable.Divide and conquer is a classic authoritarian strategy, and right-wingers hope to weaken the LGBTQ community by scapegoating trans individuals in order to turn cisgender lesbians, gay men, and bisexual people against us. Unfortunately, some supposed leftists, many of them queer, are willing to play this game.
  • Stonewall, admirably, refuses to bow to the pressure to dump the trans community.
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  • only one side is taken seriously – the side that wants to restrict the rights of transgender individuals. The other side is represented as somehow being both an incompetent punching bag and a cunning threat – at the same time
  • Bullies always play the victim, and that’s exactly what Nolan Investigates has done here. A recent BBC article also paints trans women as sexually predatory “biological men,” attacks Stonewall, and gives undue deference to the LGB Alliance also illustrates this pattern.
  • what I really want is for the British media establishment to stop taking bad-faith transphobic arguments at face value and, instead, make more space for trans voices on trans issues
Ed Webb

The vandals break the Channel - by Mic Wright - 0 views

  •  
    essential reading
Ed Webb

Norse code: are white supremacists reading too much into The Northman? | The Northman |... - 0 views

  • as rigorous and accomplished as The Northman is, it might in fact be the kind of movie the “alt-right” loves.
  • The Northman’s 10th-century society appears to be uniformly white and firmly divided along patriarchal lines. Men do the ruling and killing; women do the scheming and baby-making
  • The far right’s love of Nordic lore goes back to the Third Reich and beyond, – and the connection is stronger than ever. The deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 was full of Nordic symbols on banners and shields. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian extremist who murdered 77 people in 2011, carved the names of Norse gods into his guns. The shooter at the 2019 massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, drew Norse insignia on his possessions and wrote “see you in Valhalla” on his Facebook page.
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  • The Northman illustrates how cinema can be misappropriated in ways its makers never intended. In the past two decades, the entire cultural landscape – and films about European history in particular – has been weaponised and politicised by the far right.
  • if you are looking for a Hollywood movie to support white-supremacist beliefs, you don’t have to look very far
  • Neither JRR Tolkien nor Peter Jackson consciously framed the fantasy epic as white-nationalist propaganda, but, as with Nordic mythology, it harks back to an imaginary Eurocentric realm in which the heroes are considered to be white-skinned (and were cast as such in the movies) and the chief enemies, the orcs, are characterised as dark-skinned, ugly and uncivilised.
  • The contrast between these manly action heroes and the anonymous keyboard warriors who idolise them is difficult to ignore.
  • “The paradox of these kind of groups is that, on the one hand, they are claiming they’re deeply attached to western culture and civilisation, but they also hate western culture and civilisation, because it’s awful and decadent and liberal. So they’ve got to kind of maintain these two things at the same time.”
  • “If politics is the occupation of territory, metapolitics is the occupation of culture,” he says. “They are, at some level, creating a community. They comment upon films; they try to interpret them. That’s what they do together, at least publicly. And we could contrast that to more traditional forms of political organising that the far right for decades has not seen itself as able to do: marching in the streets or organising political parties. So, instead, they spend all this time on metapolitics.”
  • By and large, films – and the histories from which they draw – have been overwhelmingly controlled by people of white, European descent, whose own blind spots might well play into the far right’s hands. Especially when it comes to matters of race.
  • After the Charlottesville rally in 2017, Dorothy Kim, an Asian American medieval literature lecturer at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, argued that “medieval studies is intimately entwined with white supremacy and has been so for a long time”. Academics had not done enough to counter myths that medieval Europe was a bastion of racial purity, said Kim, who was attacked by academics and the far right as a result. These myths were largely established by 19th-century historians with nationalist agendas, but more recent research reveals that societies such as those in Viking-era Scandinavia were in fact multicultural and multiracial.
  • They ranged far across Europe and the Arctic and they engaged and mixed with neighbouring cultures. While they were highly gendered societies, a recent Finnish study also found evidence of “gender-transgressing or gender-mixing practices, often of an openly sexual quality”, among such societies. Eggers himself pointed to recent DNA analysis of the remains of a high-ranking Viking warrior found in Sweden, which identified them as female. (Apparently, she is briefly included in The Northman, but viewers may struggle to spot her.)
  • “Invoking the medieval past has now become a more generalised sign of the alt-right,” she says, pointing to recent far-right terrorists and their scattershot allusions to Nordic lore. “The point is not the specifics of the historical detail or what certain medieval things may mean to certain subgroups. Instead, the point is to gather them all for the maximum amount of attention, to plant as many flags to say: ‘I am a white supremacist,’ and to activate other white-supremacist terrorists globally.”
  • Taika Waititi, who is of Māori and Jewish descent, took things even further with part three, Thor: Ragnarok. As well as casting Tessa Thompson, a woman of mixed African, Latino and European heritage as the ostensibly bisexual Norse warrior Valkyrie, Waititi’s film dealt with narratives of displacement, enslavement, colonialism and white-male fragility. Thor’s all-powerful hammer, Mjolnir, that beloved symbol of white supremacism, is casually disintegrated by Cate Blanchett’s Hela. She then proceeds to bring down the Norse realm of Asgard, figuratively and literally.“Look at these lies,” she says, stripping away a ceiling fresco to reveal an older one beneath, detailing how her father, Odin, built Asgard through violent conquest. “Proud to have it, ashamed of how he got it.”
  • In an ideal world, film-makers wouldn’t have to give a moment’s thought to how their films might be co-opted by these groups; we could simply enjoy a movie such as The Northman as a piece of rousing, skilfully made entertainment. The fact that it is no longer possible to do so could be seen as a victory of sorts for the far right, but failing to consider the stories we tell from first principles could be part of the problem that created them in the first place. By this stage, in fact, film-makers ought to have realised that if the far right doesn’t hate your film, you might be doing something wrong.
Ed Webb

Burning down a burgled house - by Mic Wright - 0 views

  • The BBC was a toddler — not yet 4 years old — when it first fell over in the face of government pressure, during the General Strike of 1926. In fact, it was still the British Broadcasting Company, in the middle of negotiations to become a public corporation, gain its first Royal Charter, and wriggle free from the direct control of the Postmaster-General.
  • The BBC has remained in that state ever since: Neither commandeered nor free; at the mercy of the government in funding negotiations. There was never a golden age, the tarnish was there from the start.
  • Orwell — Eric Blair in his personnel file — ‘toiled’ composing propaganda at the BBC between 1941 and 1943. He wrote in his diary that the atmosphere was “something halfway between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum,” and penned a critique for Tribune in January 1944 that could be from 2022: People are broadly aware that they don’t like the BBC programmes, that along with some good stuff a lot of muck is broadcast, that the talks are mostly ballyhoo and that no subject of importance ever gets the honesty of discussion that it would get in even the most reactionary newspaper.
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  • the latest in a long line of right-wingers raging about BBC bias that stretches back to the halcyon days of bombing, rationing, and government censorship for which she yearns
  • Priestley made his last Postscripts appearance on 20th October 1940. His dissection of his Conservative critics’ complaints could, like Orwell’s criticisms, come from 2022. In a letter to Harold Laski in December 1940, he wrote:[The Tories are] pretending that everything on their side is non-political and not tendentious, but anything on our side must be barred because it is political and tendentious.
  • The farcical idea that BBC is a nest of Marxist revolutionaries is one the Tory Party and its media outriders push whenever an “enemy within” is required. And the response from liberals, especially extraordinarily well-paid BBC stars, plays into their hands every time. Dan Walker — a presenter on £295,000 a year — tweeting that the BBC costs 43p a day is factual but it’s also easily framed as arrogant and out-of-touch.
  • Pretending not to understand the concepts of mutual benefit and cross-subsidisation is a common affliction among right-wing commentators.
  • Seeing the league of extraordinary arseholes ranged against the BBC makes it easy to take the simple centrist line of rushing to its defence unequivocally. But while the corporation does do many things well — children’s programmes, local news, niche music programming — BBC News has big problems and has had them for many years. Big names have let their viewers, listeners, and colleagues down, time and time again.
  • What centrists and the right have in common is a desire for a public broadcaster that looks and sounds like them. The BBC is a creature of the establishment and the licence fee structure means it is also beholden to the establishment. Its natural state is arguing for the status quo and that’s precisely the tendency that leaves it bureaucratic, slow-moving, and prone to shots from both sides.
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