Iran: the new media revolution?

Many countries have been in Iran's current situation: joke elections, electoral fraud that would make Mugabe think twice and a leader that thinks that ignoring the protestations of his electorate is the solution to retaining power. Once upon a time this might have worked - doubtless it has before - but not now. Whether or not this is the first new media (actual) revolution of course depends on the outcome, but there is little doubt in my mind that the internet has played a pivotal role in the process so far.

Ahmadinejad might not understand the power that Twitter, YouTube and Flickr give to the people he has ignored, and have underestimated their ability to provide footage and real-time news to the mainstream media, but given his country's history he should have remembered that power is given to leaders on trust, with conditions. After the events of this week he might retain his legal authority but he no longer has real power. There are rumours the army have been in talks today and are 'considering their position'. Moreover, the promise of a recount by the Guardian Council is hugely significant and a further weakening of Ahmadinejad's position, even though it seems opposition candidate Hussein Mousavi has refused it (his point being that the number of missing ballot papers is the issue, which a recount would not address). External media is all but barred from covering the events as many of their outlets are blocked, and Iranian TV is portraying the demonstrators as hooligans intent on smashing up their country. It is not, but only because of the internet do we know the extent to which it is not.

Rather than speculate on events and outcomes it would be more appropriate for me to point you in the direction of the real information. Indeed, that's my whole point: that the real information is out there, despite the Iranian establishment's best efforts, and that is only because of social networking and the internet. It doesn't have a politically biased owner, nor does it know its own content. It is the most democratic media ever invented, and that is its power. Just as in 1979, power is draining from the officials out into the streets, only this time it doesn't stop there. It carries on down their telephone lines and is disseminated globally. Everybody reading the Twitter updates of people caught in riots, watching the videos of demonstrations and reading the blogs of reporters has the power to disseminate them further. So in the spirit of revolution, see below.

Revolutionary Road... : Not Kate Winslet's account of the uprisings, but Saeed Valadbaygi's frequently updated blog of pictures and badly translated news from the streets of Tehran.
Channel 4 World News Blog: Lindsey Hilsum's breathtaking account of her journey to Mousavi's rally on 15th June.
#Iranelection cyberwar guide for beginners: Self-explanatory technical guide
A blog with pictures of the ransacking of Tehran University
Frequently updated Picasa album of the riots
More incredible pictures in fairly high resolution
Twitter search for the hashtag '#iranelection': Perhaps the most important place to look. Everybody talking about this subject on Twitter is using, amongst others, the #iranelection hashtag so their Tweets can be grouped in a search like this. Click on it and see for yourself. I found all of the above links from this feed.
YouTube videos
The BBC has a great page on events that includes a helpful Q&A

In the uprisings of 1968 the walls of Paris were adorned with maxims and short phrases that beautifully captured the zeitgeist: "We will ask nothing. We will demand nothing. We will take, occupy." - that sort of thing. In 2009, the wall is actual and virtual. Two minutes ago someone in Tehran wrote on Twitter: "140 characters is a novel when you're being shot at." If that's not on t-shirts within the week I'll have them made myself.

UPDATE: Good BBC article on the same subject

How to beat the BNP

The news that the British National Party won two seats in the European Parliament following last Thursday’s elections has been greeted with the usual soundbite-driven hysteria. Nick Clegg, David Cameron, Harriet Harman etc waded into the compulsory game of tough-talking politicians have to play on occasions such as this. The person who sounds most outraged and “sickened”wins; nobody sees it as helpful or relevant but they feel they’ve done their bit. However, it does nothing to counter the BNP’s political gain.

In fact it does quite the reverse. It fuels the fear that the public have of the BNP, and this is counter-productive to any attempts to democratically defeat them. The same is true of the approach taken by much of the media and the general public, if only by extension. That is to say, they are evil racist thugs, let’s denounce and ignore them until they go away. For my money it’s the wrong answer to the wrong problem. With tactics like that they are here to stay, and worse, it creates a persona of the underdog which they are already adept at exploiting. (Nick Griffin took this exact approach in his acceptance speech in Manchester last week.)

People’s votes swing to political extremes when they feel those in the centre are not representative of their views or capable/interested in addressing their problems. See Bolshevik Russia, Nazi Germany or Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Republic of Iran for more details. Parties closer to the centre have been aware of this for some time but have done little to nothing about it. A classic tactic of parties like the BNP and rulers like Hitler, Khomeini etc, is to couch their appalling agenda - usually their raison d’être - in terms so general and/or agreeable that people overlook the truth and vote for them. As Fraser Nelson reported in the Spectator back in May, the BNP have been campaigning on local issues, presenting themselves as the ‘helpful party’, with no mention of their policies on immigration or citizenship.

So, solution number one: make sure these local issues are taken care of. Don’t give them the political space to make themselves useful, because nobody is going to complain about smooth roads, nice parks and clean local swimming pools, even if, as they see it, the guy who fixed them has some allegedly dodgy views (which he will have denied on the doorstep). This is up to the main parties, the incumbent in particular.

Solution number two is to tolerate them. In order for solution number three to work, this comes as a pre-condition. They must be heard and tolerated in accordance with freedom of speech and the rights accorded to any party that has gained democratic legitimacy. In the face of the BNP’s recent success, groups such as Unite Against Fascism are quick to consign several centuries of tradition to the dustbin of political expedience with phrases such as, “I believe in freedom of speech for everybody but fascists”. If this contradiction in terms was deliberate it would be clever. It is neither and it is ridiculous.

Egging Nick Griffin and denying his right to freedom of speech plays beautifully into the hands of the BNP. It elevates their underdog status, but more importantly denies ordinary people the chance to disagree with them on the basis of policy, and this is where they are to be beaten. If UAF wasn’t run by members of the Socialist Workers Party masquerading as normal people who have the collective political nouse of Robert Kilroy-Silk, they wouldn’t be charging around Westminster throwing raw vegetables in the street. Instead they would be pointing out the unworkable, economically insane and inherently racist policies the BNP advocate in the context of a debate, preferably on television, without shouting, placards or the back-door promotion of socialism.

Solution number three: let them drown in their own bullshit. This is child’s play. But don’t rely on the received opinion of others or assume the media always have it right; go onto their website, listen to their speeches, put aside your inherent dislike of them and actually focus on the detail of what they say. Beware: you will find that much of it is worryingly agreeable. For example, cracking down on crime, restoring public safety, healthier and more sustainable organic farming, higher pay for NHS workers, more beds, less red tape, increased investment in public transport, cuts in fuel tax and the abolition of hidden speed cameras are just some of their good ideas. Furthermore they say

Britain’s foreign relations should be determined by the protection of our own national interest and not by our like or dislike of other nations’ internal politics.

So, should you find yourself in a debate with someone who supports them, don’t talk about crime or Iraq, focus on the economy and immigration. Here they are at their most unpleasant, but more importantly, absurd. They swing wildly from right to left, from Mussolini to Mao, advocating the exclusion of foreign-made goods wherever possible, which will apparently equal full employment. Back to agriculture briefly, they call for “maximum self-sufficiency” for Britain. You don’t need to have read too many books to know all of this would lead to starvation. Full-scale nationalisation is also on the cards, with British jobs for British workers and worker shareholder and co-operative schemes, just like in Stalin’s USSR. On immigration they call for an immediate halt to prevent ‘British people’ becoming an ethnic minority in their own country, and the introduction of

voluntary resettlement whereby those immigrants who are legally here will be afforded the opportunity to return to their lands of ethnic origin…

Clearly this is inherently racist, but think about it. They are geared up, ready and practised at answering that charge. Instead of shouting them down on that front, take the easy route. Ask them what they will do when nobody leaves (which they won’t, otherwise why would they have come here in the first place)? And when they force them to return, what do they think will happen to, for example, the London Underground? Other questions might be, what is ‘Britishness’? Who are the people to whom the country ‘belongs’ and what do they look like? You say they will be an ethnic minority, so what ethnie are they? If you really want to skewer them, query the fact that they advocate full-scale nationalisation while simultaneously devolving power down to the local level. These are their policies, which, racist or otherwise, make absolutely no sense.

If you have ever seen them asked these sorts of questions you will know what a man drowing in his own bullshit looks and sounds like. If you drown them out with eggs and heckles they’ll never get the chance to hoist themselves on their own petard. They are an idiotic shower, a pathetic party of extreme stupidity irrespective of their well-publicised views on race. Of course that element should be countered, challenged and exposed at every available opportunity, but so should their other anarchic and backward policies as well; crucially, in the right forum. The whole point of our democratic system is that anyone can have their say and that they open themselves up to criticism in the process. No other party is so easy to criticise. Open, democratic, publicised debate is how you beat the BNP; go forth and question.

If you (don't) go down to the polls today

Be in no doubt, things are a little unusual at the moment. It’s difficult to know where to look for any semblance of normality, but then why would you want to do that? There is too much fun to be had gawping at the news fallout from the implosion of politics, and more recently the plastic knife backstabbings of what has become a pretty thundery Cabinet picnic. The small matter of democracy, albeit in the guise of local elections, has been entirely lost in the dust cloud, which is unsurprising given the majority of people won’t bother voting.

I’m not keen on reprimanding people for things, apart from bad spelling and grammar, sculpted facial topiary, using hair products, supporting Chelsea, socialism or Australia, and of course, not voting. The usual stories about horses and dead women are all very well, but surely the most persuasive reason to vote is that, if you do not, you have no right to complain about anything. This is not a reversible truism; casting your vote will not remove your need for complaint – your neighbours won’t be evicted, the bottomless potholes down your street will remain – but in our messy, imperfect democracy it is an incredibly easy way to make sure you can carry on moaning about the world around you.

While you may feel your vote has frustratingly little impact, bear in mind what happens when the door is closed on that narrow shaft of light. The result is usually violence. Fred Goodwin’s windows were bricked because the public couldn’t vote him out; the shock tactics used by the IRA, Tamil Tigers, Hamas, Hezbollah and friends were/are deemed necessary by them because it’s the only way to get any attention when they’re excluded from the political process.

So the argument is mainly pragmatic but also slightly ideological. Voting secures your place at the table thumping world-to-rights pub discussions and might even change a few things for the better. But it is also a right worth exercising because by doing so you are supporting the existence of that right, without which people would find another way, using weapons.

Many people feel abstaining is a protest, especially in light of the expenses revelations, but this is insanely fickle and pretty narrow-minded. No-one would argue that MPs should be proud of themselves, but what about those potholes? Does a political scandal on any scale erase your opinions about Council Tax, nuclear weapons, the NHS, City Academies and cannabis? If you really must voice your fury at the main parties, vote for a fringe or single-issue party, preferably one that isn’t full of lunatics or racists (which admittedly leaves you with little choice).

It’s too late to vote in the latest elections, but don’t worry. If another senior Cabinet minister pisses all over the Prime Minister’s picnic in the next few days a General Election will surely result (unusual times mean unusual picnics). Sharpen your pencils before your tongues and swords.

Jesus and the Future of Journalism

As Jesus said when he reached the top of a mountain somewhere in Galilee and turned to face the cameras, “Some stuff is happening and I’m here to tell you about it” [Matthew 5:1-2]. He was a man before his time. These last few weeks, months or years, depending on how many references I get into this article, have seen changes to the way we view, choose and consume media that anybody born tomorrow will take for granted but many born before 1980 refuse to even accept. A few things have happened particularly recently (or ‘last month’ as it will be referred to a month from now) that are particularly salient amongst the cacophonic playground noise of examples in support of this argument.

For those of you yet to discover him, Jon Stewart hosts The Daily Show on Comedy Central that ‘takes a reality-based look at news, trends, pop culture, current events, sports and entertainment with an alternative point of view’. ‘Alternative’ is a reference to the ‘spinmeisters and shills on the American 24 cable news network’, who, on 1 April 2009, were in receipt of a ‘smackdown’ from Stewart himself. Bearing the brunt was Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s Mad Money, who was humiliated and destroyed (his words) by Stewart, whose charge sheet was fairly simple. CNBC and its cohorts failed to report the truth about the economic crisis. Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America and AIG were all shored up by CNBC’s experts and the footage in which they did so was (on The Daily Show) artfully juxtaposed with the facts of their respective demises – collapse, bankruptcy and bailouts. Cramer was one such expert, and his humiliation at the hands of Stewart has caused widespread fallout in the world of journalism and parts of the internet where people care about this kind of stuff.

But this was much more than Stewart vs. Cramer or Comedy Central vs. CNBC. The real question is why they got it so wrong; why couldn’t they see the biggest crisis since the 1930s coming? Discounting incompetence and the fact that its size made it harder to accurately predict – because they are not excuses – the important part of Stewart’s argument is one echoing round the world of new media. Many journalists are either too cosy with or too dependent on the people whose activities they are supposed to report on. This means that if the truth conflicts with the line they are fed the latter wins and the public lose, every time.

The same argument was levelled at certain political journalists more recently in fairly spectacular fashion by the political blogosphere when its biggest player, Guido Fawkes, toppled government spinner and all round twatbag Damien McBride. His abusive treatment of lobby journalists via text message went unreported for years precisely because if it had been, the reporting journalist would have lost the access to politicians that their career depended on. I know you don’t care about Westminster playground scuffles, but this episode matters and is relevant, despite appearances, because it is yet another example of the fact that the old school old media way of doing things is dying out, and how you consume your news is changing.

Journalists used to ‘make’ the news. If you read The Times tomorrow you will consider yourself up to date with ‘the news’. But what if something happened that The Times didn’t consider newsworthy? Limitations of finance, space, geography and time have always stood in the way of us gathering our own news, which is why we use journalists as our gatekeepers on the world’s events. But those boundaries were, if not smashed, seriously eroded the moment the internet became a household must-have. If you have enough free time and know how to use Blogger or Wordpress (see last month’s issue) you too can be a gatekeeper. Or you can be a one-off journalist, like those who Tweeted about the Mumbai bombings or sent the first pictures of that plane on the Hudson River – every national event now features this networked journalism and will do forever more. At the other end of the same spectrum, The Drudge Report (Matt Drudge broke the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal) has more than three million unique visits per day, and all he does is put links to other sites’ stories on his site. He rarely authors stories himself. The internet gives everyone the potential to do something similar, and with a scoop like Clinton/Lewinsky, enormous agenda-setting power. Obviously connections on the inside are extremely helpful, but if your website gains a readership on its own merits, those contacts will find you.

Woe abounds about the death of newspapers, particularly local ones, but those advocating its rescue are missing two fundamental points: first, it is happening whether you like it or not. People are buying fewer newspapers because they can get their news online, and you cannot rebottle the genie. Second, it doesn’t matter, at least not for journalism. The written word’s content and quality are not affected by its form, whether it is printed on paper, uploaded or published. So equating the death of the newspaper with the death of journalism is completely false, and, I would suggest, rather a masked scream from those in the commentariat who have realised that the internet’s archival nature shows the worst of them up as inaccurate, hypocritical and short-termist in their views, while its low barriers to entry have simultaneously facilitated millions of potentially worthy journalistic adversaries.

If you’re a reader rather than a writer all you really need to know is the gatekeepers are changing. If you value your news you need to know that the parameters of information supply have been stretched to the point of non-existence. In other, more normal words, the only thing now limiting your news supply is your own time and how much of it you want to spend reading. This doesn’t mean all news is online and written by anonymous bloggers; comedian (not journalist) Jon Stewart is one such new gatekeeper. TV is not shiny and new, but as I said and repeat: the form does not matter. (In an attempt to tie this article together) if the internet had been around several years earlier there would have been no need for the Sermon to be on The Mount. Jesus would have blogged his moral teachings, the disciples would have linked to the post, it would have been covered by the national press and the rest of us might have tweeted about it. The message would have reached millions in minutes rather than millions in years. Big JC would have been a networked journalist too, only with a slightly more powerful editor than usual (or maybe not). In addition to which and perhaps more importantly, people wouldn’t have had to rely on their local tribesmen/town criers/journalists/gossips – the old school gatekeepers – to find out about what he said. The whole transcript would have been up on The Huffington Post in pdf before you could say Christ Almighty.

So the next time you hear Polly Toynbee moaning about people leaving nasty comments under her stupid factless articles or politicians complaining about bloggers uncovering their expenses, leave them a comment of your own (after all, it is free). Mine will simply read: the future is networked; deal with it.

Experimenting With Scribd...

The Impact of British Political Blogging on Political Journalism and Westminster

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Research media blogs

You Is, I Are; Microsoft Werd Up To Its Usual Tricks and Standards

You know, when trying to write a conclusion to a 12,000 word document, you need many things; clarity of expression and the will to live probably being the most important. Step up, Microsoft Word grammar checker. It's absence of the former is slowly removing the latter. Can't wait to not be looking at this screen.

Stewart vs. Cramer

A lot has been said about the head to head between Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer, for both sides of the argument. What remains true is that it's worth watching.

Just a thought though. Doesn't this boil down to an inherent problem in reporting the truth about markets, which is that they are built and depend on trust. If CNBC had told the actual truth throughout this crisis - assuming they had known them which at times they clearly didn't - you could make a good argument for saying the crisis would have been somehow worse (not that I can think how). From a leyman's perspective it seems market reporting is the ultimate example of where truth and what they think people need to hear at times part company altogether. It's the same fine line that Robert Peston had to tread over HBOS, and many felt he crossed it. He disagreed.

The best point Stewart makes is, why did you take the word of CEOs at face value? No political interviewer worth their salt does it with politicians; au contraire, they are repremanded for being disrespectful. I will be amazed if financial interviews don't go the same way from now on.

Make Your Own Tory Logo

Have a go yourself

Prescott In Time Warp Spin Crash

JP has just posted this absurd article suggesting that Cameron a) bears some responsibility for Black Wednesday and b) should apologise. It's a desperate attempt to counteract DC's upcoming apology for failing to hold the goverment to account over their mishandling of the financial crisis.

I write this here only because there is no way they will publish my comment, because, well, look up Stalinism.

God almighty, I thought GB was fending off the men in white coats, but this is something else. The idea that Cameron is repsonsible for Black Wednesday, and that, even if he was, he should be apologising for it now, is born either out of insanity, desperation, or both.

Alternatively, this is an attempt to counterspin a brilliant piece of political manoeuvring by the Tories, in which you have practically had to dig out a bloody history book to find something vaguely related that they screwed up. It was seventeen years ago. For. Crying. Out. Loud. I know you remember it like it was yesterday, but politically, it is history, as are New Labour.

Woeful.

UPDATE: Not really an update, just an addition. Look at the comments that have built up now. Why are they published and mine isn't? Not sour grapes, couldn't care less. But it can't just be standard NuLab censorship, because most of the comments disagree. I wonder...

Rubbish Slogan

In my local shop on Roman Road. Not sure they would be so delighted if they bothered to read it.