Two National Government Inquiries - regulation

Two National Government Inquiries into press and media behavior with one response – regulation. 

The UK and Australian Governments conducted broad ranging investigations into the performance of news organizations and journalists in their respective nations. The final reports are now out: An inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press (Leveson Report, 29 November 2012 levesoninquiry) and the Report of the Independent Inquiry into the Media and Media Regulation (Finkelstein Report, 28 February 2012 Australian Finkelstein). The Australian report showed its colors by subtitling itself, Report to the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. It was arguably forward looking, while the UK inquiry was reviewing history. 

Indeed, on 13 July 2011 Prime Minister David Cameron told the UK Parliament the reasons why the inquiry was being held. It was impossible to avoid the role News International and the now defunct News of the World played in bringing about the inquiry.  Leveson’s report started with the PM’speech. In republishing the speech to Parliament Leveson allowed Cameron’s words to repeat the allegation. The first line of Leveson reads, as did the first line of Cameron’s speech to Parliament:

“In recent days, the whole country has been shocked by the revelations of the phone

hacking scandal.” (page 1). Or as they say in Coventry, ‘Hello Rupert!’

 Leveson was directed by the Terms of Reference. And while the case was generated by the straw that broke the camel’s back, phone hacking, the peppering of the report with direct references to News International makes for a sorry tale of journalistic failure at an institutional level. The first part of the report Terms of Reference became its title:

1.       To inquire into the culture, practices, and ethics of the press… (page 4)

It is impossible to miss the point that the target was News International.

The second part of the inquiry will examine the extent of unlawful or improper conduct

at the News of the World and other newspapers… (page 4) …

(c) the extent to which the current policy and regulatory framework has failed

including in relation to data protection; (page 5)…

3. To inquire into the extent of unlawful or improper conduct within News International,

other newspaper organisations and, as appropriate, other organisations within the

media, and by those responsible for holding personal data. (Page 5)

It’s easy to criticise an institution with poor professional practices like News International. It is much more difficult to reform an entire system.

As I have noted previously on the Uprising blog, the challenge for newspaper journalism is digitization. Newspapers and the journalists who work in them are not in a happy place these days. It is pretty easy to see how the phone hacking scandal took place: digital technologies allowed reasonably smart people to gain information that had previously been private and then use that private information to sell newspapers, in public. 

How can a newspaper system be reformed when it is based on sixteenth century technology? 

The response to that question has multiple levels.

The first is that criminal acts have been determined to be just that and the editors and journalists from the News of the World will have to explain their phone hacking behaviour in court. That will be significant because the laws that apply to data in the digital era are not clearly transferable.

Criminals are redefined in the new digital context.  Historical antecedents for criminal redefinitions associated with new technology: when the printing press emerged, when radio started playing popular music and pirate radio stations went offshore…

Here is a hypothetical question: How long will it be before cell phone hacking is legal?

Second, philosophically the challenge is how to deploy jurisprudence in a situation where it is still in formation. The answer is that no one should be treated in the way people were treated in the UK phone hacking scandal. Jurisprudence is a low level solution to the social problems that emerge from the unregulated Internet.  

Third, elsewhere I have written about the way wilful neglect plays out.  Predator Drones, Wilful Neglect 

This is a bigger issue than what we can ever hope to cover, although it may be helpful to assess traditional media in the light of new media and see how wilful neglect is always part of the dilemma of liberalism – what types of human action will civil society tolerate? The challenge of the Internet is that it allows users to overlook previously unacceptable forms of human behaviour because they appear in the Internet context, not the print media context. The Internet offers new opportunities for predatory and pecuniary action, including redefinitions of privacy and publicness. It magnifies and redefines these terms and the concepts associated with them. 

It is hardly surprising then that the UK and Australian inquiries both opted for regulation, as a statutory system of public interest concerns.

Leveson recommended an independent self regulator for the UK…but as I write that is in the process of becoming a system of non statutory regulation. guardian leveson comment1

It is also no surprise that the majority of media owners, practitioners and many journalists have opposed regulation.
In contrast there are those who know the system from the inside and recognise the need for a new method. Please see my blog November 17, 2011 about Eric Beecher’s call for a public press funding system in Australia.Beecher See also Lachlan Murdoch on his grandfather, Keith, Rupert’s father. Lachlan

 In Australia the call was for a system ‘To rectify existing and emerging weaknesses in the current regulatory structures it is recommended that there be established an independent statutory body which may be called the ‘News Media Council’, to oversee the enforcement of standards of the news media…’ (p. 290).

The Australian recommendation set the cat amongst the pigeons as well. This inquiry set out to make sense of new media. In contrast Leveson set out to understand what happened in the phone hacking scandal and where possible offer a political solution to the view that News international has unreasonable influence in the UK. These were two very different inquiries.

 In sharing outcomes that recommended regulation as a solution both inquiries reinforced my view that we need an expanded public education campaign about regulation.      

Australian Cultural Digital Facilitation: Position Paper

Position Paper

 Australian Cultural Digital Facilitation (ACDF)

National Questions of Culture-Commerce-Convergence

The Australian Federal Government’s Convergence Review together with the National Cultural Policy Review have provoked questions about funding and continued public support for the cultural sector. Australian national interest is reflected in cross-party funding over many years for cultural institutions – Australian Film and Television / Screen Australia, Triple J, Australian Broadcasting Corporation and more recently support for new media and creative industries. (See for example http://australia.gov.au/topics/culture-history-and-sport/cultural-institutions). It is a growing and complex set of demands that combines culture with commerce and convergence.

Traditional support for national cultural institutions is coming under pressure and must change in the electronic (that is Internet / digital) environment. Increasing numbers of Australians receive their cultural artefacts – cinema, music, television programming (sport and entertainment) and information services through the Internet.

The digital sector, or Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is the growth sector of the economy, and severely at risk from foreign content (note especially the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement). Australian cultural producers are disadvantaged. Most content now moves through the ICT network direct to consumers.

Telecommunication firms manage the network, with Telstra as the “incumbent” infrastructure owner dominating and given special treatment by the Federal Government to the tune of $11 bn to support its business.  Telstra is the digital gatekeeper and does not operate in a genuine marketplace, but as a protected (subsidised) provider.

The emergence of the National Broadband Network (NBN), to which Telstra connects along with all telecommunication companies (Optus, Vodaphone and others) will generate massive turnover. (Over and above the estimated current annual $40 bn turnover of the telecom companies).

The NBN growth projections suggest increased costs for consumers as Telstra and the NBN maximise profits. Most of the pressure for content will be from global, read US sources. This will ultimately challenge then undermine local content and creative industry producers.

The question is how to maximise support for Australian culture in this new context. Old and established approaches to funding support are unlikely to be effective as they will be costly, while freighted with traditional appeals from powerful interests.

Australian Cultural Digital Facilitation (ACDF) is the answer –a levy on all telecommunications (arts and culture) content transactions over the network. Just as the telecommunications firms charge consumers for downloads over the Internet, so the Australian Government charge the profit making firms for facilitating the flow of culture over the network.

It is a matter of justice.

The ACDF would levy a 2-5% fee on all telecom providers (not Internet Service Providers). This would include all cultural content transported by all operators using the Australian national telecommunications infrastructure / NBN: rate of levy is equal to 2-5% of gross revenues for wholesale and retail business. The levy would operate on all network traffic – terrestrial, fibre or cloud based digital transport (no exceptions) flowing through the national network. The fee would be only levied once per algorhythmic datum. For example, if a film was stored on a Hollywood server, transported to Australia, moved to a server in Melbourne to be downloaded on to a mobile phone in Broken Hill, the cost of that transaction would be levied one time – at the point it was downloaded by the user. The subscriber’s telecommunication provider would calculate the value of the transaction and pay that fee into an account, to be distributed quarterly to the collection agency.  

 The ACDF will produce the following results:

·      progressively engage the marketplace with culture in Australia;

• guarantee financial support for cultural industries;
• reduce and possibly remove cultural funding demands from Federal and State budgets;
• engage telecoms and ICTs with nation building, but not on their self-interested terms;
• offer an innovative approach to social provisioning;
• connect the telecommunication companies with the Australian public.   

The telecos would pay the fee to an ACDF Authority / Australia Council. Mandated distribution to all sectors of the creative community would be managed by this independent institution.

Marcus Breen

Banning YouTube in Pakistan

Resistance to digital media and its previously unfettered circulation is moving apace.
Lat week the US Government reportedly asked Google to take down clips from Innocence of Muslims, the film that has generated riots in the Muslim world - that includes Sydney, Australia, not quite an Islamic stronghold!

"...In Pakistan, the prime minister, Raja Pervaiz Ashraf, ordered the suspension of YouTube over the "blasphemous" Muhammad film."
Call to Ban You Tube

Escalation of this fury should be expected. The film offers a pretext for anti-US sentiment. Proving that media is much more powerful as a mobilizing tool than almost any other force.

Anti-Muslim film, the Internet = riots and revolt

This week the cultural collisions continue apace, as theocrats on one side of a religious argument prompt outrage from theocrats on the other. One side is racist, the other outraged. Fundamentalism always ends like this: bloody murder. The unfortunate aspect of this particular event is the inevitable hardening of positions. The more we are on line the harder the positions get! The Internet is the era of the new fundamentalism.

What started as an as yet unknown plan by US based media producers who were spoken of as Iraeli-American (!who come up with this identifier and who in news rooms lets it into public circulation?) to make a film mocking the prophet Mohammad was more than a joke. It was probably intended as an affront to Islam. From the Moslem perspective it is blasphemy.

The US ambassador and embassy staff - US citizens - killed in Libya, burning of KFC and other US businesses destroyed late in the week as the matter escalates in intensity. And the film or extracts of it continue to circulate on the Internet. Here is an unintended consequence that I predicted within the jihad approach to resistance. In Uprising the jihad case study offered a view of the way this particular religious and social movement would be unassailable as the unique characteristics of ideological grooming played out. Fundamentalist excess has an inevitability about it.  Here it is, another step towards a conflagration that is motivated by the circulation of offensive media on the Internet. (It is worth reflecting on the alternative: has any one ever killed a US representative, burned down a KFC or sacked an American government compound because of pornography. If anyone knows of a case please share your knowledge).

On 13 September 2012 the US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton was reported in her usual high handed lecture mode berating everyone who might not like the US! It's a big list. Why does Hilary Clinton not back down on this? The film is a disgrace and she said as much - thank you Hilary! Then went on to her preferred position - referring to "reasonsable people" and "responsible leaders" who need to do something to defend the good and the great - that is the US and its citizens and representatives.

Here we are again with an example of the standard language of the Enlightenment ("reasonable" and "responsible"). It is thrown around as if the use of this language is followed by the kind of behavior nice people prefer and practice. (Me too, by the way!) I would prefer not to have the film made and for it not to circulate and for everyone to live together in peace. That is not about to happen. The Internet has accentuated the identity politics of every religious and other group who seeks reinforcement of their prejudices. The new fundamentalism is here now.     

Overlay this with the US insistence on free speech. As Cass Sunstein argued (and as I said in Uprising) there is a moment in the Internet era when the question of free speech must be visited, explored anew and if necessary rewritten. Purist perspectives on this ideal are a derivation of Enlightenment, pre-internet communication. The new media of the Internet is free in a contradictory way that cannot be sustained in line with US Constitutional ideas.

The US Government itself has moved to stop the circulation of the anti-Islam film, thereby making the case that it too recognizes that there is a limit to what can circulate (we know that already with Government sanctioned limits on some extremes of pornography, especially involving children.)

Google has other ideas as The Guardian reported:

"The search engine Google on Friday night rejected a request by the Obama administration to reconsider a decision to keep a clip from Innocence of Muslims online, Reuters reported."Guardian - read last paragraph

The response to the film as it circulated on the Internet offers another perspective on the relationship between media and social action, revolt and dissent. For media theorists, there's a lot of hard thinking to be done.

News Corporation again - change in digital

News Corp.’s Chief Digital Officer to Step Down as Company Prepares to Split

New York Times 24 August, 2012

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/news-corp-s-chief-digital-officer-to-step-down-as-company-prepares-to-split/

Here is the first paragraph of the story:
"News Corporation’s chief digital officer, Jonathan Miller, will step down, the company announced on Thursday, in the latest example of an executive departing since News Corporation said it would split the publishing business from the rest of the company."

I have held off commenting or blogging about News for a while because I wanted to see what played out. Here we can see the beginnings of the end of the old News organization, as the digital flails. And it will continue to flail, perhaps ending the News Corporation, News International era in newspapers.

I have some interest in this story from a professional and personal perspective that stretches back to the days when I was a consultant with the Victorian Government's Department of State Development (1994-1996). Along with John Rimmer and Terry Dyson and a host of bureaucrats we set up Multimedai Victoria, after undertaking a research project at CIRCIT (Centre for International Research on Communication and Information Technologies), where I was the director of the cultural industries research program. As a consultant I had the good fortune to meet dozens of entrepreneurs from around the state, the country and the world working in the early start up days of the Internet.

One of the people I already knew - we had been on an invited panel to discuss Intellectual Property and Australian cultural industries at Film Australia - was Greg Clark. Greg had been an IBM executive and a physicist with a PhD. I liked him a lot. Urbane, easy to talk with and confident with the ability to self deprecate, as well as blow his own trumpet. He sounded very Australian.

In the mid-1990s he became the head of News Corporations digital initiatives and ended up working out of the Fox studio lot in Hollywood. I visited him there in 1995. It was clear that he had all the technical skill in the world to manage new media. In those days it was satellite and digital signaling for television - all of which worked out quite well for News with Fox News and Sky in Europe, the UK especially and the US. After doing the policy work for News to consolidate that side of the business Greg left News Corporation. He had a wonderful place over looking Central Park in New York City: at least that's what he told me. We spoke on occasion until 2003 after which I lost contact with him.

The reason I mention Greg Clark is as follows. There was a clear impression that News was determined to take the early mover advantage that the Internet offered. It did not know what it was doing but it knew it had to do something. Greg Clark was a scientist who knew a lot about signaling and satellites. He like all the rest of us knew very little about what would work - the creative destruction that the Internet would render to established media.

Incredibly, this is still the case. Jonathan Miller's departure is another in a long line of executives who do not know what to do about the twists and turns of the Internet.

When the Levenson Inquiry hands down its findings, there will be more challenges for News, as we are reminded that News had no idea that the behaviour of their journalists was criminal, uncivilized and brutalizing. More flailing which in the phone hacking case was about letting wild horses run free until someone or something caught up. The law and the British Prime Minister did just that. And the findings, like the criminal charges against former News Corporation (News of the World) editors and journalists will come during a Tory administration! Go figure?

Moslem Brotherood rules in Egypt

The arrival of Mahomad Morsi as President of Egypt is an unanticipated outcome of the convergence of digital technology with  a long standing social movement. Reading between the lines of the reports from the mainstream western media over the past few days, it looks as if no one really wants to talk too much about a US educated engineer with a PhD leading the most radical political movement on the planet. No surprises there because no one knows what to do!
On July 1, Al Jazeera news carried reports suggesting that this would be a pretty normal presidency, given Mori's commitment to democracy. Al Jazeera also carried live and in full on TV the Egyptian presidential inauguration and related speeches. Long sections of sung sections of the Koran set the meaning of this event far away from US Capitol prayers by chaplains, or the fundamentalist Christian crazies who populate western democratic politics almost everywhere. 
The point is that this is a major story with no end point. Plus, no country or government can invade to stop this shift.
Al Jazeera noted - actually one of their commentators noted - that Israel had not been able to stop the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood. That too is a major shift. Israel as the bully of the Middle East, backed up by the US, is increasingly friendless and lacking influence. It's credibility is in tatters, with internal political opposition to its beligerant approach to the region gaining traction. Force will not resolve Israel's position in the region or the world, but some semblance of common sense diplomacy might.
Israel's will be forced to rethink it place against the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood. Why?
The fact is that the brotherhood is the parent of Hamas. This is the big picture. Now in two cases - the West Bank of Palestine and Egypt - political parties closely associated with Islamic social movements have been elected to government. While Israel was able to literally corral Hamas on the West Bank it cannot do the same thing to Egypt.
Everyone will need to be prepared to understand what this means. In terms of my theory of proletarianization, it may mean that non-western styles of legislation, law and policy will come into play to become part of the flow of information. This will be as difficult to comprehend, just like any  shift away from established patterns of knowledge.
If it involves a reworking of the Taliban's feudalism, the Internet will offer a means for exposing that backwardness for what it is. It may be impossible to comprehend: what can be done? There will be major shifts in how all manner of issues are addressed - listening to Arabic language and long sections of the Koran in a semi-theocratic copnvention removes any separation between religion and the state. That aspect of change will for example, take a lot of getting used to.
This will be transgressive knowledge.
The potential linkage between Egypt, Hamas in the West Bank and the rising tide of Islamists in Africa especially will be quick and clear. This will be due to the exhaustion of the dislocated and abandoned, the subaltern and the abject. The hopeless cases of contemporary life have nowhere else to go - unless you buy into the endless and increasingly shrill claims (some people call this Public Relations) by charities and Non Government Organizations to solve the problems of the oppressed... No wonder millions voted for the Muslim Brotherhood, which as I understand it, have some of the best social and development programs in the region. This was the same reason Hamas was elected in the West Bank.       
These programs running alongside well conducted political campaigns will be mobilized by the Internet and related resources. The US Government will not be able to limit the circulation of the information from a duly elected government such as that in Egypt. The big news is that Egypt has a Muslim Brotherhood President which changes everything.
  

Radio National broadcast - AEST 8-9 pm, Wednesday

Please note that Wednesday 27 June, 2012, at 8-9 pm Australian Eastern Standard Time a recent public lecture I presented will be broadcast on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Big Ideas program.

ALSO availabe on line 

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/

The lecture is a selective description of Uprising: The Internet's Unintended Consequences.
The lecture was presented at The University of Queensland Centre for Cultural and Critical Studies. The center's Director, Professor Graeme Turner arranged and organized the event. My thanks to him, to the centre and all the people who attended the event.