Web 2.0 skeptic, author of dotcom entrepreneur, Andrew Keen fought a feisty battle with a number of callers to Five Live's phone-in the other morning. Keen feels much of the web is devalued by amateur content that spawns inane theory and the devotion of the feeble-minded. When Tim from Notting Hill called in ranting about the absurd 911 conspiracy theory website Loose Change, claiming how 'four MPs' had now given the site the seal of approval, it was as much a Keen could take. Tim got short shrift as he tried to disprove Keen's assertion that bloggers and callers were unpaid purveyors of content drivel who devalued professional content proivders in particular, and the web in general. As Tim whined away about Bush and Cheney flying planes into buildings, Keen resorted the withering insults. Poor old Tim could not have proved Keen's assertion more vividly. Underneath all this was a more salient message that the web as an omnibus media - or should that be media omnibus - has seriouosly damaged democracy in process.
Politicians in the web age have a thankless, impossible task. The immediacy of the internet puts pressure not just on the print media, but rolling news on radio and TV, and one of Blair's more unattractive legacies is New Labour's rampant pandering to this agenda.
However, with the recent of the Falklands War and the Thatcher premiership, and more recently the raft of Blair premiership obits, it does seem the past can deliver those who have suffered from the present. It is extraordinary how those of us who remember successive Tory victories seem to have forgotten that the only media of any weight in town - the daily press - was almost entirely faithful to the Tories. With the exception of Maxwell's Daily Mirror and The nascent Independent, every single other paper offered little more than canine devotion to the Tories. Is it any wonder Blair - and New Labour's - priority was media influence? When the bleating about spin first emerged, my initial instinct was of the bear defecating in woods school.
History will record this, as it will wonder at how Blair's nickname 'Bambi' disappeared from the public consciousness almost the day his was chosen as John Smith's successor. It's not so much that the web is the cause of this forgetfulness, but it certainly clouds the memory. That said it is heartening to hear both sides of the spectrum rubbishing the unfair and fundamentally wrong assertion that Blair was Bush's poodle, for example. Indeed, if he was, part of the Balkans might well have adopted the effete beast as its totem. Likewise, more are relating how Blair insisted on Britain's part in the Iraq invasion.
It was obvious to anyone capable of putting aside a natural revulsion of George W Bush pre-9/11 record, that Blair's endorsement of that adventure was a genuine conviction move. Paxman was absolutely justified in asking the Prime Minister if he and Bush prayed together, but I don't think he implied subservience in this question.
The killer blow - the dossier - was, in many cases almost literally, manna from heaven for the bloggers. The web produced a legion of bedroom polemicists, mostly from the left. Traditionally a free press would provide a platform for a Pilger or a Fisk to turn reportage into soapbox. Now bloggers could do the same, usually by slavishly rehashing their copy verbatim, mixed in with any old rumour from around still more unaccountable website and blogs feeding a self serving community of unquestioning paranoia and ignorance. Global reach gave succour to the deluded and strength in numbers the unshakable belief they were, still are, right. Loose Change is the ultimate expample of this. A site that devotes itself to promoting a ludicrous conspiracy implicating the Bush administration in 9/11 and yet ignoring the fact that it is allowed to exist by the very police state it purports the Bush administration to be.
Nick Cohen's What's Left bemoans the way the traditional left had completely forgotten any notion of solidarity in the context of the Iraq War. He is not alone on the traditional left who finds himself aghast that liberals and trade unionists couldn't find it in themselves to support the plight of the Iraqi people - and trade union members - as they were delivered from their fascist oppressor. For that the web may not be to blame, but it certainly hasn't helped.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Oh. My. god
Like any keyboard ranter, I regularly have a metaphorical sharpener at Hitch's Bar. Christopher Hitchens is always satisfying, often inspiring, frequently amusing and for many, essential reading. More recently, thanks to the workers' paradise that is YouTube, he's become the downloader's master pundit, debater and scourge of fighty interviewers of all media.
The fact that his enemies so often fall into one, or both, of two caricatures - the hurt lover or bewildered centre back - makes him all the more entertaining. Throw in poetic offence, delivered with an actor's voice employed with the effect of a kidney dagger, and it's no wonder Hitchens (major) sells out any hall with his name on the bill.
He was on good form at The Garrick this week, where a half pint of diluted malt failed to compromise an hour's eloquence on the evil of religion to a packed house of the faithless.
He was, understandably, on a roll. Three weeks earlier - just as the 'god is not Great' tour shed is godless shadow over the deep South - the almighty chose to smite down Jerry Falwell, prompting the networks to offer Hitchens his finest hour; the opportunity to broadcast a Falwell obituary that resembled disco fever, and simultaneous prime time promotion of his anti-theist masterwork. The timing must have confused the great sage as to whether there really was a God, Kharma or Kismet. Or maybe Old Nick was repaying him for his pro bono work as his 'advocate' in the case of Mother Teresa. Either way, seldom has Kismet presented a more deliciously ironic opportunity and Hitchens seized it with both hands as he savaged Falwell's legacy on CNN. The following night he was bacj for more as he savaged Fox TV's Sean Hannity - himself a believer and Falwell apologist. The contrarian is nothing if not an opportunist
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IDfKKWBEZk
Having been loathed by anti-war liberals for the ultimate apostasy of mutating from leftist poster boy to Gulf War Standard Bearer, suddenly Hitchens was top of the best seller list and darling of hitherto silent atheists everywhere. In a relay of fiercely argued, anti-religion best sellers, the baton has been passed from Sam Harris to Daniel Dennett to Richard Dawkins and now to Hitchens in the anchor role, his lunching of religion widely 'praised' and flying off the shelves in a godless reaction to America's unseemly lurch towards unfettered religiosity.
For those liberals who supported the Iraqi campaign and Hitchens' lonely arguments for the liberation, it has been a welcome respite from the tedious squabbling with those from the left for whom the word solidarity has been sadly erased from their collective conscience.
And then, in a response to our guilty pleasure at the incarceration of Paris Hilton, a sort of deliverance from our own hopeless obsessions, who should improbably and perversely defend the indefensible? Step forward the not so young contrarian.
Hitchens' odd 'defence' of Paris Hilton (http://www.slate.com:80/id/2168128/fr/flyout) is more an attack on the genuine schadenfreude in the face of a widely welcome reality check. Indeed, never was apparent injustice so deserved in the eyes of the hoi polloi. It escaped no one that she was hoisted by her own petard. A gentle spell inside was a fair price for La Hilton's relentless drive to subvert the youth of the world.
In this instance, however, Hitch is uniquely out of touch. In dipping his immaculately styled pen into the mire of celebrity sleaze, he oddly misses the point. He was, as ever, on the mark about the sex tapes, ('I could almost have believed that she was drugged.') the Kingsley Amis reference (even as he wanted a certain spectacle to go on, he also wanted it to stop) was au point, but his portrait of her as a victim of the vindictive was disingenuous, and betrays a bizarre sympathy, and a distance gifted to those of higher pursuits from the reality beneath. Whatever slings and arrows he suffered for bravely following a point of principal that, for many, cast him as traitor, Hitchens' scourge is in no way eqitable to the relentless hold this pointless woman has over the mass media in general, and female youth culture in particular. If controversy was his intention, it was a poor afternoon's work.
Ultimately Paris Hilton was as guilty as any rich and powerful person who believes themselves above the law, and it has been obvious to all that the evidence clearly showed signs of this. Wonderful as his barracking on FoxTV of creepy Christian republican Ralph Reed was, there was little difference between the arrogance of Reed's friend, convicted fraudster, Jack Abramoff and that of Paris Hilton.
But, oddly, in his support of Paris, Hitch seemed completely unaware that in the modern celebrity age, a modest downfall offers unlimited opportunity. Perversely, Christopher has ignored Paris' hilariously brassy discovery of god and her cell-bound transubstantiation into Mother Teresa. Depressingly, the world still awaits St Paris of West Hollywood.
At risk of over-egging the irony pudding, if Hitch needs any evidence that bad behaviour begets great opportunity, he need look no further than his own disgraced ex-editor, and now fledgling US superstar, the truly grotesque, but apparently irresistible, Piers Morgan.
The fact that his enemies so often fall into one, or both, of two caricatures - the hurt lover or bewildered centre back - makes him all the more entertaining. Throw in poetic offence, delivered with an actor's voice employed with the effect of a kidney dagger, and it's no wonder Hitchens (major) sells out any hall with his name on the bill.
He was on good form at The Garrick this week, where a half pint of diluted malt failed to compromise an hour's eloquence on the evil of religion to a packed house of the faithless.
He was, understandably, on a roll. Three weeks earlier - just as the 'god is not Great' tour shed is godless shadow over the deep South - the almighty chose to smite down Jerry Falwell, prompting the networks to offer Hitchens his finest hour; the opportunity to broadcast a Falwell obituary that resembled disco fever, and simultaneous prime time promotion of his anti-theist masterwork. The timing must have confused the great sage as to whether there really was a God, Kharma or Kismet. Or maybe Old Nick was repaying him for his pro bono work as his 'advocate' in the case of Mother Teresa. Either way, seldom has Kismet presented a more deliciously ironic opportunity and Hitchens seized it with both hands as he savaged Falwell's legacy on CNN. The following night he was bacj for more as he savaged Fox TV's Sean Hannity - himself a believer and Falwell apologist. The contrarian is nothing if not an opportunist
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IDfKKWBEZk
Having been loathed by anti-war liberals for the ultimate apostasy of mutating from leftist poster boy to Gulf War Standard Bearer, suddenly Hitchens was top of the best seller list and darling of hitherto silent atheists everywhere. In a relay of fiercely argued, anti-religion best sellers, the baton has been passed from Sam Harris to Daniel Dennett to Richard Dawkins and now to Hitchens in the anchor role, his lunching of religion widely 'praised' and flying off the shelves in a godless reaction to America's unseemly lurch towards unfettered religiosity.
For those liberals who supported the Iraqi campaign and Hitchens' lonely arguments for the liberation, it has been a welcome respite from the tedious squabbling with those from the left for whom the word solidarity has been sadly erased from their collective conscience.
And then, in a response to our guilty pleasure at the incarceration of Paris Hilton, a sort of deliverance from our own hopeless obsessions, who should improbably and perversely defend the indefensible? Step forward the not so young contrarian.
Hitchens' odd 'defence' of Paris Hilton (http://www.slate.com:80/id/2168128/fr/flyout) is more an attack on the genuine schadenfreude in the face of a widely welcome reality check. Indeed, never was apparent injustice so deserved in the eyes of the hoi polloi. It escaped no one that she was hoisted by her own petard. A gentle spell inside was a fair price for La Hilton's relentless drive to subvert the youth of the world.
In this instance, however, Hitch is uniquely out of touch. In dipping his immaculately styled pen into the mire of celebrity sleaze, he oddly misses the point. He was, as ever, on the mark about the sex tapes, ('I could almost have believed that she was drugged.') the Kingsley Amis reference (even as he wanted a certain spectacle to go on, he also wanted it to stop) was au point, but his portrait of her as a victim of the vindictive was disingenuous, and betrays a bizarre sympathy, and a distance gifted to those of higher pursuits from the reality beneath. Whatever slings and arrows he suffered for bravely following a point of principal that, for many, cast him as traitor, Hitchens' scourge is in no way eqitable to the relentless hold this pointless woman has over the mass media in general, and female youth culture in particular. If controversy was his intention, it was a poor afternoon's work.
Ultimately Paris Hilton was as guilty as any rich and powerful person who believes themselves above the law, and it has been obvious to all that the evidence clearly showed signs of this. Wonderful as his barracking on FoxTV of creepy Christian republican Ralph Reed was, there was little difference between the arrogance of Reed's friend, convicted fraudster, Jack Abramoff and that of Paris Hilton.
But, oddly, in his support of Paris, Hitch seemed completely unaware that in the modern celebrity age, a modest downfall offers unlimited opportunity. Perversely, Christopher has ignored Paris' hilariously brassy discovery of god and her cell-bound transubstantiation into Mother Teresa. Depressingly, the world still awaits St Paris of West Hollywood.
At risk of over-egging the irony pudding, if Hitch needs any evidence that bad behaviour begets great opportunity, he need look no further than his own disgraced ex-editor, and now fledgling US superstar, the truly grotesque, but apparently irresistible, Piers Morgan.
Bennett-Jones' revealing naivety
Richard Curtis and his silly producer, have done well out of the BBC over the years and that relationship was clearly exploited to the full with Make Poverty History. The notion that MPH was not a political campaign is arrant nonsense and a disgraceful attempt to excuse what was obvious to most and the Trust in particular. MPH emerged to orbit the G8 summit along with Curtis' feeble drama and the Geldof ego fest, and to exert its childish influence over politicans. This was all well and good, but there was little critique of MPH, with its unedifying parade of naive multi-millionaires preaching to the hoi polloi about poverty, whilst it criminally refused to confront the real reasons behind poverty. That isolated episode was a disgrace, but there are other more subtle examples of bias. I listen to the BBC almost every day and I welcome the Trust's report. There's no question news editors in particular fail to provide balance, even in phone-ins on Five Live, where the vaccuous Victoria Derbyshire redefined toe curling political correctness. It would be wrong to say it was endemic, but the pockets of bias increasingly ruining the cut of an otherwise good suit.
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