Code breaking
It seems, at least in the higher echelons of what pass for New Labour’s ‘foremost’ ‘minds’ these days, that blogs are inciting something of a moral panic. First, last week, we had Tony Blair’s senior policy adviser Matthew Taylor* telling us that blogs and bloggers were undermining the relationship between public and politicians.
Now we have no less a figure than Alastair Campbell speaking of his concerns.
Former Downing Street spin doctor Alastair Campbell, who chaired the session organised by the Commission for Racial Equality, said blogs were “perceived as a positive development” but added that “some of the most offensive stuff” comes from them…
Most offensive? Well, it’s a cheap point and no less valid for that, but if you amalgamated all seven million UK blogs together and measured their collective offensiveness, it would still only be around one or two millicampbells. Devil’s Kitchen (for example) may be impressively foul-mouthed and therefore of dubious taste to the small-minded but I’m pretty sure that he hasn’t yet orchestrated a propaganda offensive (in both senses of the word) that contributed to the deaths of 655,000 people. What’s more offensive, a sweary blogger or a Deputy Prime Minister who can’t keep his hands to himself?
How many blogs has Campbell read in order to form this conclusion? Maybe he has someone like self-styled blogging superstar and Westminster watchdog Guido Fawkes in mind which suggests Campbell hasn’t ventured very far into Blogistan. He’d be guilty of a gross category error. Holding Fawkes up as an example would be like eating a turd and then declaring your dislike of chocolate eclairs. Sure, they’re both long and brown but you’re the one who’s been eating shit.
To think that Campbell once consorted with princes and presidents and now he’s slagging off bloggers for whatever slim living it affords. I think I have an erection.
Speaking at the same conference Press Complaints Commission director Tim Toulmin said he’d like to see a voluntary code of practice for bloggers much like the one we already have for newspapers and magazine. Needless to say, many bloggers have told Mr Toulmin what he can do with his Blogger’s Code.
It’s self-serving nonsense and ultimately unenforceable. I was once at a talk given by a PCC representative who closed the lecture with the words, ‘I know a lot of people think the Press Complaints Commission is toothless, but…’. They then refused to answer questions afterwards.
The laws of libel and contempt of court apply to bloggers as much as they do to journalists. Unlike newspapers who only admit to mistakes when what laughingly passes for PCC sanction is applied, blogging is a peer-reviewed medium where factual inaccuracies in post can be pointed out in the comments. It’s already self-policing. The best bloggers already unspokenly adhere to a code. Only the lowest of the low delete comments pointing out their mistakes and that kind of censorship tends to get flagged anyway. As for redress, as Robert Sharp says:
My comments box is open, and I respectfully invite you to redress yourself there. My readers shall consider your point-of-view, and if they agree with you over me, then I shall probably lose credibility with one or both of them.
And the rest is dictated by common decency and accepted social mores. (Messy, I know, but it’s my experience, with one or two exceptions, that if you want to be successful in Blogistan, being a total wanker will not get you very far.) And the fact that, like television, if something isn’t illegal but you don’t like it, then turn it off and go and find something more to your tastes.
* It’s to be wondered just how close Taylor was close to the formulation of Blair’s contemptuous attempts to establish formal social contracts between government and public. Taylor’s assertion that…
I want people to have more power, but I want them to have more power in the context of a more mature discourse about the responsibilities of government and the responsibilities of citizens.
…certainly betrays a line of thinking that says the public should be singing louder for its supper ‘beyond paying taxes and obeying the law’, as the Prime Minister’s policy review puts it.
Posted on November 29th, 2006 at 12:38 pm
| See also • They hate our freedoms • Meanwhile elsewhere… • Off the artistic roll call |
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7 Mn bloggers ? that’s one in 10(ish) of the population!Sounds a dodgy figure.
Remember Blur’s Terrorism a 12 step program last August 5th…
“One other point on deportations. Once the new grounds take effect, there will be a list drawn up of specific extremist websites, bookshops, centres, networks and particular organisations of concern. Active engagement with any of these will be a trigger for the Home Secretary to consider the deportation of any foreign national.”
Matthew Taylor’s remarks should be taken as a wake up call…. legislation to control bloggers probably in the works – most likely in lock step with the US authorities.
Damn, I only saw the old pigfucker in the street in Gospel Oak the other day. I was in a car and we were travelling at good speed, so I didn’t spit in his eye.
BTW, I quite like the idea of a millicampbell. Supposedly, a millihelen is the standard unit of beauty on the basis that Helen of Troy was enough to launch a thousand ships, so one ship=millihelen, and one millicampbell is enough mendacity to drive one-thousandth of a scientist to suicide.
I like the idea that we are all doing the same thing- if I had half the contacts of Guido or the influence of Iain Dale not to mention the economic knowledge of Chris Dillow I’d be a proud man. Some blogs its true can be quite vicious but then again so can parts of the press- and anyway I don’t suppose that Polly Toynbee reads Devil’s Kitchen or Mr Eugenides. Some blogs like Dave Hill’s for instance aren’t vicious. I wouldn’t have thought there is anything much worse than the Sun out there for distortions and innaccuracies- language may be a different matter.
I suspect there is actually more libel problesm from a website like popbitch which moves rumours round the net- I suspect but don’t know. And I’d have thought the celebrity gossip websites are far more vulnerable than your humble political blogger who is most of the time just expressing an opinion.
Just a thought but what’s the status of a comment on a blog- if someone puts it there and says something libellous, if I don’t remove it have I published it and am I an accessory to libel.
You’ll be one of the first up against the wall, young man!
Alistair Campbell, who took “one for the team” in the Butler inquiry still hasn’t gone away, you know. He knows where many nulab’s bodies are buried.
Watch this space.
[...] Longrider is excellent on the subject, as is Chicken Yoghurt, who is particularly scathing about the ironies inherent in Former Downing Street spin doctor Alastair Campbell’s view that blogs were “perceived as a positive development” but “some of the most offensive stuff” comes from them. [...]
Oh a voluntary code, a bit like the one the News of the World follows?
Just not sure I’d have the thousands to lob at charity of choice after I’d chosen to ignore it.
Sorry if that’s nasty.
[...] Justin of Chicken Yoghurt is wearyingly obtuse in the comments at Never Trust A Hippy. In response to this from Paulie: The prize for the most telling response to the Tim Toulmin /Alistair Campbell dialogue and call for a ‘blogger code of conduct’ surely goes to Chicken Yoghurt. His response is that the blogosphere…. “…hasn’t yet orchestrated a propaganda offensive (in both senses of the word) that contributed to the deaths of 655,000 people. What’s more offensive, a sweary blogger or a Deputy Prime Minister who can’t keep his hands to himself?” [...]