Category Archives: Politics

Vince Cable versus Rupert Murdoch – the animation!

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Another classic animation from Next Media Animation .tv, this one illustrating the Daily Telegraph’s sting operation on Liberal Democrat MP Vince Cable, who is currently the secretary of state for business innovation and skills in the UK’s Liberal Democrats/Conservatives coalition government.

Two undercover reporters from the Telegraph, posing as constituents, managed to record Cable stating in reference to Rupert Murdoch‘s attempted takeover of BSkyB: “I have declared war on Mr Murdoch and I think we are going to win.”

New Brussels-based WikiLeaks spin-off to target EU

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This article was first published by the European Journalism Centre and is reposted here with permission.

WikiLeaks spin-off Brussels Leaks launched out of the blue last Thursday to much excitement in the European capital and Twittersphere beyond.

The European Journalism Centre’s exclusive email interview with an anonymous representative is amongst the very first media contact with the fledgling European whistleblower organisation.

Image by quinn.anya on Flickr Some rights reserved.

Why did you feel the need to set up a Brussels/EU focused Wikileaks spin-off? What do you want to achieve?

We have all worked in Brussels for a while and have constantly seen, or heard about, documents floating around which ‘would be great if they could get out in the open’. People didn’t know how to do this most of the time. In our day jobs we did this, using our networks and contacts, but there were a lot of limits. Having personal connections with ‘people in the know’ means their jobs could be on the line if we revealed the information.

Brussels has more than 15,000 lobbyists attempting to have an impact on international decisions. It’s naïve to think things do not happen behind closed doors (such as European President Barroso attending a Plastics lobby dinner – weird?).

This isn’t really for media as much as to help society, and perhaps namely civil society, get their hands on the right information to make their jobs easier.

What do you plan to focus on?

Obviously it’s EU focused which is as broad as you can get. At the moment we try the best with what we get, but obviously anything social or environmental takes priority. We’ll see.

Can you give us a clue as to what leaks, if any, you have in the pipeline?

Transport and energy.

What kind of people have/will leak information on the EU to you? What are their motives?

We meet people all the time working for EU institutions, lobby and industry groups and even NGOs who want to get information out there. They’re often good people who see something they know is wrong, and want to get it known whilst keeping hold of their jobs.

Do you have any direct connections/contact with WikiLeaks? Have they or similar whistleblowing/hacker organisations been in contact with you, or given you advice or assistance?

No, not yet but we are very open to advice and assistance.

What has been the response so far to Brussels Leaks from the institutions/organisations you plan to ‘leak’ information about?

Very quiet publically but we have heard they have at least half an eye on us.

How do your security and technical capabilities match up to the organisations who may try to stop you?

At the moment, it’s hard to tell. We’re not really anticipating in the short-term anything which would put us under the kind of pressure WikiLeaks witnessed, as many of the leaks we have so far are quite low key. This is Brussels after all. Of course we want to build, improve and develop over time – we have a plan and we won’t overstep our capacities.

Is there anything you would not publish?

We are a small group of people who will try to work to a moral code. We’re not interested in gossip or slander. We are doing this because we want to get important information out in the open, but if it looks to endanger somebody, i.e. lives or jobs, then we will not. We also have high level media contacts outside of this who we can refer leaks onto. We’re not here to get publicity, just to get the information out there.

Are any of you journalists?

Yes, all are either journalists or working in communications capacities in Brussels.

What is your code of ethics?

Obviously as we are staying anonymous we need to build credibility and a reputation. We will always be truthful, accurate, and fair and want to hold everything up to public accountability.

What can people do to get involved with Brussels Leaks?

We particularly need technical help, which is always appreciated. Otherwise, we’d just want people to be patient with us. We’re probably not going to bring down EU global diplomacy or anything like that, so we just need time.

Comment: Joe Lieberman, the New York Times and the idea of ‘bad citizenship’

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Speaking to Fox News yesterday, Senator Joe Lieberman, who is among WikiLeaks’ fiercest critics, makes very clear his desire to see the organisation’s founder Julian Assange extradited to the US and indicted by any means possible. Or not possible just now, but possible very soon, perhaps.

More interesting than Lieberman’s quite naked desire to prosecute Assange or WikiLeaks, or both, is his speculation that the New York Times may have also committed a crime and may also be subject to some form of prosecution.

That isn’t a great leap though, if WikiLeaks has committed a crime in publishing the cables then surely the New York Times has also committed a crime. It seems likely that attorney general Eric Holder, try as he might, will have enough trouble bringing a case against WikiLeaks. The state has been bitten once already in this kind of fight with the Times and I suspect it will be quite shy about trying again.

More interesting still is Lieberman’s comment toward the end of the interview:

I think the New York Times has committed at least an act of bad citizenship.

Holder can’t indict the Times for bad citizenship – yet – but the charge is an interesting one. It rests, at least in part, on the assumption that the interests and motives of the ‘good citizen’ align with those of the government. The American author Don DeLillo succinctly exposed the error in this assumption in 1988, in response to a very similar criticism by newspaper columnist George Will.

That year Will published a scathing review of DeLillo’s novel Libra in the Washington Post. He wasn’t a huge fan of the book. He called it:

… an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship.

DeLillo’s novel, which tells of the events leading up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, mixes fact and fiction in the mold of Public Burning or Executioner’s Song. It challenges the official version of events presented by the Warren Commission report. In doing so it wounded George Will and, in Will’s mind, America too. The New York Times’ publication and coverage of the embassy cables has wounded Joe Lieberman and in Lieberman’s mind, America too. Lieberman makes his feelings plain in the Fox News interview: rather than discuss the possible indictment of Julian Assange in the (relatively) factual terms of breaking the law or not breaking the law, Lieberman whimpers about the “negative consequences” for America, about the country being “hurt”.

It sure looks to me on the facts that WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have violated America’s espionage act, with great negative consequences for us.

He ought to be indicted and then we can ask the authorities to in England to extradite him to the United States. If we don’t do that someone else will come along and do exactly what WikiLeaks has done and that will hurt America even more.

But did DeLillo’s novel hurt America? Will the embassy cables? Are they acts of ‘bad citizenship’? More importantly, is an act of ‘bad citizenship’ a bad thing? Should the newspaper feel chastened?

This was DeLillo’s response to Will:

I don’t take it seriously, but being called a bad citizen is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That’s exactly what we ought to do. We ought to be bad citizens. We ought to, in the sense that we are writing against what power represents, and often what the government represents … In that sense, if we’re bad citizens, we’re doing our job.

Journalists should, of course be responsible, professional, and transparent where possible, but if the Times did not act as a ‘bad citizen’ in Will’s and Lieberman’s terms, would its journalists be doing their jobs?

Whether or not the newspaper has committed a crime is one thing but this stuff about ‘bad citizenship’, this stuff about America the Brave being wounded by one of its own, is as ludicrous now as it was when George Will said it. The New York Times should pledge allegiance to the truth, not the flag.

Senator Joe Lieberman, a good citizen?

Former Sun editor expresses doubt over Andy Coulson’s phone-hacking denials

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Former editor of the Sun David Yelland has cast further doubt over the claim by Downing Street director of communications Andy Coulson that he was in the dark about illegal phone-hacking at the News of the World during his time as editor.

Yelland, who was editor of the Sun for five years until 2003 and has edited another of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, the New York Post, told an audience of students at last week’s Coventry Conversations: “I can’t believe a fellow editor would not know phone tapping was in action.”

It is understood that Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator who was sent to prison last year for his part in the News of the World’s phone-hacking operations, was paid around £100,000 by the newspaper for aiding in hacking celebriti Yelland told the audience he believed that any sum more than £1,000 would have to be signed off by someone “in deep carpet land”.

“It would be impossible for anyone at News International to not know what was going on”, he added.

Yelland’s comments will undoubtedly not be welcomed by Murdoch, who owns News Corporation, parent company of the News of the World. Yelland claimed to hold Murdoch in high esteem, calling him the “best newspaper proprietor of all time” and said that he had a close relationship with him during his time at the Sun and the Post. “He has a genuine interest in newspapers. Murdoch is rooted in newspapers and lives, eats and breathes them”.

Yelland’s talk was surprisingly open and on the record (see a live blog at cutoday.wordpress.com; podcast at www.coventtry.ac.uk/itunesU). He talked in detail about heavy drinking, which had started at Coventry and got worse during his career. He recalled drinking binges followed by sleep and a fourteen hour day in the newsroom as a regular cycle.

Yelland blamed one of his biggest mistakes as editor – allowing a front page headline about Britain being run by a ‘Gay mafia’ – on having been drunk in Dublin that day. Homophobia was not his scene, he said. He was mortified when he sobered up and read that headline and story. He later he checked himself into rehab and stopped drinking 2005 when he found out that his wife, from whom he was divorced, was dying of breast cancer. He is still teetotal now.

A worse mistake than the headline though, he said, was printing a topless picture of the soon-to-be Countess Of Wessex Sophie Rhys Jones. He did not say if it happened under the influence. Printing the picture lost over half a million copies over night, according to Yelland, and prompted an icy call from Murdoch. “It probably cost us ten million pounds.”

After five years as editor Yelland stepped out of the firing line of popular tabloid journalism and moved, via the Harvard Business School, into public relations. Today he is a partner at PR firm Brunswick and has represented the likes of BP during the Gulf oil spill scandal this summer and Lord Browne, the former BP CEO on his recent review into university fees. PR suits David down to the ground, he said. As a commander of information he is in his element being counsel to clients. Personal integrity in both journalism and PR is key, he advised the assemble students. “Once you’ve lost your personal integrity,” says David, “you’re gone.” Ambition and a determination to prove people wrong kept me going says David.

John Mair is a senior lecturer in broadcasting at Coventry University and producer of the Coventry Conversations series. The talks series has just won the Cecil Angel Cup of 2010 for enhancing the reputation of the university.

Publisher launches crowdfunding campaign for slain photojournalist’s book

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Tom Hurndall, a British photojournalist and peace worker, was shot by an Israeli Defence Force (IDF) sniper in Gaza in 2003. Publisher Trolleybooks is today launching a campaign to crowdfund money for a book of Hurndall’s work called The Only House Left Standing: The Middle East Journals of Tom Hurndall. Along with his journals the book will contain some of his poetry and an introduction by renowned foreign correspondent Robert Fisk.

The eight-week campaign will launch this afternoon with a panel talk featuring:

  • Tom’s parents Anthony and Jocelyn Hurndall
  • John Sweeney – BBC Panorama journalist and maker of 2003 documentary When Killing is Easy.
  • Rowan Joffe and Simon Block – director and screenwriter of BAFTA-nominated Channel 4 documentary The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall
  • Mohammed Qeshta – who was with Hurndall when he was shot and worked for the International Solidarity Movement
  • Gigi Giannuzzi – publisher and founder of Trolley Books

The talk begins at 5pm this afternoon. Follow this link to watch it live on the Trolleybooks site.

Hari Kunzru: ‘The right to freedom of speech trumps any right to protection from offense’

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Author and English PEN deputy president Hari Kunzru has posted a tanscript of his address to the European Writers Parliament yesterday, in which he criticised the event’s host country Turkey over article 301 of its penal code which makes it illegal to insult Turkey, the Turkish ethnicity and Turkish government institutions.

I believe that the right to freedom of speech trumps any right to protection from offense, and that it underlies all the other issues I’ve been speaking about. Without freedom of speech, we, as writers, can have very little impact on culture.

Full transcript at this link.

WSJ: Chinese blogger conference cancelled due to pressure from authorities

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An annual blogging conference in Shanghai was cancelled over the weekend due to pressure from the authorities, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.

The Chinese Blogger Conference reportedly normally attracts online commentators, digital artists and entrepreneurs, many of whom are said to be critical of government censorship. The decision to cancel is “the latest sign of tightening limits in China on free expression” WSJ reports.

This year, organizers waited until four days ahead of the two-day conference’s planned start on Saturday to announce the venue, an office building in Shanghai’s Xuhui District, near Shanghai Jiaotong University. But the planned hosts reneged late last week owing to pressure from authorities not to let their venue be used for the conference, according to one of the organizers.

Read WSJ’s full report here.

Government spending: Who’s doing what with the new data?

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Today sees the biggest release of government spending data in history. Government departments have published details of all spending over £25,000 for the past six months and, according to this morning’s announcement, will continue to publish this expenditure data on a monthly basis.

According to minister for the Cabinet Office and paymaster general Francis Maude, it is part of a drive “to make the UK the most transparent and accountable government in the world”.

We’ve already released a revolutionary amount of data over the last six months, from the salaries of the highest earning civil servants to organisation structure charts which give people a real insight into the workings of government and is already being used in new and innovative ways.

A huge amount of public spending data has indeed been published under the current government, and today’s release is a significant addition to that. So who is doing what with the vast amount of new data? And who is making it easier for others to crunch the numbers?

The Guardian is usually streets ahead of other newspapers in processing large datasets and today’s coverage is no exception:

Who else?

There are, of course, different ways of looking at the numbers, as one Guardian commenter, LudwigsLughole, highlights:

There are 90,000 HMRC staff. They spent £164,000 in six months on bottled spring water. That equates to an annual spend per head of only £3.64. So the FT are seriously suggesting that £3.64 per head to give staff fresh bottled water is excessive? Pathetic journalism.

Exploring the data yourself

“The biggest issue with all these numbers is, how do you use them? If people don’t have the tools to interrogate the spreadsheets, they may as well be written in Latin.” – Simon Rogers, Guardian Data Blog editor.

“Releasing data is all well and good, but to encourage the nation’s ‘armchair auditors’, it must be readily usable.” – Martin Stabe, FT.

Here are some of the places you can go, along with the Guardian, to have a crack at the numbers yourself. Please add your own suggestions in the comments below.

Lots and lots of data. So what? My take on it was to find a quick and dirty way to cobble a query interface around the data, so here’s what I spent an hour or so doing in the early hours of last night, and a couple of hours this morning… tinkering with a Gov spending data spreadsheet explorer:

Guardian/gov datastore explorer

[T]he real power of this data will become clear in the months to come, as developers and researchers – you? – start to link it to other information, like the magisterial OpenlyLocal and the exciting WhosLobbying. Please make use of our API and loading scripts to do so.

Also see the good suggestions on Where Does My Money Go? for how government data publishing might be improved in the future.

So, coming full circle I return to the Guardian, and to the data-minded Simon Rogers, who asks: Will the government spending data really change the world?

A big question. Feel free to add your opinion below and any other data projects you have seen today or that pop up in the future.

BBC News: Liam Fox vows to tackle ‘leak culture’

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Defence secretary Dr Liam Fox said he hoped he could change the “culture of leaks” his department “seems to have inherited”, the BBC reported this morning.

In an interview on the Radio 4 Today programme, Dr Fox was reportedly asked whether comments made by David Cameron to the Commons Liaison Committee yesterday on several unauthorised disclosures to the press represented a rebuke for him and his department.

Cameron had said the department “does seem to have had a bit of a problem with leaks, which is worrying when it is the department responsible for security.”

In response Dr Fox said he was “rebuking them much more”.

It is very easy to get, in a very big department, to get one or two people who will pass things out. I think it is unprofessional and very unfair to their colleagues who are then unable to discuss things in a free way.

I hope it is a culture we can hope to change over time.

Journalisted Weekly: Cameron in China, students in London, Suu Kyi in Burma

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Journalisted is an independent, not-for-profit website built to make it easier for you, the public, to find out more about journalists and what they write about. It is run by the Media Standards Trust, a registered charity set up to foster high standards in news on behalf of the public, and funded by donations from charitable foundations.

Each week Journalisted produces a summary of the most covered news stories, most active journalists and those topics falling off the news agenda, using its database of UK journalists and news sources. From now on we’ll be cross-posting them on Journalism.co.uk.

for the week ending Sunday 14 November
  • Coverage of David Cameron’s trip to China slightly surpassed news about student fees and subsequent protests
  • George W Bush’s presidential memoirs were widely covered in the UK and elsewhere
  • The minister for universities was hardly mentioned

The Media Standards Trust’s latest report ‘Shrinking World: The decline of international reporting in the British press’ is now available to download

For the latest instalment of Tobias Grubbe, journalisted’s 18th century jobbing journalist, go to journalisted.com/tobias-grubbe

Covered lots

  • David Cameron in China, where the prime minister went to promote UK-Chinese relations, 213 articles
  • An increase in tuition fees for students that sparked student protests and some rioting in Conservative HQ at Millbank, 196 articles
  • George Bush’s autobiography, in which he defended the use of waterboarding, 151 articles
  • Aung San Suu Kyi, who was released from house arrest in Burma on Sunday, 107 articles

Covered little

Political ups and downs (top ten by number of articles)

Celebrity vs serious

  • Take That, who appeared together for the first time since 1995 – on the X-Factor, 94 articles vs the formation of Iraq’s new power-sharing government, headed by Nouri Maliki, 28 articles
  • Ann Widdecombe, ex-politician turned ballroom dancer, 55 articles vs Paul Chambers, whose conviction for a tweet about ‘blowing up’ Robin Hood airport was upheld, 18 articles
  • Emma Watson, who attended the premiere of the new Harry Potter film, 51 articles vs child detention, in the week Clare Sambrook won a second award for her investigations and Peers condemned the government’s postponement of the ending of child detention, 3 articles

Who wrote a lot about…’Aung San Suu Kyi‘

Jack Davies – 11 articles (The Guardian), Phoebe Kennedy – 10 articles (The Independent), Andrew Buncombe – 6 articles (The Independent), Tim Johnston – 5 articles (Financial Times), Emma Cowing – 3 articles (Scotland on Sunday), Peter Walker – 3 articles (The Guardian), Mail Foreign Service – 2 articles (MailOnline)

Long form journalism

Tune in same time next week.