Local rag in freedom of speech fury

A small storm is brewing in the media world in Brighton, with a claim that the monopoly local paper, the Argus, has threatened the Brighton Green party with “consequences” after a Green Party member set up a Twitter account and website criticising and ridiculing its standards of journalism.

The full story can be found here.  As this piece shows, the final straw was the Argus splashing a story about a prominent Green activist and Councillor, Ben Duncan, tweeting, at the height of the post-Budget furore,  that he did not “give a fuck” about pasties.  Like so many people, he recognised that this was a non-story – the real effects of a deeply regressive budget being hidden behind a pseudo-debate about hot pies.

The issue is not just the Argus’ obvious political bias – frequently its content appears to consist of little more than topped-and-tailed Tory press releases, and at times it’s not possible to get a cigarette paper between the Argus’ view of the world and the easy populism that it local Tory MPs’ stock in trade.  For example, on the difficult and emotive issue of local travellers’ sites, the Argus appears happy to follow the local Tories’ inflammatory line, without reflecting the serious attempts being made by the Council and other agencies to produce a long-term solution; it reports a call by Tory Councillor Dawn Barnett for local people to stop paying their Council Tax - and hence to break the law – without a word of consideration of the  implications.

A wider issue is the quality of the Argus’ journalism.  It’s undeniable that local papers are under the cosh financially – it’s so much cheaper to do churnalism, happily recycling the material produced by others.  The work of the police, ambulance and fire service press offices is of course particularly useful in this respect.  Accuracy and detail are not things that one readily associates with the material that Argus journalists write – I remember one story (and I wish I could reference it) which described a large fire in a Sussex town, causing all sorts of chaos, which failed to name the town concerned.  Elsewhere detail is often vague.  Brighton is one of the most laid-back cities in Britain – but even minor events habitually lead to “fury” and “chaos”.  A toxic combination of cost-cutting and political bias appears to have led to the abandonment of the most basic journalistic disciplines.

And, faced with criticism, the Argus is not slow to resort to threats and bluster.  Not long ago, it threatened legal action after a Council officer described it as “the local rag” – which I would have thought was at the mild end of the range of appropriate epithets.  I once had a run in with the Argus in which I sent them an email criticising their failure to report a community arts event in which primary schools from across the County had participated, and received no fewer than three angry emails back.  Moreover, the Argus is no stranger to the attentions of the PCC.

So it’s not surprising that the Argus should react in the way it has to @EveningAnus.  It’s often regarded as a third-rate product, hypersensitive to any form of criticism (and deeply secretive, it appears, about what are rumoured to be sliding circulation figures).  But, if the report is accurate, threatening the collective punishment of a political party over the actions of one of its members is something of a new low.  It is fascinating that commercial media seem so quick to resort to threats and moral blackmail in the face of an individual exercising his freedom of expression – the moral hypocrisy being exposed day after day at the Levenson inquiry seems to extend even into the stagnant backwaters of local churnalism.

But there’s a wider issue here – what is the point of local papers in a digital age?  If I want to find out about, say, crime in Sussex, I just need to go to the Sussex Police website, or follow the informative and useful Sussex Police Twitter feed.  Local papers do not report any more, it seems – reportage involves money, effort and journalistic craft, none of which appear to be things that the local media as a whole are willing to provide – they simply collate.  Churnalism rules – so why not go back to the original sources.  Local news is often accessible more easily through local blogging and Twitter, and without being filtered through the political bias of the local paper’s owners or editor.

Meanwhile, the apparent inability of the Argus to take a bit of criticism without resorting to bluster and apparent threat speaks volumes about its values.  I’d have thought a confident, successful local paper would have reacted very differently.

The return of hate speech

There is a belief among what might be termed the Tabloid Right that in a world of “political correctness gone mad” people are not allowed to say certain things.  A quick glance at the Dale Farm hashtag (#dalefarm) on Twitter will demonstrate the absurdity of that view.  In a culture that has been brutalised by the bullying meted out by tabloids and their followers on a daily basis, the amount of sheer hatred to be found there is shocking (as well as the way in which hate feeds illusion – the community at Dale Farm owned the land, paid their taxes, and I can find no reliable information about criminality at the site.  This was a planning dispute, and as a minority pointed out, supermarket chains and trendy coffee outlets get away with much worse breaches of planning law with never a riot policeman to be seen).

Hatred of travellers may be one of the last socially acceptable form of racism, but it doesn’t stop there.  Comedian Ricky Gervais chooses to tweet what he describes as his “mong face” and he and his coterie of supporters – rather like the grinning primary school playground loudmouth and his sad little group of chums – complain that those who take offence at this gratuitous comment are humourless and need to get a life.  There is of course the defence that comedy (a strange word to use in the case of a celebrity who hasn’t actually been funny for years) needs to be edgy and challenging – but there’s the world of difference between subverting convention and getting a cheap laugh at the expense of the vulnerable.

But the Dale Farm fascism seems to me to be one – rather extreme – expression of a growing trend in mainstream politics.  The issue of travellers – always difficult in its need to balance what appear to be hugely conflicting interest – has always been a political flashpoint, and one that mainstream Conservative politicians appear to be looking increasingly to exploit.  Views like those of Chingford Councillor Thom Goddard, who tweeted that the Dale Farm scaffolding tower would make a great venue for a game of human kerplunk, may be extreme (and it’s interesting that the tweet was removed sharpish), but they’re not that unusual.

For example, here in liberal and Green Brighton, the local Tories – smarting from their thrashing in May’s local elections – appear determined to use travellers as an election issue.  Despite the fact that the new Green council’s policy in relation to traveller sites is largely indistinguishable from the outgoing Tories’ policy – not least because its options are constrained by law – the city’s two Tory MPs – Simon Kirby MP and Mike Weatherley MP – have mounted a campaign to smear the Green council as being willing to allow travellers free rein to move into the city.  Tory Councillor Dawn Barnett is currently under investigation by a Standards Committee for handing out information to travellers on how to reach Green-held wards (interesting that Tories who foam at the mouth about trespass seem all too willing to incite it).

But this is mainstream modern Toryism. There are numerous examples of how this weak Tory administration chooses to smear the vulnerable – whether it be single mothers or the disabled, who have been on the receiving end of what appear to be direct smears emerging from the DWP about the benefits available to the disabled, or the revival of the notion of the deserving poor.  As the living standards of millions – including many of the Tories’ core supporters – are trashed, we can expect more and more dog-whistle politics from the Tories and their Liberal Democrat parasites.

Green blogger Viridis Lumen has written powerfully of the racial agenda behind the Dale Farm evictions, and the comment that surrounds them – as well as suggesting why the authorities felt they could get away with the extreme violence used at the evicition.  But this is part of a wider picture.  Whether its fulminating racists on Twitter, or comedians who think it’s funny to mock the vulnerable, or Government spin doctors smearing the disabled, or the transformation of huggable hoodies into the feral underclass, this is increasingly mainstream in Tory Britain.