Reviews for Thinking clearly

The average rating for Thinking clearly based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-04-20 00:00:00 Donald Parker This is a really interesting book – but I’m not going to review it all here, as there is such a lot of detail and I’m really only interested in the helicopter view – the view that helps to explain how social policy and media reportage intersect. Now, the problem is that I’ve a horrible feeling that the helicopter view might be exactly the wrong view – the one that is too far up above the mess to really make sense of the patterns. Where this book is particularly good is in showing precisely that mess, in much the same way that say New Media, Old News: Journalism & Democracy in the Digital Age also does, with updated examples. The examples used here are of their time – the Bulger murder case, HIV/AIDS and Paedophiles. These give a really interesting insight into the way issues of social policy are framed by the media and how these are impacted by the way the public are likely to view and understand these issues. In most cases the problem with these issues is a kind of delusional vision the media presents – you know, if you take paedophiles, you might wonder why the danger that ‘strangers’ present is stressed over the statistically much greater danger that friends and family present to children. The standard story is that the media is the main source the public has for gaining access to the issues associated with social policy. The government can’t communicate with the public directly – and anyway, the media are experts at interrogating both policy and politicians, so the best of all possible worlds involves the media literally mediating between politicians and public opinion. The problem mentioned almost on the first page of this book is that public policy makes up a remarkably small proportion of the news. To quote from the first page of this: “Peter Golding, for example, reporting the findings of an analysis of media coverage of policy between 1996–97, confirms that social policy reports constitute only 11 per cent of all domestic news coverage in national newspapers, radio and television”. You have to take this in relation to other stuff I’ve been reading lately too. That is, that the vast majority of news in the media is local news. You might think that the reason why so little news is set aside for policy discourse is because we have become ‘globalised’ and so world news has become so much more important – but this just isn’t the case. The other problem is that, “reporting tends to focus overwhelmingly on the shortcomings of policy decisions and their implementation and certainly provides credence for the widely held journalistic maxim that ‘bad news is to journalism what dung is to rhubarb’” Page 2. To me, this is a large part of the problem with having the Habermasian ‘public sphere’ owned and operated by private media outlets. These organisations have a vested interest in promoting private over public provision. As such they create ‘common sense’ notions that public provision is invariably wasteful, bureaucratic and (amusingly enough) anti-democratic. This vision is based on the romantic notion that the media is the keeper of truth and integrity in our society. And sometimes this is actually true. You need only think back to say, Nixon, to see that sometimes the media really does hold power to account. The problem is that the media uses such myths to show that this is a constant state of being for them, that they are always holding corrupt governments and government officials to account. However, it is important to remember in this context that it is we – the people – who elect our governments and that it is having buckets of money that decides who will own a newspaper. And in owning a newspaper only the most naïve would assume that this has no influence in what gets printed in that newspaper. What is particularly interesting here is that newspapers so rarely have anything to say that is negative about corporations. They can’t, really, as about 70% of their finances come from advertising, so, alienating companies (even pretending companies didn’t literally own media) would be a remarkably dumb thing to do. Still, the real problem here is that businesses are grossly under reported as contributing to the policy domain. It is one of the chief silences in our public sphere. But we all know the influence of ‘pressure groups’ and who are the main contributors to these. The alternative vision to the one where the media are the fourth estate and moral guardians of our society is the one where, “The media, rather than providing a vehicle for critical and radical appraisals of government and the policy process, are merely conduits for the burgeoning flood of handouts emanating from the expansive numbers of public relations experts, press officers and spin doctors employed by government, political parties and a range of specialist interest groups with policy agendas to promote.” Page 9. This really ought to be considered much more closely today than when these words where written – that is because the move towards new media has cut the amount of money available to media to engage in investigative journalism, and so their reliance on what is given them is much greater now. It is certainly not the case that the media are completely innocent receivers of news from cynical government spin-doctors – the point I’m making isn't quite as simple as that. It is that there is no single node of this relationship that has all of the power or that has no power at all. It is also that we should beware of the standard lines that are presented to us, not because they are never true, but because we can often be lead to believe they are always true. So, the notion that the media only ever gives us the news we want really needs to be put under some scrutiny if only because it is so self-serving. If it proves to be true, all well and good – but as an initial assumption it ought to cause some concerns. That the government is always seeking to undermine your freedom and the media is trying to protect it – given the dominance of advertising in most media – is also something that should give us reason for pause. As I said earlier, there is a general assumption that the way the system works is that the government formulates policy, the media interprets and disseminates that policy for open discussion (where all relevant voices get to be heard in the open market place of ideas) and from this discussion the public forms an opinion which is then fed back to politicians by the media. A book I read recently even had a model of this media/policy model made up of boxes with arrows – distinctive because the arrows only passed back and forth between the media and government and the media and public. There were literally no links in the whole of policy formation between the government and the public. This is really interesting, because it makes a series of assumptions that are essentially and demonstrably wrong. Firstly, that what happens in society is fundamentally a battle of ideas. Now, this might ultimately be true – but I know that the Australian government is about to, if it can get it passed through the Senate, make a law that will strip people under 30 of any unemployment benefits for 6 months of every year they are unemployed. I suspect that whether or not the media discusses this change, the policy will have a direct impact on the lives of those affected. The media can say it is terrible or it can say it is great – but the lived experience of those directly impacted by this policy will communicate something to them directly via the change in life experience, whether they read the papers or not. That is, something unmediated by the media. Secondly, the government has access to advertising – and increasingly uses this access to communicate directly with the public. In fact, it is one of the things just about every opposition complains about. Not only that, but the government increasingly sees its role as having less to do with policy formation and more to do with message control. As is quoted here, ‘The policy content of all major speeches, press releases and new policy initiatives should be cleared in good time with the No. 10 private office’. Page 28 This message control is increasingly the core role of any government and a key way to see if a government is about to hit the rocks is in how it begins to lose control of its key messages – often due to leaks from within government itself. How often do we here that ‘division is death’? The other thing that governments increasingly do is punish media for not presenting a proper line. That is, they give favours to their favourites, giving them exclusives and leaking policy initiatives to them ahead of time. This makes ‘being on the inside’ much more rewarding than ‘doing your job’ as a critic and reviewer of policy in the public interest. The relationship with the media works both ways, of course. There is a lovely quote here: “‘We have a Prime Minister’, Nick Cohen argues, ‘who cannot control his tongue when Rupert Murdoch’s posterior passes by’” Page 30 A major problem is that we are literally seeing a kind of dumbing down of audiences – and this is not helped by the media having less time to understand and interpret policy. If policies are too complex they don’t get reported at all. The difficulty being that we have been so trained to respond to sound bites, to understand the world in simple binaries of good and evil, self and public interest – as well as assuming that governments are essentially about waste, that we can hardly read an article about policy that doesn’t involve a sex scandal or someone ripping off little old ladies. These media presentations of how our society works are not necessarily all that accurate. The fact we never hear any positive news informs how we will think about any policy measure. There are a series of horrifying articles at the end of this book about how the media present foster care and other services. These presentations by the media have real impacts on the lives of real people – and our preferences for the dirt and corruption – even when there might not really be any – impacts on how these services are provided. You know, governments are much less likely to provide these services themselves now, because governments tend to be tide to freedom of information policies, and so instead they ‘contract out’ these services, because then the services are ‘commercial in confidence’. How are we served by having less information about the social services we pay for to protect the least powerful in our societies? Might a private media have an interest in promoting private services over public ones and ought we fall for this three card trick every time?

Review # 2 was written on 2014-09-22 00:00:00 Nicholas Evans وقع هذا الكتاب النفيس في يدي اثناء زيارتي لمكتبه عامه في مدينه عيسى ،، فعلا كما قال بورخيس : الجنه على شكل مكتبه! انه الكتاب الذي يجعلك مثقف فجأه حال الانتهاء منه ،، مقتطفات من السير الذاتيه لعديد من الادباء الامريكين ان لم يكن جميعهم بالاضافه الى جميع اعمالهم الادبيه تمت الاشاره اليها في هذا الكتاب ! تمنياتي للجميع بقراءه شهيه