The incontinence of noise

Young, well-spoken and well-to-do, she sat at the back of a bus, phone to ear, explaining to a friend in a carrying voice about that afternoon’s appointment with her gynecologist, seemingly oblivious to all those around who were perhaps less than enthusiastic about the details of the encounter.

On a train, speeding north from London, a young man, seated at a table in a standard-class carriage, opened his laptop and decided that this was the perfect environment in which to conduct a business video conference call. Everyone within three or four seats in all directions was included – irrespective of their wishes or even the interests of business confidentiality.

These are two snapshots of a modern Britain where humans have become noise incontinent. And they will be familiar to most of us.

But it is not just a matter of conversations made public. It’s one thing for headphones to leak sound, but at least the wearer is making an effort.

Yet it is now the norm, in urban areas, for the first good weather of the year to see windows and balcony doors flung open, and music ‘shared’ with neighbours.

“Music,” that is, consisting of little more than booming bass. The same “music” that you’ll hear from passing cars, whether the windows are down or not.

But this is not simply a matter of individual behavior.

In shopping arcades, going far beyond the curse of muzak, shops blast out sound – presumably, because a psychologist somewhere has discovered that hi-tempo, booming tracks encourage spending and quickly.

The Arndale in Manchester is one example: on a visit one Sunday morning, only the Waterstones Bookshop and Games Workshop were peaceful – although both were busy. Even the Disney Store was playing music loudly – hi-tempo and with a beat, albeit rather more in keeping with little pink princesses.

On a larger scale, it is now apparently acceptable for a rave festival to be arranged and staged within 50 metres of homes, and if residents do not like feeling their bones rattled, that’s their misanthropy.

It never is, incidentally, Chopin rattling someone else’s windows – or Johnny Cash or Dean Martin or even Abba or the Stones.

But try to find a coffee shop – chain or independent – that doesn’t insist on providing some sort of soundtrack to your morning cappuccino. It might just be the radio, but you could be forgiven for thinking that we are scared to sit peacefully; to allow ourselves the opportunity to hear ourselves think.

There is a narrowing of basic good manners here – not a conscious one, but resulting from a sense of individual entitlement that requires no justification and expects no challenge.

‘Why do you think it’s fair for you to make other people listen to your conversation/music?’ This is not a question that usually earns a classier philosophical response than some form of take on a shrugged ‘because’.

Although in order to do so would require a way of explaining why the ‘right’ to converse or play your music in such a way as to force it on others trumps their right not to have it thus inflicted. Since nobody is saying that you cannot play your music or have your private conversation, then that would be difficult.

Perhaps much of it is about consumption.

On one level, we consume the gadgets that allow us to converse wherever we want. And then we consume anything we put on them. Except that, since we are encouraged increasingly to keep it in the ‘cloud’, we don’t really have it at all. When we want to conspicuously consume that tune again, we have to download or stream it once more – possibly with added consumption via whatever charges our telecommunications provider might levy.

On another level, there is a growing emphasis on consumption as a core part of citizenship: see all manner of things, from the small-state fundamentalism of the concept of the ‘citizen consumer,’ to the rising importance in the economy of the retail sector (and therefore of our personal and collective consumption).

You can find florid declarations of spending as a patriotic duty to aid the nation’s economy, while increasing suggestions that we’re in for a period of sustained low interest rates (in part because of past and present spending on ludicrously-inflated mortgages) produces a concomitant sense that we might just as well spend our hard-earned, then.

Once having consumed, we then have the right to enjoy that consumption. And after all, if it is a patriotic act we have carried out, then who can deny us enjoying it in whatever way we please? There’s no such thing as society any more anyway.

Now consider the onslaught on personal privacy of the last decade or so: the UK as the CCTV capital of the world; attempts by governments to introduce ‘snoopers’ charters’ to combat terrorism and child abuse º the two terrors of our age: all produce a semi-constant response of how, ‘if you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear’.

The ‘rights’ and ‘entitlement’ of the conscientious consumer sit well with an era in which the desire for privacy can be viewed as an admission of some guilt or other.

Consume, let others see your consumption – and never worry if you’re being overheard or watched, because it’s happening anyway. Quiet and privacy cannot be bought and sold: they have little value.

This incontinence of sound – this droning, banging, driveling bombardment of noise – is itself symptomatic of something wider: of a dumbed-down public discourse where whoever shouts loudest is heard; where considered arguments are battered out of the way by sensation and fact-free claims.

Will it take until all the satellites fail and all the ‘clouds’ burst and all the gadgets seize up to make us appreciate once more, quietness, a private conversation and music enjoyed without the need to foist it on others?

Or before then, will it dawn on people that all this incontinent noise is simply one more cover for our intellectually incontinent politicians and the corporatocracy on whose behalf they work?

Tabloids prove – yet again – that they won't learn

Here’s a thing: what will be the tipping point that means that the UK press faces regulation – however much it doesn’t want it?

The mainstream media has, thus far, managed to squirm out of any form of independent regulation, following the Leveson Inquiry.

And that bit about “independent” is important: no matter what some papers claimed, there was no plan for what the press publish to be subject to the machinations of politicians.

To remind ourselves: Leveson followed revelations about widespread phone-hacking – which, it is increasingly clear, did not just happen at the Rupert Murdoch-owned News of the World, although there was an industrial amount of hacking there. The Mirror group is now in the spotlight too.

In an interesting little side note, it seems that four members of staff on the Mail on Sunday were told by the police in 2006 that their phones had been hacked by the NotW, but bosses at the Mail group decided to keep it secret – and they didn’t bother to mention it in evidence to Leveson either.

Mail on Sunday editor at the time, Peter Wright, has been a member of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) since 2008, taking over the position previously held by Mail editor in chief, Paul Dacre, from 1999-2008.

During that time, the PCC issued two reports on hacking, in essence backing up the version of events from News International that it hadn’t happened often and that it was all just the work of a “rogue reporter”.

Which is all rather odd.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, though, Wright and Dacre have subsequently succumbed to amnesia over the entire business of the hacking of their members of staff’s phones.

Mind you, amnesia, ignorance or straightforward incompetence seem to be the defence de rigueur of senior newspaper folk when it comes to such matters.

After all, her admitted total lack of knowledge of anything that went on in Rebekah Brooks’s newsrooms was accepted as a defence by the court in the recent hacking trial, while News International godfather, Murdoch himself, has been known to be remarkably vague when being questioned over the affair.

It says something for the confidence many of these people have in their power over government that the revelations have not noticeably improved the behavior of the tabloid media in particular.

Not that it’s the tabloids alone: Murdoch’s Times – which used to be the paper of record – has plummeted so far since he bought it that it’s current idea of political ‘debate’ is to call the leader of the opposition “weird”.

Such an approach, by nobody’s definition, can be remotely positive for the public discourse.

But for the sake of this article, let’s stick with the tabloids.

It’s not so long ago that several papers revealed themselves entirely happy to splash pictures on their front pages of the moment that Mick Jagger was told that his partner had taken her own life.

Public interest, anyone?

In the last few days, the odious Richard Littlejohn,whose bilious ignorance was just the most well-known example of the ‘mostering’of Lucy Meadows, who also took her own life, has again used his column in the Daily Mail to illustrate his ignorance of and attitude toward trans issues, with comments about Kellie Maloney – formerly known as boxing promoter Frank – looking as though she is in “drag”.

But a glance at this morning’s tabloids reveals a general approach that blithely ignores basic humanity, together with any idea of journalistic ethics (yes, they do exist).

The subject is the death of Hollywood star Robin Williams, who died by suicide.

The front pages alone seem to be competing to see who can publish the most details.

In the rush for sales, editors have chosen to deliberately ignore the guidelines on reporting suicide issued by the Samaritans.

These call, among other things, for great care to be exercised on details about how a person ended their life, precisely because readers who are themselves in a vulnerable situation can be influenced to copy a sensationally-reported suicide.

But sensation boost sales and sales matter more than human beings when it comes to the tabloids.

Point six of the National Union of Journalists’ Code of Conduct says that a journalist “does nothing to intrude into anybody’s private life, grief or distress unless justified by overriding consideration of the public interest”.

That’s the biggie, isn’t it: what is ‘the public interest’?

What was in the public interest that justified seeing Jagger’s reaction to the death of a loved one?

What was in the public interest that justifies the additional pain being inflicted on Williams’s family, and the potential danger to other vulnerable people caused by the nature of the reporting?

Here’s a clue: there is none.

The apologists can whine all they like that the public interest is what the public is interested in, but this is nonsense.

Let’s look at an example of ‘the public interest’.

Some years ago, during John Major’s time as Prime Minister, with a government set on promoting ‘family values’, a junior minister called Tim Yeo stood up at the Conservative Party annual conference and made a speech lambasting single mothers as the biggest problem of the day.

A couple of months later, it was revealed (in the News of the World) that he had been having an affair himself, and was the father of a child to a single woman. He resigned.

Here was a member of a government that was promoting one thing to the public, and condemning those who didn’t behave as it wanted, who included members who were themselves behaving in the same way.

That is why it was in the public interest to publish a story revealing that Yeo had been having an affair – not because of the affair itself, but because of the double standards by a member of the government.

And yes, the people that buy tabloids – particularly when they buy promises of lurid, sensationalist copy inside – are complicit in this pimping of other people’s private lives.

And as long as there is no regulation of the industry, it is a situation that seems likely to continue.

So, as I asked at the top of this: what will be the tipping point? What will it take before tabloids are forced to clean up their act?

After all, the hacking of a murdered schoolgirl’s phone quite clearly wasn’t enough.

MediaGuidelines for Reporting Suicides from the Samaritans [PDF]

The National Union of Journalists’ Code of Conduct

It's not the Daily Mail in disguise – honestly

Here's a question: can the only way to lure women to read a newspaper be to liberally sprinkle it with celebrity tittle tattle and bitchy dispatches about someone else's private life/body/clothes?

I ask for a reason, inspired (although it seems to do that word a rank injustice) by a piece in today's Daily Telegraph.

In it, a female journalist - and again, this is taxing the language somewhat - addressed the the vexed question of whether Ms Kate Winslet, star of the silver screen, was really doing a favour to her two children in marrying for a third time, being also pregnant by the new man in her life.

I'm really not sure what Kate has done to draw this attention - other than being a famous and successful film star - or perhaps it's simply because she is a Kate. After all, only a few short weeks ago, the same publication produced another piece, written by a different hackette, and filed under UK news.

The 'news' in that case, was that another Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, was rather letting the side down in the maternity wear stakes. She had apparently been buying off-the-peg pregnancy wear. The nerve of it.

There is something a tad ironic about the dear old Torygraph carrying an article that says that marriage might not be the best option for a particular individual who, whatever their 'success' rate in that field, certainly seems rather committed to it as an ideal.

Although, of course, marriage shouldn't be allowed for gay people.

But allow yourself a flight of fancy for a moment and muse whether it would have entertained the same thoughts of Henry VIII.

Which subject itself raises a quite interesting point.

Earlier this year, author Hilary Mantel was pretty much crucified by most of the press for a lecture that she gave (and the subsequent essay that was published) for the London Review of Books. In it, Mantel argued that the bodies of royal women become public property, because their core role becomes to produce an heir to the throne.

That she appealed, very calmly, for the Duchess to be left alone in her pregnancy came to nought, as what she'd said was twisted from being a very polite condemnation of much of the media coverage (and the public obsession with the issue) into a personal attack on Kate herself.

Yet within days, there was more coverage of the royal pregnancy. I recall one online article - if we can dignify it with such a term - that was simply an excuse to publish a number of pictures of the Duchess, taken at a function, from a variety of angles, to illustrate her "baby bump".

But while you reach for the sick bags, ponder this: one of the things that Mantell pointed out was that even in the reign of Henry VIII, while there may have been no newspapers, there was still no shortage of public speculation about his wives and their abilities (or otherwise) to produce a male heir.

So the issue is not new and cannot be laid entirely at the door of the newspapers.

What these latest examples illustrate, however, is that even quality newspapers are going down a particular route.

A little background here. I was first introduced to the Telegraph when I started doing sports coverage for the Morning Star. One of the senior hands informed me that it had the best sports coverage around and that I should read it.

He was right - and I did. And since these were the days when you had no option but to buy areal paper newspaper, I also read other content.

You didn't have to agree with the editorial line - but editorial and reporting were clearly and properly defined, and the quality of both was high. The Other Half also recalls that the Telegraph had exemplary coverage of intentional news, so this isn't just my viewing things through rosy specs.

Which makes it particularly sad to see a fine newspaper's descent down the road it is currently taking.

Only the other week it was revealed that the Telegraph, in conjunction with the BBC, of all media organisations, had done some serious, public-interest work on revealing lobbying issues among MPs.

But an increasing amount of the mainstream media seems to be relying on these occasional public-service journalism to justify an increasing amount of tripe - and their continued opposition to any form of independent regulation.

And there is the additional issue of such coverage so often being an encouragement by women, to other women, to judge and despise yet more women.

What does the Telegraph want and what does it think it will achieve?

The sort of articles that I have mentioned would be more obviously at home in the Daily Mail - and indeed, the Telegraph has gained a recent nickname of the Maily Telegraph in recognition of precisely this approach.

The Mail  has been remarkably successful in winning female readers - and winning them to right-wing politics. That's a fact. So does the Telegraph really believe that this is a way to boost circulation/hits among women?

It's probably fair to say that the majority of those who purchase gossip magazines are women, so presumably there's a growth market out there or at least considered to be. And the success of the Mail should never be underestimated as a model. for other publications

Of course women do not, per se, simply want to read tat, but the Telegraph is far from alone in this, and there is a real and increasing problem with even our so-called quality press feeling a need to dumb down.

And of course it's not merely a female thing. Judging by many, many posters on the Telegraph forums, most of whom appear to be male, the ultimate problem is an increasing, cross-gender inability to think beyond kneejerkery.

And that is bad for the public discourse as a whole and, therefore, for every single one of us who cares about that public discourse and about the political life of the country that it inevitably informs.

For that reason, it is irrelevant if one personally avoids such copy. Because the impact is obviously so much wider.

Unfortunately, I cannot see an end in sight to the dumbing down. Except to say: think about what you read - particularly online - and don't give financial succour to those who are probably quite happy for that dumbing-down, that increasing bread and circuses, to continue.

There is a question of wether in discussing such articles we actually fall into the trap of doing exactly what the accountants want - particularly given the relationship between online hits and advertising revenue - but it's just as dangerous, it seems to me, to pretend that ignoring this dross will make it go away.

We need to hold up the media to some sort of standards. Anything else simply lets the bastards get away with it.

Anyone fancy having a 'free press'?

Paul McMullan – a living, walking advert for regulation

Well, it didn’t take long. The weekend after the Leveson Inquiry reported, we had the fun and games of seeing Liberty director and Leveson advisor Shami Chakrabarti having to pen a rapid response to the confusion‚ in some of the press, over her stance on the report.

Now, setting aside the questions about who exactly elected Chakrabarti – and the organisation she heads – to the position that it appears to hold, one can’t help but wonder if the likes of the Mail on Sunday and the Independent (which lovely couple share a home these days) really couldn’t understand the nuances of her original response or were motivated by something else to actively misunderstand it.

But then again, lots of other people seem similarly incapable of understanding the issues surrounding Leveson.

For instance, there is lots of talk about threats to a ‘free press’. But what exactly does that mean?

Well, at it’s most simple, what people usually mean is something that can act in the general public interest by explaining things properly and uncovering corruption and lies etc, and holding politicians and so forth to account.

And it cannot be difficult for many to agree is a good idea.

But that is not, in general, what we have in the UK today.

Instead, what we have is a press that is, generally, owned by individuals for the sake of profit and their own agendas.

Now, for the sake of clarity: I have nothing whatsoever against profit – indeed, as a freelancer, I like it. Goodness – couldn’t I make a bit more myself?!

In terms of the press, though, there is the potential for conflict between the drive for profit and the general public interest ˆ not least where news isn’t considered sexy‚ enough to get readers and advertising.

Over the years, it’s meant, for instance, that some missing children are considered more worthy of space than others – usually because pictures of pretty, white girls make better front pages.

In other words, profit has been one of the drivers of the general dumbing-down of the UK press over the last 20-30 years, whereby we’ve arrived at a point where news‚ is dominated by who tweeted what, who slept with whom, and which celebrity fell out of what nightclub at 3am.

Now it may well be that that is what the great British public wants from its press – but let’s not pretend that, if that is the case, it’s what the concept of a ‘free press’ is really about.

Then there’s that agendas bit. Now again, let’s not be naïve.

All newspaper proprietors will have their own political views, and will want to disseminate them. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

But in the last decades, we’ve seen a serious crumbling of the once sacred wall that divided reporting and editorialisation as the British press has slumped toward a sort of Fox News approach, the kind of thing that Rupert Murdoch espouses as his answer to supposed elitism.

Even a once fine newspaper such as the Telegraph does it these days. In the past, you’d buy it for its quality of news coverage, even if you didn’t always agree with the editorial line, but the two were clearly defined.

And if conflating reporting and editorial isn’t bad enough, papers further dumb down matters by employing the likes of Jeremy Clarkson or Julie Bindel as columnists.

Okay – Clarkson can at least be funny, but he’s no more a philosopher, say, than Richard Littlejohn. Oh.

And Bindel’s continued contributions to the Guardian simply serve to allow hand-wringing liberals a bit of ‘acceptable’ bigotry.

Look across the Channel and it’s a different world. When the French were having their burqa debate, for instance, the public discussion was not drawn along strictly tribal political lines.

For instance, one of the commentators was a left-wing female philosopher who was in favour of a ban, but articulated her reasons in a nuanced way. Philosophically, in other words.

Similarly, if there is a strike in France, papers might not agree with that action, but there will be a pattern of all press – from across the political spectrum – actually analysing the reasons for industrial action, and discussing it in a way that at least examines the issues.

And French newspapers are refreshingly free of those 3am nightclub stories.

They are not, however, run by the state or as organs of the state – they are private companies. Which rather suggests that you don’t need to print a diet of salacious gossip or infantilised opinion in order to make money.

But fair enough: if you’re going to turn news into knee-jerkery and titilating entertainment because it sells, that’s your decision. Just don’t try to pretend that it’s about ‘free press’. It’s not.

Indeed, it was the late Sir Robin Day who once noted: “Only two newspapers tell the truth. The Financial Times, which tells the truth for the business community, and the Morning Star, which tells the truth for the workers”.

There is, of course, plenty of other hypocrisy in all this. Imagine if you will, editor Paul Dacre at the Mail suggesting that it would be a good idea for trade unions to regulate themselves. No?

But, as the late Frank Carson would have said: “There’s more”.

Many of those now shrilling the loudest about the idea of any form of meaningful (independent) regulation are, in effect, defending the intrusion into people’s private lives on the grounds of profit.

Because profit was the only motive for the stories about Max Mosely, for instance. The News of the World tried to confect a public interest argument – and failed.

The idea that, when someone is in the public eye, they are automatically demanding to be followed and photographed everywhere etc is a nonsense.

Some might – some do – but it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t be a better world by ignoring such attention-seekers and not pandering to their demand for attention, let alone then deciding that anyone else remotely in the public eye (well, in the entertainment world, at any rate) is fair game.

And let’s note what should be obvious: making a film or writing a book is not one and the same as demanding to be followed and reported everywhere, any more than writing a column or editing a paper is also a demand for an end to one’s privacy.

So when some in the media wail about ‘a free press’, what they’re actually meaning is a press that is free to invade people’s privacy for no reason other that profit by publishing salacious stories.

What is odd about this is that it seems unlikely that the same people would also ever applaud or have applauded countries where the state invaded people’s privacy to the extent of persecuting them for what they wrote or said or read, whether for reasons of religious or political ideology.

Few would support such totalitarianism, but if not, why fall for a line that a ‘free press’ needs to invade people’s privacy for salacious entertainment that does not have the support of a genuine public interest argument?

That is one of the things highlighted by Leveson, together with other similarly irresponsible behaviour, in the name of sensation that, as Leveson himself said, has caused “havoc” in people’s lives.

One of the most tragic cases raised again at Leveson was that of murdered Glasgow schoolgirl Diane Watson, about whom a series of lies were published in two Scottish newspapers, plus Marie Claire magazine. Her brother later killed himself and was found clutching the articles about his sister.

The murder happened in 1991. One of the two papers, the Herald, only managed an apology in 2011, after Diane’s parents had appeared at the Leveson Inquiry. It was itself under different ownership by then.

The journalist who concocted stories about their daughter, claiming she was a bully and had, in effect, contributed to her own murder, claimed to have been shocked to have been personally mentioned at Leveson.

Perhaps if he had not taken a decision to invent stories to support his own agenda, that surprise wouldn’t have occurred.

There was the case of Mosely’s son, who suffered from depression and died of a drug overdose within a year of the News of the World story, which might or might not have pushed him over the edge.

Mosely himself has described how, when going to his son’s flat to deal with his remaining belongings, the place was subject of a press scrum. One wonders what public interest was served by that?

And then there’s the story of how News of the World hack Paul McMullan drove the mentally ill and drug-addicted daughter of the late Denholm Elliot to suicide by luring her into prostituting herself so he could take nude photographs of her for the paper and, in his own words, impress his new boss, Piers Morgan.

This is the same McMullan who has also claimed that the only people who want privacy are paedophiles – which quite splendid piece of utter fuckwittedness has the ring of Orwell’s 1984 about it.

And all this is without mentioning the links between elements of the press and the police in the case of the murder of Daniel Morgan.

It is without mentioning the complicity of swathes of the British press in the 20-plus year cover up of what happened at Hillsborough.

And so on.

None of these were accidents. They illustrate a culture that exists – a culture that is being defended by an assortment of individuals and groups.

It takes some contortions to pretend that any of this is remotely justifiable – or that the state of the British press is, in general, something to be proud of and something to defend.

Independent regulation works fine in places such as Finland and Denmark – the former is consistently number 1 in the International Press Freedom Index, even with (gasp) statutory underpinnings.

In the UK, independent regulation doesn’t seem to upset anybody when applied to, say, advertising.

It seems that the real problems people have with the thought of independent regulation are nothing to do with any concept of a ‘free press’, and everything to do with either reducing the ability to profit from the private lives of others – and a sort of fundamentalist small statism that has to pretend that none of the above problems and contradictions exist or need dealing with, in order to continue with it’s view that even an independent regulator would be state intervention and the end of life as we know it.

A free press? Yes – that would be most welcome.