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The New Political Communication Unit now has a Facebook group. We'll use this to keep you up to date with things that are going on, events in the unit and generally to construct a network of friends and colleagues who are interested in our research and the areas we work in. The group also has a wall and open discussion forum, so anyone can throw in their thoughts. Please feel free to go and have a look, and join the group.
Obviously, I'm reading a lot of stuff on the US elections at the moment. However, with the sheer breadth of stuff out there, it is possible to start to suffer from election fatigue - especially if you go beyond reading the columnists and start to look at the comments that many news providers now allow the general public to make on their websites. The problem is the whole flame war thing. It is horrendous. Really ugly. You have Obama supporters convinced that he is the second coming. You have Hillary supporters convinced he is a muslim. And the continual threat amongst both camps to vote for John McCain if their charge doesn't gets the nomination. That doesn't even mention both camps' attitude to the media (bias in every way, apparently). The whole thing is a manifestation of something that has been discovered again and again in research on the Internet - namely, given the chance to interact and debate with each other over politics, people don't achieve Athenian heights of deliberation; instead, the whole thing becomes more like an episode of Jerry Springer. In short, we have a loud mouthocracy.
So I was really thrilled to discover a thread of amazing quality at the New Republic this evening. The debate, from both sides, was generally really well argued. There were people who supported one candidate talking about their misgivings about their man or woman and respectfully making points about their opponents, and undecideds asking great questions and pushing those who declared a partisan allegiance. Wow! In fact, I was so inspired, I wanted to go and make my own comment*. But when I tried to set up an account with the TNR, I found this. In other words, if you want to be part of the conversation, you need to have paid for a print or online subscription to the paper. Only then will you get your password.
Well, I have to confess, my first reaction was one of outrage. What is the point of allowing comments if you are going to lock it down to such a degree that only a few people can be a part of it? Think of all the wisdom and ideas you are losing out on. And then, the penny dropped - this was the highest quality thread (in terms of the average comment and level of interaction) I had read over the whole course of the American election. It was also only open to a limited number of magazine subscribers. These two things were not unrelated. Not only is that quite thought provoking, but it raises a lot of important questions both about how we might run internet deliberation and what goals we should prioritise in doing so.
*If you wondering, my comment was going to be something like: "A lot of the comments on this board have come down to the fact that Obama's speeches tend to be about very ephemeral concepts (hope, change etc) and that he is not very specific about his policy aims (and even if details are on his website, he does little to advertise his ideas when he speaks). I would suggest these two things are not unrelated. Obama claims to reject partisan division and is casting himself as a post-ideological politician. That trick can be pulled off if you don't get too specific about policy. However, any kind of policy discussion would necessarily prove difficult and damage the coalition he is creating. I would also argue this issue explains his great electoral failing - namely, that he cannot reach out to people on low incomes. In order to do this, he would need to offer specific political positions that would help these groups. However, such policies would be the complete antithesis of the post-ideological identity he has created for himself.
Just a quick reminder that Nick Anstead will be liveblogging the Super Tuesday results tonight. Should be quite a night...
In the UK over the past two or three years, the term radicalisation has appeared more often in public debates. But it seems to be one of those terms that get used without much thought, particularly in media reports about Islamist violence or simply political Islam. Radicalisation of youth, radicalisation in prisons, radicalisation on campuses, and radicalisation on the net – what does it mean? What exactly does it refer to? Does it always mean the same thing? Research at the NPCU is investigating how Jihadist violence is justified by perpetrators and supporters in various contexts. Such violence would appear to be lie at the end point of radicalisation processes. However, we also think the term itself needs some scrutiny. In this post I want to begin to ask what kind of concept it is.
The starting point for analysing political concepts is often ‘essential contestability’. (Skip this paragraph if you know what that means.) The concepts we use such as freedom, democracy, or radical are essentially or intrinsically contestable – their meaning disputable – at several levels. We can disagree on the internal features of a concept. Let us say democracy refers to rule by the demos and to the equal right to political participation among the demos. But to those features some people might add others, e.g. democracy features periodic moments for collective decision making (elections, referenda etc). So if we are talking about a democracy, and the latter isn’t evident, then we can argue about whether it’s really democracy we’re looking at. We can also disagree on how we judge the concept. Do we judge it against an exemplar or against an ideal, (“This democracy is not what the Athenians wanted”), or do we judge it pragmatically and contextually? And then a political concept can be essentially contested because of the ways we use it. We can use ‘democracy’ or ‘radical’ to score points against our opponent or to surprise and unsettle an opponent; the point is, concepts cannot be neutral since their meaning depends on how we use them. Note that essential contestability only applies to political concepts. It would be odd for the term ‘table’ to be used in an aggressive or surprising way, for instance. But the point is, we can unpick the various levels (features, evaluation, usage) upon which a concept has meaning, and how contestation arises at each level. Such conceptual analysis can then shed light on what people are doing with language in order to achieve their political goals.
A story on BBC News 24 last year on Islamist radicalisation in prisons referred to five features of 'extremism': extremist views, extremists’ training, extremist actions (buying bomb-making material), the extremist journey (migration/asylum, trips to Pakistan), and the extremist character (agitated, angry). The reporter was using it in a fairly decontextualised manner – Islamist extremism in prisons was not compared to far right or white supremacist extremism in prisons. The reporter presented it simply as an isolated problem to be condoned. Finally, a prison officer representative was interviewed. He used the term, and the implied problem, as a chance to ask for extra funding to provide prison officers with Arabic language lessons and training in understanding Islam. He also used extremism as a threat: if they can’t limit extremism inside, society will suffer problems outside. But we could hypothetically disagree with all of this: we could say extremism has other features, or we could judge it comparatively, or we could use the term less aggressively and not try to scare government into releasing more funds for prisons.
So radicalisation then. What are the features of radicalisation that differentiate to other processes? How does the way in which people are judging the term leading to disagreements in current political debates? And how does the way the term is used contribute to such disagreements? Witness media debates around Ed Hussain’s book The Islamist last year, or government appeals for the British public to alert authorities to evidence of radicalisation – what exactly do people mean by radicalisation? What if the term didn’t exist – would we have to invent it? Did it get mentioned much before the 7/7 bombings in 2005?
Future posts will return to this matter, but I’d welcome any comments on the origins, meanings and uses of the term ‘radicalisation’ in public debate in any country. This may begin to illuminate some of the politics of security, identity and terror we are witnessing.
I've been blogging now for more than two years, on my own blog and, more recently, here on the NPCU site. I guess it will be obvious that I really enjoy blogging. So I have decided to push the boundaries a bit and embark on my biggest blogging experiment yet - live blogging Super Tuesday next week.
Now we are for all purposes down to four candidates, Super Tuesday looks like it could be a hugely historic day, when either an African-American or a women will come closer to the Democratic nomination, and the Republicans move towards choosing either a Mormon or an old white guy (OK, a very old white guy). But more than that, it looks set to be a lot of fun, and since I'm going to be up all night watching and thinking about it, it seemed like it would be a good idea.
I recently discovered an absolutely wonderful web ap called CoveritLive (you can see my write up on it here). It allows for the creation of live blogs within other blogs - all you have to do is embed the code and use their interface to enter your thoughts. But you might ask, why would you want to listen to me? Hopefully that won't be all you'll get though - CoveritLive also allows for a high level of interactivity. For example, it has an instant comment button, so that readers can write a message. This then appears on the screen of the blogger, and they have the option of replying personally to the viewer, or displaing the comment on the blog. And that's the big thing that will make this even more fun, especially if we can get a bit of conversation going.
At the moment, I have the code embedded on my site only. I'm hoping to put it on here too, but our software is having a few issues with CoveritLive. But I will certainly be on my blog. So, if you are about next Tuesday night, do drop by and share your thoughts.
Keith from CoveritLive has very kindly got in touched and offered to help with the issues am having embedding the system into this post. I have embedded the code - and as you can see, it isn't really behaving itself. This is just so as the people at CoveritLive can see what the issue is. Hopefully, it will be fixed soon.
Fixed - I now have the right code for it to work on our site. So the liveblog shall be on here and at my own page. And how about that for service? The guys from CoveritLive actually came to me to ask if they could help, before I contacted them. So a huge thanks to both Keith and Bob, not just for great service but a brilliant web product.
The Guardian's readers' editor has explained why the newspaper chose to use an 18-month old photo of Peter Hain to illustrate a story about Hain last week. The newspaper couldn't find an adequate photo of Hain looking 'under pressure' taken amid his deputy leadership financing fiasco. The readers' editor quote a Guardian colleague:
"As a rule, we prefer the news pages to use photographs which are contemporaneous to the events they describe. But if these are not available, I think file pictures can be legitimate if they help us communicate with the reader, and if they are relevant and not misleading."
There is a difference between communicating to the reader a sense of Hain under pressure by using an old photo, and communicating to the reader what Hain actually looked like amid the fiasco. In fact The Guardian could only find contemporary photos of him looking relaxed, but this didn't fit the story The Guardian along with other media chose to run with. Who is The Guardian to choose how Hain should look? This appears the thin end of the wedge in terms of accuracy in news reporting. As editors make decisions about what counts as representation, where would the limits lie? Clearly photos of UK troops under fire in Afghanistan in 1878 couldn't be used to 'communicate with the reader' the situation in 2008, but could photos of UK troops 'under fire' from the early stages of the 2003 Iraq War be used to illustrate UK troops under fire this week? Does this happen with other news organisations?
A bit of a divergence, but I hope an interesting one nonetheless. A discussion thread on the Washington Post website has just got me thinking. It all started because someone offered a list of their top ten American speeches of all time. The list was:
The list is actually hugely flawed (the exclusion of the Gettysburg address being the most obvious failing, whilst should Checkers really be up at three?). It occurred to me that it would be very hard to make a similar list for Britain (it is very hard to imagine a British version of this amazing website, for example). There are a number of reasons for this.
In part it is because our parliamentary system doesn't hold public oratory in such high regard as does the US's system of candidate / directly elected executive democracy. Nor do we have the large set-piece occasions (presidential inaugurations, party conventions and state of the union addresses) which allow oratory to florish. Party conferences are fairly mundane affairs which rarely catch the public's imagination, and parliamentary debates are just that - debates, not occasions for set-piece speech making. Perhaps as a result, rhetorical history doesn't have broad civic appeal, but tends, instead to be the preserve of a certain high-Toryish tendency. Additionally, whilst the vast majority of well remembered American speeches took place in the age of sound and visual recording, many great British speeches are lost in the mists of time, remembered (and often re-written) in fiction and folklore.
But I still reckon (perhaps foolishly!) that it is possible to construct a list based on British experience. Anyhow, I'm going to take a swing at it.
This was actually a really hard exercise. Firstly, we have to ask what constitutes a British speech - is it based on who gave the speech, where they gave it, or its content? For example, does Engel's funeral oration for Marx at Highgate cemetery count as a British speech? Broadly, I have let the speeches in on three criteria - content, their historical impact, and the significance of the person giving them. Necessarily (and unlike many American examples) it is frequently going to be impossible to assess delivery, as the speeches were made centuries before they could be recorded in any way other than textually. Some other speeches that I considered also missed out. I didn't want to reward soundbites (so the "lady's not for turning" got binned - great one liner, but can anyone remember anything else in the speech?). Likewise, I tended not to go for debating speeches. Tony Blair's proposal of the Iraq war to House of Commons (2003) is by far the greatest piece of technical debating I have ever seen, but didn't really fit into a list of speeches. I also tried to limit fictional / mythical speeches. I felt completely justified in putting Tacitus at number one, because in my view it genuinely is the greatest ever British speech (even if it never was delivered...), but I deliberately omitted any Shakespeare.
The problem is that my list is not only hugely subjective but will also reveal a whole host of historical blindspots and omissions (I appreciate, for example, that my list is horribly anglo-centric). So I really want some help with this - either alternative top tens or just other suggestions for great speeches from Britain. Also, if you are from the US, what would be your top ten? Or indeed, if you are from anywhere else, throw in some suggestions for great oratory from your experience that has moved you or has historical significance.
A friend emailed me about this, so I wanted to clear it up to avoid any confusion. I put Geoffrey Howe's resignation speech at number 8 on the list. This was the famous occassion where he knifed Mrs. Thatcher and ended her leadership with his "captain breaking her own teams cricket bat" comment. I used the name "savaged by a dead sheep" for the speech. This is in fact a soundbite from an earlier speech by Labour's Dennis Healy, used to deride the debating prowess of Howe. Of course, this became hugely ironic when Howe gave his great speech and was often referred to in discussion of it.
OK, another email has just appeared, pointing out that Checkers was actually 1952, not 1962 - I'm afraid I blindly copied and pasted that one.
The programme and details of registration and accommodation packages for this conference are now available.
We received a fantastic response to the call for papers, the results of which are contained within the mouth-watering programme of excellent panels.
We warmly invite you to join us for what promises to be an exciting and stimulating event.
Andrew Chadwick, DirectorWhy do academics make contributions to news media, and why do journalists turn to academics in particular moments or contexts? This paper presents findings from a series of interviews and focus groups with academics with experience of offering expertise in ‘security’ matters, and with the journalists and news producers who engage with them. Academics and journalists have competing interests, motives, modes of communication and modes of analysis. Any academic thinking of appearing as an ‘expert’ must be alert to these differences, and to the resulting trade offs and risks. While several academics suggested a concern at being ‘used’ by media, it is argued that there are opportunities and strategies for academics to make a contribution to news media in a positive sum manner, in which neither the news organisation nor the academic feel they have been manipulated. The paper also indicates the diversity of academics’ consideration of their media engagements, particularly concerning their understanding of who they intend to communicate to. It is not clear academics necessarily see themselves as accountable for their media statements, possibly because so much news is seen as mere ‘filling time’. Yet while the journalist may forget, or the interviewer may not even be listening, the academic’s peers, colleagues, and students, may take a keen interest.
Download the paper (pdf)