News of the Screwed

Power - pop!

Read about the things that happen throughout the world
Don't believe in everything you see or hear
The neighbours talk day in day out about the goings on
They tell us what they want - they don't give an inch

Look at the pictures taken by the cameras they cannot lie
The truth is in what you see - not what you read
Little men tapping things out - points of view
Remember their views are not the gospel truth

Don't believe it all
Find out for yourself
Check before you spread
News of the world

Never doubt
Never ask
Never moan
Never search
Never find
Never know

Each morning our key to the world comes through the door
More than often its just a comic, not much more
Don't take it too serious - not many do
Read between the lines and you'll find the truth

Read all about it, read all about it - news of the world, news of the world
Read all about it, read all about it, read all about it - news of the world

- The Jam News of the World

Culture warriors of the right should be made of sterner stuff than to complain that lefties are onto them over the British News Ltd privacy invasion scandal. No conservative case can be made for the invasion of privacy perpetrated by News of the World and its sty-mates: it lived in the gutter and it died there.

Defenders of News of the World claimed that its antics were indispensible because one day it might uncover a real story one day, and it would need to draw on some great reservoir of profit and public goodwill to get through. Well, it had 168 years and the most it could come up with were:

• A footballer having sex with women to whom he was not married;
• Inside accounts of brothels for the benefit of those lacking the guts to go there themselves, and lacking any empathy for those who work in such places;
• Medical details for a very ill infant whose father happened to be a prominent politician;
• Tittle-tattle generally; and
• That's about it really.

Those are the sorts of things that defenders of News of the World call "the big stories". They're not big stories; they are very, very petty indeed. Real conservatives rail against these things being aired in the public domain, and despair that such nonsense drives out informing, edifying and inspiring news that almost all hacks can't be bothered finding, let alone writing about. This would explain why public support for that newspaper has collapsed so quickly. It reminded me of the way Gatsby's social whirl collapses after the dead girl is found on his premises: one minute he's the King of West Egg and has Daisy within reach, the next minute he's a pariah.

If a government of a democratic-capitalist country set out to ban an investigative media outlet, or something genuinely popular, there would be public outcry and politicians would either back down or relent to some extent. News of the World was one of the biggest-selling newspapers in the western world, yet its only defence comes from those who worked were employed there. Let us have no more of this hypocrisy - I'll get to Christopher Hitchens shortly - that the closure of a factory or a shop is just another story but the closure of a newspaper is somehow a particularly poignant disaster.

I won't blame Hitchens for the headline in his piece but it is indicative of a contempt for readers found in the journosphere. Animals lap things up. No good journalism ever comes from those who mock the meat on which they feed, or who mock those who consume their output.

The reality of the scandals coming out of the Murdoch UK operation is clearly too noisome for one who has so long relied on it for sustenance. Were any other corporation in any other industry to be found to be some ethically retarded as News International, Christopher Hitchens would be first among those to call for it to be shut down. Instead, Hitchens seeks sanctuary in literature.

First, the sad news of human frailty was not bugled with lurid and sensational tactics. It was laid out more in sorrow than in anger, published on a Sabbath day that was still full of legal and moral force, and strove to show how easy was the fall from grace. Second, and in keeping, its reporters and editors took a very high moral tone. They would take the investigation of a brothel, say, only so far.

Once a certain point of complicity had been reached, there would appear a phrase that became celebrated both in print and in court. "At this stage," the reporter would solemnly intone, "I made an excuse and left."

This degree of detachment was thought essential to the proper conduct of business.

Hand it to Rupert Murdoch and his minions: They got hold of the solid old "News of the Screws" or "Nudes of the World" and made it into a paper where the question was not how low can human nature sink, but rather is there anything, however depraved, a reporter cannot be induced to do?

That depravity meant that it had nowhere to go when the public turned against them. The speed with which it was shut down showed the degree to which people were played for suckers: let to run, then reeled in, as editorial whim required.

Hitchens then flees back into literature, only to lunge out at his readers: "Yes, dear reader, you are a hypocrite, too". Even when I was in London I never bought a copy, I never read its website, so he clearly can't include me. When I hear or see the kind of thing that was its stock in trade I feel no surprise, and I doubt there is much correlation between its advertisements and my consumption habits. Can you imagine Sebastian Flyte or George Orwell accepting an invitation to a focus group for News of the World? It was always big on hypocrisy, but it lacked (and its former employee Hitchens is still lacking) both self-awareness and any real engagement with its audience necessary to assess its readership and meet their needs.

Then, he tries his hand at populism, having seen the master at work:

When reporters speak so easily of the great influence exerted on politicians by Murdoch's papers, what they really mean is by Murdoch's readers. His only real knack lies in knowing what they want.

This assumes, falsely, a link between the meeting of said wants and the ability to mobilise readers to meet the interests of the proprietor. News of the World should have been wound down slowly, were it truly an instrument of great power, not snuffed out like a candle once the electric lights were switched on.

The most neglected aspect of the entire imbroglio is this. Most of the allegations of shady practice against the Murdoch octopus have come from another newspaper.

True enough: one of the last newspapers that engages in investigative journalism, The Guardian, has the credibility to rally the public in a way that News of the World never could (and before you think this is some sort of paean to the left, consider that the UK Telegraph has an equivalent reputation for its stories on parliamentary expenses and articles like this).

Over the same period, Rusbridger and The Guardian formed the London end of the media consortium that tried to impose some element of sorting and priority on the mess that WikiLeaks had become.

Here Hitchens lapses back into piffle.

The journalists at the UK Telegraph had the good sense and humility to put all their documentation online and trust readers to help them build the story. Issues requiring detailed knowledge of accounting practice and the rules of claimable expenses was entrusted to informed and engaged readers, and they came through: this is twentyfirst century journalism at its most promising. By contrast, those at the Guardian, The New York Times and Australia's Fairfax are engaged in old-school gatekeeper journalism where lawyers and ad-sales dollies will decide what stories see the light of day, and journalists will simply transcribe them rather than explain. Journalists had nothing to do with Wikileaks: all the data simply fell into their laps, and much of the way they report it shows an insistence on presenting stories as tittle-tattle: what politician A said about politician B, etc.

... a lot hangs on the outcome of the battle between the Murdochian and Guardian world views.

Indeed it does, but not for the dialectical reasons Hitchens might imagine.

Firstly, illegal intrusions into privacy will continue. The knee-jerk response to September 11 has normalised intrusions of that sort. Government agencies do it but they offer the impression of security, far more defensible than insubstantial tittle-tattle. Big companies breach their customers' privacy inadvertently, as happened to Sony recently, and they look like idiots - but News' sins are those of commission, not omission.

Murdoch attempted to hide behind the public that had sustained him, that he felt egged him on in pursuit of tittle-tattle (a bit like some pathetic rapist you'd read about in a Murdoch tabloid, repeatedly bleating "she wanted it" in the face of all evidence going against him). When he elevated titillation to a right on par with accountable government, when he lost perspective on his prurient content, the public that had long indulged him simply abandoned him. Something similar happens to politicians: they can wear enormous popularity like armour, but when it falls away they are left with the deals and the compromises they made in their pomp, when they were riding high and everything they did or said was always "canny".

Secondly, in Australia and elsewhere the exposure of activities of this sort is most likely not from other journalists, but from IT professionals who can play all the games that Murdoch's people did but better, and with the sense and skill to expose them in a way that gives people some understanding of what is going on. Imagine trying to explain to Australian journalists about mobile phone security settings or accessing medical files remotely ("yeah, but did you read what Bolt said about Swanny? I'm trying to get a right of reply. It's the story of the day - everyone's running with it, it's a highly competitive media market you know").

The failure of bad journalism will not necessarily create more space for good. What is most likely is that editors will stuff the vacant space with dull stuff. It is more than possible that some good journalism will suffer collateral damage in all this. What this means is a distancing of journalism from politics: hopefully it will mean a greater appreciation that public and corporate policy includes decisions that aren't made by executive government.

The only journalism that will survive will not be insider goss but robustly independent investigation that knows source documents when it sees them, and how to fit it with a wider story. No amount of shrieking about "proper media outlets" will arrest this, and the shriekers probably know it (though it's hard to be sure without hacking their phones - yes, your colleagues overseas should have considered you Caroline before dragging the whole outfit through the gutter). The celebration of human frailty to which News of the World has no future: on TMZ amateurs will freely film, say, Lindsay Lohan's slow-motion suicide more graphically and pitilessly than Murdoch's complacent apparatus ever could describe it. Political insider journalism, where "favourable coverage" simply jars with a badly-served public, has no value and no future.

In Australia Murdoch owns 70% of the newspapers, yet if they had any clout at all John Howard would still be Prime Minister. In the US, Murdoch has invested billions in rightwing politics - not only in Fox, but in the vast exercise in astroturfing known as the Tea Party. Murdoch has hired almost all viable Republican candidates for President - and yet the most viable, popular and credible is the candidate who needs him least, Mitt Romney. In the UK Murdoch turning on a government followed public opinion rather than having led it.

Non-Murdoch journalism is starting, here and there, to light out for the territories of what people today need from journalism. In areas other than politics and science (IT, say), areas far from micromanaged editorial scrutiny, there are aberrant and occasional pockets of suitability in News Ltd output. The insecurity of the political class - and not just in the UK - in thrall to moguls as a substitute for a lack of community engagement is well made by The Piping Shrike. The lack of any substantial and lasting engagement by traditional media and politics with the public is ultimately their problem, not ours.

Whatever, dude

The sixth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, along with the US election campaign, has focused attention on the merits of going to war in Iraq.

Phillip Coorey makes the point that those who were too enthusiastic for war in 2002 look a little silly now. I have no idea why there wasn't a kind of PunditWatch in force to embarrass Bolt et al much, much earlier.

Then there were Alexander Downer and Christopher Hitchens seeking to quell the sniggers at their cheerleading with a toujours l'audace defence of their respective positions. However well this may or may not work as an exercise in arse-covering, neither Downer nor Hitchens offer much practical help to the citizen in deciding whether more blood and treasure into Iraq.

If Australian troops withdraw from Iraq, Saddam Hussein is not going to spring back to life, and nor will he give back the A$300m that smart Alec gave him.

The most common criticism is that they pursued the de-Baathification policy too zealously. Initially, the Americans wanted a modest de-Baathification process, knowing that many of the people who made Iraq work at all were Baath Party members because it was impossible to hold any position of authority without being in the party.

The Americans only planned to remove from office the top two levels of the bureaucracy — that is, ministers and deputy ministers or their equivalents. Once the Iraqi Interim Government took over, that is a government made up of Iraqis, it addressed the de-Baathification process with much more zeal. Arguably, the Americans should have done more to restrain them from assuming they could.

Why did Americans understand Iraq better than Iraqis? If the people running Iraq are clowns, why should Australians help prop up such a government?

The more serious criticism of the Americans is that they should have sent more troops to Iraq in the first place.

Fine, this criticism may be made of the Americans - but why did Australia send so few troops, and why make such a fuss when it is drawn down?

... decisions have to be made about the future of Iraq. We should all contemplate what we wish for. Personally, I wish for a united Iraq in which the distinctive traditions and beliefs of its diverse peoples are respected through democratic and pluralistic institutions, a country that can develop successfully its natural resources and play a constructive role in dealing with the many difficult, painful and bloody issues of the Middle East.

This is possible, but it will take time. Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told me last June that outsiders had to remember that Iraqi society had been brutalised for decades and it couldn't be stitched back together in a short period. To achieve a decent outcome for Iraq would require the presence of foreign (largely American) forces for quite some time.

The argument here is: decisions have to be made, but by whom? However well-intentioned Downer's professed sentiments for "a decent outcome", he ignores the idea that what is happening in Iraq is what happened throughout the decolonising third world a generation ago: diverse groups will unite to drive out the occupying power, and fracture thereafter.

Always beware people using the passive voice. Hitchens should know better than this:

A much-wanted war criminal was put on public trial.

The Kurdish and Shi'ite majority was rescued from the ever-present threat of a renewed genocide.

A huge, hideous military and party apparatus, directed at internal repression and external aggression was (perhaps overhastily) dismantled.

The largest wetlands in the region, habitat of the historic Marsh Arabs, have been largely recuperated.

Huge fresh oilfields have been found, including in formerly oil-free Sunni provinces, and some important initial investment in them made. Elections have been held, and the outline of a federal system has been proposed as the only alternative to a) a sectarian despotism and b) a sectarian partition and fragmentation. Not unimportantly, a battlefield defeat has been inflicted on al-Qa'ida and its surrogates, who (not without some Baathist collaboration) had hoped to constitute the successor regime in a failed state and an imploded society.

Who decides, who benefits?

Americans should thank both God and Allah that the clowns of Abu Ghraib didn't get to Saddam. Imagine the Chomsky-Pilger axis whipping up sympathy for yet another third-world dictator.

There is, however, one position that nobody can honestly hold but that many people try their best to hold. And that is what I call the Bishop Berkeley theory of Iraq, whereby if a country collapses and succumbs to trauma, and it's not our immediate fault or direct responsibility, then it doesn't count, and we are not involved.

It is inescapable that at some point, Iraqis must govern their country by themselves. The impediment to that has been removed, and at some point the US-led Coalition of non-Iraqi forces must leave. The question is not whether they should leave, but when. When the death rate in al-Anbar province diminishes to that of, say, south-central LA? At what point do you trust Iraqis to manage their own affairs?

A time will come when the Iraqi army and police can handle domestic security alone. At that point there will barely be any need for foreign troops in Iraq.

Surely barely should be replaced with not in Downer's sentence above. The foreign intervention should be judged by the countries that contributed troops against the degree to which they facilitated not just security forces, but a political system in Iraq capable of resolving and minimising conflict. The policies pursued by Downer and others were and are not conducive to this end, and stand condemned.

Hitchens and Downer have implicitly accepted Powell's so-called Pottery Barn rule: you break it, you own it. They stand there with shards in their hands with no clear idea how to impose a fix upon this broken country, nor how to rally the locals to do so themselves. Proponents of the Iraq war should spend less time covering their own backsides and more time helping those in whose name they acted (or cheered) to resolve the conflict that will ensure six millennia of Iraqi history does not vanish in an orgy of violence, but also that the reputations of two plummy-voiced men are not tarnished to the point where they are ignored.

Ask a silly question

Unless Christopher Hitchens has not recently written a book about North Korea, it is unclear why he bothered with this. Given that his handwringing leftist days are behind him and his faith in Kick Ass America remains, it was an odd piece of writing. The sentiment is there but the absence of thought and refusal to allow for any sort of geopolitical context is disappointing for being unlike Hitchens' usual fare.

The answer to the question in the subtitle is: because there's no incentive for Bush to do anything, and if he realises anything then he surely must know there's nothing he can do but wait for the Kim regime to collapse. The ill-founded and directionless adventure in Iraq has prompted dictators the world over to taunt the Americans, from Tehran to Caracas to wherever else, and Kim Jong-il is just getting in for his chop.

There were a good number of sneers and jeers when President George W. Bush first employed the term "axis of evil," but I don't remember reading very many criticisms of the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004, by which Congress, among other things, established the post of special envoy for human rights in North Korea and directed him or her to submit an annual report.

Oh no, not an annual report! In the absence of any Australian press gallery journalists, it must have been hard to criticise something that seemed so pointless and which turned out to be so. How many of the horror stories you cite came from the annual report(s) of Mr Lefkowitz?

On June 13, Bush had received in the White House North Korean defector Kang Chol-Hwan, author of the chillingly brilliant memoir The Aquariums of Pyongyang, which describes the gulag system that operates in that unprecedentedly wretched country.

...

The Kim Jong-il slaveholder regime also made the same connection, denouncing Kang Chol-Hwan as "human scum" and announcing that, by agreeing to meet with him, President Bush had thrown "a wet blanket" on the negotiations about nuclear weapons. Since that time, the regime has tested a small nuclear weapon and (less successfully but no less suggestively) test-fired the sort of long-range missile that one day might be able to deliver it.

And where was Bush's response that he meets with whomever he damn well pleases? Instead, he writes a polite letter, a turn-the-other-cheek response to which even Jimmy Carter would have the guts not to stoop.

When runaway slaves are caught, fleeing across frozen rivers to the grim and inhospitable border provinces of China, they have been known to be led back in coffles, with wire threaded through their noses or collarbones, before being handed over to the punishment system.

Just as the Swiss are morally culpable for returning escaping Jews and escaped Allied POWs to Nazi-occupied Europe, so too the Chinese are culpable for returning these poor wretches to the North Koreans.

Indeed, it seems as though we are back to the same horse-trading style that marked the Clinton years, where North Korea pretends to comply on plutonium and reactor inspections and we pretend that the subsequent food aid and diplomatic contact does not have the effect of prolonging the life and credit of the Kim Jong-il regime.

And the alternative is ...? Since the early 1950s it has been clear that the People's Republic of China is the real power in that region, and that for the US to do anything but the above only puts Beijing on the defensive, which leads them to reinforce the Kim regime.

The best way to make the Kim regime suffer is to alienate it from Beijing. Rather than have Mr Lefkowitz hobnobbing in Washington and writing reports nobody will read, he (or someone doing his role properly) should be working with the Chinese to minimise - or even cauterise - the poisonous Kim regime. Even for a fully cashed-up and focused USA, this would be the best they could do. For the Bush Administration, bogged down in Iraq (the protestation that it could withdraw at any time and declare victory is like an addict's claim of being able to kick their drug of choice but to freely choosing not to) and otherwise a laughing stock, they're lucky to have achieved parity with the Clinton administration. Assuming, of course, that's what has happened.

This is not to diminish the grave plight of the North Korean people. To have faith in humanity and its future is to hope that this suffering will not long continue and will be roundly condemned. The Clinton administration will be able to claim that it did what it could to alleviate this suffering, and so too Bush can honestly claim that he and his could not have done more than what little they have, given the choices they made.

Yet, one can still hope that Bush had made - and that the next US President and other leaders will make - different and better decisions that might help the North Korean people at the expense of their current "government". To do this it is necessary to face honestly the decisions that have been made that allow the silly and inadequate Kim Jong Il to continue the rapine of his country. That was Hitches' job and he failed it, falling back on jerking anecdotes: tear-jerkers about slavery and circle-jerks at Washington parties. It isn't good enough Hitchens, and you don't even have the excuse of spending too much time in an Australian press gallery.

In a position to help

I sometimes agree with Christopher Hitchens and sometimes disagree, but always in reading his writings is it necessary to be on the ball and engage with what he's saying. This article, however, only requires that the discerning reader believes that the President of the World Bank has higher obligations than the social politenesses one might experience at Washington drinks parties.

First, let it be said that it doesn't matter a damn whether, or how well, you know Wolfowitz or his girlfriend. You can live a good and helpful life without knowing either; it is not at all mean-spirited to hope for such an institution to be run well and to benefit those countries that need its help.

Second, the relationship between Wolfowitz and his girlfriend is none of your business or mine. What matters is the sheer lack of credibility that Wolfowitz and his institution have in combatting corruption. The World Bank employee who has to front officials in third-world countries and tell them that siphoning off World Bank money for their private gain - that person has been nobbled by Wolfowitz. Maybe he should send his girlfriend to do that job. Maybe he should do it himself. Maybe he should send Hitchens.

Third, I have no opinion on the World Bank's position vis-a-vis Uzbekistan. None (there, that should sink any accusation that I'm opinionated!).

Once you get over that, Hitchens' article starts looking thin. There's the surly tone of anyone who picks on my mates picks on me, the kind of emotional buy-in to issues that usually brings with it a powerfully analytical intellect expressed in simple prose. On the face of it, it's chivalrous of him to stick up for Shaha Riza - but the very idea of someone well-versed in the ways of Washington going out with a high-profile man and not expecting her private life to come under scrutiny is mind-boggling. It's both patronising and, for someone who made his name as an investigative journalist, hypocritical for Hitchens to go down this path.

The issue of Wolfowitz's past is entirely valid. The very idea that a man might ascend to a position without considering his recent performance in other positions is absurd. Can we now admit that it was Wolfowitz, and not General Shinseki, who was "wildly off the mark" about the issue of troop numbers required to meet objectives in Iraq - and if so, can it be doubted that Wolfowitz busily ignoring good advice at the World Bank now? The similarity of his career path to that of Robert McNamara, another smart and diligent man who bungled a war, is inescapable. It is absolutely fair game for those who criticise the man and his impact on American life.

Aha, you say, but why did Wolfowitz take so long to release these nonincriminating internal memoranda? Who acts so defensively if they have nothing to hide?

"Aha" is something I say rarely, if ever. As for Wolfowitz, he is a leading member of a governing clique who genuinely believes himself to be above scrutiny, and it is possible Hitchens is trying to insinuate himself into such company to enjoy the rarified pleasure of action without repercussion. Those who hammer away getting people like him and his dining companions to disclose what they do and why with the public resources entrusted to them do important work. It would be fair if they did something similar to a Clinton appointee. It would be fair if people started scrutinising similar actions in Australia by the Howard Government, and in NSW by Sorry Morry's outfit (actually it would be more than nice; you've gotta keep your hopes down). It's part of the whole transparency thing: if you won't practice it yourself then you're the wrong person to demand it of others.

And, if you're the sort of person who doesn't practice what he preaches but still likes having a powerful job, it's incumbent upon people like Christopher Hitchens to demand disclosure and to investigate why a senior official would demand publicly that others do the opposite of what he actually does. Perhaps Hitchens could use his slight knowledge of such people to expand his knowledge and convey it to readers, or perhaps he has just grown weary of questioning the way things are done around here.

Jeg er Dansk

Christopher Hitchens is right on this topic, people of western values should stand up for Denmark and the rights of newspapers to publish what they will. The stupid, violent mobs who try to worm their way into the afterlife by getting into a state and confusing one cartoonist and one newspaper with official policy of Denmark, the EU and western civilisation generally have made their point. There is no reason why westerners should amend their behaviour in response to this vandalism (except to buy more Danish products) and carrying on like that advances nothing worth anything.