08 Jun 09 | Uncategorized
It wasn’t quite like ordering pork in a kosher restaurant or flirting with the vicar’s wife, but my invitation to one of Singapore’s top intellectuals to justify curbs on liberty was not exactly what the free speech community was used to.
Still, I was pleased that at one of Index on Censorship’s events at the Global Forum for Free Expression in Oslo Professor Chua Beng Huat was given the chance to explain, in his words, the dangers of parasitic individualism.
Up against Prof Chua was a Russian journalist, Maxim Trudolyubov, an editor at the business paper, Vedomosti. He sought to explain, but in no way defend, a tendency among many Russians to associate the political liberalisation of the 1990s with material impoverishment.
Chua sought to differentiate between political discourse, which is heavily circumscribed through the application of perhaps the world’s most draconian defamation laws, and cultural and economic expression, which he categorised as increasingly free. He linked this with what he termed the efficiency of the government, consistently high growth rates and to a single party which has run the city state for 50 years.
I have heard this point made consistently on my various travels to Singapore, the country where I was born. It flies in the face of almost any western interpretation of free expression, but I have heard it expressed cogently, if somewhat embarrassedly, by intelligent and well-travelled Singaporeans.
Both Chua and Trudolyubov agreed with one of the main arguments of my forthcoming book, Freedom For Sale, in which I argue that the vast majority of people, whatever the country, culture and circumstance, appear increasingly willing to trade their liberty for the promise of either prosperity or security.
I also differentiate between what I call “private” freedoms –– to travel, live where you want, do what you want in your personal life –– and the “public” freedoms of free expression and free association, which are considered more expendable.
The audience agreed that self-censorship was now a far bigger threat than the traditional mechanisms of state control. One participant, a Croatian who had spent some years studying at Stanford University, argued that censorship was alive and well in the US, but deployed more subtly, through peer pressure and the desire not to stand out in the crowd or to be deemed extreme. Thus, he suggested, otherwise enquiring students were prepared to stay silent on politics, race and other contentious issues.
Can individuals, he asked, be trained to be stupid? Food for thought, but not the customary fare.
21 May 09 | Uncategorized
Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press
By Michael Schudson
Polity Press (£16.99)
This review is a guest post by John Lloyd
Democracy is served in curious ways: and one of these may have been the outburst last week of Michael Martin, the Speaker in the UK’s House of Commons, to a chamber struggling to frame an appropriate response as details of expense claims by members of parliament began to emerge. Ill humour bursting from his ruddy cheeks and avid to discover the source of the leak, Mr Martin was caustic with fellow MPs for “telling the media what they wanted to hear”. It was the voice of privilege challenged — but also of frustrated fury. Who are newspaper reporters to get so high and mighty about expense fiddles? What right have newspaper editors, in thrall to politically interventionist proprietors, to blame politicians for bringing democracy low?
These are good questions, although the Speaker was unwise to raise them in the middle of a moral storm in which the part of Jove the Thunderer is played by the British media. For this time the press — led by the Daily Telegraph, the receiver of the golden details — is right. Unlovable, hypocritical, slavish — it has done its job.
It has uncovered a scandal: and not just a scandal. The amounts of money are trivial and the infractions are mainly minor; but the public exposure of men and women deploying their creativity to wring every possible advantage out of their allowances is deeply unedifying. In some cases, it is shocking. These are the people who make the laws that tell us what to do on pain of fine or imprisonment. One does not have to be a hyperventilating tabloid columnist to expect better behaviour than that which has been revealed.
Revealed, we should remember, by the unlovable press. Michael Schudson, among the best of the academic writers on the media, has seen in the raucousness and hype of newspapers a pearl beyond price: the instinct to create trouble for the establishment, the panjandrums — them. In this collection of essays, the central one — which shares the book’s title — lays out four elements of necessary unlovability. These are: a love of the unplanned and the disruptive; an even greater love of conflict and dissent; a scepticism about the claims of politics; and a willingness to name names and connect the names with crimes and misdemeanors.
Schudson writes: “That is what serves democracy: the irresistible drive of journalists to focus on events, including those that powerful forces cannot anticipate and often cannot manage”. Thus when Matt Drudge began his subsequently richly rewarded career by showing, from his bedroom laptop, that President Bill Clinton was an adulterer; or when bloggers uncovered a speech made in 2002 by Trent Lott, the former Senate majority leader, which pointed to racist views; or, more recently, when Paul Staines, a British blogger operating under the incendiary nom de guerre of Guido Fawkes, uncovered a sleazy plan on the part of prime ministerial aides to tar leading Conservatives with sex scandals – in all of these cases, the people glorying in their ill-gotten power and tearing down the powerful did well by us.
They fulfilled one of the necessary prerequisites of the free press: that it is free. In the words of Walter Meers ,a veteran AP reporter quoted in another of Schudson’s essays: “There are too many excursions into trivia,too much play for the public opinion polls, too many words about who’s ahead and who’s behind. There’s a reason. That is what people want to know.”
But here is the rub. Schudson is writing of American newspapers. In the much more overheated conditions of the British press — where populist tabloids far outsell upmarket broadsheets and where, in any case, the latter are just as liable to sink their teeth into politicians as the former — there is a larger problem. The expenses revelations come after many years in which, in diverse ways, the media have made of politics and politicians a cross between a spectacle, a reality show and a farce.
Recently playing in the cinemas has been State of Play, an Americanised version of a BBC television series that showed leading politicians to be monumentally corrupt, and In the Loop, a farcical rendering of the spin culture of the New Labour governments. A new, web-based radio station, Sun Talk, launched by the country’s most popular tabloid, fills hour after hour with political denigration. The second most popular but arguably more influential tabloid, the Daily Mail, is organising legal challenges to errant MPs.
This is part of a long struggle between the media and the political class for the allegiance of those whom the first call the audience and the second, the electorate. How far that competition is in our interests is another matter; and one for another day.
This review originally appear on the Financial Times website
22 Apr 09 | Uncategorized
I am always blown away by the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards. But for some reason, last night’s event seemed to throw up an even more astonishing roster of award winners than usual. It was also good that so many were there in person. (In a surreal touch, Paul Staines, aka Guido Fawkes, was also there in person at a table he had bought for the occasion).
The Sri Lankan paper, the Sunday Leader, won the journalism award, which was collected by Lal Wickrematunge. Lal explained he and his brother Lasantha had started the magazine 15 years ago on a shoestring budget and distributed it from the back of a car. Unfortunately, Lasantha couldn’t be there because he was assassinated in January.
Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma, a novel about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, was the unanimous choice for the book award. In his acceptance speech the writer explained that ever since the atrocity, on the eve of the 4 June anniversary Chinese police visit the homes of former demonstrators with duvets and camp out to make sure they don’t talk to foreign journalists. What a weird and deeply sinister image of a repressive regime that is.
But I was particularly taken with the New Media award, which went to the creators of Psiphon, a software programme to allow internet access in countries where censorship is imposed. The programme, developed at Citizen Lab at the Univeristy of Toronto allows people in non-censored countries to turn any computer into an encrypted server. However, I did think the award should have gone jointly to Hossein ‘Hoder’ Derakhshan, an Iranian blogger who can take credit for a revolution in blogging in his country. In 2001 he invented a way for Persian characters to be represesented on the web. He was arrested for his activities in November 2008 and is being held in an unknown location.
Originally posted at The Bright Stuff
22 Apr 09 | Comment, News and features, United Kingdom
In a stirring and provocative speech at the Freedom of Expression awards, Sir David Hare presented a challenge for Index on Censorship, and all free speech advocates
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