Street of Self-Importance; Or How I Hijacked My Daughter’s Death To Look Down Wid Da Kidz

Fleet Street used to be called the Street of Shame, presumably because a lot of stories were written and/or made-up when the writers were drunk a spokesman said, which used to be an automatic flag for “I totally made that up,” as everyone always knew.

For me, I lost trust in what I hate to call MSM – Mainstream Media – last Bonfire Night. I know that sounds a bit like The Night I Found Out About Santa. But it was. There was a huge demonstration in Westminster, outside the Houses of Parliamment. It was a wholly peaceful demo. But while Twitter and Facebook knew about it from people who were there, it was totally invisible to the BBC. So much so that for over four hours there wasn’t a single mention of it on any BBC website. There are obvious news priorities. There’s a finite amount of print space or website or attention span and an almost infinite amount of news. But it seemed distinctly odd that the BBC had the time and space to drear on about the traditional Bonfire in Lewes but no space at all to even mention 5,000 people outside Parliament. And then Russel Brand turned up.

I don’t like Russel Brand. I confuse him with Russel Grant. I think he has an extremely silly voice. I’m sure neither of those things bother him in the slightest. But what bothered me was the BBC’s capacity to ignore something that demonstrably was important, the Million Mask March, something that was happening in major cities all over the world, and try to divert attention from it, deliberately.

darvall

Then today I read about a journalist saying that he was ashamed to be a journalist. You can read the original article here. I thought it was going to be atonement for things like that. A cry for forgiveness, from a profession that decided that it was ok to write down that the Prime Minister threatened BBC journalists in public that if they didn’t toe the line he’d shut the BBC, but it was only ok to write about it after the election, in case it annoyed the Prime Minister. Or maybe, in case his behaviour was so outrageous that he would have lost the election if people knew that the public service broadcaster had been treated like this.

But I was wrong. John Darvall was outraged because other journalists told the truth. Or if they didn’t he doesn’t say what it was they made-up. His daughter was killed in a car crash. He made up a tribute to her, as anyone might, then attributed it to her mother. Which was not true. She might have thought those things about her daughter. She probably did. But she didn’t say them. John Darvall did. Then he pretended someone else did and wanted other journalists to repeat this fiction. His daughter had lived with her mother and step-father since she was three. His daughter and her mother and John Darvall and the step-father didn’t use that word, but that was the fact of it. Cosy sophistry of the order of “I am Polly and Oliver’s father, Simon is their dad” may be fine around the kitchen table and doubtless it was, but it isn’t all that clear when you’re trying to tie things up in 150 words in the Western Evening Press or wherever.

That may well be “always the language we use,” but it isn’t strictly true. Whoever Simon is, he was the poor girl’s stepfather. He and she may not have thought of him as such, nor used the word, but that is what he was. Language really is vital if as the 1,000 words of self-indulgence claims, “we are to understand who we are and what we do. ”

What ‘we’ chiefly do in this case is get irritated because other journalists tell the truth using a word you don’t approve of and write copy for other papers that you think is badly written. John Darvall repeatedly says that untruths were said, but somehow forgets to mention any of them. Not one, in fact. What gets most attention is that other journalists described his ex’s partner as his daughter’s step-father, which he was. And that the step-father, after he’d heard John Darvall on the phone, rang him up later and gave him a bollocking about what other people said.

I don’t know John Darvall. I don’t know anyone involved in this story. I can fully understand why people lash out and say unreasonable things when they’re upset, especially when they have something as serious as sudden death to be upset about. But being ashamed to be a journalist because other journalists use a factual descriptor and you don’t like it, and your ex’s bloke rings you up and goes on at you isn’t anything to do with anyone else. It’s piggy-backing his own daughter’s death to look right-on.

The gist of the problem, the thing that sticks most in John Darvall’s craw, apparently it is ‘they’ said his ex’s partner was the dead daughter’s step-father. Well, he was. Deal with it. It’s not something to be ashamed of. And it’s not as if journalism needs to look far for things to be ashamed of. There are, after all, more shameful things than using truthful words that people don’t like. Except as the journalists on Cameron’s airplane decided, maybe there aren’t.

 

 

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The Complicity of Vice

Years ago, when the world and I was young, Iain Banks wrote a book called Complicity. It was about a man who wrote a bit, and a woman he fancied who became an accountant, his half-hearted pursuit of her and his how shall we say, his taste for alternative avenues of enjoyment. I have nothing in common with him. Honest.

Anyway, good book. It was really about the 1980s and how everything changed and even though while it was changing you had the feeling everything was turning into something not very nice at all, damn but it felt good. A lot of people sold their souls for a pair of fake tortoiseshell Ray-bans and thought they’d come out ahead on the deal. vice-1

It was about how bankruptcy accounting was a growth area and how good the 4×4 and the boat that bought you felt. It was about stupid schedules that meant you had to be off your face to meet them and how that was just supposed to be part of the job, in that whole ‘lunch is for wimps’ BS mantra. It was about a man who after the Falklands and the stupid venture-capital rubbish shop he opened going mega decided he’d extract a personal revenge on the people who’d annoyed him, now that he could afford to. And it was about how journalism and castles in the air, or in the book a computer game, turned to crap.

I just about remember how a team of journalists brought down Richard Nixon. These days editorial resource is devoted to ‘reporting’ the latest eternal truths from reality TV shows that aren’t even vaguely real. Buster Friendly and His Friendly Friends was supposed to be a spoof when it was written about in Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, not an accurate meta-analysis. To save you the bother, just in case you’re a journalist, book that was turned into Bladerunner. (Character in book but not in film watches TV all day long. Chat show. Called Buster F & his F Fs, obvs.)

At breakfast time Buster interviews an actress about the film she’s about to make. At lunchtime Buster interviews her about the film she’s making. At what we used to call teatime Buster interviews her about the film she’s just made. There isn’t any film. There never was and never will be and nobody minds. Just try not to think of the actress as Kenny Everett’s Cupid Stunt though. It doesn’t help at all.

As an accurate summary of news gathering now and how it relates to what’s going on, that seems a fair enough analogy to me, after ‘beheading videos’ that categorically didn’t show anything of the sort. And if you think they do, watch them again. Then tell me at what point you see the beheading, at what point the guy it’s being done to even flinches, and exactly where eight pints of blood fountaining into the air is supposed to have gone, because it certainly isn’t in the video.

Vice magazine looked as if it was going to be different. Until today when it didn’t print this, where John Ronson chats to Adam Curtis. Obviously, you’re supposed to be hipNhappenin™ enough to know exactly who these two are, or why their coffee time drolleries are worth publishing to the universe and yours aren’t. They tell you at the end, if you get to the end.

Totally relevant.
Totally relevant.

At least they didn’t do those twee little face shots that every newspaper feels they have to have now, feigning amazement, indignation or trying to look beautiful-when-they-take-their-glasses-off-and-nobody-ever-told-them-but-they-knew-it-anyway/quirky-kooky-smart in the way most female newspaper writers go for.

Why do you believe journalism changed?

Cooed John. Or Adam. It doesn’t really matter which. Trust me. Well, we like writing about interesting people. Not dull old guys who wear ties and iron their shirts and have meetings. So not people like well, JFK then. He was quite interesting. Or Churchill. Fat drunk though he was, anyone who wears the same clothes for five years, lives in a house with more bedrooms than lots of streets and eats steak and kidney pudding by mashing it up in the bowl and pouring it into his mouth because

Graphic enough for journalists, apparently.
Graphic enough for journalists, apparently.

So not people like well, JFK then. He was quite interesting. Or Churchill. Fat drunk though he was, anyone who wears the same clothes for five years, lives in a house with more bedrooms than lots of streets and eats steak and kidney pudding by mashing it up in the bowl and pouring it into his mouth because he’s off his face counts as quite interesting in my book.

Except of course, journalists didn’t write about that at all. We’re expected to believe that we got here because George Bush senior and his son look a bit dull, even if Junior bears a disturbing physical similarity to Alfred E. Neuman.

The Adam and John show took a little time out from ‘as I was saying in my latest book dude, just like that great film you just did…” to come out with this:

It’s intimately related to what has happened to politics, because journalism and politics are so inextricably linked. Politicians…handed power to other institutions…..to finance, but also to computer and managerial systems.

They reinvented other parts of the world they thought they could control into incredibly simplistic fables of good versus evil. I think Tony Blair is the clearest example of this – a man who handed power in domestic policy making over to focus groups, and then decided to go and invade Iraq.

Well, bollocks. We’re supposed to beleive that for the first time ever, finance dictated politics. I mean, what a preposterous idea! That could never happen. And even more ludicrously, we’re being asked to accept with a straight face that focus groups called for the Iraq war.

Tony Blair was a spineless liar driven by expediency. He crawled around George Bush to bask in the reflected glory of a man whose own election was clouded with doubt. He lied, lied and lied again. And the media lapped it up and gave it to people as the truth. Weapons of mass destruction. 911. Al Q’uada in the Middle East. Missiles from Iraq in 30 minutes. Our Brave Boys. All of it total bullshit. All of it churned out as ‘journalism.’

But it doesn’t stop there.

And I think this process led journalism to face the same problem. They discovered that the new motors of power – finance and the technical systems that run it, algorithms that try and read the past to manage the future, managerial systems based on risk and “measured outcomes” – are not just obscure and boring. They are almost impossible to turn into gripping narratives. I mean, I find them a nightmare to make films about, because there is nothing visual, just people in modern offices doing keystrokes on computers.

I wonder how much ‘gripping narrative’ there was about hundreds of clarks sitting on high stools under gaslights, copying longhand before type-writers were invented, the people who underpinned Empire, global domination, the Industrial Revolution, the Golden Age of railways, or any and all of that. Or how visually appealing the Corn Laws were, or the endless committe meetings that preceded passing the Act that gave women the vote. About the same as visualising a modern office, I’d guess.

 

Even more fatuouosly, we’re supposed to believe that the failure of modern journalism in the sense of it finding things out and telling people about them isn’t just because it’s easier to repeat government press releases than go and do something that an MP might not like, nor even that you’re paid the same whether you do or not, no, none of that. The failure isn’t that journalism as say, represented by the BBC, the thing that used to be the lodestone of impartial, accurate reporting, went the way of highly visual frock coats years ago. That would be too simplistic for Adam and John. The failure is one of imagination, apparently. Because let’s face it, giving people boring old facts, like say, that there weren’t any WMDs or if there were it was because we sold them in the first place, what would be the point of that? It’s just no imaginative enough. Unlike Adam and John. Who managed to get through the entire mutual admiration piece without once saying that the problem with modern journalism is it isn’t about finding things out any more. And they certainly don’t use any phrases about it losing any balls it might once have had.

 

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