In all the analysis of the surprise and shock of yesterday's election result, three key influences to do with the process rather than the content of contemporary elections stand out:
First, polling is a distraction from the reality of what is occurring. Polling has provided the media with their primary source of news and debate throughout the election and, as a result, much of that debate and discussion has proved wholly irrelevant to the outcome. Lynton Crosby, who masterminded the Conservative's victory, has been quoted as saying, 'Ignore most of the opinion polls that you see in the newspapers, because they are so simplistic.' This proved true for Labour who were 'given false comfort by the national opinion polls showing the party neck and neck.'
Second, Crosby's strategy of negative campaigning, which is based on the politics of fear, has proved once again to be successful. In this case the fear was of 'the influence the SNP might hold over a minority Miliband government'; a fear which is a essentially unfounded but which, 'with typical shrewdness and ruthlessness, Crosby identified ... as a wedge that could be used against Labour, both in Scotland and in England.' Crosby has stated that, 'At its absolute simplest, a campaign is simply finding out who will decide the outcome … where are they, what matters to them, and how do you reach them?' (Andy Beckett). No-one has been more effective than Crosby at focusing on this simple truth.
Third, the continuing power of the predominantly right-wing press has been demonstrated. 'When Murdoch appeared before the Leveson inquiry he argued that the Sun’s “won it” headline had been “tasteless and wrong”, adding: “We don’t have that sort of power.” The election of 2015 might just prove him wrong.' The 'campaigning coverage of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sun and the Times, Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail and the Barclay brothers’ Telegraph titles has been a marked feature of this campaign ... the Sun, Murdoch’s biggest-selling title, was more virulently anti-Labour in this campaign than it was in the runup to the 1992 election when Neil Kinnock was depicted in a lightbulb on polling day.' 'With a party now in power whose only manifesto pledge on the media was to freeze the BBC’s licence fee, Murdoch and his UK executives can rest easy that they can do business again. Calls for a Leveson-approved press regulator are likely to diminish.' 'It is likely that whoever replaces Miliband as Labour leader will be even more wary of threatening Murdoch or any other press baron with increased regulation and the breakup of their empires.' (Jane Martinson)
Giles Fraser, as often, is both clear and honest in his reaction:
'Right now I feel ashamed to be English. Ashamed to belong to a country that has clearly identified itself as insular, self-absorbed and apparently caring so little for the most vulnerable people among us. Why did a million people visiting food banks make such a minimal difference? Did we just vote for our own narrow concerns and sod the rest? Maybe that’s why the pollsters got it so badly wrong: we are not so much a nation of shy voters as of ashamed voters, people who want to present to the nice polling man as socially inclusive, but who, in the privacy of the booth, tick the box of our own self-interest.'
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Patti Smith - After The Gold Rush.
Showing posts with label murdoch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label murdoch. Show all posts
Saturday, 9 May 2015
Tuesday, 4 October 2011
A special rapport with writers and actors
Local colleague, Fr. Gareth Jones, has posted regarding the Memorial Requiem of Prebendary Gerard Irvine at St Matthew's, Westminster last Saturday.
Irvine was a priest with a special ministry to writers, actors and politicians as these extracts from obituaries demonstrate:
"Irvine had a special rapport with writers and actors, many of whom recognised beneath his charm, hospitality and friendship a wisdom derived from his deep devotion to God. Iris Murdoch, PD James and AN Wilson were among these, as was Tony Warren, the inventor of Coronation Street, and Barry Humphries, the creator of Dame Edna Everage.
Politicians also responded to his lovable character. Harold and Mary Wilson valued him as a near neighbour when they were living in Lord North Street, during the refurbishment of 10 Downing Street. Tom Driberg had a room in the clergy house for several years, and the Labour MP Frank Field was another close friend. Several spies are said to have called in from time to time. Yet there was always space for the hungry and the homeless." Obituary in the Daily Telegraph
"He had the secret of being lovable, and of loving other people, across the social scale. His friendships ranged from spies and politicians – Maurice Oldfield, Harold and Mary Wilson, Tom Driberg and Frank Field – to literary figures like Rose Macaulay, John Betjeman, Iris Murdoch, PD James and AN Wilson. There were also popular figures like Tony Warren, the inventor of Coronation Street, and the teenagers in his youth club at Holy Angels, Cranford (then a Nissen hut overflown by the planes from the new London Airport), some of whom were still in touch years later ...
No one knows all the details of his relationships with the leaders of politics and culture of the 20th century but perhaps Irvine's joyful and thoughtful face offered something important in an age of doubt.
Rose Macaulay wrote of him: "a clever young prophet, very good company too." " Obituary from The Independent
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The Beatles - Paperback Writer.
Irvine was a priest with a special ministry to writers, actors and politicians as these extracts from obituaries demonstrate:
"Irvine had a special rapport with writers and actors, many of whom recognised beneath his charm, hospitality and friendship a wisdom derived from his deep devotion to God. Iris Murdoch, PD James and AN Wilson were among these, as was Tony Warren, the inventor of Coronation Street, and Barry Humphries, the creator of Dame Edna Everage.
Politicians also responded to his lovable character. Harold and Mary Wilson valued him as a near neighbour when they were living in Lord North Street, during the refurbishment of 10 Downing Street. Tom Driberg had a room in the clergy house for several years, and the Labour MP Frank Field was another close friend. Several spies are said to have called in from time to time. Yet there was always space for the hungry and the homeless." Obituary in the Daily Telegraph
"He had the secret of being lovable, and of loving other people, across the social scale. His friendships ranged from spies and politicians – Maurice Oldfield, Harold and Mary Wilson, Tom Driberg and Frank Field – to literary figures like Rose Macaulay, John Betjeman, Iris Murdoch, PD James and AN Wilson. There were also popular figures like Tony Warren, the inventor of Coronation Street, and the teenagers in his youth club at Holy Angels, Cranford (then a Nissen hut overflown by the planes from the new London Airport), some of whom were still in touch years later ...
No one knows all the details of his relationships with the leaders of politics and culture of the 20th century but perhaps Irvine's joyful and thoughtful face offered something important in an age of doubt.
Rose Macaulay wrote of him: "a clever young prophet, very good company too." " Obituary from The Independent
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The Beatles - Paperback Writer.
Saturday, 9 July 2011
The News of the World as soap opera
Ian Jack, in today's Guardian, suggests that with the closure of the News of the World "the great age of Britain's popular press is drawing squalidly to its close."
What he calls the great age of the popular press, he characterises in two vignettes. First, the owning by the News of the World of "what the Victorians knew as our baser selves" through the paper's specialisation in "salacious accounts of sex and violence." Second, the "enterprising devotion" of the popular press to the frivolous as characterised by Lord Northcliffe, who "spread the word to his staff like a preacher: roughly, to subvert the words of Philip Larkin, readers were forever surprising a hunger in themselves to be more trivial."
"Crime exclusives," Northcliffe noted: "are noticed by the public more than any other sort of news. They attract attention, which is the secret of newspaper success. They are the sorts of dramatic news the public always affects to criticise but is always in the greatest hurry to read ... Watch the sales during a big murder mystery, especially if there is a woman in it. It is a revelation of how much the public is interested in realities, action and mystery. It is only human."
This "only human" principle of feeding our baser selves with a daily diet of reality, action, sex, violence, and the trivial has led, in time, to the ongoing reality soap opera which forms the substance of the redtops, celebrity mags, reality TV, and online chats/tweets encompassing as it does the 'who has been seen where', 'who is with who', 'who has broken up with who', 'who has attacked who', and 'who has cracked up and/or rehabilitated' of the real (and, sometimes, manufactured for money) lives of celebrities, entertainers, politicians, sportstars and victims of serious crime.
This ongoing soap opera which blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction has become 'the news' for many, if not most of us. In what Ian Jack calls "the great age of Britain's popular press," it was the redtops which provided this daily diet to millions of us but, with the advent of rolling news and the internet, the ability of the redtops to deliver, sufficiently quickly, the public face of this celebrity reality soap opera has diminished pushing the News of the World into its alleged illegal focus on the secret face of the celebrity reality soap opera.
This soap opera now provides our sense of the sacred. Gordon Lynch, writing in the same edition of the Guardian, explains that: "Coverage of the death of Baby P or processions at Wootton Bassett honouring soldiers killed in action momentarily bind their audiences together in strong, moral sentiment, either through their recognition of a particular sacred form or horror at its pollution ... The moral credibility of news media lies partly in their ability to work with the grain of sacred meanings shared with their audience ... The degree to which the News of the World profaned what many people take as sacred is unprecedented in post-war media history ... The tipping point came when the actions of people associated with the News of the World became profanations, an evil polluting the cherished sacred significance embodied in the stories of Milly Dowler, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, and the 7/7 bombings."
The death of the News of the World, however, does not diminish in any way the celebrity reality soap opera. Instead, it feeds it. Rupert Murdoch, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson have all become part of the story in ways that they never intended - indeed they are 'the story' for the moment - but, because we are fed by this ongoing soap opera and therefore need those who become stories in it, I predict that - as in the career of Piers Morgan - the story will rehabilitate them at some point in the future and by means of some other role in the soap opera, as long as they come to accept that they have, by foul means, become characters within the ongoing celebrity reality soap opera that they themselves have helped to perpetuate.
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Echo and The Bunnymen - The Puppet.
What he calls the great age of the popular press, he characterises in two vignettes. First, the owning by the News of the World of "what the Victorians knew as our baser selves" through the paper's specialisation in "salacious accounts of sex and violence." Second, the "enterprising devotion" of the popular press to the frivolous as characterised by Lord Northcliffe, who "spread the word to his staff like a preacher: roughly, to subvert the words of Philip Larkin, readers were forever surprising a hunger in themselves to be more trivial."
"Crime exclusives," Northcliffe noted: "are noticed by the public more than any other sort of news. They attract attention, which is the secret of newspaper success. They are the sorts of dramatic news the public always affects to criticise but is always in the greatest hurry to read ... Watch the sales during a big murder mystery, especially if there is a woman in it. It is a revelation of how much the public is interested in realities, action and mystery. It is only human."
This "only human" principle of feeding our baser selves with a daily diet of reality, action, sex, violence, and the trivial has led, in time, to the ongoing reality soap opera which forms the substance of the redtops, celebrity mags, reality TV, and online chats/tweets encompassing as it does the 'who has been seen where', 'who is with who', 'who has broken up with who', 'who has attacked who', and 'who has cracked up and/or rehabilitated' of the real (and, sometimes, manufactured for money) lives of celebrities, entertainers, politicians, sportstars and victims of serious crime.
This ongoing soap opera which blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction has become 'the news' for many, if not most of us. In what Ian Jack calls "the great age of Britain's popular press," it was the redtops which provided this daily diet to millions of us but, with the advent of rolling news and the internet, the ability of the redtops to deliver, sufficiently quickly, the public face of this celebrity reality soap opera has diminished pushing the News of the World into its alleged illegal focus on the secret face of the celebrity reality soap opera.
This soap opera now provides our sense of the sacred. Gordon Lynch, writing in the same edition of the Guardian, explains that: "Coverage of the death of Baby P or processions at Wootton Bassett honouring soldiers killed in action momentarily bind their audiences together in strong, moral sentiment, either through their recognition of a particular sacred form or horror at its pollution ... The moral credibility of news media lies partly in their ability to work with the grain of sacred meanings shared with their audience ... The degree to which the News of the World profaned what many people take as sacred is unprecedented in post-war media history ... The tipping point came when the actions of people associated with the News of the World became profanations, an evil polluting the cherished sacred significance embodied in the stories of Milly Dowler, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, and the 7/7 bombings."
The death of the News of the World, however, does not diminish in any way the celebrity reality soap opera. Instead, it feeds it. Rupert Murdoch, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson have all become part of the story in ways that they never intended - indeed they are 'the story' for the moment - but, because we are fed by this ongoing soap opera and therefore need those who become stories in it, I predict that - as in the career of Piers Morgan - the story will rehabilitate them at some point in the future and by means of some other role in the soap opera, as long as they come to accept that they have, by foul means, become characters within the ongoing celebrity reality soap opera that they themselves have helped to perpetuate.
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Echo and The Bunnymen - The Puppet.
Monday, 3 November 2008
Ethics in a global economy
Ethics in a global economy was a timely seminar, held on Wednesday 29th October, to explore faith perspectives on business ethics, at the level both of the global economy and the individual workplace.
Participants in the seminar called for a shared faiths perspective on the credit crunch to be developed and Faiths in London’s Economy (FiLE), the organisers of the event, undertook to facilitate that work.
The seminar was held at the St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace and was based on the understanding that the global economy operates in a multi-faith world which continually raises ethical issues for individuals and organisations.
Contributors to the event included:
Participants in the seminar called for a shared faiths perspective on the credit crunch to be developed and Faiths in London’s Economy (FiLE), the organisers of the event, undertook to facilitate that work.
The seminar was held at the St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace and was based on the understanding that the global economy operates in a multi-faith world which continually raises ethical issues for individuals and organisations.
Contributors to the event included:
- Dr Edmund Newell (Director, St Paul’s Institute) who spoke about the importance of the credit crunch being used as an opportunity for reflection across the global economy and within which faith communities have a valuable contribution to make.
- Jay Lakhani (Head, Hindu Academy) who highlighted the needs of those in the two-thirds world whose experience was consistently one of poverty and called for this period of reflection to be one that takes account of the needs of such people.
- Alison Murdoch (Director, Essential Education) who highlighted 16 guidelines for life and helped participants apply these to real life ethical issues in their workplaces through an interactive exercise.
- Saif Ahmad (CEO, Muslim Aid) who encouraged those present to be the people to drive this agenda and these issues forward from a faiths perspective.
Justine Huxley, St Ethelberga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace, said:
“I felt it was a valuable first conversation and the speakers created an interesting range of perspectives. I hope we can do some kind of follow up to this. It would be good to start the ball rolling and help get a multi-faith response to this more widely heard.”
FiLE is a new network working with a range of organisations across London in order to create coordinated faith-community responses to the issues facing London's economy. FiLE is seeking to foster a more creative engagement between faith communities and employers. In facilitating a shared response across faiths to the issues raised by the credit crunch we will seek to demonstrate that faith can be put to work in work to bring real creativity and change.
Organisations that have so far worked together on different aspects of FiLE’s agenda include: Employer’s Forum on Belief, European Baha’i Business Forum, Faith Regen Foundation, Mission in London’s Economy and St Ethelberga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace.
As a new network, our first initiative has been to begin to map organisations delivering resources and services on issues of faith and work across London and to share the information we have found with others through listing these organisations and resources on our webpage at http://www.mile.org.uk/file.htm. As this listing grows, it will offer employers and employees a one-stop shop for organisations and resources addressing issues of faith and work available in London.
Secondly, as part of raising awareness and removing misconceptions about issues of faith and work, we have begun a seminar series addressing such issues. The series began by considering Ethics in a global economy and will continue by exploring Faith-based models of Leadership. Through this series of seminars we will seek to broaden employers’ perceptions of the ways in which faith impacts work including issues such as creativity, diversity, empowerment, relationships, service delivery, transformation and values, among others.
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Pink Floyd - Money.
Thursday, 30 October 2008
Ethics in a global economy
Here are some of the comments that have been received following Wednesday's seminar on Ethics in a global economy:
- "Thank you for a really well organised and interesting event with good speakers and discussion."
- "I certainly received the impression the seminar was greatly appreciated by everyone present and am convinced we will be able to build on it as we begin to plan our next seminar together."
- "Just wanted to say thank you for yesterday's event. I felt it was a valuable first conversation and the speakers created an interesting range of perspectives. I hope we can do some kind of follow up to this. It would be good to start the ball rolling and help get a multi-faith response to this more widely heard."
- "I was very impressed with the contribution from the rest of the group. This country has given many good things to the rest of the world like (as Ed remarked) the Banking system. Yet people in this country do not recognise the even greater concept they posses - dignifying humanity - this concept too needs to be globalised. What we may do in a small group can become the catalyst to do this."
- "I hope you were encouraged by today - I thought it went very well and had an interesting mix of people and contributers. I particularly valued the exercise we particpated in on the 16 core values. I can talk for the UK in the Olympics but always gain massively from those sort of participative exercises."
One of the participants, Zaki Cooper, had a very useful article on Faith and business: a new deal for the modern workplace published recently in The Times while Alison Murdoch, one of the contributors to the seminar, has highlighted an interesting initiative from The Templeton Foundation. "Does the free market corrode moral character?" is the Big Question posed in the latest of the Templeton Foundation's advertorials, which has been running this autumn in newspapers and magazines in the United States and the UK . The advertorials bring together different combinations of the thirteen distinguished commentators and public figures who have written essays responding to the question. The essays are available in their entirety at www.templeton.org/market, where the full texts can be read, printed as PDFs, or requested in a free printed booklet.
I'll post more on the event and its outcomes shortly.
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Sam Phillips - Can't Come Down.
Monday, 29 September 2008
Ethics in a global economy
The programme for 'Ethics in a Global Economy,' the FiLE seminar being held on Wednesday 29th October at the St Ethelburga's Centre for Reconciliation & Peace, has now been finalised. The full list of contributors to the day is Saif Ahmad (CEO, Muslim Aid); Jay Lakhani (Head, Hindu Academy), Alison Murdoch (Director, Essential Education) and Dr. Edmund Newell (Director, St Paul 's Institute).
The programme will be as follows:
8.30am Breakfast and registration.
8.30am Breakfast and registration.
9.00am Introductions and icebreaker
9.15am Keynote speech from Ed Newell (including Q&A)
9.45am Breakout groups:
Group 1 - ‘Faiths & business ethics’ with Alison Murdoch & Jay Lakhani. Question: Is it possible to be true to your faith values and be a responsible employer or employee?
Group 2 - ‘Ethics of business in a multi-faith world’ with Saif Ahmad & Ed Newell. Questions: What relevance do faith communities have to a global economy? How can a faith community be heard in a global economy? What change can faith communities bring?
10.45am Break
11.00am Repeat of Breakout groups
10.45am Break
11.00am Repeat of Breakout groups
12.00noon Panel session with panellists: Saif Ahmad, Jay Lakhani, Alison Murdoch and Ed Newell.
12.40pm Keynote speech – Jay Lakhani
1.00pm Lunch
Cost: £50.00 for organisations, £25.00 for individuals. To book a place call Emma at Faith Regen Foundation on 020 8361 2288 or email her at emma@faithregenuk.org. For more information see: http://www.mile.org.uk/file.htm.
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Nu Colours - Desire.
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