The Daily Novel

This guest blog comes to you courtesy of the Daily Express.

 BEACHCOMBER 31 JAN

90 years old and STILL

paying his taxes...

THANK YOU for attempting to access the Beachcomber column, but you've caught

me at rather a bad moment. It's January 31, you see, and I've just gone to

do my tax returns and I may be some time.

It's all very well them asking me to subtract the lesser of box b47 and box

c23 from the sum (or difference, as appropriate, see Guidelines p.73

paragraph 5) of box b35 and a37 and enter "zero" if the result is negative,

which it always so I don't see why we went through all that rigmarole

anyway, but do these chaps at Inland Revenue appreciate how many bits of

paper I have to gather from around Beachcomber Towers just to work out what

figure is meant to go into box b47 in the first place?

Right, that's got all the bills and receipts together. Now for a bit of

organising. But first, I think, after all that scrambling I deserve a cup of

tea. I'll just pop to the kitchen and put the kettle on. 

Oh hello! Are you still there? The tea was most refreshing, and so was the

second cup. I'm ready now for some serious form-filling. Where was I? Oh

yes, box b47.

Wait a minute, I need the 2005 third quarter Sundry Ancillary Expenses file

for that box, and it's not here. It must be in the gazebo; I seem to

remember Mrs B using it to transport compost last year. Hang on. I'll go and

get it. 

Sorry to have been so long. It's amazing what you find in a gazebo. Do you

remember that armchair? The one with the broken leg? Well, I've mended it.

All it needed was a long enough nut and a bolt, and I found just the thing

in the Sundry Ancillary Expenses file. Must have dropped it there when I

went to try to mend the chair last Spring. It worked a treat, though I did

take some time finding the pliers. They were back in the West Wing where the

ex-Deputy Sommelier had taken them to tune the harpsichord - or so he said.

Anyway, the chair is now as stable as ever, though I had to repot a few

snails that had decided to make their home among its back netting. 

Right, back to the taxing affairs of the moment. Box b47.  Once I've got past

that, it'll all be plain sailing. Talking of sailing, I'm always reminded of

seafood, and if I'm not very much mistaken, there's a salmon in the fridge

that needs cooking, and all that chair-repairing has made me feel a bit

peckish.  I'll just look up some salmon recipes on the Internet and get back

to the tax in a moment.

Sorry if I've kept you waiting, but that was really delicious. Making one's

own puff pastry takes time, but it's well worth the effort. And that Rick

Stein really knows what he's talking about. I'd never have thought of adding

currants and stem ginger to the salmon, but it worked beautifully and went

so well with the Laurent Perrier Ultra Brut. 

Right. Box b47. I wonder what's on the television? I'll just look at the

guide to see if there's a good film I can look forward to when I've got this

form completed. I fancy I'll be in the mood for something tastefully

violent. Now where did I leave the TV guide? I'll just pop downstairs and

see if it's in the billiards room.

Did you see that shot? I potted the black off three cushions. Junior was

there and challenged me to a game. Well I could hardly disappoint the young

fellow. Oh my goodness, is that the time? I'll never get the tax done by

today's deadline. Still, it's given me a good idea: I think I'll write a

column about displacement activities.  

According to Larry Elliott of The Guardian Gordon Brown is ready to embrace the bloggers of the world. He says Brown, who appeared on the panel with Rupert Murdock, says the days of decision making in smoke filled rooms are over. Politicians had to involve the public and recognise the importance of the internet.

“A few years ago the debate was about whether the media controlled politicians or whether politicians controlled the media.

“Now it is about how we are all responding to the explosive power of citizens, consumers and bloggers.”

I would like to think that the blogging community had ‘explosive power’. But I doubt. I think the big companies, who are well represented at the World Economic Forum, have quite a lot of power over the consumers. And I think the new internet millionaires, including companies like Technorati and Google have a big say in a big say in which blogs get read.

The big companies, including the old media companies, are in a much better position to learn the tricks of meeting the criteria established by the search engines. And they have the money and manpower to attract bigger audiences. The millions of individual bloggers cannot compete in terms of supplying information. They can express their views, opinions and feelings. But how they come to them is still largely dependent on the reports by the mainstream media.

The coolest party was given by Forbes Magazine, which represents old media money. And it is big money. Steve Forbes, the nephew of the man I used to work for, is and he can afford to give away $7 million to political parties.

(Guest blog by Anushka Asthana, education correspondent of The Observer.)

Three thousand young people, packed into an auditorium, jumped to their feet and started cheering and shrieking with joy. It was as if a rock star had stepped on stage.

In fact, this was Barack Obama, a rising star in the Democrat party who the Washington Post had sent me to interview. Next month, the senator from Illinois will take his first step towards becoming the first black president of the United States.
Interviewing Obama was just one highlight in three months packed with once-in-a-lifetime experiences when I was the Laurence Stern fellow, last summer.

Top editors at the Post gave me a huge amount of time and support, and trusted me to write a host of stories.

In the run up to the 2006 mid-terms I was sent to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to cover one of the most hotly contested races for the House of Representatives. I spent time with scores of locals discussing how the Iraq war and domestic issues such as health care and immigration were affecting their vote. When it came to the election it was one of the seats that the Republicans lost.

As well as being an amazing journalistic experience it was also great fun. I was taken on an airboat ride over the Everglades and managed to spend an afternoon in Miami.
UK and US politics are vastly different and spending time in Washington DC in an election year was a huge learning experience. I met senators and representatives, sat in on hearings over the Iraq war and worked alongside some of the country’s most renowned journalists.

I was able to write stories about the president, Congress and federal agencies and also given the freedom to work on issues close to my heart such as race and women in politics.

It was a different world of journalism than that back home and I had to adapt to it. I was amazed that political reporters there rarely even expressed their opinions in the newsrooms - people wrote news or comment, never both. Leonard Downie, the editor, has not voted since he took up post.

There was a different style of reporting, different style of writing and a different set of values - ones that I will let future fellows judge for themselves.

On a personal level, my time in the US also went some way to breaking down stereotypes I had heard about the country. I also met some of the warmest and most welcoming people I have ever come across and in the time that I was given to travel (I chose California) saw some of the most magnificent scenery.

But the thing that caused most excitement among my friends had to be the fact that I twice travelled on Air Force One to report on the president. I was standing close by when George Bush made a speech on the war on terror in Atlanta and watched as he shook the hands of soldiers about to travel to Iraq.

For me, it was just one of many remarkable experiences during my time as the Laurence Stern fellow.

The idea of a woman and a black man fighting it out for the presidency, or at least for the Democratic nomination for President, seems irresistibly attractive. Sometimes, I find, the question who is more likely to win is asked here in Britain as if it were the surrogate for another: ‘Are Americans — white, male Americans! — more prejudiced against blacks or against women?.

There are in fact excellent reasons for having doubts about how good a president Hillary Clinton would make that have nothing to do with the fact that she is a woman. Something similar applies to the negritude of Senator Obama: the colour of his skin is only one interesting fact about him, and by no means the most interesting.

Indeed it can be seriously argued that he is not a black man in the full sense of what that means in American political terms. Barack Obama is the son of a white mother and an African father: he is not therefore an “African American” in the usual meaning of the words. Specifically, he does not emerge from a black political background, as other African American politicians did who were actual or potential presidential candidates: Martin Luther King,. Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton.

The contest between Senator Clinton and Senator Obama is, however, intensely interesting and significant. For one, thing, their candidacies have such intense media appeal that they inevitably lessen interest in other Democratic candidates and possible candidates, and there are plenty of them, some with qualities that would attract a good deal of attention if the two glamorous novelties were not in the race: John Edwards, Al Gore, Bill Richardson (the governor of New Mexico with a Yankee father and a Mexican mother), Tom Vilsack (former governor of Iowa), John Kerry, Joe Biden of Delaware (chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee) and Chris Dodd of Connecticut, a solid mainstream Democrat with a record of legislative commonsense on good Democratic issues like health and jobs.

Still, as of a year before a presidential campaign would traditionally get going, Senator Clinton is way ahead in the polls (47 percent this morning) against 17 percent for Senator Obama, who is running second. Both seem clear of the field for the time being. It is reasonable to ask why.

Senator Clinton is ahead partly because of her name recognition, partly because of her shrewd political management of her own career, and in large measure because she has the combination of celebrity and glamour that impresses the “mentioners”, those politicians and political journalists who collectively decide who will be counted as potential candidates and who therefore will appear in then polls and attract journalistic interest and financial support. .

Everyone has heard of Hillary Clinton, both because of who she is married to, and also because — as First Lady — she not only managed her image with both courage and skill in the most difficult of circumstances, and also because, more than any other President’s wife in history, she made a political contribution of her own. It has to be said that that contribution, her management of the Clinton administration’s health care programme was little short of disastrous. But since she left the White House, she has hardly put a foot wrong, except in one respect, one where she was in good or at least respectable company.

She was easily elected to the Senate from New York, which is still, with the possible exception of California, the best placed home state for a presidential hopeful because the concentration of media and other opinion formers there. She was careful not to seem to be using the Senate as merely as stepping stone to a presidential run. She succeeded — better than many who knew her anticipated — in making few enemies.

She made only one mistake, one that most of her colleagues made with her, and it may yet destroy her hopes of the White House. She voted for the Iraq war. She made the calculation, made also not only by all but a maverick handful of Democrats, but also by the best pressed minds in the punditocracy, of assuming that the national reaction to 9/11 made George Bush’s war politically unassailable. The mid-term elections of 2006 proved that, whatever may have been true in 2004 or 2005, is not true now.

The case of Senator Obama is different. In 1968, when I was travelling with Senator Robert Kennedy in California, I wrote a piece about the pyramids of voters, hanging on his words as he spoke from a flatbed truck, reaching up to him, clutching at his clothing, their faces expressing adoration and trust. If only, I wrote, one could understand what those voters wanted, and why they saw Robert Kennedy as a Messiah, much about America would become clear.

Barack Obama has the Kennedy touch. There is an emotional fervour, a flavour of the Great Awakenings and nineteenth century evangelism, of Moody and Sankey and the Chatauqua tent, about his appearances. His books sell almost as well as the novels of the reverend Tim La Haye about the wrath to come, and they are much better books. He is a serious, a committed, a highly educated man, who worked as an activist with the poor in Chicago, then resisted the golden temptations that lie in the path of a black man who has been the editor of the Harvard Law Review, to commit himself to law teaching and politics.

None of that means, however, that he has the special combination of personal characteristics and political skills that not only took a Lyndon Johnson, say, or a Ronald Reagan to the Oval office and then enabled them to use the power of the office. Obama has everything going for him, including, perhaps for the first time in this generation, the fact that he is of mixed race. For the fact is that, though racial inequality has by no means disappeared in American life, most Americans now are actually pleased to see a Condoleezza Rice, a Tiger Woods, a Colin Powell or an Oprah Winfrey “making it”.

Subtly, it flatters white Americans by feeding an “Americn exceptionalism” of the Left: “Look”, it says, “in this great country of ours there are no barriers blocking the path of an African American!” Ask a Condi Rice or a Colin Powell, deep in private conversation — not that I have ever had the chance to do so — whether they met any barriers, and I will warrant that they will tell you, yes, there were barriers, but we overcame them, and we were allowed to do so.

Which brings me back, by a circuitous but I think necessary route, to the question with which I started. Are Americans more uncomfortable with the idea of a black president, or a female president?

The answer, I believe, is that while the opinions and attitudes of the American people are, as the sands of the sea, innumerable and unknowable, one truth is probably to be relied on. Americans prefer public and political figures who do not appear to be stereotypes or epitomes of a group. They feel more comfortable, to take a perhaps offensive example, with a Jew who is, like Senator Goldwater, an Episcopalian. They prefer an African American, like Colin Powell, who is a Republican. And the first woman president, it has often been said, would have to be someone who does not come on as a feminist.

Now Hillary Clinton would be annoyed to be told that she is not a feminist. Like highly educated women of her generation (and she did almost as well at the Yale law school as senator Obama did at Harvard) she believes that all opportunities ought to be open to women, and the presidency ought to be an equal opportunity employment. She certainly feels, too, that it is time that a woman should prove that by winning.

It is my personal hunch, however, that Hillary Clinton’s success or failure will depend on how she handles a very delicate task of political persuasion. How — to put it crudely — does she persuade women voters that she is a feminist at heart, while at the same time persuading male voters that she isn’t?

Oddly, her task may be trickier than Senator Obama’s. For he is already in a position to have the best of all political worlds. It is plain enough that he is not an ordinary African American. His father was a diplomat, his mother white, from Kansas. He grew up in mult-racial Hawaii and in Indonesia, where his mother moved after marrying an Indonesian. He went to Catholic and also to Muslim schools.

If, as I suspect, Obama is acceptable to mainstream American voters, as an American, not an African American, it may be evidence — not, as American exceptionalists and flag-wavers would have you believe — that racial prejudice is dead. It may be that today, in America, as has long been the case elsewhere, class ultimately trumps race.

If you went to Harvard, that is, are you less black? Ah, but in that case, if you went to the Yale law school, are you less a woman? Does class trump gender?

Godfrey Hodgson is journalist and author mainly on American politics. He helped set up the Laurence Stern Fellowship which sends a young British journalist to Washington to work for three months on the Washington Post. Last year’s winner met Barack Obama when she was there. Anushka Asthana of The Observer is writing about her experience for The Daily Novel. Coming soon.

Those journalists who disparage bloggers as amateurs should look again at how journalism was when it began, argues Milverton Wallace in this guest blog.

James Cameron (1911-1985), arguably the greatest British journalist of the last 100 years, always insisted that journalism is a craft. Now “craft” implies pride in work, integrity in dealing with customers, rites of passage, and long years of training to acquire the requisite skills/knowledge.

But that was then. Today, journalism is a “profession”. Many aspiring hacks now need a university or other accredited “qualification”, and, except in the Anglo-American world, a government issued licence to “qualify” as a journalist. The march towards professionalism began with the rise of the mass media in the latter part of the 19th century, a development made possible by the invention of the rotary printing press, cheap papermaking from wood pulp, and mass literacy.

Journalists have developed rigorous techniques for gathering, distilling and presenting information; and, to standardise these procedures and wrap them in an ethical framework, a normative model for reporting, carved in stone, was crafted: impartiality, objectivity, accuracy, transparency.

Today, this carefully constructed edifice is crumbling as the read/write web blows away the need to be a member of any such club to be able to practise journalism. A significant number of “unqualified” people are “doing journalism” without permission from anyone.

Nowadays, the word “amateur” is being deployed by media professionals to belittle the media-making efforts of bloggers and others who create media productions outside the journalism guilds. Such reporting is deemed “unreliable”, “biased”, “subjective”; they are
“unaccountable”, the facts and the sources “unverifiable”.

All of this must be puzzling to historians of the modern mass media. Consider the first newspaper in English, a translation of a Dutch coranto, printed in Amsterdam in December 1620 and exported to England. It began with an apology, a typographical error, a number of lies and disinformation. The apology appeared in the first line of
the publication: “The new tydings out of Italie are not yet com”. The error (in spelling) was in the date: “The 2. of Decemember”. The lies? The dates of many events were brought forward to make the news appear fresher than they were. The disinformation? Many news items in the Dutch edition which might have displeased the English government were not translated for the English edition out of fear that the
authorities would seize or ban the publication. Verily, a very unprofessional beginning!

And who were the “reporters” for the early periodical press? Postmasters, clergymen, sheriffs, burghers, shipping clerks, court officials, merchants, travellers. In a word, “amateurs”!

Here I use “amateur” in the noble, Corinthian sense—someone or an activity motivated by love.

The differences between 17th century amateur reporters and
21st century citizen journalists go beyond stark polarities. The
former were contributors to the new media of their age but over whose
operation, growth and development they had no influence or control;
their 21st century counterparts, on the other hand, are contributors
to a new media which they themselves are creating.

This new media is not about the production of news, it is about self-expression. It is
about participating in defining and shaping the information/communication environments in which we live. An entire generation—call them the digital natives or the new Corinthians—is creating an open, collaborative, networked communications infrastructure in opposition to the closed, top down, hierarchical traditional media organisations which have dominated the media universe since the 19t century.

Demanding that these digital natives adhere to old methods of discovering and learning about the world won’t do. They’re crafting their own methods, thank you very much. Ten years ago Slashdot, Kuro5hin and others pioneered peer-to-peer coverage of technology. Stories gained credibility through the trust and reputation of peers.
Digg has added collaborative filtering via powerful algorithms; Del.icio.us lets you organise the world via shared social taxonomies. Even some of the backend functions of the news business have been socialised: Wikipedia for reference, Answers.com for expert sources, Flickr for pictures.

It is hard for a mature, long-dominant culture to make radical changes to its ideology and practice. And that’s why many newspaper groups still cling to the command and control model even as their businesses head for the butchers and their customers “head into the cemetery”. Bold and adventurous though he is, Rupert Murdoch has only chosen co-optation (buying the number one social networking service MySpace); however, full embrace of the new world is a revolutionary step, a rupture in the old order. Anyone doubting the difficulty of such a move need only look at the upheavals and dislocations being experienced by the UK’s Telegraph group as it
re-engineers it news gathering/reporting processes towards a networked
journalism model.

The momentum of change is with the new Corinthians. The open source ethos and method of work/production, which began in the periphery with collaborative software development, is moving to centre stage by way of the blogging revolution and open standards in web services. In tagging, syndication, ranking and bookmarking we have the rudiments of a peer-to-peer trust, reputation and recommendation system well suited to self-regulating collaborative networks. These could be takenas analogous, but not identical to, the “checks and balances” of traditional journalism, but we shouldn’t belabour the points ofdifference too much.

In mainstream media “editorial authority” is concentrated in the hands of a single, all-powerful person whereas in social media it is distributed among many voices. This could be seen as a weakness and critics point to it as the Achilles heel of Web journalism. Yet in many instances, the networked world, e.g. the blogosphere, has proven to be much better (and quicker) at correcting errors, falsity, lies
and distortions than the mainstream media.

As the number of people who participate in open, collaborative, networked communications increases, the veracity of messages will improve and the need for corporate gatekeepers and standards-setters will decrease. Will we all become Corinthians then?

Copyright 2006 Milverton Wallace

Milverton Wallace founded and ran the annual NetMedia conference and the European Online Journalism Awards when he was a journalism lecturer at City University London, 1995/2003.

Sandringham

My husband and I are very conscious that we are only one part of the British constitution which we revere with the utmost respect. (And neither of us wants to have our head chopped off). So we delivered our usual Blair/Cameron feely touchy style Christmas message. Produced by Alastair Campbell, who still does odd jobs for his friend Tony, although he is no longer on the Downing Street payroll.

We have decided, however, to publish our real feelings to our many close friends who read The Daily Novel. Because we are very conscious what our subjects think about our part in George Bush’s Iraq War, which is keeping so many of our loyal soldiers away from their families this Christmas. Our feelings can be expressed in one short sentence.

We are not amused.

And a merry Christmas to you all.

Godfrey Hodgson takes a holiday from American politics to celebrate his local river.

‘Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria.’

So said the ghost of Francesca in Dante’s Fifth Canto: that there is “no greater sorrow than to remember in misery the happy time”. With the greatest respect to Francesca and to the poet, I have learned that the reverse is true. There is no greater joy available in a time of misery than to remember a happy time.
About a year ago I committed myself to a project that would give purpose to my great love for the part of West Oxfordshire where I live. Three times and for some twenty years out of the last thirty-something, we have lived within a mile of the river Evenlode, and for most of the rest we lived within three miles of where that small but perfect stream loses its identity by joining the Thames.
One of my favourite books is Claudio Magris’s masterpiece, Danube. As a Triestino, Magris was bilingual in German and Italian, and with an acquaintance with Slav languages; villages where they speak Slovene are almost in the suburbs of Trieste, and there is even a Slovene Orthodox cathedral on the foreshore in that remarkable city. Magris took the Danube as his thread, and hung on it the whole bloody history of Mitteleuropa, with learned digressions on the fish, the navigation, the hydrology and the culture of the great river.
I formed a project of my own: to write as it were a mock-heroic version of Danube, exploring the course and honouring the history of our beloved little river. A neighbour who is a publisher has agreed to bring it out. We set out to walk the length of it in a series of circular walks. At that rate a two-mile stretch of the river was at least a four mile walk. The 42 miles (against the Danube’s 1,770!) would take ten or a dozen weekend walks.
We began with the little tributaries which come together west of Moreton-in-March. Only one has cultural dignity, the brook that runs down through the pleasure gardens of Sezincote, an Anglo-Mughal palace on the southern slope of the Cotswolds ridge that runs north-east from Stow-on-the-Wold to Moreton. It was built for a nabob, Sir Charles Cockerell, by his brother, the architect S.P.Cockerell, who later imitated the style for the Prince Regent’s Pavilion in Brighton.
Weekend by weekend we followed the little river, past Adlestrop, where Edward Thomas heard from the train “all the birds, Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire”, past Shipton, home of John Foxe, the author of the gruesome 16th century bestseller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, past Ascott-under-Wychwood, where the martyrs were nineteenth century housewives, imprisoned for a week for supporting their menfolk in an agricultural strike, and compensated with scarlet petticoats by Queen Victoria, no less.
We followed the valley in a great curve round the northern rim of Wychwood, which locally we call simply The Forest. We skirted Chilson, where we used to live, past Shorthampton, tiny gem of a church with box pews and fourteenth century wall paintings, crossed the Coldron brook from a mushroom field on a footbridge, and marched up the mill field, between the mill race and the mill leet, into Charlbury. This is the largest of the “hundred little towns of stone” in Hilaire Belloc’s poem about the river. Charlbury has many claims to fame, including the proximity of Cornbury, where the village barber recognized Bonny Prince Charlie who was hiding there, and the patronage of the present archbishop of Canterbury, who had a weekend retreat here incognito. In our time, this was the home of W.D. Campbell, naturalist of prodigious learning who wrote the Country Diary in The Guardian for thirty years.
We duly admired the black Dexter cattle on Stonesfield Common, and revisited the Roman villa at East End. We paid homage to a private shrine, Rupert’s Beach. This is a sandy bend in the Evenlode near Combe mill, named after and beloved by my late Labrador collie cross. Once when I was filming an interview there about the rustic quality of my new life, two mute swans, cob and pen, sailed round the corner into shot, followed by their six cygnets; no assistant stage manager in history could have managed the timing more perfectly. We went as far as the ingenious works being carried out by the Environment Agency at the corner of Blenheim Palace, within sight of Bladon church, where Winston Churchill is buried. The Agency has deliberately slowed down the course of the river by heaping gravel on alternate banks to create an artificial meander, to the great benefit of fish and the whole food train, up to the otters who have come back from near extinction from dieldrin poisoning and are now recolonizing the Evenlode valley.
And that is as far as we got.
On January 12 we went for a walk, not along the river, but for a couple of miles. I remember congratulating myself, with a twinge of superstitious guilt, about how well I felt. Then I went to my office, sat down and signed off on one book, a biography I had been working on for five years, and literally finished a second, a history of the American feast of Thanksgiving. For good measure, I polished off a proposal for a third book to be sent to my agent in New York. I was so pleased with the afternoon’s work that I stood up, unwarily, planning to reward myself for my hard work with a celebratory martini, permitted only as a rare treat.
I tripped over a cable (still un-martinied, I need perhaps to specify). I fell heavily on both knees. I was carrying a parcel and could not save myself with my arms. The tendons connecting my kneecaps to my quadiceps were ruptured in both legs. I was taken to hospital, in great pain. My knees were brilliantly restitched. While I was in hospital, the doctors investigated my high nightly temperatures. They found I had a life-threatening abscess in my stomach and gut. Another operation, four hours long. Realistically, breaking my knees saved my life.
I was four months in hospital. Now, another four months further on, I am still learning, slowly, clumsily, and not without fear of falling, to walk, first with a frame, then with crutches, then with a cane and now, sometimes, cautiously and timidly on my own. (“How are you, grandpa?” asked my three year old grandson Angus. “I’m well”, I boasted. “I’m learning to walk”. “Oh, grandpa” — with a smile to show he had got the joke — “everyone knows how to walk!”
It will be a long time before I can walk the last four or five miles of the river bank, from Bladon to Cassington mill, for which the rent paid in Domesday Book was 175 eels. Realistically, I may never be able to manage it. But in a hospital bed, unable to move, and still today, hobbling round the house, to remember the tempo felice of our explorations along the Evenlode is anything but dolorous.

Journalists and journalism are facing an unprecedented level of attack in terms of public cynicism, legal constraints and the political spin designed to bolster support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the media’s watchdog role is dying through lack of use.
This form of undercover journalism, which challenges the activities of the dominant institutions in our society, is on death row. Since the late 1970s there has been a decline in investigative journalism in the world’s media, particularly in America and now in Britain
The demand for instant news diverts journalists and news organizations from their role of detecting, investigating and exposing society’s ills, which requires long and patient work by a team of journalists, in favour of the more easily produced, audience-friendly task of light entertainment and live reporting. News has now become a business force, focused on profit and political spin, rather than keeping the powerful in check.
Investigative journalists used to be the feather in the cap of any well organized newsroom, with some of the most famous being Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein exposing the scandal at Watergate in America. Seymour Hersh on the My Lai massacre, Wilfred Burchett, the first Westerner to enter Hiroshima in September 1945; Israeli journalist Amira Hass, reporting from the Gaza Strip in the 1990s, to name but a few.
The most prolific purveyor of investigative scoops, in Britain in the last century was the Daily Mirror newspaper, whose innovations, which included the now widely imitated, ‘shock issue,’ in which page after page was devoted to a single subject, usually exposing some social evil. The then editor, the legendary Hugh Cudlipp, called it an “exercise in brutal mass education”.
The first shock issue in 1960 was a searing account of the suffering of horses shipped from Britain to the butchers of Belgium and France. This was followed by scandals of poorly equipped youth clubs, cruelty to children, pollution, the suicide club of teenagers on ton-up motorbikes and the neglect of old and lonely people.
“Forward with the people!” said one masthead, during this time, which encapsulated the democratic role that journalists played in representing the public against the pillars of power.
However, in today’s more modern society such journalism, particularly by the popular press, has been confined to digging up dirt and revealing secrets about the private lives of the rich and famous, the Royal family, politicians and rock stars. The resignation of Paul Foot in 1993 brought an end to the Daily Mirror’s tradition of hard-hitting political investigations and marked a rapid decline that beset all news outlets. With the quality press, technology, competition and new owners have acted to curtail investigative work.
Investigative journalism defines what it is to write in the public interest and to be part of a democratic society. Democracy is founded on a number of principles, one of which is the accountability of elected representatives and civil servants to the people. Investigative journalists are among those best placed to expose it and ensure that justice is done.
But the politicians have hit back, as they did at the turn of the last century in America. Then, the Republican President, Teddy Roosevelt, turned the tables on the investigative journalists who had exposed the underside of American capitalism. He labelled them muckrakers, who were only concerned with digging up dirt. Today governments are seeking new and improved ways of restricting journalists, in what they report and in their working practices. And they are building on public dislike of the intrusion into private lives and the hounding of individuals for relatively minor sexual misdemeanors to suggest that all journalists are underhand and dishonest.
News of the World reporter David McGee found himself in the dock after his investigation into the failings at Woodhill Prison, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire. McGee had taken a job guarding prisoners. After months undercover he took photographs of Ian Huntley, who was serving a life sentence for murdering two young girls in Soham, in his cell. The pictures were published in June 2003, and prompted a Home Office review of prison security.
He got the job in his own name, providing passport ID showing his profession as a journalist. Yes, this was illegal but if one man with a camera can get in that position, what is stopping a crazed feminist protestor in a shell suit and a claymore, or an armed terrorist?
Moreover, due to his investigations he managed to reveal the problems with security and administrative procedures – he was working in the public interest. This did not stop, however, McGee being charged with taking a camera into prison, very minor offence. The government is punishing investigative journalists for pointing out that they are not doing their jobs properly.
Legal proceedings, in my view, should not be taken against investigative journalists, if they have acted in-line with what it means to write in the public interest and they have followed the guidelines set out by the NUJ, governing body
Another example is the BBC’s Real Story documentary, ‘Detention Undercover,’ took nine months of investigative research, including three months of secret filming to reveal asylum seekers and immigrants being racially and physically abused by security guards in a Cambridgeshire detention centre.
The programme’s findings were presented to the Home Office and also to the private security company who employed the guards whose deplorable behavior had been caught on camera. As a result, a number of employees were suspended. This is another classic example of investigative journalists providing a public service by using methods, which stretch the laws of the land. Investigations by undercover journalists have the potential to reduce crime, improve national institutions and the people who work in them.
Journalists must be free to identify problems and investigate them using whatever methods are necessary. They should be free to publish or broadcast their stories their stories when those stories are in the public interest, without fear of censorship, recrimination or penal sanction.
And journalists need to be supported by the public when governments and big business, try to use the law against them for doing their most essential job, uncovering the abuse of power.

Phil Simms is an undergraduate student in the Department of Journalism, City University.

It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that there are very few journalists whose day-to-day work is worth republishing after half-a-century or more. And it’s just as much of a commonplace that, of the tiny band of mid-20th-century hacks whose work lives on, none is of greater contemporary relevance than George Orwell.

Yet Orwell’s journalism, or at least his everyday journalism, is not read as widely as it deserves to be. Lots of people are familiar with his novels (particularly Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four), his three great books of reportage – Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, and Homage to Catalonia – and his most anthologised essays, most of them written for small-circulation literary journals.

But unless you have worked your way through the final ten volumes of Peter Davison’s magisterial 20-volume Complete Works of George Orwell, published in the late 1990s, the chances are that you haven’t come across more than a smattering of the extraordinary quantity of exemplary journalistic jobbing that Orwell did for most of his life as a writer.

Everything is in Davison, of course, but because it is spread through ten volumes, interspersed with letters and fascinating ephemera, it is just a little difficult to take in. There was a generous selection of Orwell’s journalism published in four volumes in the 1960s as Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, edited by Ian Angus and Orwell’s widow Sonia, but Sonia’s criteria for inclusion and exclusion were strange in the extreme. In the 1980s, the New Statesman produced a slim pamphlet of Orwell’s contributions to its pages and the writer W. J. West edited two volumes of Orwell’s broadcast scripts for the BBC in 1941-43. And a couple of years ago came a collection of his reviews and reportage in the Observer.

All this was marvellous – but there was a glaring gap. The routine journalism on which Orwell’s reputation is primarily based is not his work for the BBC or the Observer, let alone his half-dozen reviews for the New Statesman, whose editor, Kingsley Martin, he famously detested. Rather it is Orwell’s columns for Tribune, the Labour left weekly, 80 of which appeared under the rubric “As I Please” between 1943 and 1947.

The columns for Tribune are justly feted. The range of subjects he covered was extraordinary: it is difficult to think of anyone before or since who could write about so many different things. As his friend Julian Symons wrote: ‘He discussed a hundred subjects, ranging from the comparative amounts he spent on books and cigarettes or lamenting the decline of the English murder from the days of Crippen to a casual wartime killing to the spawning of toads in spring.’

But it isn’t just Orwell’s versatility that stands out. The columns are also remarkably original and written in a taut, demotic journalistic style. As another friend, George Woodcock, put it: ‘He could always find a subject on which there was something fresh to say in a prose that, for all its ease and apparent casualness, was penetrating and direct.’

What’s more, despite the diversity of subject matter, they form a single coherent body of work. In the words of the literary critic D. J. Taylor in his recent Orwell biography: ‘One of the most engaging features of the column, read sequentially, is the sense of dialogue, points taken up, conceded or refuted, continuity rather than a trail of pronouncements which the reader could take or leave as he or she chose.’

Tribune was, as it remains, a political paper, but Orwell rarely dealt directly in his columns with the subject matter of most political journalists: elections, debates in parliament, legislation, policy pronouncements, ministerial appointments and so on. Nor, for the most part, did he use his Tribune column to examine in detail the latest developments in world affairs.

Nevertheless, his columns were intensely political – even, paradoxically, when they appeared to have nothing to do with politics. Orwell was writing as a democratic socialist for democratic socialist readers, and his role as he saw it was to provoke them, to get them to think about what politics is and what it can and cannot achieve.

If there is a single theme that runs all the way through Orwell’s Tribune columns from 1943 to 1947, it is that the left needs a more nuanced conception of politics. Democratic socialism is not just a matter of the Labour Party adopting the right manifesto, winning a general election, nationalising the means of production and creating a comprehensive welfare state (although it is all these). It also involves telling inconvenient truths – about the nature of Soviet communism, about the economic consequences of decolonisation, about the extent of popular anti-Americanism in Britain. It means, among other things, reforming the press, defending the right of anarchists to sell seditious literature and countering racial prejudice. Moreover, a lot that is important in life cannot be reduced to politics. Great writers can be very right-wing; people will never tire of celebrating Christmas by eating and drinking too much; and the arrival of spring will always be a source of wonder.

Sixty-odd years on, Orwell’s emphases on the lacunae of left politics and principles, rather than the programmatic core of 1940s democratic socialism or the week-by-week flow of events, makes his Tribune columns more accessible than anything written by his contemporaries. Not everything he discussed is still current. The Soviet Union and British empire are long over, the Cold War has been and gone, and the best writers in Britain have not been right wing for some time. But totalitarianism and imperialism are still very much with us, and Orwell’s commitment to telling inconvenient truths, his warnings about the slipperiness of political language and the sensationalism of the popular press, his concerns with racism and religious intolerance and his conviction that there is more to life than politics as traditionally conceived are as relevant today as they were in the 1940s.

The idea of putting out a collection of all Orwell’s Tribune columns is hardly original. Bernard Crick, still Orwell’s best biographer, suggested it more than 20 years ago, and he was not alone. But Tribune, which holds copyright on the Orwell it published, was in no state to sort it all out then – and it was only a little more than a year ago, when Politico’s, an imprint of Methuen, jumped at the idea of putting all Orwell’s Tribune columns into a single volume, that the idea began to be made concrete. It has been a bit of a rush, but Orwell in Tribune: “As I Please” and other writings is coming out next month, and I can’t think of a better way of celebrating Tribune’s 70th birthday at the beginning of next year.

Orwell in Tribune: “As I Please” and other writings, edited and introduced by Paul Anderson with a foreword by Michael Foot, is published on 25 September.

Paul was deputy editor of the European Nuclear Disarmament Journal 1984-87, reviews editor of Tribune 1986-91, editor of Tribune 1991-93 and deputy editor of the New Statesman 1993-96. After leaving the New Statesman he wrote (with Nyta Mann) Safety First: The Making of New Labour, published by Granta Books, and worked as a sub-editor on the Times Educational Supplement and the Guardian (where he still does shifts during vacations). He joined City in 2000 and is currently working on a history of the British left and the Soviet Union.