Proof Set 3, May 2012 The Reformation of Journalism

‘Murdoch’ has replaced ‘banker’ or ‘Sir Fred’ as today’s top term of opprobrium. Dethroning media baron Rupert Murdoch is even more of a talking-point than the humiliation of the former chief executive of RBS (now plain Mister Goodwin after his knighthood was annulled in February 2012).

Such a high level of excitement suggests something highly unusual. Indeed it is unusual to see the global Murdoch Empire under sustained attack (even if the attacks stem mainly from that small portion of the globe called Britain). But there is also an element of ritual, as if denouncing Murdoch is almost a magical incantation.

In the UK, almost everyone except the Tories seems pleased at the prospect of the fall of the House of Murdoch. Especially excitable are the Jeremiahs who previously envisioned a ‘neo-liberal’ conspiracy with Rupert Murdoch at its head. For them, this is the day of judgement; and finally, after so many years without much authority, they are the presiding magistrates.

Among this vociferous group is a smaller cohort who really should know better; because knowing better is their job. The role of Journalism Studies academics is two-fold: (1) to study journalism in order to understand how it works and why its workings often leave a lot to be desired; (2) to act as a critical friend to journalism – offering the constructive criticism which would enable journalists to improve their performance.

Yet rather than perform this critical but constructive role, the majority of Journalism Studies academics has formed up within the anti-Murdoch magic circle. From this position, their declarations are unlikely to have a positive influence on journalism. Instead, their performance has a galvanising effect only on their own kind: it makes them and their associates feel better about themselves. Ipso facto, if you are not inspired by it, you are obviously not the right kind of person.

You can try this at home: stand in front of a mirror and, holding a Journalism Studies textbook in your right hand, repeat the words ‘Rupert Murdoch’; or, if you are over 50, ‘the Murdoch Press’. If you are one of us, your ‘life world’ will be filled with meaning; but if this is not a meaningful experience, it means you are one of them.

Mouthing ‘Murdoch’ has become the shibboleth that sorts out the ‘we’ from the chavs: it is a test of belonging. But it is also a mirror on academia, since the ritual denouncement of Murdoch accurately reflects the condition of almost the entire academic milieu in Britain.

Many in this milieu see themselves as left-wing, and they know themselves – rather, they know what they think they are, by their hostility to Murdoch. Accordingly, what’s bad for Murdoch can only be good for their identity. Thus Professor Toby Miller feels renewed by Hackgate and what it means for his old enemy:

Like any socialist who has lived where I have during Rupert Murdoch’s hegemony, I’ve taken immense delight these past months in his public humiliation and much, much more.

Such socialists made ‘Murdoch’ their call sign back in the days of CB radio (the out-of-date metaphor underlines how long ‘Murdoch’ has been used to this effect). But to repeat (10-9), this is more ritual than real. Regular reference to Rupert Murdoch has long been a way of affirming the collective spirit. It says: we know what we’re here for; he‘s the one we have to sort out. Thus it serves to conjure up the evil spirit of Rupert while warding away full realisation of what is to be done.

‘Murdoch: the mantra’ is not so far removed from Susan Sontag’s idea of ‘illness as metaphor’. According to Sontag, in modern times first ‘tuberculosis’ and then ‘cancer’ became almost unsay-able because of their deathly connotations. On the other hand, indirect reference to what could not be said directly, was also a tacit form of acknowledging the consumption of self in modern society, expressed in the recurring motif of the ‘consumptive’ individual living out a slow death.

At first sight, repeated reference to ‘Murdoch’ is the opposite of this: instead of what cannot be said, ‘Murdoch’ is what must be said in order to gain entrance to particular circles. But in other ways, constant reference to Rupert Murdoch is also consistent with Sontag’s idea. In the past, ‘Murdoch’ offered a way of not talking about the death of the Left and the demise of what it once stood for. It affirmed the collective spirit while the collective itself was dwindling away. Now, with the Leveson Inquiry still in session, it is one way of evading what’s really wrong with journalism. In both instances, strenuous repetition of ‘Murdoch’ is a form of displacement. For those disposed to deploy this metaphor, it stands in for what they cannot bear to say.

As a metaphor, however, ‘Murdoch’ also stands for something which is real, but not in the form in which it is described. In today’s world, as in the days when the spectre of tuberculosis loomed large, we really are subject to malign forces beyond our control; but not because such forces are controlled by malignant bacteria such as Rupert Murdoch – or James Murdoch or the Sun or News International or BSkyB or News Corp (‘Murdoch’ is the cipher for all of these).

‘Murdoch’ is metaphorically, not literally true, where metaphor is something like what is, but not how it really is. And it really does not help when academics who ought to know the difference, only compound these two forms of description into a single misunderstanding.

If you haven’t heard this before, please note that a metaphor is a simile without the word ‘like’: a form of words which identifies two things that are alike; but though similar the two things are not, after all, identical. As a literary device, metaphor works best when the reader or listener can see both the likeness and the dissimilarity between the two things apparently identified; though as and when the reader/listener sees this of them, they are already being compared rather than mistaken for each other.

This pedantic digression is important because the problem with the Murdoch metaphor is that those most disposed to use it, are also least able to recognise it for what it is – a metaphor. The way they say it, what is really only a likeness (and perhaps not a terribly good one), is taken for the thing it only vaguely resembles. In their mouths, Murdoch is the essence of capitalism; the evil empire’s Darth Vader. Indeed Rupert Murdoch really is a capitalist, but by no means the mastermind behind a system of world domination (if only there were such a person; but mindlessness, not master planning, is the banality behind the evils of capital). Thus ‘Murdoch’ is a case of mistaken identity, in which one man is wrongly identified as the cause of the ‘neo-liberal regime’. Moreover, the longevity of this error makes it especially sad: it has been going on for decades.

Fortress Wapping

On the picket lines outside Fortress Wapping two-and-a-half decades ago, the list of un-sayable things included: (1) all employers in the print are planning to cut costs and dump labour in much the same way as News International; (2) many union leaders are cutting ‘sweetheart deals’ with employers (we promise not to strike if you promise ours will be the only union on site) – much the same as the deal which Eric Hammond, leader of the electricians’ union (EETPU), had already concluded with News International inside Wapping (allowing the management of News International to sack its previous workforce and keep them locked out). Both of these statements were already, demonstrably true; and they needed saying. But instead of confronting the truth, many activists reached for a metaphor instead. ‘Don’t buy the Murdoch Press’ and ‘Boycott the Sun, News of the World, Times and Sunday Times‘ were the preferred metaphors of the day.

These metaphorical slogans served to displace attention from the scale of the problem facing the labour movement, then under political attack from a militant right-wing government, but without any current, political ideas to call its own. Instead, the focus shifted to the alleged peculiarities of News International and the personal attributes of Rupert Murdoch.

For example, on the routine demonstration outside Fortress Wapping every Saturday night (described by printworkers themselves as ‘social picketing’), it became an endless talking point that Australian-born Murdoch continued to own British newspapers while he applied for (and was granted) American citizenship. Speaking along these lines to print union delegates at their summer conference in Scarborough, (then) Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock managed to win them over, even though, in the course of the same speech, he also disowned militant action by printworkers in defence of their jobs. Kinnock’s denunciation of Murdoch was enough to stop their elected representatives denouncing a Labour Party that did not support labour – such was the strength, even then, of the Murdoch metaphor.

Thus the particularities of ‘Murdoch’ and ‘the Murdoch Press’ stood in for a concerted address to the generally parlous condition of workers’ organisations. Of course, phrases such as ‘workers’ organisations’ have since become utterly anachronistic. But such phrases, and the movement they represented, might not have run out of time if in the mid-1980s there had been less reliance on ‘Murdoch’ and other metaphors.

Boundless metaphor

If the past is another country, the Murdoch metaphor travels well. In 1989 the fall of the Berlin Wall came down on politics like an iron curtain, closing off the old country and the class-based, ideological divide between Left and Right. But ‘Murdoch’ made it into the new territory of the early 1990s. Accordingly, when in 1992 the UK electorate surprised the pundits by preferring an exhausted Tory government over a disconcertingly non-descript Labour Party, the ‘Murdoch Press’ again served as a metaphor – a way of acknowledging but not having to explain why Labour lost to a Conservative Party that was, to paraphrase a comment of the time, ‘more dead than Marxism’.

In re-electing the Tories, voters were only expressing their instinctive pragmatism: better the devil we know. But Labour supporters, including the academics among them, seemed to think it was better not to know why they had lost. Instead they reached for the Murdoch metaphor. The election result was duly ascribed to the power of the Sun: Neil Kinnock was toast because on polling day the Sun had said: if he wins ‘will the last person to leave Britain please turn out then lights?’

In the aftermath of the general election, a reader wrote to the Guardian to say she did not like sitting next to Sun readers on the tube; and her preferred paper duly printed it. Here the Murdoch metaphor had become a contagion. Even the Sun was infected. The hardened hacks of its subs’ bench were hardly immune when they puffed up their chests with the front page headline ‘It’s The Sun Wot Won It’ (11^th April 1992). Labour’s next generation – Mandelson, Campbell, Blair – was similarly affected. They built their New Labour apparatus on the basis of the Murdoch metaphor. Having accepted that ‘Murdoch’ was a sufficient account of what went wrong, they took it that things could only get better as long as ‘Murdoch’ was persuaded to join them.

Metaphors Old and New

In the litany of complaints against the Sun et al, ‘Murdoch’ is shorthand – metaphorical signage – for the allegedly negative effects of popular journalism. Although woefully inadequate as an account of why the working class left the Left for dead, there is surely an element of truth in the proposition that tabloid newspapers can have a deadening effect. Yet the truth contained in this proposition turns out to be more metaphorical than real.

With the Sun as its exemplar, in the 1970s and 1980s Journalism Studies first identified itself in Britain by mounting a critique of tabloid newspapers and their capacity to suck the intelligent life out of working class readers; hence, or so it was said, the incorporation of the working class into the bourgeois body politic. But this critique was unwittingly metaphorical.

In reality, capitalism does deaden humanity by transforming human beings into little more than packets of commodified labour-power. This violent transformation has long been represented in tabloid journalism, not least in the murder story: each murder splash is the story of how a human being was forcibly transformed into a lifeless thing – the corpse. Furthermore, if murder was the lead story in popular journalism (‘if it bleeds…’), conversely, the need for what was represented in the murder story, also led to popular journalism in the form in which it duly developed – the tabloid. Thus the tabloids have repeatedly described and just as often misrepresented the death of humanity under capitalism. But this does not mean that they were responsible for the death of working class consciousness in the 1980s. (To understand this we must look to the failure of the Left at that time.) However, when the new discipline of Journalism Studies distinguished itself by attributing both murders to the same tabloid villain, it transformed a deadly accurate metaphor into literal untruth.

Even when Journalism academics were constructing it, this critique was misplaced. But now, to make matters worse, their criticism is reserved exclusively for the old metaphor – ‘Murdoch’, without a word against the new metaphor which has only recently appeared: “Leveson” – and still without recognising either metaphor for what it is.

The Leveson Inquiry is already on its way to becoming ‘Leveson’, the equally metaphorical antidote to Murdoch as metaphor. The metamorphosis of Leveson into ‘Leveson’ occurs at a time when Sontag’s insight has been turned inside out. Whereas she observed reticence in reference to fatal illness, today’s therapeutic culture confronts us with the opposite – a carnival of morbid symptoms. Accordingly, already beset by the scourge of ‘Murdoch’, we are now equally absorbed in his mirror image, the antiseptic ‘Leveson’.

When Sontag wrote ‘Illness as Metaphor’ in the 1970s, she was writing about unspeakable illnesses which nonetheless spoke volumes about the society that could not bring itself to mention them. Today, however, nobody is not ill; alternatively, if you are not ill, you must be a nobody (apologies for using a double negative not once but, appropriately enough, twice); anyhow, there is nothing more to be said about you. Conversely, being ill and/or in recovery from illness is now much-used as a metaphor for human existence.

Similarly, ‘Leveson’ now stands both for the ills of journalism and for the treadmill which will supposedly bring journalism to a state of ‘wellbeing’. However, just as the hushed tone associated with ‘cancer’ once registered the social significance of the disease without adding one jot to our understanding of it, so the Leveson display – private trauma promenading with journalistic iniquity and police malpractice – both alludes to a key issue of the day and contributes nothing to its comprehension. As before, by opening up a conversation conducted through analogy, the new metaphor is a way of closing down discussion of how things really are.

In today’s context, the imbalance between private and public life is a real problem. But the hollowing out of public life is not the sole responsibility of journalism; neither will a dramatisation of irresponsible journalism suffice to replenish the deserted public realm. Instead, the histrionic humbling of journalists (and their managers and employers) on the grounds that (like almost everyone else) they have been paying too much attention to the intimate details of private individuals, is a way of acting out this problem metaphorically. The problem of public and private is misapprehended in what is purportedly the means of redress. When metaphor stands in for reality, it stands in the way of addressing it. Worse still, it has real consequences, not just metaphorical ones. Accordingly, ‘Leveson’ is already latent with therapeutic intervention: journalism is to go into detox and the newsroom must break its addiction to secretive behaviour by undergoing regular procedures to ensure transparency.

Leveson the metaphor could not exist without Murdoch as precursor. But Leveson now tops Murdoch whose metaphorical role is to support the new lead: Leveson himself. Strong against the unions and the left, Murdoch has been humbled by the ghost of a teenage murder victim. As a metaphor Murdoch may even be losing some of his black magic powers, but the Leveson genie is already working its way beyond News International, suffusing itself throughout journalism as a whole. Unless, that is, we journos muster the strength to stick this metaphor back in the bottle.

Proof Set 3, May 2012 The Reformation of Journalism

Introduction

What follows is a small scale attempt at a different way of doing journalism – a new version of journalism which might have less difficulty distinguishing itself from the rest of the digital landscape. However, the fact that the author of this experiment feels the need to introduce it, already suggests that it may not have been entirely successful. If his Cartoons really represented a new way of doing journalism, they would need no further presentation; speaking for themselves, they would be self-sufficient, surely?

But please note that nothing like the Cartoons experiment has ever been conducted before. Moreover, writing the Cartoons forms only part of the experiment; the other part consists of how you receive them. Accordingly, it seems reasonable to explain to you, in your role as Part Two of the experiment, what the author hopes you will receive from Part One. This in the further hope that something will be gained from the Cartoons experiment – perhaps enough for an improved version of it, even if the early results of the first iteration were not up to scratch.

Others among you will have recoiled at the prospect of ‘literary journalism’. Oil and water, some of you are saying. Again, please note that the current issue of Proof is primarily concerned with form; also that the Cartoons comprise an experimental form of words for potential use by journalists. Furthermore, following Cyril Connolly’s construction that literature is to be read twice and journalism less often, Proof’s Cartoons comprise a form of writing which requires the writer to read and re-read his own words, drafting and re-drafting in order to formulate them just so. Hence the hybrid: ‘literary journalism’.

Enough caveat; let’s get on.

The idea is to devise a new form of reporting which gets to the essence of what’s being reported. Not that previous forms of reporting have failed to do this. Formats such as the inverted pyramid were largely successful in their own way, for their own times. The problem is that their times and ours are not the same. Accordingly, at this time even old stagers cannot play the same part as well as they used to. New ways are needed for journalism to regain its essential character.

The argument that essence is essential to journalism – summarised as ‘the importance of being essentialist’ – is set out elsewhere in Proof, so there is no need to re-set it here. But why is this form – the Cartoon – thought to be of the essence? That is the question for this Introduction. Here is the Cartoonist’s first answer:

• The Cartoon is designed to allow the reporter to shift instantaneously from close up to long shot, from particular detail to general observation. Working within one, and only one, format – the Cartoon, the reporter can move his material very quickly, reconfiguring his observations the instant he arrives at them; in much less time than it would take to make the transfer across a series of multimedia platforms.
• The Cartoon caters for the reporter’s peripheral vision: it enables him to make sideways references to other, prior representations of human experience, such as advertising copy, pop songs, iconic images, as well as literary sources; incorporating these into what becomes a new composition. Thus the reported event is located not only in space and time (where and when, as of old); it is also positioned in the media landscape – today’s common land.
• Timing is crucial: the Cartoon is based on the assumption that most of its readers will have already received the latest basic information, coming at them along different, digital pathways (text, Twitter, online TV). It does not attempt to compete with these on speed of information delivery. Its selling point is composition. It addresses the reader as follows: though you will already have seen or heard of this event in bits and bytes, its essence is revealed here for the first time, now that it has been composed into a Cartoon.

By way of a second answer to the same question – why this form now?, here’s how the cartoonist came upon the Cartoon as a form of writing.

On and off over the past few years I have worked on a comic novel about the attempt to generate a shared national experience by hosting the Olympics in London. This story of mine, Games Makers: a London satire, was eventually published on April Fool’s Day 2012 and is now freely downloadable at http://londonsatire.com. I won’t ruin the suspense by summarising the plot; suffice to say that panic breaks out among those in charge of London 2012 when the mega-event they’ve staked everything on, looks set to become the non-event of all time – the world’s first mega-non-event. Their problem is that the Games are not tangible enough to become truly memorable; still less a transformative experience. With the Olympics about to start, Londoners remain stubbornly unengaged. Meanwhile the Director of the Cultural Olympiad cannot bear London’s lightness of being any longer; he makes a last ditch attempt to give the Games weight, substance and tangibility; until it all comes crashing down around him.

Clear as mud? You are welcome go ahead and read the novel. But for now, please note that writing Games Makers was my attempt to make the intangible, tangible. By describing London-lite, I was trying to constitute it as something we can grasp. Not blowing the mist away, but thickening the air; making London foggy again. Similarly, Alex Cameron, the superb designer who worked with me on the finished product (if you download Games Makers from our site, be sure to click on his PDF version), developed a set of typographical devices – twists and turns in the use of type – so that the form in which the story is contained, also contains the very thing that is lacking in the lives of its characters: texture. This bears repeating: with this text, texture is what we were aiming to create.

As I finished the novel, I started to apply some of the same techniques in an effort to describe not just one event, visible on the London horizon since 2005; but a stream of events, as and when they appeared in the news. Again, the goal was to capture each event, to materialise it in the description thereof. In other words, to get at the essence of it; where essence is not to be confused with the basics, which, increasingly, can be obtained for free, and with decreasing reference to paid-for, professional journalists.

Thus the work which has gone into the Cartoons is a continuation of the work which went into Games Makers. In both projects, in much the same way, I have been trying to arrive at a form which allows us (the writer and his readers) to hover over the media landscape and touch base with the fine detail of human experience.

Whether this could work as a new way of working for journalists; moreover, a way of working that other people would be willing to pay for – I honestly do not know. I would like to think so. As a precedent, I have in mind the kind of photography which emerged in the 1930s in the work of Kertesz and others. At that moment more people than ever before were starting to take photographs, partly because of the increasing availability of cameras such the Kodak Brownie, and partly because of the proliferation of cars like the Model T, which transported millions of folk to new places where they were keen to take pictures of each other. However, just as the camera became generally available, instead of all photographs defaulting to the level of holiday snaps, there emerged a special form of photography – a higher form, and with it a new kind of photographer. Similarly, the moment – this moment of ours – when almost anyone can report the basics using digital media technology, may also be the moment when a special form of reporting emerges – a higher form, and with it a new kind of reporter.

But the Proof of the writing is in the reading: it is for you to decide whether the sketches I have come up with could form the template for a different kind of reporting.

You may think that the writing is just not good enough; or perhaps you will say this is simply not journalism; and even if you accept that the writing is not bad, and that it could be described as journalistic, it might also be the case that the form in which it appears, remains prohibitively idiosyncratic. If having read the Cartoons you come to this last conclusion, you are effectively saying that the experiment was a brave one, and its results may be worth looking at, if you happen to have the time, yet it is ultimately unreal, not serviceable, because it is not reproducible: nothing like this form of writing can be practiced by other writers. This would make me a far, far lesser version of L.S. Lowry, who was both a uniquely brilliant artist and a dead-end in the history of art. Whereas with the Cartoons my ambition has been – still is – to influence the history of journalism, by showing that journalism can become not the first draft of history (been there, done that), but history’s first composition.

Please read the following Cartoons and compose your responses, if you have any, to andrewcalcutt@gmail.com

Cartoons

(1)

Royal Preserve

Dateline: 2^nd March 2012

Halfway between a wave and the brush-off, Prince Harry gestures to Caribbean photographers at the start of his first solo tour. He is ginger and slightly gauche. Back in London his grandmother, the elderly Queen Elizabeth, looks quizzically at the food hamper produced by Fortnum and Mason to mark her Diamond Jubilee (1952-2012).

Nestling among the preserves, 60 years of judgment reserved.

(2)

By A Nose

Dateline: 2^nd March 2012

When injured journalist Edith Bouvier was brought home to Paris from Homs, Syria, she was carried off the plane sheathed in protective padding – only her nose poking out from under the red wraparound. On the runway, in attendance: President Sarkozy. But this homecoming was too intimate – daughters rush forward to hug their mother’s prostrate form – for Sarkozy to make a show of it. Like the estranged husband that no one finds time to acknowledge, the president of France was obliged to withdraw.

(3)

Anders Breivik: the fascist salute that hardly was

Dateline: 16^th April, Central Criminal Court, Oslo

Enter the……disappointment

Fat face. Small eyes behind considerable expanse of flesh and forehead. Receding hair and a thin strip of beard with a patch that’s missing – either his beard is also balding, or he made a mistake when shaving. Bulky. Suit, collar and tie in a style that might be 1970s-retro; but isn’t.

‘Defiant salute,’ they said of Anders Behring Breivik’s far-right gesture to the Oslo court on the first day of his mass murder trial.

(Norway, summer 2011; 77 dead in a killing spree directed ‘against multiculturalism’ – Breivik’s description).

But the Reuters clip shows an understated movement. Breivik’s right arm touches the left side of his chest, grazing it lightly before unbending into the familiar, straight-armed gesture – only for a moment.

His arm has performed a cautious curve, not the absolute angles associated with ‘fascist salute’. Completing this modest arc, Breivik sits down with downcast eyes.

Perhaps he swore to himself he would salute, then lacked the will to tough it out. Perhaps that’s how he murdered his victims: diffidently.

Responding to the rattle and shuffle of countless camera shutters, Breivik half-smiles, his teeth kept hidden by thin lips. Although the cameras are keen, keen, keen to find something striking, exciting, disturbing, there is nothing to show for the extraordinary carnage caused by this seemingly unexceptional person.

A man ill-at-ease with himself, but so what? On that score, no different from a billion others.

(4)

Jason Russell: textbook study of arrested development

Dateline 10^th March 2012, Reuters studio

Firm chin, full jaw, and a smile so wide a family of Mexicans could move in there. Of course his teeth are pearly white.

Raised in San Diego, graduate of the University of Southern California, Jason Russell’s face testifies to the expansive wealth of the Sunshine State.

Co-producer/director of world-renowned viral movie Kony 2012, and co-founder of the charity, Invisible Children, Russell is famous for bearing witness to the plight of African child soldiers pressed into Joseph Kony’s militia, the Lord’s Resistance Army. He has come in to a Reuter’s studio to respond to queries and criticisms of his film.

‘I had just finished my film degree at USC’, Russell recalls, ‘and I wanted that post-graduation globetrotting adventure. I figured instead of backpacking Europe, I’d visit an African genocide.’

‘Figured’ – early morning reruns of Wagon Train and Rawhide sure left their mark. ‘Visit an African genocide’ – is this Kardashian-style self-obsession? Or candid admission of same, which effectively cancels it out? Russell’s relaxed manner says: you decide; his self-confidence comes with 40 million internet hits.

He shrugs off the complaint that Kony 2012 is one-sided: ‘this video is not the answer, it is just the gateway to the conversation.’ But this self-confidence is only skin deep; super-facial. Having exposed the plight of particular children, Russell has to hide behind the condition of childhood in general.

‘When you get older, you get muddled and polluted by the way the world is supposed to work,’ he explains. Thus children respond unequivocally to his film because they ‘have very clear understanding’, not ‘muddled’ or ‘polluted’ by grown-up hang-ups; such as objectivity or getting the story right, right?

All that bone and muscle and gristle. So much protein invested in such a prize specimen of American manhood. But still Russell defers to a child’s ‘understanding’.

His kind of deference would make kids of us all.

(5)

Mourning Man and the Dissolution of Self

Dateline 20^th April 2012, Jinnah International Airport

Eyes more than half-closed, mouth wide open; thick, upper lip stretched across the horseshoe arch of his top teeth. Whatever it is pouring out of this man’s throat, it clearly means an awful lot to him.

If it was his own hand caressing his right cheek, looking at this picture we’d put him in the midst of a vocal performance; and in our minds we would fill in the sound of him singing. But the hand in the photograph is someone else’s, reaching out to comfort this man whose wife, child, father, friend – who knows?, is presumed dead after an airliner fell out of the sky while preparing to land at Jinnah International Airport, Islamabad.

Microphones on either side of the mourning man, thrust forward to capture his moans and wails, serve to reinforce the idea of performance. For us, in a way, it is. The curve of his open mouth, the framing of the photograph – this is grief, perfectly formed.

But for the man we’re looking at, sheer loss has rendered him shapeless. His feelings are not framed at all. Right now, he does not even have a point of view from which to look back at us.

(6)

Sisters of Surprise

Dateline: 21^st April Bahrain

Her head is loosely covered with a shawl, and a lock of hair has spilled out and splashed over the right side of the young woman’s face. The left side is obscured by the glare of bright sunlight shining through a police visor. Right, left – her face is effectively screened off on both sides. Thus the religious rules are more-or-less observed, if only by chance.

Without seeing right through this accidental screening, we are looking at the face of Zayban al-Kkawaja, daughter of human rights activist Adbulhadi al-Khawaja, stopped by helmeted riot cops on her way to the anti-F1 Grand Prix protest in the markets district of Manama, Bahrain. But Zayban is not the one wearing the visor; this belongs to a police officer standing directly in front of her.

Zayban is holding her hands at chest height. She has made them into fists, and although we can’t see her eyes, from the tilt of her head we can tell she is looking intently into the eyes of the officer blocking her way. ‘Are you going to cuff me, then?’, her look, which we can’t quite see, would seem to be saying. The officer’s thumb and forefinger are already wrapped around Zayban’s right wrist.

In order for the religious rules to be observed, however, the restraining officer must be a woman. The rules that dictate segregated protests in Bahrain (male protestors separated from women), also demand segregated policing – only female officers to manhandle female protestors.

Underneath the visor, therefore, a pert nose. Decked out in the stuff of Robocop (matt black padding and webbing), a small, human form. There is even a pouch beneath her helmet at the back of her neck, so that the female Robocop can conceal the rope of her own dark hair.

(7)

Pretend Answers and Real Questions

Dateline: 24^th April 2012, Leveson Inquiry, London

Young James’ eyebrows are raised in a continuous, upward frown. Beneath them, his spectacles are fashionably large, the frames transparent like the Milky Bar Kid’s.

The Milky Bar Kid is coming to town. This Milky Bar Kid can’t help himself frown.

With his left hand he is holding onto the lower part of his right arm, which is resting – it’s being made to lie still – on the table in front of him. Meanwhile his right hand is tucked under his left elbow, so that the weight of his left, upper arm is keeping it down.

Hold on tight, he seems to be telling himself, lest extravagant hand movements lead to loose talk.

In town today is James Murdoch, son of, recently resigned from, due to the phone hacking scandal and related events at his father’s News International. At the current session of the Leveson Inquiry, chaired by Lord Leveson and commissioned by prime minister David Cameron to investigate ‘the culture, practices and ethics of the press’, James Murdoch is being asked to answer for a series of internal emails re: his thwarted attempt to overcome restrictions on UK media ownership and gain full control of BSkyB.

The question is: given that the (Liberal Democrat) secretary of state for business was not well disposed towards ‘the Murdoch press’, were you not jockeying for position with the (Conservative) secretary of state for culture, who was likely to look more favourably on a bid from your family firm?

Although James clearly feels the need to keep a grip on himself, he seems to be handling the pressure. He maintains that he would not conduct business in a directly politicised manner. While it is hard to credit such a clear cut distinction between business class and the political elite – as if they only ever speak to each other through formal channels, as he makes this distinction and elaborates upon it, Young James’ voice becomes more insistent; he appears to gain in stature.

Not for what he is ostensibly saying in response to his inquisitors (the flat denial simply sounds flat), but for the tacit questions underlying his answers:

Don’t you people know better than to wash this kind of linen in public? In the tired, old country that you guys live in, have you forgotten what it takes to get anything done?

(8)

Messrs Rueful

Dateline: 1^st May 2012

His hands on the table are the mottled hands of an old man, though his eyes are sharp as pins. Pausing between sentences, his mouth defaults to a downward curve – a pictogram of sadness and regret.

Last week, giving evidence to the Leveson Inquiry, Rupert Murdoch kept his composure, managing to maintain his stance as a newspaperman. Particular answers to detailed questions (so much detail from all those emails) were generally a way of saying: that’s who I am – a newspaperman.

In front of Lord Leveson, Rupert was careful to regret the damage done to others, ruing the day he allowed himself to be compromised by corporate concerns.

If I hadn’t let myself be corporatised, none of this would have happened, Murdoch seemed to be saying. And the way he said it: so much the cartoon he could have been Roger Hargreaves’ latest character, Mister Rueful.

This was a more positive performance than last year when, quizzed by the parliamentary select committee for Culture, Media and Sport (a group of senior MPs), Murdoch Snr had seemed like King Lear upon the blasted heath: lost.

Days later, he killed a newspaper; akin to suicide for a man like him; or, for the man he wants us to think is him. But then, by launching the Sun on Sunday to replace the News of the World (deceased), he was seen resurrecting himself. In his shirtsleeves among the newsmen of Wapping, Rupert rolled the stone away from his own tomb.

Two months later on 1^st May, with their announcement that ‘Rupert Murdoch is not fit to undertake the stewardship of a major international company’, members of that select committee are trying to roll it back on top of him; punching his lights out; shutting him out of the corridors of power.

They looked nervous, conscious of the whole world watching, even while making their pronouncement. However much they want to be the MPs who dethroned Murdoch, there’s no guarantee that the British government – or even the British people – will let the old king go down.

In months or years to come, those MPs may be rueful about what they said today; just as Rupert has come to rue the day he looked the other way.

Proof 2010: Journalists Defending Journalism
Set 2, September 2010 Politics, Postmodern Journalism, and the Public

During election campaigns, immense effort and a great deal of money are expended in creating debates on policies and programmes which are intended to reach as many people as possible. However, the public process of electioneering comes to a head only in the voting booth where privacy is guaranteed and voters are thoroughly alone. This is just one example of how the schism between public and private, and also the relation between these two, are engrained in our political culture. What goes for infrequent elections is also a constant feature: throughout our lives, we alternately crave privacy and yearn to “go out” and act socially and publicly.

Perhaps because ideas of public and private are everywhere around us, it is easy to take the link between the two for granted. In recent discussions of the public sphere there has been a tendency to assume the split between public and private rather than to understand how exactly they are connected. And there are further complications. While the public/private division is formally universal, it seems to have been undermined in practice. Various contemporary commentators have observed a “confessional culture” in which people seek to make the details of their private lives into public property – celebrity being just a part of this. Elsewhere the state has moved into regulation of previously private matters, from health and lifestyle to parenting. Hence the slew of references to both “colonisation” of the public sphere by the private, and encroachment on privacy by public bodies.

Difficulties in the public sphere, often attributed to the lack of informed discussion or apathy towards politics, are happening at the same time as the blurring of the line between public and private. This seems more than a coincidence. My essay attempts to create a framework for understanding the public/private combination, at a time when this combination is itself under (partial) revision.

The Advent of Private and Public

Throughout history there have been what might be considered public events. However, it is important to understand that what we mean by ‘public’ cannot be retrospectively applied throughout all human history. The public sphere exists only in contradistinction to private individuals entering into it; moreover, these relations, and the individuals so related, acquired their full existence only in the modern period. In modern times, the close link between the historical development of the individual and the parallel development of the public sphere accounts for the enduring drive to create and recreate the public sphere on the part of individuals seeking to create and recreate themselves.

Clues as to when and how public and private began to interact fully, are writ large in the works of Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s strongest characters, pertinent to this day, are distinctly public figures. However their decisions and actions require long, notably private monologues. Harold Bloom (1998) suggests that in making his characters perform their decision-making in public, Shakespeare is undertaking no less a task than the invention of the human. Bloom argues that such characters are only able to establish their private world because of the conversations they have with themselves. These conversations take place away from the action and outside the interaction between characters – in private, in other words. But they are also soliloquies, performed by actors for appraisal by the theatre audience – in public. Thus the Shakespearean soliloquy shows how public expectations play a formative role in the internal life of the modern individual; conversely, it seems that neither the individual nor society existed, at least not in modern terms, until the interaction of public and private came to exercise a decisive influence on human, historical development.

The comparative novelty of the private and its public counterpart is also illustrated by the development of another interior monologue: silent reading. While writing and reading have, of course, existed for a very long time, reading silently has, with notable exceptions, only relatively recently become the norm (Manguel, 1996). When in the fourth century BC that public character Alexander the Great read a message silently, his troops were amazed (Fischer, 2003: 90). Likewise when Julius Caesar read a note without speaking, his “ostentatious” display caused a furore (Fischer, 2003: 90). The word-separation and ordering required for silent reading, did not become firmly established in the West until the thirteenth century (Saenger, 1997:256).

There seems to have been an overall historical trend towards greater interior (or private) life among the population as a whole, which has, roughly speaking, gone along with greater participation in the public world on the part of “the masses”. Simply put, the development of the private individual, rather than a sign of being inward-looking or insular, can be seen as the condition for public life as we understand it today. After all, only with individuals and their differing outlooks being widely recognised as important, is there the need for a public sphere where individual intentions can be played out, reconciled, modified or fought over.

Expansion of the market; growth of the self

While great historical figures have perhaps long made their own decisions, it is only with the development of market societies, which take the decision-making of the bulk of the population as their essential feature, that there is a clear and general separation of public from private spheres. Market-based societies have at their heart individuals owning property and making decisions about the exchange of commodities – even when the commodity owned and being sold is simply their own labour. Hence it transpires that the private individual acting autonomously in the market is also creating the basis for the public sphere today.

There are many facets to the general character of the individual associated with the market. In the 1920s, a legal theorist by the name of Evgeny Pashukanis, sought to understand why today’s individual was at the same time a legal subject. He started by examining market exchange or, specifically, the exchange of commodities. Pashukanis concluded that in societies organised around the market there are three aspects of the private individual which can be derived from the process of exchange:

“The party to the exchange must be an egoist, i.e. be guided by naked economic calculation otherwise the value relationship cannot appear as a socially necessary relationship. The exchanging party must be the bearer of a right, i.e. have the possibility of making an autonomous decision, for his will must ‘be embedded in objects’. Finally, the exchanging party must embody the basic principle of the equality of all human personalities, because in exchange all types of labour are equalized and are reduced to abstract human labour.” (Pashukanis 1924: 102)

What Pashukanis is saying here is that the modern individual has particular characteristics – rather than simply being “private” or wanting their own space – which are traceable to the ever-present trading of commodities. Because commodities cannot trade themselves there is an underlying requirement for individuals to act privately: to be able to own commodities and make their own decisions on what to exchange and in what ratio their commodities might be best exchanged for their own benefit. Individual calculations in which each seeks to get the best deal, give expression to the regulation of the working time of society by market trading – what Adam Smith might have called the hidden hand of the market. In trying to establish the basis for the private individual being also a legal subject and the form that law takes “independent of the content of legal norms” (Arx cited in Miéville, 2005: 91), Pashukanis identified a set of underlying characteristics essential to that individual as private actor. His analysis presents us not with the individual as such – outside history, but with the bourgeois individual – the individual in the time of capitalist society.

This analysis opens the way to understanding why the ideas of rights, freedom and equality are felt so strongly by modern individuals and are so significant a feature of the public sphere. These ideas can be clearly linked to the stamp that commodity exchange puts on the world. Rights are established through the contract made implicitly in exchange, in being able to own commodities. Freedom from restraint, for the exercise of will, derives from the freedom to act on one’s own will in the market in the disposal of commodities. From the form of commodity exchange, Pashukanis derives the idea of private individuals as being equal – expressed in terms of equality before the law, or as having an equal vote, or, as the Unites States’ constitution puts it (even stating it as birthright), “all men are created equal”. The comparison made in exchange strips away the particular qualities of the individual producer and their particular labour, transforming all efforts alike into an amount of undifferentiated money. Similarly, in the exchange relationship the people who meet via their products are just labourers in the abstract: all personalities are equal (Pashukanis, 1924: 101-102; Rubin, 1972). This equality of personality also occurs at the point of exchange where buyers and sellers meet as owners of commodities. In exchange the person’s goods, not the person, are taken into account. With the sale of labour, for example, the question being asked, strictly speaking, is not who you are, but what you cost compared to what you can produce.

The link between the independence of private individuals and the market is to a degree hidden because this independence is presumed to be established outside the market prior to exchange taking place. Being fit to take part in exchange becomes the business of all individuals to be undertaken (partly in the sphere of consumption) before they come to market. The private sphere becomes a necessity in market societies as the time and place for rest and reflection, so that these preconditions can be met. Individuals must take responsibility for their own physical upkeep and for establishing their own sense of self in private reflection. By comparison, in feudal societies, the obligations, roles and decisions of most people were much more fixed, and required far less autonomy.

Rather than the market, the “intimate sphere” of the family is the central location for private reflection. The family is an institution for social reproduction. At its most basic, it serves as the mechanism for nurturing new generations, but it also provides for intimacy, privacy and some material support (hence Engels’ description of the family as a “haven in a heartless world” ). Intimacy allows for behaviour which is not judged with the same harshness as the outside world. However, intimacy in the family, although it might act as a place to test out one’s personality, does not transcend the need for that other aspect of privacy in which it serves as the domain for establishing a level of independence that is to be taken into the outside world and applied there.

Of course no man is an island: in general it can be asserted that the private individual, despite being so constituted, cannot exist in isolation and must at least to a degree seek out the public world. While the egotistical individual might see himself ideally as an atom – as a self-sufficient, Robinson Crusoe figure – the reality is that each of the activities and attributes of individuals require resolution and satisfaction through others with the means to meet these demands. Social reality transforms the egoism of the individual “into a hunger for the objects and people of the external world” (Marx cited in Pashukanis, 1924: 81). Individuals are compelled through self interest to attempt to make the social connections which will result in their needs being met. Thus, “[h]owever alien they may seem to one another, the members of civil society are united through self interest.” (Marx cited in Pashukanis, 1924: 81)

Barriers to Growth

More specifically, among the earliest generations of fully fledged, private individuals, it was those with the closest association to trade whose private interests first led them to attempt public interventions with much wider ramifications. There is a particular self interest exhibited by those in pursuit of private commercial interests as traders. Their ambition to expand trade and increase its profitability requires them to make more and more products commensurate, and this is what constitutes the expansion of markets. Their self interest might then cohere around obstacles to this expansion, in particular the pre-modern state and the monarchy which headed the ancient, feudal system.

The English Civil War in the seventeenth century is one of the earliest conflicts between the old and new orders. And, to attract support, the civil war was at the same time a hotbed of debate and pamphleteering, a public sphere given sharp impetus, in which the clash of ideas variously took natural, religious, or abstract-rational forms. On both sides, ideas and arguments were brought to bear in the attempt to break people from old loyalties and fixities: now you must decide.

One episode from the English Civil War in particular serves as a pointed example of how developed this public sphere became, and how the influence of the market was already making itself felt. In 1647 the Putney Debates within the New Model Army set the Levellers against the army grandees. The Leveller-inspired manifesto An Agreement of the People, argued for “our just freedom” and for “common rights and liberties” (Purkiss, 2007: 488). The poorest sections of the army were attempting to grasp power and take what they needed. As one Leveller, Thomas Rainsborough, had it: “the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he” (ibid: 495). Opposing Rainsborough, the rights-based case for the defence was put by MP Henry Ireton:

“If you will resort only to the law of nature…you have no more right to this land, or anything else, than I have. But here comes the foundation of all right that I understand to be betwixt men, as to the enjoying of one thing or not enjoying of it; we are under a contract, and, we are under an agreement, and that agreement is what a man has for a matter of land that he hath received by a traduction from his ancestors, which according to the law does fall upon him to be his right (ibid: 492)

When Rainsborough asked whether “the soldier” had fought to “give power to men of riches…to make him a perpetual slave” (ibid: 494). Ireton responded that the soldier had fought the danger that “one man’s will must be a law”, and so that the law was better decided by “common consent” on the part of “fixed men” that “had the interests of the kingdoms in them” (ibid: 494). Ireton’s argument was that the vote – which could determine law – was for everyone. However, each voter must have a stake in property relations as was: otherwise there might be a law that ordered redistribution of property, resulting in anarchy rather than the stability of “fixed men”. In other words, in this case, ‘equal’ rights qualified by property trumped anything approaching absolute equality. Ireton’s measure of equality could carry conviction in debate (aside from carrying the day by force of arms), because the debate itself was prompted primarily by the expansion of only that qualified form of equality inherent in the exchange of property.

With unusual clarity, perhaps because unguarded by precedent, the Putney Debates crystallized the rights of bourgeois man. Liberty and equality were ideas put forward by both sides in the argument. Ireton’s response shows how the legal form of the enforcement of rights could be used as a defence of property and the conditions of rule by his (bourgeois) class, even if the latter depended on (limited) common consent and had been forged against monarchic tyranny. Also note the address to “he” and “man”: political rights were only discussed for men, as women were then dependants with limited autonomy (ibid: 509). The forces of popular involvement unleashed by the Civil War were to be firmly put back by repression of the Levellers and confirmation of Cromwell’s dictatorship; but only after prior removal of the power of the monarchy to block reform completely. This power was taken off in 1649, along with the head of the king.

From Battlefield to Coffee House

The more conventional starting point for a discussion of the public sphere is not the battlefields of England in the seventeenth century, but the coffee houses and salons of Europe in the eighteenth. In many ways this period has been taken as an ideal or model for the public sphere in general. Nonetheless the nascent bourgeoisie meeting in new public arenas were continuing the programme of the English parliamentarians and continuing an assault on the ancien regime with a trade wind behind them. The freshness of an emerging ruling class in the eighteenth century with novel ideas and growing confidence explains why the period might be attractive as an ideal. However, these particular qualities also make it difficult to generalise from this situation – especially to today’s public sphere.

Likewise the “normative”, or standard, analysis of the eighteenth century public sphere found in Jürgen Habermas’ Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989), despite many insights, is problematic in taking the particular features of the period as the starting points for an analysis of the public sphere in general. For example, when in Structural Transformation Habermas takes up the point that civil society came as the “corollary of depersonalized state authority” (Habermas, 1989: 19) this becomes a “basic blueprint” (ibid: 29) for his understanding of public and private: “The line between state and society, fundamental for our purposes, divided the public sphere from the private realm” (ibid: 30). However, one might say instead that elements of civil society had long been striving to depersonalise the state and that the division of public and private did not follow so neatly the division between state and “society”.

Similarly, Habermas appears to make categorical distinctions which are premature, applying them to an historical period in which the social contradictions that comprise the basis for such distinctions, were not yet fully formed. Conversely, in Habermas’ analysis, the role that the family economy began to have in home manufacture and trading becomes an argument that “the private sphere comprised civil society in the narrower sense, that is to say the realm of commodity exchange and of social labour; embedded in it was the family with its interior domain” (ibid: 30). Because private life, intimacy and commodity production often happened in the same place and at that stage seemed so closely tied together, Habermas does not adequately distinguish between the domestic, private sphere and the market demanding greater private independence as the corollary of profitable, public interaction. It seems there are fundamental limitations to generalising Habermas’ “idealisation of historical processes” (Hardy, 2009: 29) in the analysis of public and private within market economies.

The Recent Past

It might be said that his concern with the eighteenth century only partly explains why Habermas’ model of the public sphere has become so influential. The second half of the book, which compares the earlier Golden Age of public life with the commercialisation of public life that seems to have followed, is perhaps more pertinent to its popularity. When Habermas, writing in 1962 in West Germany, castigated the market for undermining public life, he was implicitly excusing the Left in Germany for being unable to make much of a mark even against the deadly dull establishment politics of the day. Similarly, when in 1987 Margaret Thatcher won a third term of office, thereby confirming the reconfiguration of UK politics (Jenkins, 2007), the Left in Britain, it could be argued, set about blaming the media, or else structural changes in society – anything rather than address the problems with its own politics. Habermas’ book arrived in English to order, and it chimed in with the expansion of Media Studies as an academic discipline in the UK. Unfortunately, current complaints against Fox News in the USA seem set to repeat the scapegoating of media for the problems of the public sphere, and the public failure of the Left in particular.

For our purposes, what is perhaps most striking about the public sphere of the eighteenth century, even with its revolutionary class on the up, is that the interests of the individuals meeting together by no means readily coalesce. As Habermas argues, existing institutions were subjected to a rational critique (1989: 28). This infused the bourgeoisie with clarity and belief in the idea that their material, class interests were the best for society; the use of rationality could put their opponents on the defensive; and this presentation, using the “liberty, equality, rights” ideas that had spontaneous expression in material relations, could be used to garner support among other sections of society. It seems, however, that common interests were unevenly felt. Long clarification from argument, debates and political organisation was required to establish a sense of collective interests. And the political was not the only important constituent in this process. Manners, morals and attitudes were established and came to be held in common by means of literature and journalism, not least through the good offices of magazines such as the Tatler and Spectator. Here, identification of self with class, occurred via the “delightful exercise in taste and reason” – regarded as a goal in itself by those with the wealth, leisure and discernment to aim for it. Thus the consumption of culture shown in the “very form of the discursive community itself” became an identifiable, cohering form of bourgeois existence (Eagleton, 2005:27).

Essentially Related: the Commercial, Cultural and Political

Where some see the commercialisation of public life as a major problem, my analysis shows that the modern public sphere is inextricably linked with commercial exchange and private individuals taking part in the market. Understandably, this creates a demand for goods to satisfy the rest, recuperation and character-formation which tend to be achieved in private. Moreover, as people in their free time enter into the public domain, they express their material interests often through ideas that in many ways are coloured by the organisation of society around exchange and its division into classes. Through interaction in the public sphere – in the various forms of politics, culture, morals and ideas – there can be a solidifying of collective identities. In this arena the state and other institutions are fought over and reformed, and new institutions created. This is done around programmes reflecting these interests and ideas, and often through the familiar prism of freedom and equality. Rather than the commercial form of the provision of cultural goods, it is issues of ideas, programme and agency and their ability to satisfy the interests and aspirations of private individuals as they bring their interests into the public, that seem to be the pertinent issues.

Moving to today, there seems to be a qualitively different problem in expressing private concerns in the public sphere. The shift towards a more individualistic society and the parlous state of the public sphere, have been identified as long term trends by various commentators. For example, Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone identifies a decline in public participation in the USA, arguing that “we need to create new structures (public and private) to facilitate renewed civic engagement” (2000: 403). Richard Sennett in The Fall of Public Man notes the historical specificity of public and private, and argues that we have a “tyranny of intimacy” stemming from a fear of any impersonal life (1992: 335). Christopher Lasch noted that the classical obsessive-compulsive mental problems of modernity have been supplanted by problems of narcissism signalling a new age (1979). Lasch and latterly Bauman argue that the default position of elites is to avoid taking responsibility for society (Lasch, 1994; Bauman, 2000:10).

While some of these writers have traced such trends back to the 1970s and even earlier – depending on the precise topic of their enquiries – it was only during the 1980s that they became so widely apparent. Zygmunt Bauman notes that in this period a series of new theories emerged – post-modernity, the end of history, second modernity and surmodernity – all of which “articulate the intuition of a radical change in the arrangement of human cohabitation and in social conditions under which life-politics is nowadays conducted” (2000: 10). One possibility is that the problems these authors variously identify, as subsequently synthesised by Bauman, were held in check by the Cold War which acted to cohere meaning and purpose under threat of extinction, thus partly energising otherwise exhausted institutions. An account of international politics A World Without Meaning by Zaki Laïdi offers a view of the Cold War as just such a “battle for the appropriation of meaning” (1998: 15). With the thaw there was a “divorce of meaning and power” (Laidi 1998: 14) and “[p]ower is nothing when it has lost meaning” (ibid: 16).

While it is beyond the scope of this essay to fully explore today’s public sphere, its renewal would seem difficult in the absence of frameworks of meaning that point to the future. With wider views of progress under question – indeed sometimes in the face of hostility to progress itself – spontaneous notions of rights, freedom and equality seem to lose their purchase. Support has ebbed away from the ideological forms that emerged alongside commodity exchange as guides to collective interests. Thus an erstwhile liberal political programme cedes all responsibility to individuals tightly regulated by the state. Meanwhile what might be called left-wing politics has difficulty in relating to contemporary individual problems or posing any relevant collective solutions. Among left-wingers, there is a widespread desire to recoup old forms of collectivity in what Ulrich Beck refers to as “zombie” institutions (Bauman, 2000: 6) – or even in the use of new communication technologies. In this context, however, institutions created by previous activity in the public sphere, and often now subsidised by the state, might even act as barriers to new initiatives.

An important part of reinvigorating the public sphere might be to take seriously the notion of the autonomous individual that comes with it. The close link between the public sphere and the development of the free autonomous individual suggests that attempts to protect, regulate and set controls on individual behaviour may get in the way of the re-building of a public sphere. On the other hand, a concerted effort to defend and expand this distinctively modern, human figure may serve in its reconstruction. Perhaps it is through the defence of the freedom for individuals to govern themselves without regulation that a public sphere is best renewed today. For example, some opposition to the “personal safety state” (2006: 154) that seeks often through law to guarantee happiness or safety, may be given in how people continue to experience the world through rights, liberty and equality. Similarly, the defence of individual autonomy might provide the groundwork for cohering common interests and renewing the public sphere.

Mark Beachill recently graduated from UEL with First Class Honours in Journalism. He is now reading for a PhD.

Bibliography

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Proof Set 3, May 2012 The Reformation of Journalism

Collision At The Crossroads: tabloids crash into celebrity journalism

It had to happen. The recent shift towards the cult of personality (in journalism and wider society) was bound to collide with impersonal news reporting in the narrow, tabloid tradition. Combine this with left-of-centre hostility towards ‘the Murdoch Press’, and the conditions were ripe for the multiple pile-up which includes Hackgate, the end of the News of the World, and LevesonPlus (Lord Leveson’s inquiry plus the report of the parliamentary select committee for Culture, Media and Sport, frequent calls for media reform, etc etc).

We are constantly reminded that there were more than a few bad apples rotting in the News International barrel. But (if you’ll allow my original metaphor) ascribing the car crash to a whole fleet of journalists, is no less inadequate than putting it down to a few reckless motorists. The road is the thing. In order to explain the collision, we need to map the route leading up to it. Accordingly, this essay surveys the main approaches pursued by the two, different drivers of UK journalism since the late 1980s, and shows how they would inevitably come together, head-on.

The Tabloid Route

The tabloid road is especially demanding. The style of writing required of tabloid journalists is unusually compressed. Direct and to the point. If broadsheet newspapers sometimes take on the characteristics of a dinner party, the tabs are more like fast food. Though the results can be messy, there’s no messing about.

Tabloid style is the result of pressure to cram news into a smaller space, i.e. fewer square inches of newsprint than a broadsheet. Over time, the pressure to compress was consolidated into a distinctive tradition. Furthermore, there is less room to deviate from this tradition. Literally. Space restrictions are an additional restriction on further development. The tabloid has fewer columns in which to try out alternatives.

This means that the tabloid tradition is stronger than most. In other words, the tabs are journalism’s natural conservatives. (NB if this were a tabloid, there would be no space to make the same point ‘in other words’.) In tabloid news, even today, the journalist is still expected to write the story as if he himself does not exist, using an impersonal frame of reference which has been largely lifted from other news platforms. Where both broadsheets and the BBC would now allow or even encourage their reporters to say ‘I’, more often than not the tabloids still say ‘no’ to such usage.

There are other ways in which the ghost of Journalism Past continues to haunt the tabloids. Tabloid journalists continue to see themselves hunting quarry and capturing stories. Moreover, they expect the hunt to come to a decisive end in a key phrase or ‘killer quote’ that clinches it. Thus the Sun‘s infamous headline, ‘Gotcha!’, not only described the sinking of the General Belgrano, it also told the story of the tabloid tradition in one, deathly word. Though this headline only appeared in the paper’s first edition, three decades later the tabloids were still living the life which it symbolised.

The celebrity route

Meanwhile, the rest of the world had moved on. As early as the late 1980s, celebrity magazines put a new gloss on UK journalism. Titles such as Hello! allowed readers to download the domestic interiors of the rich and famous, thereby uploading themselves into a newly privatised culture – enacted in Thatcherite legislation; represented by the rapid rise of celebrity magazines.

Whereas in the tabloid tradition, finality is the supreme virtue (this is the story; end of), celebrity journalism has been deliberately inconclusive: in our next issue, we go inside XXX’s wardrobe; in the following issue, we will turn out her handbag, etc etc. Thus each magazine article serves only to connect the one before and the one after. In this respect, celebrity magazines anticipated the continuous flow of social media.

In the 1980s the new emphasis on celebrity also signalled a revised role for journalism, which coincided with the emergence of financial services as the UK’s ‘engine for growth’. But this was no mere coincidence. In different ways, both the rise of celebrity journalism and the expansion of financial services represented the growing role of mediating activity in a society at some distance from industrial production. When news is a ‘conversation’ and journalists its mediators, they are acting in much the same mediating capacity as their counterparts in the City; and just like the markets for fictitious capital, this kind of journalism is particularly liable to crash.

Coming to the crossroads

Celebrity magazines (early incarnation) and the iPhone (first iteration) are separated by two decades. During that time there was a considerable amount of lane-hopping between the tabloid tradition and the newly personalised form of celebrity journalism.

Although the tabs and the magz were always going to bang into each other, at first they seemed to hit it off.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 showed that one of the staples of modern journalism – the battle of political ideologies – was fast becoming a hollow exercise. Within the space of a few months, the world of politics was largely emptied out; and this left the tabloids in something of a vacuum. They filled it with a knowing tone of voice, partly in tune with what was then referred to as ‘the postmodern condition’, and partly a straight lift from the nudge and the wink of the music hall, which had been a formative influence on the tabloids’ original incarnation. Headlines such as ‘Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster’ were largely an aside to the audience; sorry, readership. Between the lines, the subs were saying: we know you don’t believe what you read in the papers, or what the politicians are telling you; neither do we.

In turn, this tone of voice was adopted by the next generation of celebrity magazines, epitomised in the re-vamp of Heat under its second editor, Mark Frith. Instead of the adulatory tones of Hello! and OK!, the new version of celebrity took a knowing look at celebrity itself. Once described as ‘irony in the soul’, this kind of knowingness may also be considered ‘postmodern’. Yet the new magz took the form of their postmodernism from the tabs, who had themselves resurrected it from the good old days when popular journalism was a kind of theatre, with the drama laid out on the breakfast table instead of the stage.

Having taken up the aside – the point at which the performer steps out of the action and comes to the side of the stage to address the audience, the new journalism has been running away with it ever since. Led by, but not exclusive to magazines, what was only on the side has since become central. In such media circles (as we have seen, they are intended to be circuitous), direct speech is now the default mode of address: your magazine; tell us about your life, your feelings etc. In its new-found you-and-us mode, journalism is no longer the staging of the story; instead it becomes a conversation about some personalities (celebrities) undertaken by other persons, aka journalists and ‘users’ (the people formerly known as readers). This is the point at which journalism, especially magazine journalism, segues into our current usage of social media.

So far we have shown celebrity journalism borrowing from the tabloid tradition, in such a way as to make its borrowings into something else. But there was traffic in the other direction, too. During the 1990s, tabloids became heavily indebted to the world of celebrity, especially that part of it which appears on TV. Accordingly, the boss of the Daily Mirror became a ‘celebrity tabloid editor’: Piers Morgan turned the Mirror into a celebrity-based paper and became a ‘sleb’ himself. Forced to resign after he was hoaxed (Morgan was unable to kick the tyres on a traditional tabloid ‘scoop’), he went on to be a TV personality.

But just as the magz re-made what they borrowed from the tabs, when the tabloids took up with celebrity, their tradition obliged them to treat it differently. Although they signed up to perform some of that circulating journalism in which stories need not – indeed, they had better not – come to a head, tabloid journalists could not give up the habit of trying to get the story and finish the job. Furthermore, this habit was more than a hangover from the past. Uncharacteristically removed from the tradition of popular, political journalism (deceased), uncomfortably reliant on the alien world of televised celebrity, the tabloids felt they had to hold onto something of their former selves, lest they cease to exist as a distinctive type within the print. Without the presence of the past, the tabloids would have feared even more for their future. Hence the fateful decision – more like compulsion, really – to combine the close-up on personality with the traditionally impersonal tone of hard news reporting.

Slow motion crash

It took Milly Dowler’s phone to set off the crash. On the one hand, journalists hacking into it, in search of the elusive personal detail that would somehow be conclusive; on the other hand, the dead girl’s phone symbolising the new life (ours as well as hers) comprised of countless, continuous exchanges.

The tabloid tradition, in which murder is the best story because it is the ultimate compression of human life. Versus the new journalism, which prefers illness because it is comparatively indefinite. Only now, as LevesonPlus looks set to run and run, we are asked to sit through saga of journalism’s own sickness.

In the current case notes, some positive aspects of news reporting have been misdiagnosed as morbid symptoms; even the ambition to ‘nail the story’ comes in for a bad press. But we do not have to sit on our hands. Although the crash was going to happen in some shape or form, we are not condemned to watch the sequence again and again without protest. Even if it did become distorted, we should still celebrate the tabloid ambition to get the definitive story, and define it in the shortest, simplest terms. Having allowed the tabloid tradition to be corrupted, we will have to find new ways of meeting those terms; but they are worth holding out for, nonetheless.

Andrew Calcutt

Proof Set 3, May 2012 The Reformation of Journalism

Introduction

Previously in Proof, a small number of journalists made the case for reinstating the much-maligned concept of objectivity – a strong case based on four, substantial points:

1) Journalism is the objectification of human experience. The journalist makes an object – the story – out of what is happening to human beings; and objectivity is the quality of objectification. Thus the rejection of objectivity is a rejection of objectification; as such, it is also the negation of journalism.

2) Journalism is a secondary form of objectification: it makes an account of the world which human beings have already made. Primary objectification (human activity) and its secondary form (journalism followed by other kinds of knowledge of the world we humans have activated) together amount to the realisation of the human subject. In its widest sense, objectification compounds the primary and the secondary: it is the sum of what the human subject has done, in thought and deed. Thus subjectivity and objectivity are not only opposites, they are also related; and the value of journalism is the strength of their relationship. Conversely, the strength of their relationship is the value of journalism. Accordingly, when their relationship is weak, the value of journalism is lowered.

3) Against a background of ‘citizen journalism’ and user-generated media content, the value of professional journalism has never been lower. In response, journalists have further weakened the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity by disowning objectivity in favour of subjectivity. In effect, we have been short-selling our own stock, deflating what we do in a misguided attempt to re-float it for the digital age. But objectivity is the USP of the professionals. As we distance ourselves from it, so we endanger our own jobs in journalism and the social role of journalism. On both counts, journalists must rediscover their objective side – or risk extinction.

If you have got this far, Dear Reader, you’ll know why the Proof-ers who made this argument did not make much headway with it. As formulated above, its positive message – objectivity is human not alien, requires prior recognition of ‘the human subject’ – a universal concept which few people are now able to recognise. In other words, to understand Proof‘s positive message in this form, requires prior conceptualisation of universal human activity. If you can get the message, in other words, you don’t need to hear it, aka preaching to the converted. Meanwhile, the journalists we were trying to get to, could not get past the negative connotations of objectivity, no matter how often we said that its bad press was totally unjustified.

What follows, then, is a new way of conveying the original message of the first issue of Proof: the journalist is essential, but only if journalists live up to their social role; moreover, since the public will only pay for essentials, professional journalists had better live up to this social role or they risk becoming superfluous.

However, apart from our internal limitations, events in the outside world also demand a different level of Proof. If our first issue came out when journalism was entering an economic crisis, during the past two years UK journalists have been dragged into a moral crisis. In both senses – moral and commercial – journalism is now called upon to prove its worth; and Proof will duly respond to each aspect of this dual crisis.

In the good old days (2009-10) when we only had one crisis to deal with, it was widely believed that digital technology had done the dirty on paid-for journalism. Now it is widely held that the sordid activity of journalists, especially those employed by the Dirty Digger, has damned the ‘profession’ a second time. But in our analysis, the second form of damnation is as spurious as the first. Moral re-armament will not be the ultimate salvation of journalism, any more than digital technology was the only cause of its commercial decline. Similarly, if the fixation with digital technology was unhelpful, preoccupying ourselves with morality is equally misguided. The real priority is to reformulate the story. Ethics and economics will solve themselves, almost, if journalists first focus on finding form.

Reformulating Journalism: the essentialist manifesto

Journalism faces reform
The Leveson inquiry is yet to conclude, but the stage is already set for ‘statutory underpinning’ of journalism, i.e. legitimate, journalistic activity designated so that journalists will be obliged to adhere to this designation in order to gain legitimacy. Journalism’s reformers stress that this constitutes neither gatekeeping nor state censorship. They may be right; but ‘statutory underpinning’ will import into journalism the compliance culture (an audit for this, a risk assessment for that) which has already proved so obstructive elsewhere. In higher education, for example, ‘closing the loop’ means that academics are increasingly bound up within procedural circuits. This kind of circular definition is absolutely not what journalism needs.

Journalism faces formlessness
To keep up with what non-journalists can now do for themselves in social media, journalists have been doing whatever it takes to stay in the conversation. But when journalism loses its close association with recognised forms, e.g. the hard news story in the form of an inverted pyramid, unless it also finds new forms to be identified by, it can only be moving towards formlessness. Recent movements in this direction have been championed as the liberation of journalism from formal constraint and elitist restraint. Unfortunately, as journalism becomes anything you want it to be, there is less certainty about what anyone will want it for (or why they would pay for professional journalists to do whatever it is).

Journalism needs reformulation
The trend towards formlessness in journalism amounts to the deformation of journalism. This is the biggest threat facing journalism today. Phone hacking may have got out of hand, but the deformation of journalism as a whole is a more pressing problem than the defamation of individuals by particular journalists. Moreover, if journalists continue to be preoccupied with the moral reform of journalism, the deformation process may continue unchecked until there is little left to reform.

For journalism to thrive, journalists must not be dragooned into reform school, to be lectured by the new worthies of ‘self-esteem’ and ‘well being’; instead we should be teaching ourselves to reformulate the story, finding new forms of expression in which journalism can distinguish itself once more.

Journalism is essentialism
We habitually say that ‘journalism is essential’ but recent developments suggest otherwise; increasingly, the-people-formerly-known-as -readers can take it or leave it. Better to say that journalism was essential as and when it was essentialist, i.e. when journalism was expected to capture the essence of events and journalists found a distinctive way of realising this expectation – at least, in part. Having studiously avoided philosophy, journalists may well recoil from such terms; nonetheless, the journalist has always been a tacit essentialist.

The essence of events is the necessity of journalism
If journalists must capture the essence of events in order to remain essential, this means that journalism needs essentialism or it is bound to become optional.

In our faux modest way we are wont to say that we have ‘nailed the story’; but this really means capturing the essence of an event, where ‘essence’ includes the basics (who, what, where etc), but it is not reducible to them. Thus the essence of events entails more than the old formula; and it is different again from the new digital discourse around events and non-events.

Conversely, without aiming for essence and minus a distinctive form in which to attain it, what looks and sounds like journalism has already slipped into something casual; and therefore inessential. Many journalists are now performing a kind of post-journalism, which lacks definition because it has lost the ambition to define. Their work is in poor shape; and their long-term employment prospects are equally uncertain.

But if journalism shapes up, it could regain its essentialism. The best chance we have lies in the attempt to capture the essential character of events and to make this capture in new and distinctive forms.

Reformulating the story along essentialist lines is the only way to make journalism essential again.

By analysis and experiment, the current issue of Proof makes a small contribution to the fulfilment of this daunting task.

. But the absence of morality among some journalists is less damaging than the lack of definition across journalism as a whole. Having conceded that ‘there’s always someone out there who knows more than us’, we are losing the will to define what we see; and we tend to write our stories in the same way – without a definite shape. In form as well as content, our stories are becoming indefinite. As a result, journalism is close to losing its distinctive character. In this context, the reformation we really need is a re-formation of the story.

[pullquote]But the absence of morality among some journalists is less damaging than the lack of definition across journalism as a whole[/pullquote]

The Reformation of Journalism is Proof’s theme for 2012. But re-forming the story must take precedence over re-setting the moral compass. Story, first; morality, second – unless we follow this order of priorities, journalism will be unable to regain its sense of direction.

ISSN 2042-1621

Proof Set 3, May 2012 The Reformation of Journalism

Dear Journo,

The Leveson Inquiry may be the most far-reaching investigation into ‘the culture, practices and ethics of the press’ (if only today’s investigative journalism was so well-resourced), yet it is way wide of the mark. The most pressing problem in journalism is not moral collapse but the collapse of ‘the story’.

‘The story’ is journalese for capturing events: it is the form in which an event appears, as and when we journalists have captured it. But today the story is on the point of escaping us; and we have done little to stop it.

The idea of capturing events strikes many, younger journalists as impossibly authoritarian. After the advent of Web 2.0, even senior editors began to share these misgivings. The cat is out of the bag, they said. With the media landscape opening up, there is no need for the kind of closure that capture contains: it’s foolish even to try. To keep hold of readers, go for Twitter instead.

Then along comes LevesonPlus (the man himself and the whole ensemble of his inquiry) with the message that capture is not merely mad, it is also morally bad. Thus the News of the World was doomed in the attempt to capture the story in a killer quote from Milly Dowler’s voicemail, allegedly. Unless it is regulated/reined in, the ambition to ‘nail it’ will be the death of journalism, supposedly.

On the contrary, it would be morally reprehensible if journalists did renounce their ambition to capture the essence of events; as if doctors could take back their Hippocratic oath while continuing to practise medicine. Moreover, journalism practised without this ambition is quack journalism: it collapses the distinction between casual media content and professional journalism, i.e. journalism worth paying for. So YPay for it? Indeed there is a now a generation that does not expect to. If you weren’t the journalist whose job depends on it, you wouldn’t, would you? And if we continue operating along these lines we will find ourselves writing the longest, professional suicide note in history – our own.

Previous issues of Proof made the case for the continuation of professional journalism, assuming that professional journalists continue to distinguish themselves by capturing the essence of events. The current issue is primarily concerned with how that happens, at a time when it seems to be happening less, and there is growing resistance, even among journalists, to it happening at all.

For journalism to remain a must-read, it must devise new story forms, capable of capturing the essence of the early twentieth century. Even more important than the moral choices facing journalists, journalism is destined to become optional if it does not rediscover its own essentialism, and devise new ways in which to formulate it. These are the tasks to which this Proof is dedicated.

All human life has to be here, in our pages and on our screens; or we don’t have to be here at all.

Please feel free to agree or disagree, extend or challenge the ideas and analysis contained in Proof.

Andrew Calcutt andrewcalcutt@gmail.com