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Ron Paul: still in the race – and with a remote chance of causing an upset!

Professor Richard Lance Keeble, Acting Head of the Lincoln School of Journalism, finds that – while maverick US Republican contender Ron Paul remains largely ignored by the mainstream media on both sides of the Atlantic – the complexities of the US voting system mean that he still has an outside chance of causing an upset

 Read the mainstream media and you would be forgiven for thinking that only one Republican remains in the race for the GOP presidential nomination – Mitt Romney. And yet Ron Paul remains – and he could win!

On 29 November last year I wrote a blog highlighting Paul as the ‘most interesting’ Republican candidate even though he had been entirely ignored by the mainstream media since the beginning of the caucuses season. Paul is in many respects a conventional libertarian, right-wing politician – and yet his opposition to US imperialism and the Federal Reserve is clearly beyond the pale for theUSpolitical Establishment and the mainstream media.

But these policies are clearly attracting support. And the complex system of appointing delegates to the Republican national convention in Tampameans that Paul could squeeze in. If Romney fails to gain the 1,144 delegates he needs on the first ballot then it becomes a brokered convention – and anything could be possible.[1]

Let’s explain: the first news about the Iowacaucus in January was that Mitt Romney had won. Later, we were told Rick Santorum was the victor. But, in fact, Paul gained 20 of the 28 delegates. A 3 May article on Salon.com[2] commented:

In many caucus states, the ‘official’ results that most people saw this winter were from nonbinding straw polls conducted in conjunction with precinct-level caucuses. But when it comes to choosing national convention delegates, the real action is at district caucuses and state conventions. In the past, this distinction hasn’t mattered much, but for the Paul forces – who lack the numbers to win statewide primaries but have the devotion to pack any room, anywhere, at any time – it has offered an inviting loophole. When turnout is small and no one is looking, the Paul folks can win, and that’s what’s been happening in a number of states.

To Paul die-hards, this will all culminate in a surprise in Tampa, with the political world suddenly realising that Romney actually doesn’t have the 1,144 delegates needed to win the nomination, thereby allowing Paul to extract major concessions or even steal the nomination for himself.

The American mainstream media is reluctantly beginning to acknowledge the possibility of an upset. On 6 May the Washington Post [3] reported on Paul’s victory in Nevada:

Despite former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s overwhelming victory in the Nevada caucuses, Texas Rep. Ron Paul has won a majority of the state’s delegates to the party’s national convention later this year in Tampa, Florida.

Thanks to organised Paul supporters, who have been working to increase their candidate’s support at state conventions around the country, 22 of the 25 Nevada delegates up for grabs will be Paul supporters. (Another three are automatic delegates.)

A recent Huffington Post [4] article acknowledged that Paul had won 20 of Minnesota’s 24 delegates. In Colorada, almost half of the state’s 33 delegates will be voting for Paul. In Maine, 21 of the 24 delegates are Paul backers.[5]

 To add another intriguing twist to the US presidential race, official figures suggest that while Paul has been alone amongst the candidates in daring to criticise US imperial aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, the Yemen and so on (and the hawkish threats to Iran) he has won the most support from individual members of the military – clearly angry at being embroiled in wasteful and unwinnable conflicts.[6]

The most recent count indicates that Paul has received $99,733 from individual members of the US Army, $75, 652 from the US Air Force, $73, 057 from the Navy and $32, 479 from the US Department of Defense – far more than any of the other presidential hopefuls. In contrast, Obama’s funding comes from Microsoft Corp and the University of California, Mitt Romney’s, not surprisingly, from the big banks: Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and Co., Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse Group.

So, who will win the Republican nomination remains an open question. For the mainstream media only Mitt Romney is there to challenge Obama – but let’s not forget Ron Paul and his wily, devoted followers.

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By Ian Richards – May 14, 2012

Are the local election results ‘within the normal range for mid-term result’?

Dr Andrew Defty, Senior Lecturer in Politics, Lincoln School of Social Sciences considers how yesterday’s results compare to previous mid-terms results:

Do local election results matter? Whilst the outcome is clearly important for thousands of local councillors and the people who live in those areas being contested, national politicians from all parties will spend the weeks  leading up to local elections seeking to depress expectations for fear that they might be judged on the results (not least by members of their own party).

Following local elections the party in government will inevitably claim that the public have taken the opportunity to give them a kicking but it will all be different come the general election. Cue Foreign Secretary William Hague on the Today programme this morning declaring that the results of yesterday’s local elections were ‘within the normal range for mid-term results’ for a party in government.

William Hague does have a point, parties in government do tend to do badly in local elections but it would be folly to dismiss this as unrelated to the outcome of subsequent general elections. In general elections the candidates and constituencies may be different but the parties and crucially those voting for them are the same.

So how do yesterday’s results compare to previous mid-terms results. To some extent this depends on how we define mid-term. If we look at previous occasions on which these seats were contested and compare the projected national equivalent share of the vote. At present  Labour’s national equivalent share of the vote is predicted to be around 39%, with the Conservatives on 31% and the Liberal Democrats on 16%. If we compare this with the national vote share the last time these seats were contested in 2008 the Conservatives, then in opposition secured 43%, with Labour on 24%,  and the Liberal Democrats on 23%. This does seem to support the view that parties in government get a kicking in local elections.

However, it is important to remember that at the next general election following the 2008 results Labour lost the election. If we go back to 1996, the last time these seats were contested when the Conservatives were in power, Labour secured 43% of the vote compared to the Conservatives 29%, and of course Labour then went on to win the 1997 general election. In contrast, when these seats were contested in 2000 and 2004, whilst the opposition party, the Conservatives, still secured a larger share of the vote, 38% and 37% respectively, it was Labour who went on to win the subsequent general elections in 2001 and 2005. What this suggests is that whilst it may be true that opposition parties tend to do well in mid-term local elections, it is the scale if their success which matters. If Labour stay on 39% the Conservatives may breathe easily but if the projected national equivalent share of the vote tips over 40% these results will look more like a 1996 or a 2008 than within the normal range for a party which hopes to remain in power.

If we compare these results with local elections at the same point, two years into previous governments the results look even less promising for the Conservatives. In local elections two years into the 1997 parliament Labour actually did better than the Conservative opposition securing 36% of the national equivalent share of the vote, compared to the Conservatives 34%. In local elections in 2003, two years into Labour’s second term, the Conservatives did come out on top with 35% of the vote, with Labour on 30%, but lost the 2005 general election. At local elections in 2007 two years into Labour’s third term the Conservatives hit the magic 40% share of the vote, and Labour lost the subsequent  general election in 2010.

Of course psephology is not an exact science and predicting the outcome of general elections on the basis of local elections is complicated by the low turnout in general elections which looks to be particularly acute this time around. However, it is perhaps accurate to say that the whilst parties in government do tend to do badly in local elections, the normal range for mid-term elections is quite wide and it is the scale of defeat which may help to define the outcome of subsequent general elections.

 

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By Joni Appleton – May 4, 2012

Love thy neighbour v shop thy neighbour: lessons from ‘The Weakest Link’

A new poll by The Guardian asks whether or not we would be prepared to report our neighbours for breaking the hosepipe ban, which came in to force in some areas today. Dr Paul Goddard, a senior lecturer in the University of Lincoln’s School of Psychology, suspects he knows the answer thanks to his recent research and, of all things, the TV game-show The Weakest Link.

“Research suggests that we might be more likely to ‘Love thy neighbour’ than ‘shop thy neighbour’ because we don’t like to do bad things to those physically close to us.

I led a group of students on a research project analysing the voting pattern of contestants on the popular TV game show ‘The Weakest Link’.  Each of the nine contestants had to elect one of the other contestants as the ‘weakest’ with the contestant getting the most votes eliminated from the show.  The students analysed 72 episodes of the show and worked out how many times it would be expected that a contestant would vote for their direct neighbour.  They found that the observed number of votes for a neighbour was significantly lower than expected.

Contestants used two sources of information to make their voting decision. The first is conscious and based on the observable behaviour of the other contestants but the second is unconscious based on the voter’s hidden, opinions and beliefs. Those voters with an implicit attitude to shy away from conflict with their neighbours will tend to avoid voting for their direct neighbour. When the first, observable, source is unreliable then contestants are more likely to rely on the second, subjective, biased source even though they might not realise they are doing that.

If contestants on the Weakest Link game-show exhibit an underlying reluctance to do something ‘bad’ to their neighbours then it should transfer to a reluctance to ‘shop thy neighbour’ during the hose-pipe ban. Of course, the TV game-show involved an open vote where all contestants see each other’s votes, it remains to be seen whether contestants would still be so considerate of their neighbours had they made their votes secret. Perhaps a blind vote could have made it even more likely to vote for their neighbours!

The project was generated in the first instance as a learning exercise as it is a simple way to get students to use simple probability theory to generate expected frequencies and then compare these with observed frequencies using inferential statistical tests to test for significance using Chi-square goodness-of-fit tests. Students worked on the project under the University’s student-as-producer initiative and was supported financially by the University’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Scheme.”

The full report can be found here http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/4581/ and you can take part in the Guardian’s survey here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/poll/2012/apr/03/shop-a-neighbour-hosepipe-ban

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By Joni Appleton – April 5, 2012

The importance of being precise

In the latest of his blogs concerning whether GCSEs are easier than ‘O’ levels, Barnie Choudhury, Principal Lecturer in the Lincoln School of Journalism, reflects on the need for precise language in everything we do and say.

In the fog of war, communication is all important. A missed word in a text or misplaced co-ordinate can lead to certain death. Exams are nothing like conflict. Well, only in our minds. The conflict of knowing you haven’t revised hard enough. The conflict of knowing you’ve missed one topic. The conflict of knowing you can do nothing except wait for your results. But in the end exams are a moment in time when, as an old tutor once told me, you need to fool the examiner into thinking you know more than you do. It’s a lesson which serves outside the exam room too, by the way.

I sat two of my three GCSE maths papers this week. On Monday it was statistics and numbers; on Wednesday it was algebra and numbers. Paper 1 was a blur but I felt it went badly. It was the weaker of my skills and I left the room thinking I had not scored enough for my coveted A*. So it hinged on picking up marks in Paper 2.

No matter what, I’m now firmly in the camp of knowing GCSEs have NOT been made easier. They are difficult and I can only watch in admiration the Herculean effort of my daughter Olivia. Anyone who’s a parent will understand the angst of a teenager. And then society says it expects them to marshal the raging hormones and sit a series of potentially life-changing tests. But it was always thus.

So why the better scores over the past decade when it comes to GCSEs and A Levels? Until there is a proper academic study, rather than political and journalistic speculation and rhetoric, we can only hazard a guess – and it’s not really an educated one. I firmly believe it is just that we have evolved and progressed. Teaching has got better. Like academics, teachers are drowning in goals, peer review and observations so the “consumer” gets the best “service” possible. The days of “those who can do and those who can’t teach” are, in my humble opinion, over. You have to be able to do both.

Furthermore pupils no longer need to rely on the teacher. In the internet age there are so many tools which students can use to improve their chances of success: online tutorials; BBC Bitesize; past exam papers with marking schemes so you can get into the mind of the examiner; the chance to re-take and get better results. All these factors mean that we should expect better results year-on-year. Anything else leads to failure. We need to expect. Any teacher with an ounce of sense will want to improve his or her results and learn from mistakes. Why wouldn’t they? It’s commonsense. The better your results, the greater the chance of your school surviving without being put under special measures.

But the elephant in the room is that examiners are untouchable. Their work too should come under scrutiny. I’ve said it in the past and I now say it unequivocally. When will examiners learn that unless they are unambiguous in their use of language, they put students at a huge disadvantage? Students are already frightened. So let’s help them, just a little, eh? Examiners should be forced to learn good English and the subtle nuance of language.

It was question number 10 in a paper where I expected to score 100% that attracted my ire. You see I love algebra. But I’m not good at verbal reasoning because as a journalist I like my words to be simple. Just ask my students. I drill into them week-on-week the importance of saying what they mean and meaning what they say. In journalism, where I teach, imprecise or inaccurate language can lead to an expensive law suit and, in some cases, jail.

Here’s the question as I remember it.

Mr Bell is four years older than Mrs Bell.

Mrs Bell is three times the age of the twins.

The twins are seven years older than Kevin.

Their combined ages are 150.

If x is the age of the twins, write an algebraic formulae and work out how old the twins are.

Well, that’s just great. Is ‘x’ the combined ages of the twins? Is Mrs Bell three times older than that the combined ages of the twins? These matter because one leads to the right answer and the other doesn’t. You know you’ve made a mistake if things don’t work out too simply. The solutions are rather neat at GCSE. And in the fog of an exam room, I didn’t understand the question and made a fundamental error. My formulae didn’t compute easily and this was a non-calculator paper.

Of course once you leave the room it is so simple. If I’m right then the equation is as follows:

Let x be the age of ONE twin so:

Mrs Bell is 3x

Mr Bell is 3x+4

Kevin is x-7

150= x + x + x – 7 + 3x + 3x + 4

150 + 3 = 9x

153 /9 = x = 17

Easy.

But I didn’t get that answer and I’m SO furious with the examiner who wrote this imprecise question and myself. Some will argue that it’s spoon feeding. I’d point out that clarity in all things helps to ensure that misunderstanding and, by extension, mistakes don’t happen. Note to examiners: it’s something worth teaching, learning and practising.

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By Thirzah Wildman – March 8, 2012

Joining the conversations…

The Independent released its Twitter 100 list last week and attributed the site, which has more than 100 million active users, with playing a pivotal role in the Arab Spring uprisings, and making a mockery of the British libel laws by outing Ryan Giggs in the super injunction affair. Jane Crofts, lecturer in Public Relations in the Lincoln School of Journalism, considers the implications of social media for the world’s ‘professional communicators’.

 

We are seeing a massive shift in the way in which we engage in professional communications and the way in which we socialise. That change comes courtesy of a social media platform near you. We chat with complete strangers from across the globe and can have human contact without leaving the sofa.

Public Relations students from the University of Lincoln recently took part in a social media conference held in Lincoln. LincUpLive,  #LUL360, however you wish to recognise it out in the ether, brought together some big hitters in the world of social media to share their expertise. The students were there to record the event in words and pictures. The pictures contributed over the day to the gallery and the words formed live blogs, Tweets and diary pieces shared across the world via the event’s blogroll and through Twitter, take a look at the website and see for yourself http://lincuplive.co.uk/ . Rebecca Brandreth (second year Journalism and PR student) spoke to seasoned blogger and digital media expert Emily Leary who reminded us; “…a conversation about your company is happening online whether you like it or not”.

The use of Twitter at events is on the rise and it has been given some careful consideration on http://www.prconversations.com/index.php/2011/08/using-twitter-for-pr-events/  by academics from the UK and Canada. It has resulted in a really useful checklist of two-way communications. And that is the nub of it; social media is finally allowing Public Relations to achieve its long held ambition of engaging in truly two-way symmetrical communication. Anyone can start the conversation and everyone can take part. It makes it difficult to control and scares the pants off many a corporate communicator who is used to ‘managing the message’! But it is so much more engaging and brings authenticity to the strategy of engaging with our publics. Public Relations is changing and moving away from spinning a line – yes it will still be there to present its organisation or client in the best possible light; but the tools are changing and the effort required to keep on top of the message is increasing in complexity. It brings a new ethic to the discipline and one that I for one welcome and believe in.

For the Top Twitter 100 visit http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/the-twitter-100-britains-titans-of-the-twittersphere-7466850.html

 

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By Joni Appleton – March 5, 2012

Meteoric rise of the new media

Professor Richard Lance Keeble, Acting Head of the Lincoln School of Journalism, witnessed a remarkable, newsy event high above the Lincolnshire Wolds at the weekend – and its later media coverage was highly illuminating:

On Saturday night, my partner, Maryline, and I were in the car heading back home having seen the hilarious Roll out the Beryl (a one-woman show performed by Elaine Pantling about the comedienne Beryl Reid) at Louth Riverhead Theatre. We passed the circus, on through Hallington and then turned into Louth Road – beginning the climb up the Wold. At 9.40 pm, as we were making the second turn, Maryline, who was driving, saw on the right in the corner of her eye what she first thought was a firework – perhaps in some way connected with the circus. But it didn’t extinguish.

“Oh look! What’s this? Is it a shooting star?” she asked. But the light was growing bigger and seemed to be moving towards us. Then Maryline saw red, orange and yellow flames – and I saw them too. Was it a plane on fire? It then shifted to the left – right across the length of the windscreen for around 10 seconds before heading into the clouds.

I saw something circular with flames bursting out at the back; Maryline saw more a sort of tube with flames flowing out at the back. Those flames petered out as it was moving to the left. When we arrived home I phoned the police who said four other people had rung in “about a UFO”. Some of them had witnessed bits of flames falling away.

I then tried to interest the local media in the story but there were no responses to my phone calls. We then Googled “comet sighting in Lincolnshire”. There were a few websites with mentions of sightings in Lincolnshire but most of them were from 2009. The latest was dated November 2011.

We then searched “meteor sighting in Lincolnshire” – and already two videos had been uploaded on to YouTube of a “fireball” over Lincolnshire at exactly the same time – 9.40 pm. One of the videos showed something a little similar to our sighting – the other pictured more of a “shower” of lights darting in different directions in the dark sky.

Looking up on Wikipedia, it confirmed that we had witnessed a meteor – also called a fireball, if very bright. The flames we witnessed were particularly strong and Wikipedia explained that “the atmospheric pressure heats the meteoroid so that it glows and creates a shining trail of gases and melted meteoroid particles”.

On Sunday, the Observer/Guardian’s website carried news of hundreds of sightings on its home page under the headline “Meteor ‘fireball’ spotted in sky across UK”. Apparently it had travelled from the north of Scotland to southern England.

Gary Fildes, the director of the Kielder Observatory, in Northumberland, said he was with a group of people who were overcome with excitement and wanted to know if it was “going to end life on Earth”. He added: “Of 30 years observing the sky, this fireball is the best thing I have ever seen.”

And for us, it was a wonderful, unforgettable and other-worldly experience.

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By Ian Richards – March 5, 2012

Horsegate – furore mounts

Revelations that David Cameron went riding with the husband of former Sun editor Rebekah Brooks on a pensioned-off police horse caused a predictable furore last week. Professor John Tulloch, head of the Lincoln School of Journalism, asks if there is anything new under the…er…Sun…

Shock horror – Tory party leader admits to riding old police horse.  And the Guardian’s cartoonist Steve Bell excelled himself with a ferocious parody of a famous image from The Godfather : David Cameron, head as usual clothed in condom, waking up in bed between the severed heads of the venerable Raisa, and the ginger curls of Rebekah Brooks.  

Politicians in bed with old nags and Murdoch editors – whatever next? The Leveson inquiry still has a long way to run.   But intimate links between Britain’s pols and media aristocracy go back a long way.

These relationships, which politicians see as crucial to getting and maintaining power,  are determined by a pattern of ownership  and control of the media and go back to the origins of newspapers in the early 18th century. Social media and the rise of ‘citizen journalism’ may now be profoundly changing this power balance. But essentially the story so far is that there have been three overlapping phases in the relationship.

Phase One covers the 18th and most of the 19th centuries – journalists were mainly the social inferiors of politicians and most newspapers were comparatively small organisations, run by such-like riff-raff as printers.   Politicians, most of whom were substantial landowners, did not deign to allow the House of Commons to be reported routinely until the early 19th century.  

Many MPs owned or sat on the boards of newspapers – in fact a common mode of political campaigning from the 1850s, when the laws restricting newspapers were relaxed, was for a group of like-minded gentleman (yes, always men) to club together and set up a paper to back the local candidate or MP. That’s how many of our fast- vanishing local newspapers originated. 

Another expression of this relationship was that political parties subsidised certain newspapers and routinely bribed journalists. And journalists routinely bribed public officials…like imperturbable men in blue. Evening all.

As gentlemen and proprietors, politicians objected strongly to being approached directly by a common hack.  Gladstone (PM 1868-74, 80-85, 86, 92-94) generally refused anything as ungentlemanly as being interviewed, and just cut them dead, although he would brief selected pet editors. (The great campaigning editor W. T. Stead caused a notorious scandal when he claimed to interview the dead Gladstone in a séance in 1909 – he got the chance to do the whole thing live when he went down with the Titanic 3 years later). 

This attitude was universal among the governing classes and the military. As late as 1898, General (later Lord) Kitchener exclaimed to journalists in the Sudan as he swept out of his tent: “Out of my way, you drunken swabs!”

But by this stage in the early 20th century newspapers were getting too large and powerful to be treated with such contempt and too expensive to subsidise.  As for favours – those had to be big commercial opportunities dangled before proprietors. 

Phase Two of the relationship moved into a systematic attempt to manage press-political links.  The first press offices with PR officials were set up during World War 1 and the system burgeoned in the inter-war period.  Compliant journalists and helpful proprietors were routinely rewarded through the honours system.  Journalists could aspire to a knighthood. Proprietors – the House of Lords. 

Thus the system welcomed the noble Lords Northcliffe (Daily Mail), his brother Rothermere (Daily Mail), Riddell (News of the World), Beaverbrook (Daily Express), Burnham (Daily Telegraph), Kemsley (Sunday Times, Daily Sketch), Camrose (Daily Telegraph) and many more.  Peerages were awarded ostensibly for services to the press – in fact, they were given for services to politicians and their parties and to flatter the whims of millionaire tycoons. 

As such, they were in a spirit of total cynicism and intimately linked with the major political project of 20th century Britain – how to manage a democracy when universal suffrage arrived finally in 1928, and both women and men over 21 gained the vote.  Early on in this process in 1903 Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe), founder of the Daily Mail, observed: “Every extension of the franchise renders more powerful the newspaper and less powerful the politician.”

Up until 1925 there was nothing illegal about selling peerages and politicians sold them to enrich themselves and their parties and hoped thereby to extend their influence. 

Most notoriously David Lloyd George (PM 1916-1922) had a fixer, Maundy Gregory, to do the dirty work – ultimately Gregory was gaoled and a 1925 act banned the practice.  Under Harold Wilson (PM 1964-70, 1974-76) the Canadian press proprietor Roy Thomson (Times, Sunday Times) lobbied hard for one until Harold Wilson succumbed.  He became Lord Thomson of Fleet. 

Gone are the days however when a peerage in the Imperial parliament would satisfy the craving for recognition of a media tycoon. As the media has gone global, and proprietors have become American, Russian, German etc, rather than larrikins for the old ‘white’ commonwealth,  who wants a British peerage?

The last hands-on press baron is the Daily Mail’s Lord Rothermere. Rupert Murdoch notoriously loathes a British establishment that cold-shouldered him as an Australian newcomer to London in the 60s. He must hate it even more deeply now.  Even a desperate Labour or Tory media minder would shrink from a Baron Lebedev (proprietor Independent, Evening Standard). About the last to succumb to a peerage was Conrad Black (Daily Telegraph) – another Canadian – but his graduation to a US jail in 2007 lost him his British honorific, Baron Black of Crossharbour.  (That’s a DLR station down in Docklands where most of the British press hangs out now.) 

So what precisely is Phase Three?  To an extent we might describe it as government by media – that is, the thorough incorporation of the so-called ‘Fourth Estate’ into the governance of the country – dating back to World War 1. For, despite the revelations about phone hacking, press assaults on privacy, and the alleged systematic corruption of public officials, Britain has a largely compliant media for which investigative reporting and sustained challenges to the political establishment are the exception, rather than the rule. Systematic positive press and broadcasting coverage is vital in managing the public opinion needed to win modern elections. 

The name of this game? ‘Hegemony’ – basically the maintenance and development of  the value system  that supports the status quo. In hack speak – winning the battle of ideas.

During both world wars, media proprietors were actively recruited into government. In World War 1, for example, Lord Beaverbrook was put in charge of the new ministry of information, and his rival Lord Northcliffe given charge of propaganda to  enemy countries. Northcliffe’s brother, Lord Rothermere, was briefly minister for aviation.

In World War II Beaverbrook, a close friend of prime minister Winston Churchill (PM 1940-45, 1951-4) , was made minister of aircraft production during the Battle of Britain. (He wasn’t notably good at it, but the publicity was great.)

Flash forward 65 years to 1995: new Labour party leader Tony Blair flies half way round the world to a private island off the Australian coast to make a presentation to Rupert Murdoch and the managers of  News Corporation.

He got the part  (PM 1997-2007).

 

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By Ian Richards – March 5, 2012

Last Orders for our social and cultural wellbeing, as time is called on our rural pubs

Research by Claire Markham at the University of Lincoln is providing new evidence about our social and cultural attachments to rural pubs:

This week (Thursday 1st March) the IPPR published the second edition of Rick Muir’s work on the social value of community pubs. Up until now this issue has largely been overlooked, overshadowed by debates of ‘binge’ drinking and alcohol taxation.  Muir’s conclusions show why the community pub is important; his work details not only how they help create, strengthen and expand social networks but how they are a unique part of England’s history and heritage. Based on a social return on investment methodology, he suggests that the social value of a community pub could be up to £120,000.

This overall neglect in social science on the importance of the pub is why I decided to embark on a PhD looking precisely at that. Unlike Muir I have focussed solely on the rural pub and the role it plays in rural communities. Many of us living in rural communities will have seen local pubs close. I have witnessed first hand how this decline in number impacts on individuals and communities and how it can alter perceptions about villages and the people who inhabit them. Figures from CAMRA show that nationally 16 pubs close every week. Just over a third of these are occurring in rural localities.

It has long been established that pubs are a social haven, strengthening and expanding social networks.  This is especially true in Lincolnshire where because of the dispersed rural population and decline in other rural services social interaction has become more difficult. Many of my research participants have explicitly stated that because of village services, like the pub and shop they have been able to maintain a social life. Many indicated that without those services they would miss out on village life and their social lives would become less fulfilled.

My new research shows that this social value also extents beyond a pub’s regular users. The emotion portrayed by some participants at the loss of their local pub was immensely powerful. It is not until you speak to those who rely on local services that you realise just how detrimental the decline in number is. One gentleman said: “I care about my neighbours and the people in my community. If they become isolated and withdrawn, like some of them did when our local (pub) shut, it’s upsetting…. it’s hard not to let it impact on your own lives.”

An additional finding from my ongoing research is that there is a symbolic importance to the pub which is reflected in the pub sign. As one female participant stated “the sight of a village public house and its sign signals a sign of comfort and reassurance”. This is a theme that is by no means unique to this one individual. Many of my research participants have made remarks like “a village is no longer a village unless it has these characteristics” or “when locals close we lose a tiny piece of Lincolnshire and England as a whole”. Rural pubs, and their signs, are a connection to our history – when they are lost so too are vital links to the past.

The IPPR report and my ongoing research provide a foundation for recognising the different values attached to pubs, especially in rural communities. Much more, however, needs to be done, if we are to truly understand their economic, social and cultural importance. Only with this knowledge can we support village pubs in providing essential social and cultural services and detach these debates from the politics of alcohol prices, taxation and binge-drinking.

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By Ian Richards – March 2, 2012

Two plus two and other mathematical tales

Last September Senior Lecturer in Journalism Barnie Choudhury enrolled in a GCSE maths class. He wanted to test whether the media was right in saying that education has been dumbed down. Next week he faces his first maths exam in twenty-eight years.

It seemed such a good idea at the time. I felt like a knight in shining armour taking up the cudgels on behalf of the thousands of school children sitting their GCSEs this year, only to have their proud achievements ripped away by a cynical press. Today I feel more like Jonathan Aitken  who vowed to fight “the cancer of bent and twisted journalism” with “the simple sword of truth”. We know how well that ended, don’t we? As a journalist I was half hoping to prove that my colleagues were right; that GCSEs had been dumbed down. But alas, I fear little more than huge embarrassment.

In the five months since I started my self-inflicted purgatory I have realised one home truth: there’s no fool like a vain, old fool. You see, I actually had the audacity to think that if I could have got a grade B at ‘O’ level maths, then the common-garden GCSE variety would be a breeze. How stupid I was. Imagine if Lennox Lewis were to enter the ring again and fight for a boxing world title without any warm up fights. That’s the situation I find myself in now. I am petrified and I’ll tell you why.

My brain’s a lot slower than it once was. I have this annoying habit of being so competitive that I want to finish first and so make careless mistakes. And the biggest reason: unlike ‘O’ levels, GCSE maths has plenty of random topics which you’re expected to understand, memorise and apply. What’s more, you seem to need the equivalent of a degree in English Language to understand what the question is getting at and when you think you’ve understood it, the examiners trick you by deliberately putting in information you don’t need. The only herrings you need in a maths question are the silver kind where you work out the price of fish. You can keep your red ones.

No, it doesn’t bode well. The sad news is that my first exam, which I think is statistics, is on Monday the 5th March and the second, algebra and numbers, is on the Wednesday. But there is one respite that wasn’t offered to me when I was 16. It is that this version of GCSE maths is “modular”. This means that if I don’t do so well, I can re-take it in the summer and the best marks count towards the overall grade. [Perhaps that’s why the media thinks that GCSEs have become easier?] Despite this reassuring thought, those dreams I mentioned the last time around? Well they’ve come back.

Last time I set a little homework. “As I was going to St Ives I met a man with seven wives. Each wife had seven sacks. Each sack had seven cats. Each cat had seven kits. Kits, cats, sacks, wives how many were going to St Ives?” Ah, you see this is a typical trick question. There are many answers, all of them probably correct, because the question is not phrased as best as it could be. I mean…were they going to St. Ives as well or did you meet them as they were leaving? Were they carrying the sacks or did they put them on a cart which was being dragged by someone else? You see, so many variables. Just like GCSE maths today.

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By Thirzah Wildman – February 28, 2012

Politics of reporting journalists’ deaths

Following the tragic death of war correspondent Marie Colvin, Professor Richard Lance Keeble, Acting Head of the Lincoln School of Journalism, examines the political factors behind the general reporting of journalists’ deaths:

The death of Marie Colvin, the Sunday Times’ legendary war correspondent, earlier this week in Syria highlights the dangers faced by journalists worldwide. Yet the political factors behind the coverage of Colvin’s death have been largely ignored.

Significantly, last month the French journalist Gilles Jacquier was killed in Homs, Syria – but by opponents of the Assad regime, according to a report in Le Figaro, on 20 January. But Jacquier’s death gained little coverage in the international media. This week, the mainstream media have assumed uncritically that the missile which destroyed the building in Homs where Colvin and a French photographer died, was fired by forces loyal to Assad, already massively demonised and clearly the target of US-led moves for regime change. But in an ever escalating civil war can we be so certain?

Politics also influences the selection for coverage of those journalists killed across the globe. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 151 journalists have been killed in Iraq since 1992. But since the vast majority have been Iraqis (such as Khalid Hassan, Salih Saif Aldin and the former President of the Iraqi Union of Journalists in Baghdad, Shihab Al-Timimi) their deaths have received little coverage in the Western media. As Kim Sengupta reported in the Independent: “There is a feeling among Iraqi journalists that the reason their plight receives so little attention is because the majority of those affected are not members of the Western media. On the occasions when the victims were, in fact, foreigners, the scope of the coverage was glaringly different.”

Iraq, in fact, became the most dangerous assignment for journalists in history. Compare previous conflicts: two were killed during the First World War, 68 in the Second; 77 in Vietnam and 36 in the Balkans during the 1990s. In all, since the D-Day landing in Normandy in 1944, more than 2,000 journalists have been killed on duty around the world – all of them remembered in a dedicated park in Bayeux, commissioned by Reporters Without Borders and the local mayor.

And throughout the world, journalists, writers and intellectuals are persecuted, jailed and harassed simply for speaking out (see www.indexoncensorship.org ). For instance, the al-Jazeera camera operator, Sami al-Haj (known as “Prisoner 345”), was imprisoned without charge for almost six years and tortured at Guantanamo Bay, the notorious US detention centre on Cuba, until being suddenly released in May 2008 and flown to his native Sudan. So why was the UK mainstream media so silent about his plight? He was one of an estimated 23,000 detainees in US military custody in Iraq who were never charged – but deemed a security risk.

Robert Fisk, of the Independent, (and one of the greatest war correspondents of his generation) suggested that journalists themselves bore a certain responsibility for becoming targets in conflict zones. He cited the examples of journalists wearing Pashtun hats in Peshawar or a US Marine costume outside Kandahar. Geraldo Rivera, of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, even arrived in Afghanistan with a gun proclaiming his intention to kill Osama bin Laden, the Al-Qaeda leader. Fisk commented: “We are all of us – dressing up in combatants’ clothes or adopting the national dress of people – helping to erode the shield of neutrality and decency which saved our lives in the past. If we don’t stop now, how can we protest when next our colleagues are seized by ruthless men who claim we are spies?”

Fortunately, in Britain and Ireland murder remains an extremely rare threat to journalists. Yet the killing of Veronica Guerin, crime reporter of the Sunday Independent, in Dublin on 26 June 1996, (the subject of a 2003 Hollywood blockbuster starring Cate Blanchett) raised serious questions about journalists’ training for dangerous assignments and newspapers’ cultivation of their star reporters’ personalities as a deliberate marketing ploy. In her biography of Guerin, Emily O’Reilly (1998) quotes Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post: “Although it has become increasingly difficult for this newspaper and for the press generally to do since Watergate, reporters should make every effort to remain in the audience, to stay off the stage, to report history, not to make history.” According to O’Reilly, the Sunday Independent broke the Bradlee rule – and Guerin paid a terrible price.

In September 2001, Martin O’Hagan, an investigative reporter for the Sunday World, was shot in front of his wife near his home in Lurgan. He was the first working journalist to be killed in Northern Ireland since the start of the civil war in 1969. Twenty years previously he had been jailed for gun-running for the IRA. Becoming a journalist late in life, he was a key source for the material used in Channel 4′s 1991 Dispatches documentary, “The Committee”, about the so-called Ulster Central Co-ordinating Committee, a group of loyalists and security forces members who allegedly conspired to carry out sectarian assassinations. Just before his death, O’Hagan expressed fears he was under surveillance by members of the splinter loyalist group, the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF). The death barely registered on the British or international news agenda.

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By Ian Richards – February 24, 2012