Trust

Some time ago, before I left the BBC, I took part in a meeting about blogging with Mark Byford, the BBC's Deputy Director General and the executive with primary responsibility for news and editorial standards.

During the meeting he raised the familiar question about whether you could trust bloggers. In response I said that trusting individual bloggers on the first reading would be foolish but that over time one built up patterns, connections and associations that I did believe meant that you could trust bloggers - certainly when seen as a network.

I also said that I increasingly didn't "trust" BBC news in the sense that I found their coverage to be sensationalistic and focussed on the negatives in the world and that I and others were increasingly choosing not to "consume" it.

On the web I can exercise judgement as to who I read, who I link to and largely what images I am subjected to.

Once I let the television into my living room I can't.

Comments

[pk]

Totally agree with this point about 'trust'. It does not have to be immediate. Indeed, in blogland trust has to be earned (an old-fashioned virtue), not "projected" by a brand.

As for the Saddam execution: I oppose capital punishment. But I resist commenting further. I just don't feel qualified. I have to leave it to people whom it affects more closely. I just wish I could have believed in the trial.

But dictatorship is a ruthless, terrible business. I suppose the question is, really, can ruthlessness of this scale end by means other than the death of the leader? I don't know the answer.

But if I look at my own family history, I feel some weakening of my anti-capital punishment principle. Tadeusz Witkowski was my uncle. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A06EFDC163AF934A25757C0A9659C8B63
Sachsenhausen was, of course, the work of Adolf Hitler.
Turning to Josef Stalin, my own father was imprisoned in Siberia. My Grandfather died in Tehran after the long trek to freedom (Siberia to the Middle East!!).
So, would I oppose the death penalty for Hitler and Stalin? My principles weaken. I need to draw breath. Perhaps if I am really being honest, I would say 'no.'

So, to my mind, the real issue for us in the comfortable west is the media coverage. This is something we are better qualified to talk about. Wall-to-wall images of hanging are not needed. The media, as usual, lacks composure and grace. And I warn you, I know for a fact, that some children as young as my own (aged 6 and 3 years old) will be watching. In most cases this will be because we have TV almost everywhere in modern houses and parents cannot police the combination of multiple sets/continuous coverage. However, what's really scary is that I know some decent middle-class folk who will encourage their young children to watch: so that they can 'get used to the real world.'

As I said in a recent post elsewhere: media is "mind technology".

Hope this post is neither too much of a rant nor too long.

[Euan Semple]

It is impossible to be either having taken the time to comment on this blog - thanks!

[Jon Husband]

I believe that your practive response to choosing what goes into your head, mnind and heart will eventually become a more and more common response ny people everywhere (caveat: chacun a son gout), and it will become more and more evident through behaviours, speech and other markers what choices people have made about what they consume and how that has enculturated them.

And it may come to be that choices are made for them / us ... whether through control of bandwidth, or censorship or other forms of control. Ever see Minority Report .. ads that talk to you as you walk through commercial space, I imagine through RFID technology perhaps embedded in your drivers' license, whereby government-approved brands have been given access for a price to the government approved personal information on you (and what won't be commercial space)

... and so on. The brave new world is likely to be quite new and different, and require us to be brave in ways we may not have considered much yet. What would an underground interlinked resistance be like ? In the movie V For Vendetta they called each other citizen, as did the French resistance in WW 2.

Oh, my .. guess I should stop crazy-thinking about the future.

[Jon Husband]

pk .. re: your "As I said in a recent post elsewhere: media is "mind technology"

Your story is very powerful, pk, and shows imo quite concisely the difficult polar extremes involved when dealing with information in today's world.

Amongst other more famous aphorisms and statements, Marshall Mcluhan once said something less well-known that went something like (close but not verbatim) "the television and the kinds of programming it has come to carry will eventually rip our values and societies to shreds ... we would be better off had it not been invented" (or "we will come to wish it had not been invented").

Now of course anyone can choose what goes into their head, as Euan demonstrates, but the PTB count on the fact that a small proportion of the populace will .. it's the large majority that they count on being able to hypnotize and manipulate (which I don't doubt was some of the reason for Reagan's deregulation / gutting of the Fairness in Media doctrine (not sure if that's the right term), which in turn opened the floodgates for massive corporate ownership of media in the USA.

Happily in the UK you have public media such as the BBC, but again Euan's story demonstrates the pernicious influence of American culture and the corporatization of the media on media more generally around the world.

Hence the incredible importance, for all of us, to care and think hard about how we use this gift of hyperlinked interconnection. It may come to be all we have with which to resist, as we become increasingly surrounded by the Society of the Spectacle (Guy Debord).

Me too apologies for long post, but something I feel very very strongly about.

Thanks for offering the space for a maybe-conversation, Euan.

[christianhauck]

what is the problem with being subjected to these pictures, accidentally, by TV:
- that you don't like the pictures per se? They are not nice, but I assume that that's not the real problem.
- that once you see them your mind gets altered forever (the goatse effect)?
- the uncomfortable feeling that you are being manipulated by propaganda.
- that you feel being manipulated by/through someone (BBC) that you trusted in the past?
- that you think the world is getting worse, because even BBC can not resist being manipulated by the propaganda through these pictures?

[Euan Semple]

"Propoganda" and "manipulate" imply motives that I don't believe in this case apply. See the previous post for my reasons.

[carlo alberto morosetti]

it's the same debate that has arisen in Italy. Tg1 Rai, the equivalent of Bbc One evening news, at 20,00 local time showed those pictures of Saddam execution with a patetic foreword by the chief-editor Riotta: " the pictures you will see are meant only for adult viewers, as if parents could inhibit their children while the family is watching the most followed news programm of Italy !
The web is the only media that can avoid this pharisaic wording, and make us aware and conscious of the values and principles that count for each and everyone. Death penalty is wrong, showing it is even worse.

[Bobbie Johnson]

So do online news organisations - increasingly all of them - follow the rules laid down by their old media cousins (where the user is inert), or those created on the wider internet (where the user is active and responsible for what they see and hear)?

The end result of the second case could well cause the same sorts of problems as you've already been annoyed by, if the issues aren't thought about fully by those creating new editorial standards.