SpinWatch

Nicholas Jones, 27 March 2013

A failure to avoid an ill-judged photo-opportunity – or an inability to exploit unexpected mishaps – is often a pointer to the chances of eventual success in British politics.

David Miliband’s inept appearance at the 2008 Labour Party conference – walking along holding up a banana in his hand – was instantly captured by photographers and was an image which came back to haunt him.

Indeed the former Labour Foreign Secretary – now to be the new chief executive of the International Rescue Committee, a leading American humanitarian charity – never seemed entirely at home in the cut-and-thrust of the cruel interface between British politics and an unforgiving news media.

Today’s politicians, as demonstrated so colourfully by the Mayor of London Boris Johnson, have to always have an eye on how their every move in public is likely to interpreted – or misinterpreted –  by the tabloid press.

David Miliband’s goofy photo-opportunity was a political car crash. It provided the most unforgettable, and much reproduced, image of the 2008 party conference season and came to symbolise his lack of a killer instinct.

Pete Roche, 26 March 2013

All the indications are that the British government, in its desperate attempt to entice the nuclear industry to invest in new nuclear plants, is about to give them billions in yet more subsidies.

The scam involves giving subsidies to ageing nuclear reactors, instead of giving it to new clean low carbon technologies. But why should a stealth tax which is supposed to encourage new low carbon electricity generation provide a huge windfall to old nuclear reactors? Adding around £34 per year to the average electricity bill is going to worsen the UK’s fuel poverty crisis – in other words this tax to help old reactors is going to kill people by increasing cold related illnesses.
 
On 10th January 2008, when the Blair Government confirmed it wanted new reactors to go-ahead, one of the ‘facilitative actions’ proposed to speed up construction was simply to work to strengthen the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) and give investors confidence there would be a meaningful long-term carbon price. But by October 2009 it was becoming increasing clear that the nuclear industry wouldn‘t be able to afford to build new reactors without some form of subsidy, so secret plans to tax electricity consumers were drawn up. According to the Guardian:
  The government believes that only by artificially increasing the cost of electricity generated by coal and gas stations through an additional carbon levy on household bills can nuclear become more competitive and encourage new reactors to be built.
 

Nicholas Jones, 21 March 2013

A Budget leak by the London Evening Standard – listing on Twitter the key changes to be made by the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne – has lifted the lid on the lengths to which successive governments have gone in manipulating the presentation of financial announcements.

By mistakenly Tweeting its own front page splash on the Budget twenty minutes before the Chancellor had even started his speech, the Evening Standard inadvertently confirmed the extent of the collusion between the Treasury and selected political correspondents.

Why, might one ask, would a Chancellor want his officials to give exclusive details of his Budget in advance to an evening newspaper in London? 

The answer is simple: the Evening Standard presents the City of London’s financial markets – and the rest of the news media – with the first considered impression of the announcements in the Chancellor’s red Budget box.

No spin doctor would dare to underestimate the potential impact of the Evening Standard’s front page; after all this is the first serious assessment of the Chancellor’s announcements. 

Andy Rowell and Richard Cookson, 17 March 2013 

Exclusive published in the Independent on Sunday.

The boss of a company set to build two nuclear reactors in Somerset has been demanding cuts to renewable energy subsidies and to help for people in fuel poverty while quietly lobbying the European Commission for financial help for new nuclear power stations.

Areva, which is part owned by the French state, has signed a contract to build nuclear reactors for EDF, another French company, at Hinkley Point. If it goes ahead, it will be the first new nuclear power plant in Britain for a generation. Areva already has hundreds of engineers working on the project.

EDF and the Government are locked in negotiations over how much the firm will be paid for the electricity it produces at Hinkley. Even though the Coalition Agreement states that new nuclear power stations will only go ahead if "they receive no public subsidy", the Government is offering to guarantee a minimum price for the electricity produced for up to 40 years. Critics say this amounts to a subsidy.

Until now, it was widely assumed that EDF was leading the call for subsidies for new nuclear. But a new document reveals that last November, Areva's chief executive officer, Luc Oursel, lobbied the European Environment Commissioner, Connie Hedagaard, for financial help for the construction of new nuclear power stations.

Mark Metcalf, 16 March 2012

This article was first posted on Big Issue in the north.

The police spy recently revealed to be Mark Jenner (left) worked on a number of political activists' campaigns, reveals Mark Metcalf.

I now know the name of the Metropolitan Police officer who was employed to spy on the protest group in which I was one of the key organisers in the 1990s. Thanks to his former partner Alison (not her real name) and the Guardian it has been established that the man I knew during my time at the Colin Roach Centre (CRC) in Hackney as Mark Cassidy is Mark Jenner of the Met’s special demonstration squad (SDS).

Jenner’s name was revealed when Alison gave evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry into undercover policing, his police role confirmed by the Guardian on 1 March. He is one of 11 undercover police officers publicly identified. Nine of them had sexual relations with activists mainly from environmental groups.

The officers’ actions began unravelling in 2011 when the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) dropped criminal proceedings against six people facing charges related to a conspiracy to sabotage a coal-fired power station at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Nottinghamshire. The convictions of another 20 activists were later quashed after it was revealed that long-term police spy PC Mark Kennedy had acted as an agent provocateur within the environmental movement. Further allegations of undercover police officers acting beyond their authorisation then surfaced and we now know they were given the names of infants who had died many years previously.

The Metropolitan Police has now been ordered to investigate under Operation Herne how SDS officers created and maintained false identities while undercover.

Nicholas Jones, 14 March 2013

Chris Huhne’s downfall had a thread running through it which connected him to the disgrace of a long-line of post-war politicians. In almost every case it was the work of journalists which was responsible for initially exposing their misdemeanours or sexual infidelities, yet those involved seemed to have believed mistakenly that they could somehow outwit the ability of Britain’s national newspapers to hold the powerful to account.

Whether it was John Profumo, John Stonehouse, David Mellor, Jeffrey Archer, Jonathan Aitken or John Prescott, they had all learned how to use – and to even manipulate – the news media yet in the end they could not keep the journalists at bay.

Often because of their prominent positions in public life or their acquaintance with newspaper proprietors, editors and broadcasting executives, politicians believe they have established some kind of protection against the worst excesses of the tabloid press.

They tend to become overconfident; they sometimes make the mistake of threatening to go over the heads of reporters direct to the editor or worst of all, try to play one newspaper or news outlet off against another - a sure fire way of encouraging Tony Blair’s “feral beasts” to take even greater risks.

Paul Lashmar, 7 March 2013

Spies and the media is a good subject for investigation and the BBC’s Radio 4 Document programme launched its new series this week with a programme called ‘The MI6 and the Media’. The pre broadcast publicity said it examines purported MI6 documents released by the Soviets at the height of the Cold War said to identify MI6 agents in the British media.  As a journalist who has covered MI6’s activities since the late-1970s and heard endless speculation about MI6 assets in Fleet Street, I looked forward to some new facts on this controversial area. But after listening I felt ambivalent about the value of the programme and it is decidedly a curate’s egg. It did, in its favour, managed to get to the end without one reference to James Bond. Kim Philby did pop up rather inconclusively.  On the one hand the programme, fronted by author Jeremy Duns, revisited and develops an interesting historical vignette: in December 1968 the Russian newspaper Izvestia ran a series of articles accusing high-profile British journalists of being spies - listing their names and alleged codenames.

The Russians claimed journalists and editors at the Sunday Times, the Observer, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the BBC worked directly with MI6. The Soviets had a cache of documents they claimed were MI6 memos, apparently photographed with a miniature spy camera. One table listed each publication, the journalist or editor MI6 had as its contact there, their codename and the codename of their MI6 "handler".

Biserka Anderson, 6 March 2013

On 20 February 36-year-old artist Plamen Goranov set himself ablaze in the Bulgarian seaside town of Varna in protest against the local government’s links to the mafia, amidst nationwide anti-corruption rallies that have shaken Bulgaria in the last few weeks and led to the government's resignation. After sustaining 80% burns and spending 11 days in a coma, he died in the evening of 3 March – Bulgaria’s Liberation Day. Today, 6 March 2013, Bulgaria has announced a national day of mourning for Plamen Goranov who has turned into a heroic figure for protesters - a symbol of what many believe is a long-overdue revolution, with his death kindling revolutionary sentiments even further. Parallels with Jan Palach, the Czech student whose self-immolation in protest against the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia is believed to have led to the fall of Communism, are not uncommon. The dramatic incident happens at a time when hundreds of thousands of Bulgarians take to the streets every day to voice their discontent with the status quo after 23 years of political and economic transition, which has left Bulgaria the poorest country in Europe.

Media filters in action – restriction and slant

The mainstream Bulgarian media’s coverage of Plamen’s act has 'ranged from deafening silence to attempts at character assassination', as his friends wrote in a manifesto which was shared in social media days before he died, in a bid to tell the truth about Plamen’s personality and the motives behind his sacrificial protest act. 'There is no doubt that it was an act of resolute rejection of corruption and injustice that have permeated every aspect of social life in his town and his country,' states the manifesto, which has so far been largely ignored by the agenda-setting media in his home country and beyond.

Joe Emersberger, 5 March 2013

You can read the first part of Joe's analysis for Spinwatch, 'Media communication and the consequences of war: counting the casualties in Iraq', here.  Below is an exchange Joe had with Chris Elliot, the readers' editor for the Guardian, regarding their article last week that stated the death toll from the Iraq war was "tens of thousands".  Joe has added further comments after the exchange.

My letter to the Guardian

RE: Don't Mention The Iraq War

Dear Guardian editors

Nick Hopkins wrote that the war “…led to the death of almost 200 British troops and tens of thousands
of Iraqis.”

It is beyond any rational dispute that the Iraq war caused over a half
million Iraqi deaths.

There were 2 scientific studies published that examined the death toll
from the war up until the end of June of 2006. The Lancet study
estimated a death toll of 650,000 Iraqis.  The Iraqi government (in
conjunction with the WHO ) published a study in the New England Journal
of Medicine (NEJM) that examined the same period. It published death
rates which correspond to a death toll of 400,000 (as confirmed by the
lead author of that study).

Nicholas Jones, 1 March 2013

Investigative journalism – across both the press and broadcasting – will almost certainly suffer as a result of the Leveson Inquiry and the introduction of a new regulatory regime. Most speakers at the launch of a new book – After Leveson? The future of British Journalism – feared the worst.

Perhaps the clearest warning of the obstacles that would be placed in the way of investigative journalism came from Dorothy Byrne, head of news and current affairs at Channel Four Television, who gave a vivid description of the way 'multi-billion pound organisations and evil regimes' used 'tiers of incredibly expensive lawyers' to thwart Channel Four’s investigations.

She said that any new regulatory regime for the press would be scrutinised by lawyers to find new ways to frustrate and curb newspaper investigations.

Her concern was echoed by Mick Hume of the Free Speech Network and the investigative journalist Paul Lashmar. But Evan Harris, Associate Director of Hacked Off, the group campaigning for the introduction of the Leveson recommendations, disagreed and insisted that Leveson had not proposed any alterations to the existing regulatory code of the Press Complaints Commission.

The future prospects for investigative journalism dominated much of the debate at the Media Society event to launch After Leveson? (26.2.2013)