Back? - 1 comment

Well my 6 weeks of work training is over, so I'll be returning to more normal hours. Unfortunately you should be suspicious whenever you read statements like "I might make a full return to blogging this week...", recognising a symptom of blog-tiredness when you see one.

Not tiredness with Bloggers4Labour itself, or necessarily with what the most interesting bloggers are writing about politics, it's just that I can't bring myself to blog about it at the moment. Not national politics anyway, and certainly not via the regular route of pouncing on something stupid (and quite possibly misrepresented, misinterpreted, or only 'floated' in the first place for the benefit of the Sunday papers) at the BBC or Comment Is Free.

Perhaps I need a holiday - I can't remember the last time I had one. Alternatively, I could look for the practical benefits of political policies rather than fall into the trap of becoming the kind of hack content to write solely off the top of their head, or on the basis of what someone told them over dinner.

Update: Sorry, I will be trying to answer emails, but I still have 22 drafts to work through. The general rule is that I'm not ignoring you, and not trying to snub you, I just can't think what to say/what the answer is, at present.

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I wonder if a lot of time and intellectual effort wouldn't be saved by devising a kind of "automatic Fisking device" that could be deployed by bloggers against potentially offending articles, emitting a factual/logical demolition of the article within seconds. Perhaps the device/program could also be trained by experts with a dictionary of offending terms and phrases that mark the author and article as a potential offender (e.g. "Turbo-consumerism", "... the language of the BNP", "political legacy", "a time of change" - I'm sure you can improve on this list). Perhaps this way the "village idiots" (the Lawsons, Buntings, Clarks, Murrays, and Galloways of this world) can be dealt with swiftly, but not gratuitously, so we can be the more confident that serial critics really do have positive points of their own to make.

The Commentariat, again - 2 comments

This is good, from the Ministry of Truth:

For all the professional commentariat complain bitterly of their rather 'robust' and ungentle handling by some bloggers and a few anonymous blog-trolls, it should be noted that there is nothing that pisses them off quite so much as those occasions on which their standard charge of amateurism contrives to explode in their face.

This latest spate of sniping from the hallowed ranks of the professional commentariat has, I will freely admit. prompted me to contemplate a pivotal question.

Just what, exactly, is it that journalists - or rather columnists, as there is little by way of real friction between most bloggers and other subspecies of the genus 'Journalista' - possess that bloggers do not, such that these columnists routinely operate from a presumption of their own professional and intellectual superiority?

The only answer that seems to fit, having pondered the subject, is that with payment for one’s opinions comes the hubristic belief that one’s ability to string together words in a more or less grammatically correct and pleasing manner automatically confers on oneself the status of being an ecumenical authority on any and all subjects to which one turns ones attention.

My last take on this topic.

In defence of political blogging - 1 comment

In the light of Guido Fawkes' recent humiliation on Newsnight at the hands of The Guardian's Michael White, Oliver Kamm criticised political blogging in that newspaper on Monday. He concluded:

The blogosphere, in short, is a reliable vehicle for the coagulation of opinion and the poisoning of debate. It is a fact of civic life that is changing how politics is conducted - overwhelmingly for the worse, and with no one accountable for the decline.

I don't mind dishing out a bit of criticism from time to time, but I couldn't disagree more with this analysis.

The central thesis in Oliver's piece is that Guido failed because, as a (mere?) blogger, he developed in an atmosphere where talk is cheap, commitment is low, and facts aren't checked:

[...] He thereby illustrated blogging's central characteristic danger. It is a democratic medium, allowing anyone to participate in political debate without an intermediary, at little or no cost. But it is a direct and not deliberative form of democracy. You need no competence to join in.

This is partly true of the political blogosphere, and yet a poll of bloggers taken before Newsnight would undoubtedly have predicted the outcome: because Guido has a particular reputation for gossip, rumour, and rabble-rousing faux-scandals; because of the ludicrously effected anonymity; and because White is an experienced and reputed journalist, who, I daresay, fancied Guido's scalp. Bloggers4Labour is lucky to have some of the most thoughtful British political blogs pass through its aggregator, day in, day out, and it's hard to believe many of their authors would venture forth as foolishly as Guido did, for they are just as careful, and just as keen to avoid tarnishing their reputation by publishing and uttering nonsense, as "dead-tree" journalists, not all of whom could have wielded a scalpel as efficiently as White.

A secondary charge is that political bloggers can be lumped together as "a self-selecting group of the politically motivated who have time on their hands". One arguing this point would have to prove this was generally the case, and generally not the case amongst offline journalists. By definition, a professional journalist will have upwards of 40 clear hours per week to devote to their musings, while a typical blogger will have evenings and weekends only, to juggle alongside family, food, and TV commitments. As for "self-selecting" and "politically motivated", these are pretty weak charges: what would be left if we eliminated political motivation from public service, from literature, journalism, or other areas of human expression? I certainly selected myself to blog: if you don't want to read what I have to say, you can vote with your feet and read another blog, or perhaps a book. As long as you trust me not to mislead you, reader, I'm sure you're better off under such an arrangement than if someone else selected your correspondent.

I can't help feeling it's ultimately fruitless to maintain a distinction between bloggers and journalists: there are standards of behaviour, repute, interest, and quality, and these ought to be applied irrespective of the medium.

True, political blogging is partly "parasitic on the stories and opinions that traditional media provide", but that doesn't mean that political bloggers must narrow the conversation, any more than entering a verbal conversation with someone must. "Fisking"or otherwise undermining and correcting bad (illogical, inconsistent, demonstrably false, etc.) arguments gives people the chance to debate better arguments. It is frustrating when people are resistant to changing their mind with the balance of evidence/persuasion, but minds change, and new thoughts are introduced.

It is a shame that political bloggers keep so closely to their own political community, albeit with some on the edges feeling the need to lash out at opponents periodically, tackling the Party rather than the ball, and others dealing in the crudest and most hackneyed stereotypes. Nonetheless, I can't accept this is the generality: much of the hostility between political bloggers stems from a small number of trouble-makers. Political blogging has created a decent, and fair-sized online community here at Bloggers4Labour, whose affiliates have met in real life on several occasions, which has - I hope - done a little to increase political engagement, and is keen to do more.

I've posted before to criticise the "post-comment" model of political engagement, where politicians struggle to find a way of assimilating a disparate mixture of distracting, abusive, stupid, but also some sensible (yet contradictory?) responses to articles they have published. Perhaps only a small technological leap is required here; alternatively, a commitment may have to develop between local politicians with power, and local voters with an interest and a commitment. I'm convinced that the better political bloggers, together with the online civic society crowd, will take us there - and that a reaction against the blogosphere, back towards the reputed off-line journalists whose names we're all familiar with (journalists, perhaps, of the calibre of Madeleine Bunting), and whose articles make the journey from word-processor to printed Berliner page by some method beyond the ken of their readers, would be a retrograde step.

Over the past three-and-a-half years or so, I've found political blogging challenging and informative, and I believe I've learned a lot from some very intelligent people. It's not the solution to every political issue that faces us, it doesn't yet come close to approaching genuine popular democracy, and it shouldn't distract us from meeting voters on the doorstep, but I've enjoyed the opportunity to engage in it, and therefore I'm all the more reluctant to have my voice taken away just because some political bloggers - who it is easy to ignore - have acquired a bad name, and because other journalists can feel a hammering at the gates but see only barbarians.

Via Tom H.

Update: I've just discovered Tom Freeman has a response; as does Norm, who even chose the same title as me.

Update II (12/04): Oliver updates as follows: "I gave at the end of my post links to three blog posts by writers with much experience of, respectively, journalism and academe. They [...] declare themselves mystified at my criticisms of political blogging. In the next post or two, I shall oblige them by explaining why they're all wrong."

Mystification was by no means the only criticism, nonetheless, this I have to see. With the greatest of respect, making unnecessarily crude generalisations seems an unwise gambit at the best of times, all the more so when it antagonises the kind of blogger who, one assumes, wasn't the intended target.

Shooting Fish / Competitive Sport - 2 comments

What strikes me about journalists - and this seems to be particularly the case with bloggers - is the temptation to pick the softest of targets when a deadline looms, so that one's word limit can be reached with the minimum of original thought, and the maximum of boilerplate text that the intended audience will instantly recognise. Familiar concepts, familiar language, and familiar targets allow the reader to sail from beginning to end without feeling short-changed, with a vague feeling that something significant was said, even if they are unable to identify what the point was.

Sadly, this approach has a cancerous effect on comment-pieces that deal with Tony Blair. It is so widely believed that his authority is diminished, and it is so rare for commentators to defend him/his record, etc. that the journalistic bar has been lowered to not much more than an inch above ground-level. This is what makes reading Blair-themed blog posts (not all, just too many) so dispiriting: it's the fact that, time and time again, the opportunity to post a powerful critique is squandered in favour of something trivial; an opportunity to make a constructive point wasted; and it's the recognition of a writer patently jumping on the band-wagon.

Opportunists will defend themselves by stating that their target is power and authority, even when that power and authority is evidently now in name only, and their iconoclasm is applied only narrowly. Critics can also be accused of being loyal ("slavish", and "unthinking" are popular synonyms, depriving critics of their human faculties) to the target, incapable of independent thought.

Frankly I could pick a couple of Comment is free posts a day to illustrate this, but I just happened to pick on Dave Hill's post, Off the ball, the tagline of which makes the following extraordinary claim:

The prime minister's failings are never more sadly exposed than when he talks about sport in schools.

With the courage of a man confident he won't be challenged, Dave begins:

I've been meaning to respond to the PM's words ever since, but it's been hard to find the time, what with my long nights of weeping interspersed with bouts of hysterical mirth. [...]
As facile claptrap goes it may be small potatoes compared with his evasions over Iraq. [...]
Thus spake the pillock...

Having actually read the whole piece on the Labour web-site, I'd say it was a wide-ranging, and pretty reasonable coverage of the issue of sport in schools, covering societal change, health implications, Government funding and initiatives. It's also very long piece, not well-suited for a one paragraph summary. The aspiring journalist, however, spots the following paragraphs...

[...] for too long, a damaging argument was allowed to run. It said that competitive sport is bad for children. It was thought to be aggressive and set people apart from one another. Actually, like most areas of intense competition, sport of course teaches people to co-operate.

An unholy alliance between some well-meaning but misguided teachers and schools with a peculiar ideological view of sport and a failure to invest in the basic infrastructure of schools, let alone school sport, led to a slow decline.

... is waken from the lethargy that comes from reading something dull and worthy, and 15 minutes later the completed article is ready to be handed over. OK, I don't think anyone's claiming that his "unholy alliance" was universal by any means, but what I'd expect to see in a critique of this is an analysis of how competitive sport is bad for children, how it does encourage aggression, and does indeed set people apart from one another. What do we get?

It is and always has been utterly untrue that participation in competitive sports is automatically a good thing for children.

Who said anything about automaticity? Can you name one single thing that is automatically good for children? Perhaps competitive sport is good for 60% of children, and bad for 20%? If so, it would surely have about as much right to be on the syllabus as any other subject.

I say this as someone for whom the thrill of chasing some sort of a ball around a field was only ever rivalled in his schooldays by that of snogging, but who can also never forget the sheer, pointless misery the inclusion in the timetable of double games on a Wednesday afternoon represented to too many of his male peers.

Well, speak for yourself (though I find the snogging claim rather hard to believe). Either way, the popularity of sport among children tells us nothing about whether sport encourages good health, or aggression, or sets people apart from one another, and is therefore irrelevant to the issue in hand. If you expect school subjects to be popular, you can expect sweeping changes to the syllabus...

A truly brave and progressive physical education policy would start from the conviction that different approaches are needed for different sorts of kids, and that those who are suited to competitive team sports should get a social education in the process of participating in them.

So this is what it boils down to: we should encourage a range of physical education, with competitive sports available for those who like that approach, and those sports; non-competitive sports for others; and perhaps general health education for all. I don't know if this can be called "truly brave and progressive", it seems pretty uncontroversial, and doesn't seem even remotely to contradict Tony Blair's words.

It's great that we can find a consensus on an issue like this - just a pity that we have to wade through so much pointless rhetoric, personalised attacks, and point-scoring to get there.