Simmering penny stock egghead over a memorial to Dwight D.
Eisenhower designed google sniper Frank Gehry for the National Mall came out into the open on Tuesday at a Congressional hearing on the project.
IN ATLANTA “I have a lot of nicknames,” David M.
Walker says.A
musical primer on the next big star from Nashville in the Taylor Swift mold.
A group of 64 offers support for serious
action on reducing the national debt. Q: DEAR TIM: The grout in one joint of my floor tile has come out. Do
you know why this happened? I can see that the previous homeowner repaired it.
What’s the best
way to work with floor grout in this situation? What type of grout do I install, and how do I match the color perfectly? BP is set to to issue $3 billion in bonds. Separately, the Justice Department told a federal judge that, despite the oil spill, there was no reason to revoke BP’s probation associated with the 2005 Texas City refinery explosion. Today’s extract from the book After Leveson* is by Bernard Clark, a former BBC correspondent for
the
programme Nationwide and later the independent producer of hundreds of documentaries who now chairs TVT.He thinks Lord Justice Leveson was looking backward at a disappearing problem in print rather than looking forward to the digital world.
In a post-Leveson world, he believes, questions of press regulation – whether run by the industry or ordered by statute – are largely irrelevant. The problem is the internet. We are heading into a future of no regulation with the internet
where its monoliths will have plenty of clout, pretty well unfettered by democratic national governments (but not totalitarian ones, like China).Content doesn’t matter to net companies as long as editorial issues don’t interfere with the bottom line. Citing “freedom of expression”, which like motherhood and apple pie is impossible to attack, they will host their
anonymous contributors’ bullying, lies, smears, breathtaking invasions of privacy and reputation-destroying carnage while refusing all responsibility for what they host.To
illustrate an example of information misuse, it’s worth recounting the alarming experience of a work colleague at the hands of Facebook. Someone he did not know took his name and set up a Facebook page purporting to be his, along with a photo and several intimate details, some true, some false.
The entry included enough facts and events to appear credible, and it played havoc with his personal life and relationships. He had a sense of being stalked, as if someone had stolen his very being.He
contacted Facebook but they, more or less, didn’t want to know. Pointing out that they had very few staff to look into such matters, their unconcerned operator put the whole onus on him to prove he was not responsible for the page and to demonstrate personal harm.
Ultimately he gave up, and eventually we bluffed his anonymous character kidnapper – we still don’t know who it was – into believing they would be exposed, so they finally stopped.
But not before he had suffered several weeks of shame and embarrassment.Even
the Press Complaints Commission would not dare to be so cavalier about what was clearly an outrageous denial of responsibility.
Yet this was probably only one single crazy weirdo making someone else’s life a misery.How
does information terrorism work?What’s coming in the future could be far more deadly, involving widespread smears, character assassinations and the destruction of companies and maybe even institutions. And by then we may not have a vigorous press to hold it to account.What
Leveson needed to examine was the way in which reputations are traduced on the internet by accusation, images and innuendo before any evidence is produced.In my view, though controversial and possibly abhorrent to some people, much of the reputational damage that has followed the Jimmy Savile allegations falls into that same category of information terrorism, or certainly information assault. Post-Savile, family men, often with lives of unblemished public success, have been suddenly traduced by anonymous, out-of-the-blue allegations from 20, 30 or 40 years ago. Why? Because of completely unrelated media stories, about completely unrelated people, mainly completely unrelated circumstances, and unrelated crimes – inspired by the pass-the-parcel “it happened to me too” accusation
culture, fed by the never-sleeping information machine.
Based on untested historical information, presumably without a scrap of forensics
or contemporaneous medical examinations, the distinctly excitable police – to the delight of the conveniently present photographers and gawping neighbours – arrest first and ask questions later.For some men this has reached the stage where a fear about something long forgotten nags away in the small hours: “Did I once brush against a secretary’s bottom, her breast? Did I once go to kiss
a cheek, and touch lips instead?”As a BBC presenter during the 1970s, this comes close to
me.
I worked with Jimmy Savile in 1978 when we co-presented the Nationwide skateboard contest. From memory, he was highly professional, a pleasant but wily man, the life and soul of the crowd that sought him out for autographs. I also presented the Nationwide disco doubles with another arrestee, the disc jockey Dave Lee Travis, who was less professional but more approachable.Would Exposure have been screened if Savile
had been alive?So a couple of the people frogmarched away are, if not friends, past acquaintances. Though their reputations are seemingly in terminal tatters they remain uncharged and therefore innocent. To them, it doesn’t seem that way because the first few pages of Google under their name now churn with words like ‘paedophile’, ‘indecent assault’ and ‘Savile’.While
on the subject of Savile, I have to say I felt mildly concerned when watching ITV’s Exposure documentary that the broadcaster’s lawyers may have been uncomfortable at passing the investigation if Savile had still been alive, especially if Jimmy had had the services of a Maxwellesque
lawyer. Given that they would have had to put the evidence to him in advance, and the police had previously been reluctant to
proceed, it would have required a robust effort to get “errors and omission” insurance, as generally required by ITV.
But, of course, none of that matters now that the pack of historical accusers has passed the 500 mark. It surely must be true, mustn’t it? Then comes the case of Julian Assange, the man now languishing in the Ecuadorian embassy. If information terrorism is a manipulation of half truths to pick on defenceless individuals, Assange and Wikileaks produced the exact opposite because, not only was the target the most powerful military machine in history, the information was true.
What followed, whether farce or deliberate plot, became such a convoluted story of condoms, ‘consensual rape’ or sex-while-asleep, that the leaked pictures of a helicopter gunship massacring a couple of dozen innocent Iraqis, including a Reuters journalist, palled in comparison. That was exactly what the US military wanted.
Who cares about the message if you can character assassinate the messenger? Perhaps there is no conspiracy against Assange. Perhaps he was just unfortunate in his choice of bed mates. But the suspicion remains that an unscrupulous super power has punished and eliminated an embarrassing critic for revealing uncomfortable truths. Wait a second: governments wouldn’t get involved in information terrorism, would they?Why didn’t Leveson tackle the real story?These days, when I look across the panorama of the way information disseminates, I see the destruction of people, companies and even governments accelerating, partly because the hunting
pack can rip targets apart with random ease, and partly because transgressions which are often trivial can be blown out of all proportion by clever ‘spinners’. Over the next decade or two we will look back with astonishment at the whole edifice of Leveson and wonder how so many people took so much time and used so much money to produce a report
of relevance to so few. Didn’t the noble judge know about cyberspace? Surely he must have seen it as the real story? He must have realised that it is no longer reasonable for the big players – the Googles, Facebooks, YouTubes and Twitters – to say: “Nothing to do with us, guv, we only provide the
pipes. What goes through them, that’s up to
the folk who put it there.”However,
the intenet also has within its power a bright new dawn
of freeing journalism and storytellers from the editorial and political tyrannies of the past. But it does need regulation, not least so that reliability and credibility can be added to its power.Leveson missed a big opportunity. But maybe it’s not too late to take the principles in his report and craft a new set of disciplines for a converged and electronic future.That’s probably old ink thinking. An entirely new information world is rising in which each of us can be readers and editors, contributors and subscribers, and maybe even proprietors, at the same time.
Hark, was that a nightingale I heard? Or a bomb?After Leveson? The future for British journalism, edited by John Mair, is published by Abramis.
Available at a special Media Guardian price of £15 from richard@arimapublishing.co.ukTomorrow: Deirdre O’Neill argues that Lord Justice Leveson failed to probe deeply enough into the portrayal of women in the national pressLeveson reportInternetJimmy SavileLord Justice LevesonFacebookGoogleYouTubeTwitterDigital mediaITV channelBBCJulian AssangeWikiLeaksPress Complaints CommissionRoy Greensladeguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies.
All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds This chart presents the reasons cited by individuals for participating in PIAXP.
The respondents could select more than one motivation.That finding has several practical implications for prize design.
To attract a large and diverse group of competitors, an effective prize must offer activities and events that provide a wide range of incentives. Prize design is thus an unexpectedly challenging task.
“You can’t just put up the money, walk away, and come back a year
later and give people a prize,†Murray says. “You have to create events around it.†The PIAXP, for example, included a highly publicized series of races, specifically intended to draw attention to the competition and to make “heroes†out of the