Economic Equality
Funny the way money can make all countries equal in terms of reportage. (By Images_of_Money via Flickr)
One thing I’ve learned through looking at stories for this blog and my thesis is that the most egalitarian coverage of U.K. news stories (and any country, for that matter) usually happens for economic coverage. For some reason, the leveling power of money seems to hold up in terms bringing objective reportage to issues going on across the pond.
What brought about this realization today is a search I carried out for any U.K. news by National Public Radio. Finding a British story on the NPR website proved harder than I expected; I was directed from the NPR home-page to the news site, then to the World section, then to Europe, then I had to scroll down past quite a way to find this story: “The 38-Year-Old Woman Who Controls More Than 1,200 Companies.”
An interesting blog about an English publication’s (The Guardian) series on offshore companies, this piece from the Planet Money team picks out the highlights of the original article and showcases them for an American audience. As far as aggregated stories go, this one is well done, making overt connections to Planet Money’s ongoing coverage of offshore companies as an explanation for bringing attention to The Guardian’s story, and appropriately linking to the source.
But what interests me is why I have yet to come across an article showcasing a similar knowledge of U.K. news outlets’ good work. Something as simple as re-contextualizing a British story for an American audience should be a staple of any news site that alleges to cover international issues in the U.S., but so far, this is the only such story I have come across.
Other stories of U.K. economic developments have been as level-headed as this example, but as you may have realized by now, much of what is published in the U.S. about the U.K. is frankly embarrassing. It’s time for somebody to run with Planet Money’s example; perhaps a soon-to-be-graduating journalism student like myself!
Red (White and Blue) Scare
David Cameron, Prime Minister, Herman Van Rompuy, President of the European Council, Stephen Harper, Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, President, Naoto Kan, Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, Prime Minister, Barack Obama, President, José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, Angela Merkel, Chancellor, and Nicolas Sarkozy, President, walked at the 36th G8 summit in Muskoka District Municipality, Ontario Province on June 25, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)
OH boy! Get out the history books–ladies and gentlemen, we have a red scare on our hands! Check out this headline today from the Los Angeles Times: “Some in Britain say EU is bringing a new ‘Marxist revolution.'” Without reading it, what do you think this story is about? A coming Communist conspiracy to take over Europe and turn it into the next U.S.S.R., probably.
Unfortunately, it is nothing as exciting as that. The story is simply a run-down on the common arguments of Euro-skeptics in Britain: the quasi-dictatorial directives from Brussels do not have the U.K.’s best interests in mind, the regulations are unnecessarily strict, the monetary union is unfair for “thriving” economies like that of the U.K.
Of course, to get a reader’s attention, the American publication must bring up Marxism, because Europe itself is just a boring problem that won’t go away, but for some reason hasn’t really effected Americans. The article does, however, bring up something interesting in terms of the special relationship between the U.S. and the U.K.:
‘The Americans have always told the Brits that ‘you guys are important for us because you have a big influence in Europe,’ said Philip Whyte, a research fellow at the London-based Center for European Reform. If Britain left the EU, you [in the U.S.] won’t be necessarily picking up the phone to London. Britain won’t be the first country you’d be calling; the first country you’d be calling would be Germany.’
This is one of the first honest admissions of the current state of the special relationship I’ve seen in an American news article. Normally, an American news article would either cling to our ties to the mother country (like this New York Sun article) or just completely ignores the country, like usual. Hearing someone acknowledge the fraying state of the ties between the U.S. and the U.K. is both refreshing and startling, but I was even more surprised to find it in a story that baits the reader with the spread of Communism and never delivers.
Hate-Watching The Today Show’s U.K. Coverage
Screen shot of the Today Show’s most recent report on the ballad of Kate and Wills. (By Harry Huggins)
Will and Kate gear up for busy holiday season
If you only watched the Today Show for your news, you would obviously have a very weird view on the world. Even if you watched more than the Kathie Lee and Hoda Cocktail Hour from 10 to 11 (a.m.!), you probably wouldn’t know much about the U.K. beyond the fact that they still have a Queen, and that Will and Kate are married and going strong.
I’ve talked about the depth and breadth of their U.K. coverage before, but this time the story is an actual “news” report, beyond the previous celebrity gossip segment. So what is the news from abroad?
Will and Kate back in the spotlight after a fall of controversy and keeping quiet this weekend attending a rugby match, and earlier in the week releasing private photos from their trip to Borneo…. The pictures were unveiled on a new website for the couple. William is seen at work, making tea and making his bed.
Oh my! Such a compelling and pertinent topic! Somebody get this guy a Peabody. They don’t have one for “Most Useless Topic Covered”? Well take one away from Edward R. Murrow; he’s got enough.
The report also mentioned a “startling” statistic: William is now the most popular member of the royal family “even beating the Queen!!!” Wait, so the English masses prefer a young man whose mother’s death was one of the most widely reported deaths since John F. Kennedy over an elderly lady who hasn’t smiled since before most of them were born?
The point of this rant is that this is the kind of pointless drivel that earns 1:40 of costly air time on America’s most popular morning show. The journalists at NBC News seem to consider this story worthy of representing the U.K. to a wide American audience, when there were other REAL news stories going on in Britain (Leveson Inquiry, negative effects of austerity on the economy).
How is an American working-person with little time to search British sites for real news supposed to know that the U.K. is a real place with real problems beyond their royal family if all they hear from their morning news is this fluff? Sure it’s what interests a lot of people (including many of my friends), but shouldn’t there be some real news to balance it out?
Inquiring Minds Want to Know…
Enhanced screen shot of the Wall Street Journal’s story on the upcoming results of the Leveson Inquiry, showcasing the pinnacle of objective journalism. (By Harry Huggins)
The Wall Street Journal recently published an article preempting the announcement of the Leveson Inquiry’s recommendations for British press regulations in light of the recent phone hacking and BBC scandals. The story started on a high note, calling News Corporation tabloids “saucy,” and continued to delve into the worries of members of the British media and the expectations of those familiar with the inquiry.
The reasons for greater regulation of the British media are easy to list: the phone hacking scandal, the Jimmy Savile coverup and the BBC’s false allegations against a government official are just the most recent in embarrassing press mishaps. The inquiry’s purpose was to investigate the ties between the press and the British government. In summary:
But critics say that such close ties between the press and government allowed newspapers to get away for years with egregious invasions of privacy, such as phone hacking.
But what about the consequences on the other side of a close government-press relationship? As both editor of Fordham College at Lincoln Center’s student newspaper and as a friend of many members of our school’s student government, I’ve experienced this problem of conflict of interest first-hand.
A question as interesting to me as how the British press-government relationship allowed the press to get away with unethical and possibly illegal behavior is how that same relationship allowed government to get away with unethical and possibly illegal behavior. What stories about the British government went unreported because reporters and officials were friends? The repercussions of what went hidden are potentially more harmful to the country as a whole than the emotional damage caused by the phone hacking.
Nevertheless, the fact is that this is an established pattern of behavior by the British press; the article reports that “Mr. Leveson’s is at least the fifth major public probe of newspaper practices in the U.K. since World War II.” As the article argues, something must be done to break that pattern and restore the public’s trust in the British media. Even from an American standpoint, the public needs no more reason to distrust the media in general.
A Tale of Two Stories
Juxtaposing headlines via Google News. A rare day of diverse stories on the U.K. (Screen Shot edited by Harry Huggins)
I woke up this morning and checked my Google News feed to catch-up on the U.K. news I missed in the American haze of Thanksgiving. What I found was surprising; there were actually a lot of stories for once! But I also noticed a weird flow to the content, starting with two Wall Street Journal stories.
First was a story reporting on an increase in U.K. bank lending. In good news, the story reports, the U.K. government’s Funding for Lending Scheme is working as mortgage lending and small business lending both rose in October. Second was a story reporting on the British Intelligence Agency GCHQ’s inability to crack a code found on a dead World War II pigeon. Or, as the headline might have you believe, “Pigeon Defeats U.K. Code Breakers.”
The weird juxtaposition of the serious economic story and the historical/interesting but silly story is a little disorienting. The first story talks about the serious implications low lending by British banks has had on the U.K. economy, while immediately below that was a story comparing the skills of a British intelligence agency with a pigeon.
There isn’t a real connection to the two stories, but they’re both considered interesting to the U.S. audience. The fact that those two were both highlighted by Google News shows the increasing diversity of interests in the U.K. The intricacies of British institutional lending and the ups-and-downs of their economy are now seen as newsworthy to an American, as is a reminder of the British code-breaking organization that helped defeat Hitler almost 70 years ago.
Nationalize’d
Despite it’s name, Royal Bank of Scotland is not governed by the U.K. … yet… (Robbie via Wikimedia Commons)
A seemingly innocuous story about a set of branches of the Royal Bank of Scotland potentially being bought out by the United Kingdom if the bank cannot find a new buyer for them was picked up today by Fox Business via the Dow Jones newswires, allowing us the opportunity to see how a news corporation’s global ties can extend the reach of stories.
The subject of this story is seemingly irrelevant to a U.S. audience. What American would know that RBS is not wholly owned by the British government via Scotland, let alone care that some of the bank’s branches may become nationalized? And yet we see FOx Business reporting on the intricacies of why it was necessary for the 316 branches of RBS to be sold in the first place.
The answer, I think, lies in one simple independent clause: “…the Sunday Times reports without citing sources.” Besides the weird lack of trust this exhibits (why add “without citing sources” to the end of that if you’re still going to cite it?), it also makes sense that Fox News, a News Corporation company, would pick up a story from the Dow Jones newswire, another News Corporation company, about the U.K. government perhaps buying banks.
In class, you learn that in the news world, synergy can be a bad thing, leading to the silencing of independent voices and even the censorship of some stories that paint the corporations in a negative light, but one positive thing as highlighted by this story is that it can also lead to a better spread of stories from corners of the world not normally reached by an average-sized news organization. Thanks to what I’m sure is a close relationship between Fox Business and the Dow Jones newswire, the American Fox Business reader will be informed of something other American media were not reporting.
Educate, Inform, Entertain
The values of Sir John Reith, the first director-general of the British Broadcasting Corporation, have been broken by the recent scandals. (By ? Wooding [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)
This entire scandal has been so shocking to me because of how out of line it all is from what Reith established as the BBC’s purpose: to educate, inform and entertain. What makes the BBC (and PBS, which started in America with a similar purpose) different from commercial broadcasters is the order of those three parts of the mission statement, specifically, entertainment being the last of the three. For Reith, education and information came before entertainment, and were treated as the most important tenets.
What the cover-up of performer Jimmy Savile’s sexual abuse showed was an abandonment by the BBC of education and information (the truth of the matter) for the focus of entertainment (entertainment legend Savile’s legacy). The second part of the scandal, the incorrect allegations brought about by Newsnight, broke the trust the BBC had earned through years of ensuring correct information.
But what does this say about the media as a whole if one of the ballasts of “good” journalism seems to be sinking under the pressure of competing with the likes of SkyNews and iTV, commercial entities that are (arguably) much more obvious in their non-journalistic focus? Who can stand up for education and information when people (myself included) would almost always rather have entertainment? This scandal has renewed my worries about the fight for information.
Bumbling Broadcasting Corporation
The inside of BBC’s Television Centre feels magical and wholesome, but recent Newsnight and Jimmy Savile disasters prove otherwise.
This is Part I in a series on the current BBC crisis.
Rightfully so, the American media have jumped onto the story of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s recent humiliation after airing a news show falsely accusing a former Conservative politician of sexual abuse and, independently, failing to investigate the sexual abuse of former presenter and formerly beloved broadcasting figure Jimmy Savile. Even America’s most-trusted fake newscaster devoted time on his program this week to discuss it. (You can find the video here).
In this case, there need not be very much analysis to understand what makes this ongoing so interesting to U.S. news outlets as obscure as The Hollywood Reporter. You could understand it simply as an interest in the failings of seemingly faultless and omnipotent British media behemoth, especially as a reminder of why we cast-off our dependence on the crown.
You could also see it as American media finally getting a chance to prove that the much-ballyhooed BBC, who some people to believe the only people still doing real objective journalism, is just as fallible as any news organization in the 24/7 new cycle. It is unlikely that U.S. media organizations are only covering these momentous and horrendous events because of a vendetta against the BBC, but you can understand the tinge of Schadenfreude on the whole thing.
More likely is that this is simply interesting to people, and important enough, with wide-ranging consequences for an entire field, that media outlets as detached as the Hollywood Reporter will be willing to cover the story’s developments.
Forgotten Olympics
The London Olympic stadium prior to completion and, after its use, ignored. (Photo by Harry Huggins)
After a brief hiatus to catch up on work post-Sandy, this blog is back up and running! This week, we focus on a story that previously would have earned unending coverage by the U.S. press, but due to the end of the Olympics, is no longer important to the American audience, whether or not it has interesting and important examples for future American Olympics.
Here is the story as reported by the Financial Times. According to the story, the number of foreign visitors in the U.K. from July through September fell about 4 percent from last year, but the amount they spent while in the U.K. was 6 percent more than last year.
The first question to ask is what does this mean for the U.S.? Well, as a nation that has contended to host the Olympics for almost every year, winning most recently in 2002, the fact that the London Olympics managed to attract more money than last year’s Olympics-less tourism season could set an example for future Olympics organizations. Any organizers for a future, U.S.-hosted Olympics could look at the approach and planning of the London Olympics committee and follow their stellar lead (despite what Mitt Romney may have said about London being unready!).
But, then, why are U.S. media outlets not reporting on this new information? Only a few months ago, any news about problems with the Olympics or any bad news whatsoever related to London would have garnered a great amount of media attention and criticism. Unfortunately for America’s conflict-loving media, the Olympics went off almost without a hitch, and it ended up making money. So what was left on which U.S. media could report? The good work of the London Olympic committee? No, that would bore readers. The risks and benefits of hosting the olympics? No, that might be informative. Instead, they decided to just ignore it (for now).
European Disunion?
Could the U.K. be on its way out of the E.U.? And would America care? (Dave Kellam/Wikimedia Commons)
On a typically quiet Sunday, when most Americans are watching football or going to church, London’s Financial Times covered this story of a senior U.K. government official asserting that his country could do well outside of the European Union. The story summarizes the current tenuous relationship between the U.K. and the E.U., with many British politicians working to get the country out of the economic union, even rebelling against their own parties to vote for decreased funding for the E.U.
But the American media have covered very little of this aspect of world news, especially in the midst of Hurricane Sandy. The New York Times did cover the voting rebellion on Thursday, and they did a good job of explaining the historical tendencies of the Labour and Conservative parties, but little other coverage can be found.
Instead, U.K. coverage from U.S. media remains mainly on the Jimmy Savile/BBC controversy, perhaps because they believe the American audience cares more about any celebrity controversy than political intricacies, no matter how important the political developments are. As the U.K. is one of the U.S.’s major trading partners, Americans should care about Britain’s membership in the European Union and any repercussions that would have on the U.K.’s economic position. Jimmy Savile’s sex abuse scandal could tarnish his image, but probably not the economic standing of an entire country or continent.
The View from the Colonies 