More Zonkyness

Author: Mike Meredith

  • Press Regulation for the UK in the Wake of HackGate

    Pretty much everyone is agreed that the current “regulator” for the printed media (the Press Complaints Commission) is pretty much a waste of space and needs to be replaced with something else. After all, it has pretty much ignored the whole News of the World phone hacking scandal. But what ?

    It would be easy to say that self-regulation has failed, and that a legal regulatory framework is required. But that gives politicians far too much say in how the media operates – which is something far less desirable even than allowing phone hacking. Because despite the current scandal involving phone hacking, breaking the law to obtain information for a story is not always wrong.

    It depends on the story of course – a story about some celebrity up to some sexual shenanigans does not justify any illegal information gathering. This applies even more to some victim of crime, but getting to the truth behind something like the politician’s expenses scandal ? Perhaps that does justify what would be illegal activity.

    The overriding requirements for a new organisation to oversee the press are :-

    1. It should not be controlled by politicians. This is the core of what it means to have a free press – free from political interference. Specifically free from interference from publishing stories that the press wishes to publish. That is not to say politicians cannot have a say on what kind of story would be acceptable.
    2. It should not be controlled by journalists, editors, or newspaper proprietors. The current PCC is controlled by the media themselves, and look how effective that is.
    3. It should be controlled by ordinary members of the public selected by lottery. This avoids the regulation of the press being controlled by the establishment; offer £75,000 a year and most people selected would jump at the chance.
    4. Sanctions available to the authority should be significant – varying from a fine as a percentage of daily revenue, banning publication for a number of issues, requiring an editor to resign, etc. This would require a law allowing the enforcement of the sanctions.
    5. All stories together with the classification of sources (more on this later) should be sent to the authority in an electronic copy. Most stories can (and should) be sent in advance of publication to allow the authority to review and prevent publication.

    Public Interest Immunity

    Certain stories qualify for public interest immunity, but the phrase “public interest” is problematic as it does not mean what the public are interested in. There is no clear definition of what public interest is, but you could think of it as what the public should know rather than what they want to know. For example, some members of the public may be interested in the sex life of a famous footballer, but that most definitely is not in the public interest.

    Unless his “sex life” includes rape of course.

    But if a story were to be about perhaps a bunch of newspaper editors allowing their journalists to routinely break the law on the flimsiest of pretexts, then there is a “need to know”.

    In the later situation, a public interest immunity should apply. Or in other words, breaking certain laws to gather information is justified.

    The key thing here is that we no longer trust editors to make this sort of decision without the commercial interest influencing their decision. Such decisions now must be made by an appropriate authority. So in addition to the list given above, a press regulatory authority needs to allow and encourage journalists to seek their advice on such matters in secret.

    Classification of Sources

    One of the things we have heard consistently on the past is that journalists do not reveal their sources … not even to their editors. Well, perhaps (or I’m not entirely sure I believe that), but that does not mean that the journalist has to hide what kind of source the story comes from.

    The reason journalists never reveal their sources is that a source for a story may fear retribution for leaking information. After all footballers with a predilection for balling the wrong person are notorious for killing off those who would leak their stories. But fair enough. After it is not just their lives that sources might fear for – it could be job security, or reputation, etc. And in some cases, they could have a legitimate fear for the life.

    But anyone who has read any history of the intelligence services will know of this problem, and of any number of solutions. The most obvious solution, is not to name sources but to allocate them code numbers, and categorise the source information – from which numbered source, and what kind of source it is – information from a whistleblower, copied from a document, rumour, etc. There’s a lot of ways this can be improved.

    But the key thing is that an editor or a regulatory authority does not need to know the name or identity of a source, but the methods by which the information was obtained.

  • Norway’s 9/11 Moment

    First of all, a little number crunching … Norway has a population of around 5 million as compared to the 309 million in the United States. Or around 1.43% of the size (in population). If we were to “scale up” the known casualty figure of 76 dead to the equivalent figure in terms of the US population, we get a figure of around 5,300 “casualties”. So whilst the Norway bombing and shootings casualties are “only” 76 in number, it is hardly an exaggeration to call this Norway’s 9/11 moment.

    There are of course differences – not least of which is that this appears to be the work of a single individual rather than a network of terrorists. The fact that this was a christian fundamentalist rather than an islamic fundamentalist ? That’s only on the surface – when someone’s heart is as black as hades, the shade of black hardly makes a difference. As I said a long time ago, it is not Muslims or Christians that are the enemy, but extremist fundamentalists who want to force their view of the world onto others.

    Perhaps you could claim that Norway’s catastrophe has more in common with the London 7/7 bombings because the terrorist was “home grown”. Fair enough, but even 7/7 has been called Britain’s 9/11.

    There are those who say that this is the end of Norway’s “time of innocence” … which frankly I find a little odd, and perhaps a touch patronising. Whilst on first reaction, Norwegians may not have seen themselves as a target for terrorism, those Norwegians in charge of security matters will have on reflection realised that it is still possible for Norway to be attacked. And well before the events of last Friday.

    Norway deliberately chose an open society – perhaps one of the most open societies there has ever been. And despite the risks of an open society where a nutter can commit these sorts of crimes, it seems that Norway is determined to remain free and open. Many other countries when attacked by terrorists have reacted by clamping down on their freedoms in order to make terrorism just a little less likely, but it does not stop it.

    It seems that Norwegians have reacted to this tragedy in a way that can only be called mature – whilst there is undoubtedly anger at the killer, and some concern about security, they are determined to keep their freedoms.

  • All Unicode Characters In 33 Minutes

    This is probably one of those videos you will only watch once … if that (in full at least), but it is one of those things that you can be glad that someone did :-

    [

    That shows one character per frame over 33 minutes. It’s an impressive demonstration of just how large the human writing system is.

  • Foreign Aid: Enough Already ?

    Given the current situation in Eastern Africa, it is about time to come up with a few words about foreign aid … specifically the amount that each country contributes towards foreign aid. There is plenty of suspicion that some countries are not contributing their fair share – indeed some countries have promised aid and then failed to deliver.

    There are those who criticise the uses to which foreign aid is put – and there may be valid criticisms there, but whilst your country is being stingy, you don’t really have the right to criticise. Stump up the money to at least the average, and then you may criticise away. Indeed some of the criticisms are in the end due to a lack of money – for example paying for emergency aid to keep starving people alive doesn’t solve any long term problems, but solving the long term problems takes money beyond that for emergency aid.

    I’ll be using percentage of GDP as a metric of how stingy countries are when it comes to foreign aid. Some may criticise this metric, but it is the only sensible metric to use … and indeed someone has already looked at the percentage of GDP question and more or less come down on the side of saying that it’s probably the best metric available. See here.

    When looking at the figures, it is worth bearing in mind that the UN has a target of getting the rich to contribute 0.7% of their GDP towards foreign aid. This is a target that was agreed by the rich countries way back in 1970, and has rarely been met. Stealing an image from another web page :-

    Graph of foreign AID by GDP

    I would rather have included just the second graph which is the important one, but the first allows me to make a point about absolute aid monetary values. It allows the US to hide it’s stinginess behind it’s absolute value of donations – it looks generous, but the true story is hidden behind the size of the US. For instance, you could more accurately compare (in absolute terms) the donations by the US with Europe as a whole – if you add up the value donated by the next three largest contributors (all in Europe), you get a value of approximately $39 billion – way more than the US, and the contributions from less wealthy European countries would make the US even more stingy.

    I’m picking on the US here simply because it is one of the stingiest rich countries around, but very few countries reach or exceed the UN target of 0.7% of GDP. Only 5 out of 23 countries (22%) meet or exceed the UN target. Or in other words, 78% of the listed countries have not met a target they are obligated to have met by the mid-1970s!

    And before anyone mentions that this is because of the current economic climate, bear in mind that foreign aid budgets have increased since the banking crisis – over time, the rich countries have accumulated a “debt” of some $4.1 trillion dollars representing the shortfall between what they have promised and what they actually give.

    Or in other words it’s not “enough already”, but we have fallen a long way short of what we promised to do – except for a tiny minority (that 22% who exceed the target are all quite small countries). It may well be that some foreign aid is wasted, but that is a topic for another time – a time after the UK has reached the 0.7% target (it is currently 0.56% of GDP).

  • Eight European Banks Fail Stress Test. Panic!!

    In a classic example of a deceptive news story, the BBC announced today in their TV news bulletin that 8 European banks failed the stress test – meaning they might not survive a financial crisis.

    But later listening to Euronews (and in fact in the online article by the BBC), I hear a slightly different slant to the story – 8 our of 90 banks tested failed. Or 9%. Or to put it another way, 91% of European banks passed the stress test.

    Merely announcing that 8 failed the test does not give an indication of the scale of the problem – was it 8 out of 8 ? 8 out of 80 ? Or 8 out of 800? Given the current climate in the wake of the recent banking crisis it is not unreasonable to assume that 8 failing the test is a much more serious problem than it really is.

    Is it so much to ask that the media actually spend some time thinking about statistics and giving a proper slant to the news they announce ? Saying 9% failed the test is just as quick as saying 8 banks failed, and gives us more information, and the objection that some people may not understand percentages is pretty bogus – those who do not understand them are unlikely to be bothered by the “8 banks failed test” statement anyway.

    A case of over simplification leading to unintended (or was it intentional?) deception.