I had a dream about Jeremy Corbyn last night. Well, I think it was Jeremy Corbyn, it could have been Keith Allen, to whom he bears a passing resemblance. On balance, though I think it was JC, since in return for my borrowing his Kindle (yes, really), he treated me to a lecture on Labour Party policy, not that I can remember any of it, although I do know that it went on long enough for me to miss my bus. Dreams are weird, aren't they?
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| The leader of Her Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition, and an actor/comedian. |
Why did I dream about Jeremy Corbyn? It could have been a surfeit of cheese too close to bed-time, but more likely because he is rarely out of the news. In fact, if you are like me and glean most of your news from Apple's News aggregator, you would believe that Corbyn is one of only a handful of newsworthy politicians on the planet, the others being Donald Trump (inevitably), Boris Johnson, and the late John McCain, with Theresa May, Emmanuel Macron, and Justin Trudeau trailing in their wake.
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| Rarely out of the news, regularly decrying it. |
On the face of it, Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump have little in common; their politics are, after all, poles apart (no pun intended), but one thing they share is a fragile relationship with the press, or more specifically, the so-called Mainstream Media (MSM). Donald Trump regularly rails against what he calls 'Fake news,' i.e. anything published or broadcast that either criticises him or does not share his worldview, while Jeremy Corbyn has recently acquitted himself less than impressively by displaying no little contempt in front of the cameras on a couple of occasions. Questioned about his involvement in a wreath laying at a Palestinian Martyrs Cemetery in 2014, Mr Corbyn rolled his eyes and sighed in exasperation at the interviewer's temerity in asking a question of significant interest to the public. Then, when asked by Channel 4 news if he honestly thought that the UK was better off outside the European Union, he responded no less than six times with evasive answers. And let's not even get started on the furore about allegations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.
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| "I'm not rolling my eyes! Have you seen that cobweb up there?" |
If I give the impression of singling out Jeremy Corbyn for dissembling and providing disingenuous answers, it is only to illustrate a universal truth about politicians, that they only want to give answers to questions they wished they had been asked, not the more difficult ones that interviewers throw their way. An exception, of course, is Fox News who in interviewing Donald Trump lob him a few easy balls that he proceeds to attempt to knock into the next parish, albeit that he sometimes comes close to failing even with these dolly-drops.
One of the reasons that Mr Corbyn featured in my nocturnal subconscious may have been thanks to a speech that he gave last week at the Edinburgh Television Festival in which he raised some interesting, but ultimately worrying points. To a large degree I go along with his idea that the BBC's licence fee needs reviewing, although I'd take issue with his view that in part this needs to be done to reduce the cost of the licence fee to poorer households. A year's TV licence is £150.50; the cheapest Sky package is about £480 per annum - to which many families who fall in the category of poorer households subscribe - and that is before additional services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and the like are factored in. If the BBC loses its ability to raise funds through the licence and does not take on advertising, then revenue generation is probably going to come in the form of subscriptions or Pay-Per-View, rather than Mr Corbyn's proposal that 'tech giants and Internet Service Providers' pay a digital licence fee. Such a fee may be difficult to implement or would be passed on to customers in the event that it was introduced. None the more for that, Corbyn is right to raise the matter; licence fee reform is long overdue, and while his proposals may not fly, they will at least spark debate.
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| The TV Licence; an anachronism these days? |
Mr Corbyn's speech included a Trump-like criticism of the press and came with a proposal that journalists be given the right to elect their editors once newspaper or broadcaster becomes “particularly large or influential," which I guess would encompass most of the current British press even now. It exposes a typical politician's support for a free press, which exists only as long as the free press is being nice to them and not asking awkward questions.
The digital information age we find ourselves in today has changed the way we consume news irrevocably. There is little that I have read lately that sums this up better than an article on The Conversation website written by Doug Specht of the University of Westminster [1]. "In the “old” media landscape of even just a few years ago, Specht writes, the public was able to collectively develop ways of identifying bias and distinguish truth from lies and propaganda. But today that’s much harder – not just because of the volume of information, but also because algorithmic curation makes it increasingly difficult for laypeople to develop strategies that successfully identify bias." He goes on to say, "While a certain amount of scepticism is useful when deciding what sources to trust, the level of ambivalence, distrust and cynicism on display today is something else. Thanks to the sheer volume of information with which users are now inundated, compounded by skewed algorithms and bellicose Trumpian rhetoric railing against fake news, readers and viewers are increasingly unable to discern that which demands scepticism from that which doesn’t. The net result is a terminal sense of ambivalence."
Ambivalence is most certainly something that I feel on reading the news these days (along with cynicism and distrust). You know how it goes, a newspaper or website reports something uncomplimentary about someone - usually a politician, often POTUS45 - they decry it as fake news, and then they or their cronies come out with some rebuttal that contains as many, if not more, inaccuracies, unsubstantiated statements and even downright falsehoods as the original statement they were complaining about. Donald Trump has gone so far as to claim that Google is showing only fake news stories about him. When politicians complain that the free-press is giving them a hard time, we surely are only a step or two from them deciding that state intervention in guiding the news agenda is a desirable goal.
Perhaps Mr Trump, who once claimed that he could call up Bill Gates to help him shut off the internet to curb radical extremism, should get together with Mr Corbyn, who in his recent Edinburgh speech floated the idea of a publicly owned social media platform to rival Facebook. The free-press, so called because it is free of government influence and control, may be in the hands of 'unaccountable billionaires,' and may not report on politicians in the way they would like, but how much more damaging would state-controlled media, in which I include internet companies and social media, be? Facebook may have faced scandals recently over the harvesting of personal information by Cambridge Analytica, and we may reasonably have concerns over what data the social media giant has on us and how they use it, but how much scarier would it be if our social media accounts were state-run, state-controlled? How much more likely would data be lost, compromised or misused?
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| Graphic: bestdroidplayer.com |
On reflection, we would probably have nothing to fear. Given the track record of successive British governments in large IT projects, a state-run equivalent of Facebook would be so awful that no one would use it, and if they did, it would probably crash immediately and never recover.
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