Martin Kettle:

Having read the Hutton report and most of what has been written about it, I have reached the following, strictly non-judicial, conclusions: first, that the episode illuminates a wider crisis in British journalism than the turmoil at the BBC; second, that too many journalists are in denial about this wider crisis; third, that journalists need to be at the forefront of trying to rectify it; and, fourth, that this will almost certainly not happen.

The reporting of Lord Hutton’s conclusions and of the reactions to them has been meticulous. The same cannot be said of large tracts of the commentary and editorialising – nor of much of the equally kneejerk newspaper correspondence. Much of this comment has been sullied by scorn, prejudice and petulance. The more you read it, the more you get the sense that the modern journalist is prone to behaving like a child throwing its rattle out of the pram because it has not got what it wanted.

Read the rest. See also this, in more knockabout style, from Mark Steyn:

Incidentally, apropos that full-page ad from Beeb bigshots in Saturday’s paper, no self-respecting journalist should put his name to a statement such as: “Greg Dyke stood for brave, independent and rigorous BBC journalism that was fearless in its search for the truth.” “Fearless in his search for the truth” sounds like something the announcer intones in a dark brown voice over the opening theme of a Fifties cop show: it’s fine for Perry Mason or Eliot Ness in The Untouchables, but it’s less credible applied to Greg Dyke, who was positively blasé in his search for the truth. That’s why, nearly a month after the offending broadcast, he still hadn’t bothered to listen to the tape of it and he offered the corporation’s unconditional support to Gilligan without making sufficient effort to determine the accuracy of his allegation.

For all the self-puffery about fearless truth-seeking, that non-act of Dyke’s is the central act of this drama. Why bother checking the story when it fits not only your own general assumptions but those of everyone you meet at dinner parties? Last June, I quoted Peter Worthington, the Canadian columnist and veteran of the Second World War and Korea, who likes to say that there’s no such thing as an unpopular won war, and I noted that British public opinion seemed weirdly determined to make their Iraq victory an exception to that rule. And so it’s proved. If I understand correctly, the people seem inclined to accept Lord Hutton’s findings on the very narrow, technical, legalistic point of whether Mr Blair personally clubbed Dr Kelly over the head, dragged him out of the house and killed him, but they’re furious that the good Lord declined to broaden his remit to the wider “underlying” issues, such as whether everyone’s sick of Blair and, let’s face it, his sucking up to that warmongering moron Bush is the final straw.

Again, read the rest. I suppose I’m going to have to say that I don’t share Mark Steyn’s general political outlook. But the sanctimonious claptrap that is now being served up daily regarding the BBC’s impartial record is an entirely appropriate target for his mockery – and, against appropriate targets, few people do it better.

Ken MacLeod has a dicussion up, at Early Days of a Better Nation, of a question I raised. I raised it at the end of my recent post on Paul Berman’s Dissent article. The question was:

Why does this particular thematic combination lead so many [on the socialist far left] to come down each time on the side they do – morally and politically, in my own view, the wrong side?

And the ‘thematic combination’ I was referring to there was:

America, as foremost representative of global capitalism, on one side, and (speaking loosely) regimes and movements of an utterly ghastly kind politically, on the other…

I have the following comments to make in response to Ken’s post.

First, he suggests that my question was rhetorical, but it wasn’t. It’s a question I mean to offer an answer to in due course, and one of the purposes of my discussion of Berman was to delineate the question clearly for myself before answering it – although Ken wasn’t to know this.

Second, the answer Ken himself gives to the question – in a nutshell, anti-imperialism – is one I already know, of course. But it’s not an answer at the level of analysis I myself am aiming for. I’m interested in what it might be about the Marxist and other (broadly left) theoretical outlooks in which anti-imperialism is a large, and quite proper, concern, that so minimizes, if not completely evacuating, all competing considerations.

Third, Ken writes that he is not concerned with whether the viewpoints and political positions which he reviews in brief are ‘correct or not’. Well, if he says he’s not concerned with this, I’ll accept that he genuinely doesn’t mean to be. But I will suggest, nonetheless, that an unintended subtext of some of what he says is that those of us who would want to distinguish between, say, the NLF’s struggle in Vietnam, ZANU’s in Zimbabwe, the ANC’s in South Africa and the MPLA’s in Angola, on the one hand, and the Taliban or al-Qaida’s efforts in Afghanistan and beyond, the activities of Milosevic and his friends, and the Saddam Hussein regime, on the other – that we’re being a bit morally pernickety. Naturally, I don’t accept this subtext, whether or not it’s Ken’s intended meaning. To take just one of these cases, I supported the ANC’s struggle against apartheid as being the struggle of a genuine liberation movement; something which the Taliban and all the rest in the above sorry (second) list were, or are, not. At the same time, I never supported the use of ‘necklacing’ and suchlike; indeed I explicitly criticized it at the time (click on ‘Past Volumes’, then on 1989; or see my Discourses of Extremity, chapter 2) – as certain well-known left voices supporting the Iraqi so-called ‘resistance’ today conspicuously do not distance themselves from the openly murderous activities of this said ‘resistance’, which involve organized and deliberate crimes against humanity.

Fourth, and finally, in an odd and to me not altogether transparent closing paragraph, Ken alights on the area in which at least part of my answer to my own question will be focused when it comes, but he does so not in a manner that I find either persuasive or congenial. He talks about (political) morality, saying:

Morality is real. Morality is ideology. It is the heat given off by the workings of quite different machinery. In measuring the heat while ignoring the mechanism – in making a moral case for or against a particular war, for example – the moral philosopher reasons ‘consciously indeed, but with a false consciousness’. The screams of those caught in the machinery continue unabated. They cry to heaven. It is only in what Locke called the ‘appeal to heaven’ – the clash of arms – that anyone… sees a hope that some day the machinery can be made to stop, and the screams to cease. That hope itself is the machines’ fuel.

I am perplexed by the final sentence here, but otherwise would say this. Ken’s treating morality as ideology, false consciousness, is in the right ball park (for the question of mine he’s responding to) but it’s there in the wrong way. That is to say, it’s part of the problem in the outlook he’s seeking to explicate, and here also seemingly endorsing. I know where it comes from. It was always, even in the best hands, one-sided. It should by now have been utterly discredited. To the extent that it still inhabits the thinking of the left, that is dismaying. We should have got beyond it.

Moreover, it is a manifest self-deception, including in this paragraph of Ken’s. Purporting to raise the writer or speaker who deploys it above the mere ‘heat’ given off by the mechanism – while all the rest of us flail about believing this heat to be the central thing – the morality-as-ideology discourse still permits that person to insinuate their own superior moral judgement. This comes in the way they speak about the mechanism to which the heat is said to be secondary. Here, it comes with the phrase ‘screams of those caught in the machinery’. That’s the concern of others than yourself, Ken. As it happens, it brings to my mind something else than – something as well as – the depredations of imperialism.

This time Terry Lane, in The Age, shares his thoughts about Germaine’s loving Oz-knock:

Where would we be without Germaine Greer? Who else would keep us on our toes and at the same time keep us humble?

There she is, part Cassandra, part Gorgon, spoiling our Australia Day barbie by reminding us of our lack of couth out here in our Ramsay Streets, spreading “as rapidly as oil stains on water”.

Except that it is not quite Ramsay Street, she says, because in the real thing we don’t even know who our neighbours are, let alone live in each others’ pockets.

It’s enough to make one ache for the true camaraderie, community and intellectual stimulation of Coronation Street, where films and books are the constant topic of conversation.

Well, we haven’t got time for films and books. And if she lived here instead of piddling on us from a great height, she would know that we have other things on our minds.

Does she have any idea what it is like to live in a nation where there is so much sport going on that, with the best will in the world, there are not enough hours in the day to watch it, listen to it and read about it?

Where are we going to fit a movie or book into this crowded schedule, never mind find time to talk to what’s-her-name next door?

She makes a big song and dance about the brain drain from the antipodes to the civilised world. She reckons that 1 million of our best and brightest have left to work in foreign laboratories and universities.

It’s a matter of priorities. First things first. We have the best sporting stadiums in the world and we have more of them than anyone else. We have domes and arenas and parks and grounds and God knows what. We have Olympic games and Commonwealth games and grands prix, world championships, Ashes, one-dayers and opens and at least eight institutes of sport, state and federal.

Where does she think we are going to find the money for schools, universities and laboratories and research and development or even to make movies after we’ve paid for all this world-class sports stuff?

Linda Grant writes of the women of Machsom Watch. ‘Machsom’ means ‘checkpoint’ in Hebrew. The organization observes the conduct of Israeli soldiers and police at the checkpoints which control the movement of Palestinians. One of these women expresses the following view, similar to that I have argued for on this blog:

Ora is not opposed to fences on principle. She wants the Israeli government to end the occupation, withdraw to the Green Line and build a border. “There will still be terror,” she said, “but we will be justified if we hit back.”

Andrew Meldrum reports:

The number of Zimbabweans needing food aid has increased to 7.5m, nearly two-thirds of its population, according to a joint assessment by UN experts and Zimbabwean officials published yesterday. It said there had been a remarkable increase in the number of people going hungry since September, when 5m were then considered in need of help.

International donors say they are scrambling to provide adequate supplies and accuse President Robert Mugabe’s government of refusing to admit that the policy of widespread land seizures has reduced food production.

Mr Mugabe’s government is withholding food from opposition supporters, according to human rights groups – an observation confirmed by interviews with hungry rural people. There are 5m in rural Zimbabwe who are dependent upon international food aid.
…..
According to Zimbabweans and human rights groups the government routinely withholds supplies to rural people in southern Matabeleland and many other areas which voted for the opposition in Mr Mugabe’s disputed presidential election in 2002.

A fraction, just the merest fraction, of that volume of attention…

A reader emails:

Phoned my mother in Jerusalem late Wednesday night here / early Thursday morning there, just to say hi. I hadn’t yet heard about the attack on the bus a few minutes earlier. My mother answered the phone and, before she even knew who was calling, said, “Hi. I’m okay, don’t worry.”

“Don’t worry about what?” I asked. Then, in the background, I heard the sirens of ambulances that were on their way to the scene of the explosion – just a ten minute walk from where my mother is.

I worry less than I would if my mom took buses or spent lots of time in crowded places. She does neither. There is this surreal aspect to thoughts about risk: it’s sensible to avoid taking buses in Israel if one can, I suppose; but it’s absurd that the circumstances should be such in which that’s the sensible choice. And what if one can’t get to work any other way than with a bus?

I so hope for better days.

The Dude about certain things:

[I]f he really didn’t have any stores of unlawful WMD, it was very dumb of him to act as if he still did or perhaps even to believe that he still did. And it seems perfectly idiotic of anybody to complain that we have now found this out (always assuming that we have, and that there’s no more disclosure to come). This highly pertinent and useful discovery could only be made by way of regime change. And the knowledge that Iraq can be finally and fully certified as disarmed, and that it won’t be able to rearm under a Caligula regime, is surely a piece of knowledge worth having in its own right and for its own sake.

How refreshing.

The most inventive theory I have heard this week is that Lord Hutton is an Ulsterman and that Gilligan is a republican-sounding kind of Irish name, and that this is all a subtext of the age-old struggle between Orange and Green. That’ll do fine to keep the conversation going, as this ridiculous and paltry controversy recedes into the past.

But where is the green parrot?

(Via Mick Hartley.)

Is she the most talented female singer since Billie Holiday?

No.

Posting has been light today because I’ve been otherwise, and most pleasantly, engaged. I met up again with an old friend whom I’ve known since we were at school togther in Bulawayo. I haven’t seen him in over thirty years, though neither of us could quite pin down whether it was the late 60s or the early 70s when we last met up. Anyway, John and his wife Mimi, who live in Florida, spent the afternoon with me and WotN, starting out with an excellent lunch at the favourite restaurant of the Geras family, the Great Kathmandu in Burton Road.

Catching up conversation: their kids, our kids, what they’d been up to, what we’d been up to. Reminiscing conversation: when John last saw this person, and when I did, and what was the name of the younger brother of the sisters Nola, Wendy and Carol – in fact, Peter – and the occasion on which John met up with our former Latin teacher in Cape Town, and the time in 1964 when he and I were driving past Hartsfield sports ground singing ‘Anyone who had a heart (boom boom) / would also have (boom boom) / a blood circulaa-aation’. We wandered back home from the restaurant for more such conversation and looking at photos and taking a couple.

How come you can remember the names of people you hardly even knew at school and haven’t seen in more than forty years, and often haven’t thought of in a decade or more, but you can’t remember the name of a movie you saw last month? How come I still know the names of Plumer Street and Moffatt Street and Peard Avenue, but I couldn’t tell you the names of roads just a stone’s throw from where I’m writing now? Huh?

Some of the talk was of you know which political questions, and there was a large measure of agreement between the four of us. In amongst it all, we caught a couple of BBC news broadcasts from which I gathered it was most seriously bad for Tony Blair that he was now moving towards an inquiry on what might have gone amiss with the intelligence on WMD. You know, I feel sure that had he not been moving towards one, it would have been (what’s the best way of putting this?) seriously bad for Tony Blair. Same old same old out there. Good day in here.

Sophie Masson writes a letter to The Australian (January 23, no link that I can find to the letter itself) on the subject of Germaine Greer’s reasons not to live in Australia:

Alas, poor Germaine. ‘Tis pity that everywhere she goes, she takes herself with her. The fault lies not in her stars for having been born Australian, but in herself.

Sophie Masson describes herself as a French-Australian writer. Her website is here and it includes this list of her books. I’ve had a read of some of Sophie’s journalism. In this piece from February last year, she discusses France’s international role. Dismissing what she considers to be several myths about it, she writes:

France has a sense of destiny, a “civilising mission”, just like the United States; it is as a rival, not as a client, that French anti-Americanism expresses itself.

Official France sees itself as representing one view of human development, and the US as another. It’s not sheer power we’re talking about, but an “empire of influence”.

In another article last October, Sophie thinks about different kinds, and levels, of fear:

Not a day passes when someone or other opines that the trouble with the world situation is that people are living in fear (a fear that by definition the opiner claims not to share).
…..
There’s a lot of guff talked about how the fear that supposedly stalks this country means that people have become more isolated, more intolerant and retreated into some white-bread, white-picket fantasy. This is simply not true of the general public, who continue to work, travel and enjoy themselves, just with the new knowledge that certain hidden dangers of an increasingly globalised world are now fully on show. We just factor in the presence of globe-trotting terrorists as well as other dangers and annoyances…
…..
I’ll tell you what fear really is. It’s Bergen Belsen and the gulag; it’s the look on the faces of the neighbours of a woman baker in Afghanistan, burnt to death in her own oven by the Taliban for breaking the prohibition on women working. It’s the all-pervasive police state of Iraq…

I particularly liked this observation:

The more you know, the more you understand, the less you excuse.