Was even Gordon Brown hacked by News Corp?

It is a sign of the times that one of the most serious corruption–and–criminality scandals in the British postwar era may be quietly put to rest by an offer of more money by the very organisation at the heart of the scandal. In this post I would like to quote in some length a piece by Henry Porter which appears today in the Observer. The article may give the reader a sense of the extent of the rot which is now shaking the very foundations of British democracy, all that our society reportedly rests on and stands for. It also forces a re-appraisal of traditional critiques of conspiracy theories. The quote is taken from an article titled ‘It is hard to imagine a more dangerous breach of trust by a public corporation’, and is well worth reading, along with the more general coverage of the issue by the Guardian.

It is a measure of James Murdoch’s failure to understand the gravity of the phone-hacking scandal that in answer to a question from the US broadcaster Charlie Rose, he replied: “You talk about a reputation crisis – actually the business is doing really well. It shows what we were able to do is really put this problem into a box.”

One of the most serious post-second world war scandals to affect British public life cannot be placed in quarantine and forgotten simply by means of a late apology and millions in damages. It is already clear that admissions made by News International raise huge questions about the competence and ethics of the company’s management, including James Murdoch, as well as profound doubts about attempts to quash the police’s inquiry into allegations of widespread criminality.

But much more important is that the News of the World operation has penetrated to the heart of the British government and may even have intercepted Gordon Brown’s messages. We know that Labour’s culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, who was the minister overseeing the media, was hacked, as was her husband David Mills; the former deputy prime minister, Lord Prescott, has been told that the News of the World was listening to his messages; and it seems likely that Tony Blair’s communications director Alastair Campbell was also a victim.

Two weeks ago I wrote formally to the former prime minister Gordon Brown to ask if he had received confirmation from the police that his phone was compromised by the News of the World. He has yet to reply..

Why Assange chose Sweden (and needs to avoid Britain)

Earlier this year, a professor of phonetics at Stockholm University addressed the MPs at the House of Commons. According to the Daily Telegraph,

‘Francisco Lacerda, Professor of Phonetics at Stockholm University, questioned the effectiveness of the voice risk analysis (VRA) system that is being trialled by the Government as part of a crackdown on welfare fraud.

The academic paper was withdrawn by the publisher after legal action was taken by the company behind the technology.

Speaking after he addressed MPs at the House of Commons today, Prof Lacerda said the fear of a writ could lead to important research being suppressed.

”Either we will see cases like mine where something has been published and we have actions or threats after publication, or even worse the challenging research never sees the light of day,” he said.

In 2007 he coauthored a paper entitled ”Charlatanry in Forensic Speech Science” that criticised the technology made by Nemesysco, an Israeli company.

But the paper was withdrawn after lawyers for the company threatened to sue’(1).

I would imagine that Lacerda must have been astonished to discover that it is so easy to engage in what in my opinion amounts to a form of censorship. But Britain’s libel laws mean that virtually all that it takes is a letter from a solicitor threatening legal action. Unless the target of censorship is part of an institution with deep pockets and a determination to defend freedom of speech, anyone seeking to suppress uncomfortable information has to do little more than send an email threatening legal action to a bloghost, a journal, or a book publisher.

As has been noted by journalists in the UK, Britain’s libel laws do not just apply to Britain. According to George Monbiot, ‘Such is the reach and severity of Mr Justice Eady’s [Britain's senior libel judge's] illiberal rulings that four states [in the U.S.] have so far passed what are, in effect, Eady laws, and Congress is currently considering a federal bill whose purpose is to defend US citizens from his judgments, and the English law he interprets. The Eady laws arise from his encouragement of libel tourism: allowing cases with only the most tenuous connection with this country to be heard in London, and using them to stamp on free speech all over the world’(2).

This and other bloggers should know. Last January, four posts in this blog were taken down  (they have subsequently been republished) after the legal department of the University of Liverpool objected to some passages which linked Howard Newby, the university’s vice-chancellor, to a private training firm which went into administration in 2008. In my view, the passages in question for the most part did little more than echo information disseminated by Private Eye in a piece which it had published almost three years earlier, and which generated a scandal at Newby’s former university. (For a full account of what happened, see When the Exchange of Knowledge is Threatened. See also my Financial Scandal, Corruption, and Censorship series). Thanks to Britain’s libel laws, WordPress, which I take to be very keen to defend the freedom of speech of its bloggers, evidently felt that it had no option but to comply with the lawyers’ orders. It was as if the matter had gone to court, and a judgement passed. The lawyers were effectively allowed to act as prosecutors, judge, and jury. Alas, the attempt backfired when it became known in higher education and internet circles that one of Britain’s more reputable universities was effectively trying to stop the publication of posts in an academic blog. Other more widely-read blogs which were also targeted as part of the action generated an even bigger scandal.

These and a growing number of cases like Lacerda’s help to explain why WikiLeaks chose Sweden as the site in which to try to locate at least some of its servers. Swedish publishing laws reportedly go a long way in protecting whistleblowers. The Nordic country’s democratic tradition has made its policy-makers aware of the importance of maintaining a space in which people can speak out against acts of corruption, and presumably all manner of abuses of power by members of public and private institutions. It seems that Swedish legislation would protect Julian Assange and the rest of the people running WikiLeaks from the kind of persecution by ostensibly legal means that they might face if their servers were located elsewhere.

It will be interesting to see, beyond the legal process that Assange might now face, whether Sweden does prove to be a safe bet for WikiLeaks. One interpretation of at least one of the unfounded accusations in Sweden is that the forces of darkness are trying, by any means, to stop Assange from benefiting from Sweden’s freedom of speech. I expect that we will shortly be seeing that this case will take a number of unexpected twists and turns.

Here in Britain, I would note that the Liberal Democrats, and even the Tories made loud noises before and after the elections about addressing our critical deficit in civil liberties. Some steps have been taken, or are supposedly in the process of being taken, at the behest of the Liberal Democrats. I have, however, as yet to hear that our draconian libel laws will be extensively modified, let alone repealed and rewritten, as they need to be. Is this another area in which Dem Tories have had a change of heart? If so, the politicians will not be able to blaim the alleged ‘bond vigilantes’ that have been so conveniently employed to justify the rest of the Liberal Democrats’ u-turns vis-a-vis so-called ‘fiscal austerity’.

By way of a postscript: Craig Murray, a former British ambassador who has himself been the target of censorship, has noted that Assange has been awarded the ‘Sam Adams Award for Integrity’, an award which is judged by ‘a group of retired senior US military and intelligence personnel, and past winners. This year the award to Julian Assange was unanimous.’

References

1) ‘English libel laws threatening freedom of speech, says Swedish scientist’, in Daily Telegraph, 12 March 2010, at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/7422273/English-libel-laws-threatening-freedom-of-speech-says-Swedish-scientist.html, accessed 22 August 2010.

2) G. Monbiot ‘How our senior libel law judge stamps on free speech—all over the world’ in the Guardian, 19 October 2009, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/oct/19/eady-libel-tourism-free-speech, accessed 22 August 2010.

These Liberals are starting to look like Neoliberals

Less than a day after a judge effectively tried to remove our right to go on strike, Nick Clegg declared that he would push through the most radical changes to British democracy in 200 years. Alas, Clegg, like the rest of the Liberal Democrats, said nothing about the implications for democracy of Judge Mr Justice McCombe’s extraordinary judgment, which removed at a stroke the BA cabin crews’ right to strike: the union allegedly failed to convey to its members that 11 ballots had been spoiled. Thanks to two of the three members of the panel that considered the appeal, the outrageous judgment has been revoked, and the BA cabin crew will be allowed to strike.

I’ve scanned the news for a reaction on the part of the ‘radical’ Clegg, and can find no statement that celebrates the outcome of the Unite union appeal. It might be argued that no politician would do that (what with thousands of passengers, including my brother, potentially left stranded). Then again, Clegg seemed quite happy to defend the courts’ decision not to deport the alleged Al-Qaida activist.

In my opinion, Mr Justice McCombe’s decision was the equivalent of taking the spoiled ballots and shoving them up the nether regions of Britain’s working classes. I find it almost as extraordinary—and just as worrisome—that one of the three judges of the appeal panel was willing to argue that the decision was a just one. It speaks volumes of the direction that Britain is headed that two out of the four judges that considered the issue were willing to back ‘Brutish’ Airways over what the airline itself described as a technicality. In my view, it is difficult not to conclude that in this country, as in Spain—witness what has happened to Judge Baltasar Garzón, who is being pursued by fascists with the help of a right-wing supreme court judge—at least some of the judges are now playing an explicitly ideological, and right-wing role. Perhaps what many regard as the union-busting Willy Walsh will have been gloating over his lawyers’ initial success; with a legal system like ours, who needs Lib-Tories (or as I will call them henceforth, the ToryLibs)?

As if this were not enough, it has now been revealed that the ostensibly critical Vince Cable—the David who promised to take on the banking Goliaths—is intent on privatising the Royal Mail. What the Prince of Darkness could not achieve, Cable and the Tories will: the already tattered service will be split into yet more parts, and in an extraordinarily cynical gesture, the ToryLibs will offer to give the Royal Mail’s beleaguered workers a share of whatever is left. Note that this proposal was actually in the Liberal Democrats manifesto; it is not a caving in to Tory policy.

The upshot is that, contrary to what some of us would have believed as little as two weeks ago, a parallel can now be drawn between the careers of Vince Cable and Gordon Brown. Both politicians wrote essays in the famous The Red Paper on Scotland, which was published in 1975. (Cable’s essay was titled ‘Glasgow: Area of Need’, and in one passage, he stated that ‘It is a reasonable working hypothesis that most of Glasgow’s social problems can be related back to unemployment, job instability and an unbalanced occupational structure’. Does he believe that privatising Royal Mail will lead to employment, job stability, and a balanced occupational structure?) Now both politicians have now demonstrated that they are quite ready to betray the principles of progressive politics which they not only held back in the 1970s, but which both still claim to represent.

Before the elections, I was convinced that the worst possible outcome would be an outright Tory victory. I am starting to think that the coalition is worse, indeed, possibly far worse. The Tories will now be able to hide behind the apparent liberalism of the Lib Dems, even as the Lib Dems aid and abet what will be yet another velvet claw-like stage in the advance of neoliberalism. The mild John Major introduced legislation that was far more brutal than anything that Thatcher ever managed, and New Labour did the same again. How much further will the ToryLibs take us in the same direction?

Ken Loach rightly noted in this week’s Guardian that he thinks that ‘…we’ve got the real British ruling class back in power. Very rich white men with old money. This is the real face of the ruling class –very nuanced, very urbane, very smooth, and we shall see how very ruthless they are’.

Financial Scandal, Corruption, and Censorship: Part 6

Conclusions: Financial Scandal and Neoliberalism

…to engage in corruption, and to expect to survive in public life is to have either a generous faith in the mechanisms of secrecy or a confident sense of what one can get away with in the event that activities hitherto hidden are suddenly made visible to others. —John B. Thompson, in Political Scandal

Please note: this is the sixth post in a series; to read the rest of the series, click on any of the following:

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: When Knowledge Is Exchanged
Part 3: Case Study A: the Beeching ‘Axe’
Part 4: Case Study B: the Newby-Mandelson ‘Axes’
Part 5: Scandal in the Times of the Internet
Part 6: Conclusions: Financial Scandal and Neoliberalism

In this, the final post in the Financial Scandal series, I’d like to return to some of the issues which motivated me to write the series in the first place. What are the implications, both present and future, of my analysis for the relationship between financial scandal, corruption, and censorship in Britain? In particular, what are the implications for the neoliberal politics which this blog has critiqued?

Neoliberalism is a discourse of market fundamentalism: the most zealous advocates of neoliberalism—better known as neo-conservatives—attempt to reduce everything to ‘the economy’, and this on the basis of a model that conceptualizes the economic in terms of a peculiarly idealised marketplace: one in which individuals are at once driven and controlled by greed. In this world of macho predators, competition amongst alleged economic equals results in the fabled ‘invisible hand’ that produces at once ‘free’ and ‘stable’ markets. By this account, such markets are not only the most ‘efficient’ way of conducting business, but if Milton Friedman is to be believed, the markets go hand in hand with democracy. According to Friedman and his many followers, democracy can and must be conceived in ‘free’-market terms: to be free is to be free to buy and sell things in an ostensibly unfettered marketplace, and vice-versa: a democratic economy is one in which individuals are ‘free’ to buy and sell whatever they please. The role of government is paradoxically to police a freedom thus conceived. In Friedman’s now infamous terms, ‘…the scope of government must be limited. Its major function must be to protect our freedom both from the enemies outside our gates and from our fellow-citizens: to preserve law and order, to enforce private contracts, to foster competitive markets.’

Alas, it doesn’t take a degree in sociology or critical theory—the very subjects that are now amongst the first to be threatened with closure by neoliberal managers in some of the UK’s foremost universities(1)—to realise that this discourse is utterly ideological: as many people have discovered, so-called ‘unfettered’ markets are actually those in which the dominant private corporations and their managers—popularly known in Britain as the fat cats—are able dictate terms not just to individuals, but to entire nations (witness what has happened with the financial markets in the case of Greece and Spain, and what happened with Rupert Murdoch in the case of the UK). As Adam Smith himself recognised, an unregulated market is one that eventually results in less competition, not more. Indeed, in so far as some individuals, organisations or social networks become disproportionately powerful, this selfsame power contradicts the other fundamental(ist) tenet of neoliberalism: that the economy is purely economic, in the sense that it is entirely separate from politics and culture.

If the economy is always purely ‘economical’, how can we explain what many believe is a link between Alan Milburn, Capita, and New Labour’s NHS policies? Or indeed, how can we explain any analogous link between David Blunkett, Entrust, and New Labour’s ID card proposals? (In the U.S., the example that comes to mind is that of Dick Cheney, Haliburton and Iraq)

In my view, the answer to these, and countless other questions seems obvious: as certain individuals, corporations, and/or social networks accumulate more and more profits, they are bound to attempt to exchange some of their economic power for political, cultural and symbolic power. In so doing, they are bound to use that power to attempt to modify legal and other market conditions in order to further increase their economic capital. There is, from this perspective, an inexorable link between economic, cultural/political, and symbolic forms of capital. In so far as this link remains unregulated, or is regulated in ways that serve the interests of those with the most capital, then there is likely to be a snow-balling dynamic that eventually spreads throughout more and more social and cultural spheres. This process not only contradicts the very discourse of neoliberalism, but is likely to lead the agents of neoliberalism to transgress moral or legal thresholds that they themselves claim to observe—the boundaries of what counts as morally or indeed legally acceptable behaviour.

It is here that ideology—which I define with John B. Thompson as meaning that serves to develop and then sustain durable relations of domination within and between social groups(2)—may play a key role. On the one hand, a variety of forms of everyday practices—media, DIY, etc.—may serve an ideological role in so far as they help to keep people preoccupied with matters that distract them from the overarching political process, or at least lessen the pain of neoliberalism’s harshest prescriptions. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to assume that we are simply ‘duped’ or ‘distracted’; many of us may realise that there is a fundamentally ‘unfair’, if not corrupt social order, but may still be persuaded that there is ‘something in it for us’, or worse, that there is no alternative. Then again, many take an active part in furthering the ideological relation by demanding lower taxes, rejecting the very principle of public services, expressing their support for expeditionary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so forth.

If ideology may work to dissimulate social inequality, financial scandals may work to puncture the ideological ‘spell’, or at least to contradict any easy adherence to the predominant forms of rationalisation. A manager may argue that it is necessary to shut down railway lines or to close university departments, and this for reasons to do with economic scarcity. S/he may also attempt to make the case that such closures further the cause of managerial efficiency, the long term survival of an organisation, etc. Arguments such as these may be greeted with some scepticism, but by and large, are likely to be accepted, however grudgingly, by all but those most directly affected by a proposed closure.

If, however, it is alleged, or indeed it becomes known that the manager stands to benefit personally and financially from such policies, then moral outrage may ensure, and, in more ways than one, the proverbial cat may well and truly come out of the bag: the ‘fat’ cat may be exposed as having a vested interest in pursuing policies to real or alleged problems that might have alternative solutions; and the lion of public opprobrium may be released in so far as localized groups, and social groups at one remove become aware of the arbitrary nature of an ostensibly ‘economic’ form of management. One may have difficulty understanding the complex nature of what I have described as the ‘nocturnal’ connections between politics and the economy, but no critical pedagogy is required to explain a manifest conflict of interest, let alone crude financial corruption of the kind commonly associated with financial scandals.

I further believe that it is in this context that censorship, and indeed Britain’s extraordinary libel laws, come to the fore. In so far as New Labour’s, and before it the Tory’s neoliberalism advanced the kind of market fundamentalism I outlined above, then the risk of financial conflicts of interest, if not of a culture of corruption has arguably increased exponentially. A government that is predisposed to accommodate big business, or a political party whose leading members declare, as Peter Mandelson famously did, that they are intensely relaxed with people becoming ‘filthy rich’ may promote, however inadvertently, corrupt and/or fraudulent practices. When all that matters, or appears to matter is money, then why should social regulations be allowed to stand in the way of making more money?

While some of the media of mass communication may have a vested interest in concealing any ensuing transgressions, others may be keen to expose them. In this series I have suggested that, in the context of Ernest Marples and Richard Beeching’s railways, a ‘quiet word’ was apparently enough to silence the most powerful media; in the context of Peter Mandelson and Howard Newby’s higher education, and in contemporary politics more generally, a growing army of bloggers has proven more difficult to silence. Indeed, unless some legal means may be found that can operate to silence the critics, then moral or legal trangressions, real or alleged, may develop into internet-based forms of mediated scandal. As I suggested in Part 5, this then alters the dynamics of scandal in a variety of complex and far-reaching ways.

It thus comes as no surprise that Jack Straw allowed extraordinarily authoritarian libel laws (by Western standards) to prevail in the UK until the dying days of his tenure as New Labour’s Justice Secretary. These laws meant, amongst other things, that the British Chiropractic Association could sue Simon Singh for critiquing its practitioners’ claims regarding the power of their spinal manipulations (see Simon Singh’s account of how the attempted censorship took place in his case). But they also meant that this blog had four posts temporarily removed simply because they mentioned the possibility of a conflict of interest involving Howard Newby and the private training firm Carter & Carter (see Parts 4 and 5 of this series; see also When the Exchange of Knowledge is Threatened).

As Jack Straw rather belatedly—some might say, cynically—recognised, the political economy of the British libel laws, as reflected in the fees commanded by lawyers, means that they are skewed in favour of the very wealthy. From this perspective alone, far from being just legal instruments to stop defamation, the laws work, in practice if not in principle, as a weapon of mass silencing: unless a critic is very wealthy, or unless s/he is so disempowered (or otherwise empowered) that s/he stands little or nothing to lose from a libel trial, then only a very brave, naïve or foolhardy person (the boundary between these is not always clear) would dare to take on the corrupt minister or the powerful manager. The implications of this state of affairs for Britain’s democracy are difficult to overstate.

Looking towards the future, it seems clear that unless David Cameron’s much vaunted ‘Liberal Conservative’ coalition prevails in its stated aim of rolling back over a decade of New Labour authoritarianism, then it may well be that we will witness, sooner rather than later, a transition from what might be described as the New Labour, to the Chinese model of censorship. It is, in my view, no coincidence that Friedman’s economic model was first tested in Pinochet’s Chile, or indeed that Margaret Thatcher sent her own Cecil Parkinson to Santiago to look and learn from the Pinochet economic team: as Parkinson explained in El Mercurio, Chile’s leading newspaper at the time, the Chilean ‘economic experience’ was ‘very similar to what we are trying to develop now in Great Britain’. Asked about the differences between the two countries, he almost wistfully suggested that ‘Chile could impose a policy and a speed of application of that policy which just isn’t possible in this country’(3).

If or when the mentioned transition occurs, it may be necessary to speak of the ‘early internet’ era, i.e. a period when it was still possible, despite some risks, for individuals to engage in an honest exchange of knowledge, that is to say, to speak up and out against corruption and populist authoritarianism, as well as to communicate about all manner of things both economic, and more–than–economic.

1) At Liverpool, Howard Newby tried to close philosophy, politics and communication. Middlesex is now threatening to close its highly regarded philosophy department.
2) in (1990) Ideology and Modern Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.
3) Quoted in the Latin America Bureau’s (1983) Chile: the Pinochet Decade. London: LAB, p. 16.

Financial Scandal, Corruption and Censorship: Part 5

Financial Scandal in the Times of the Internet

…to engage in corruption, and to expect to survive in public life is to have either a generous faith in the mechanisms of secrecy or a confident sense of what one can get away with in the event that activities hitherto hidden are suddenly made visible to others. —John B. Thompson, in Political Scandal

Please note: this is the fifth post in a series; to read the rest of the series, click on any of the following:

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: When Knowledge Is Exchanged
Part 3: Case Study A: the Beeching ‘Axe’
Part 4: Case Study B: the Newby-Mandelson ‘Axes’
Part 5: Scandal in the Times of the Internet
Part 6: Conclusions: Financial Scandal and Neoliberalism

In Part 4 of this series, I examined some of the continuities between the Beeching ‘Axe’, and what I described as the Newby-Mandelson ‘Axes’. In this, the penultimate post in the series, I would like to consider what I regard as one of the main differences between the two contexts and their associated scandals: the role played by the media of mass communication. In my opinion(1), a key difference was that neither Richard Beeching nor Ernest Marples had to contend with the politics associated with internet-based representations; in this post I will offer a view on how financial—and to be sure, not just financial—scandals have changed thanks to this difference.

* * *

In Political Scandal (2), John B. Thompson argues that the mass mediated disclosure and commentary of what he describes as a scandal’s ‘discourse of opprobrium’ are not secondary or incidental features of the scandal. Mass communication introduces qualitative shifts to scandal, and indeed some of the shifts may actually be constitutive of aspects of the scandal.

It is possible to begin to show how this is the case by way of Thompson’s notion of ‘mediated publicness’. Thompson suggests that in localised scandals, the disclosure of events associated with scandal tends to be limited to acts of communication involving the co-presence of the different actors: information about the events is disseminated via face-to-face encounters in everyday living or working spaces. By contrast, in the case of mediated publicness, the actions or events at the heart of the scandal are made visible to others who are not present at the time of their occurrence, and who may be situated in spatially distant locals.

Thompson analyses this difference with reference to Erving Goffman’s(3) distinction between ‘front regions’ and ‘back regions’. Simplifying somewhat, ‘front regions’ are those in which an individual attempts to project an image that is compatible with social conventions and frameworks, while the ‘back region’ involves actions or aspects of self which are felt to be inappropriate, or which might discredit the image that the person is seeking to project (4). In the case of localized scandals, there is one shared front region and multiple back regions; the individuals who share the front region become aware of the events in at least one individual’s back regions. By contrast, in mediated scandal real or alleged transgressions in back regions are propelled to multiple front regions: there are, for example, the front regions of the different media institutions—some sympathetic, others unsympathetic to the actors at the centre of a given scandal; and then again those of different audiences, which may themselves be disposed, or not to join in any condemnation.

Before the media of mass communication publicised aspects of the Newby/Carter & Carter scandal, it is unlikely that more than a handful of high level staff members knew about any real or alleged conflict of interest. However, once the matter was reported by Private Eye, it burst into a national arena. This meant, amongst other things, that the events could be both perceived and judged not just by much larger numbers of people, but in the context of a variety of front regions: those shaped by the different media themselves, and those shared by different audience groups.

Thompson notes in Political Scandal (and indeed in earlier works)(5) that if this change occurs, it is because the media can work to inscribe or ‘fix’ symbolic forms in technical media of transmission. This process has the effect of durably inscribing messages, and thereby makes it possible to transpose the messages across space and time to new contexts. It might be argued that the internet makes it possible to enact a newer version of this self-same process. I suggest, however, that the internet reveals the relative, and itself potentially ephemeral nature of the ‘fixing’ of media messages. In the more traditional media of mass communication (e.g. newspapers or TV), a message may indeed be ‘inscribed’ as Thompson suggests, but this is of course no guarantee that it will be received, let alone preserved by audiences. As Thompson himself would doubtless agree, in the course of everyday life a variety of factors may lead audiences to miss, overlook, or simply forget a media message, or one of its aspects. A first key shift in the internet is that the messages, or one or more aspects of the messages may be more durably inscribed thanks to the internet’s archival character. The ‘half-life’ of certain kinds of messages is thus likely to be greatly extended; even if internet messages may themselves be overlooked, audiences can always return to them, or be encouraged to return to them.

In the context of the Newby/Carter & Carter case, I would offer two examples of this phenomenon. First, almost two years after the scandal first acquired mediated publicness in the spring of 2007, ‘SOS’ (Save Our Subjects) campaigners at the University of Liverpool who mobilised to stop the closure of their departments (see Part 4 of this series) found, and were able to ‘re-activate’ the commentary of blogs such as this one. I include below an image taken of a page at Liverpool Student Media, in which one campaigner—presumably a student—alerted others about one of my own blog’s earliest pieces about the scandal, and in so doing made an allegation that the cited blog itself did not:

Image of page in the Liverpool Student Media, originally at http://www.liverpoolstudentmedia.com/they-say-cut-back-we-say-fight-back, accessed 27 April 2010. Days after I accessed it, the page, and the overall LSM website were removed, with a sign that said ‘This account has been suspended’.

As a second example, I would refer to the short Private Eye article which inaugurated the aforementioned mediated publicness of the scandal. This piece was transcribed by the ‘SOS’ campaigners in the spring of 2009, and then again, in early 2010, by a blogger who scanned and uploaded the article (6).

A second shift is illustrated by these selfsame examples. It was not just that the items in question were preserved, and made available; after all, anyone wishing to retrieve most printed news and current affairs in the traditional media might well be able to do so via one of the national libraries (though it might be considerably more difficult to do the same with newscasts). A key change was that the Private Eye piece, and a variety of blogs could be both retrieved, and then re-distributed via new websites. In some cases, such websites might act as virtual clearing houses of discourses of opprobrium, listing all critical accounts and making them instantly retrievable by existing, or new generations of web users (7).

The consequences of this change are difficult to overestimate. Unless the actors at the centre of an internet scandal are able to ‘scrub’ the web (I will return to this point at the end of this post), any damage inflicted to their reputations in a first wave of traditional media representations is likely to acquire a new spatiality and temporality on the internet. Stories may be easily accessed for much longer periods of time, and may be made available to new audiences in quite different spaces.

My reference to different spaces leads me to a third change. It might be assumed that the recontextualised items are simple reproductions of the ‘originals’. But of course, many internet-based references to pieces such as appeared in Private Eye or in this blog were more than reproductions; they were framed in accounts that often highlighted or sought to otherwise intensify what the new sites’ authors regarded as the most transgressive aspects of the actions at the centre of the scandal. The allegation made by the SOS campaigner in the example I offered above is a case in point. Another good example may be found in the Bristol Blogger, which was eventually censored but whose original text may still be found quoted at the ‘Howard Newby and the Management of Science’ page of DC’s Improbable Science(8).

* * *

A different example, drawn this time from the comments posted after an internet version of a Times Higher article, leads me to another major shift brought about by ‘internet-mediated’ scandals. The example involves the commentary that followed, and which I depict below (9).

Again, the commentary involves allegations not made by Melanie Newman, or by this blogger. What interests me here is that, as I noted earlier, Thompson draws a distinction between localized and mediated scandals. However, the above juxtaposition of a ‘bona fide’ journalistic piece, and the commentary that follows suggests the need for a reconsideration of the distinction between localized and mediated scandal. Thompson would no doubt be the first to recognise that his localized/mediated distinction is not set in stone. However, in my view the above example (and indeed the earlier one of the SOS campaigner) points to the extent to which an internet-mediated scandal refigures the question of what counts as the local, ‘word of mouth’ scandal, and what counts as the mediated, technically ‘fixed’ or inscribed scandal. Here I would like to question not so much the manifest difference, as the difference in the implicit or underlying codes of communication.

Even when the media report on local events, they do so in ways which, explicitly or implicitly, frame views and events to fit with the overall discourse of the media institution. Whatever the politics of that discourse, journalistic conventions, and the threat of libel means that the media must work to maintain a distance, however superficial, between their own representations, and those of the individuals or groups they refer to.

By contrast, especially in the context of sites with open commentary, ‘third person’ representations of the kind associated with conventional journalism may be juxtaposed with ‘first person’ experiences and opinions of the kind that might be expressed in the course of everyday conversations or gossip. One consequence is that the kind of morality associated with local, ‘word of mouth’ discourses of opprobrium is transposed to the context of mediated publicness.

While there is almost certainly a greater risk of defamatory commentary, it is also the case that more direct and experiential accounts of real acts of corruption (or of social injustice) may be made available, and may be accessed by a wider range of audiences. Ideally at least, the internet functions as a means of empowering voices that would otherwise be either entirely suppressed, or effectively filtered by mainstream media.

* * *

This point leads me to the last issue I’d like to address in this post: what can the actors at the centre of scandal do in the context of the changes I’ve described?

We should recall that scandal does not necessarily mean that a corrupt or illegal action has taken place. Individuals may be wrongly accused of transgressions, or the transgressions may offend a certain morality without constituting illegal actions in and of themselves. Indeed, Newby himself might argue that any scandal arising in relation to Carter & Carter was the result of determined efforts on the part of disgruntled staff first at UWE, and then at Liverpool to stop a necessary exercise in the rationalisation of each university’s practices.

Whatever the case, it seems to me that in the context of an internet-mediated scandal, it becomes rather more difficult for individuals or institutions—even individuals and institutions with significant amounts of economic, cultural and symbolic power—to attempt to manage or otherwise control the mediated publicness of a scandal.

As I explained in Part 3 of this series, soon after he became Minister of Transport for the Macmillan government, Ernest Marples was ‘outed’ as having a direct interest in promoting greater road use. However, a full and potentially cripling scandal was averted. This happened thanks to the Tories’ ability to control parliamentary procedures. As a result, a full debate of the matter in the House of Commons was cut short, and Marples was allowed to do a paper divestment of his road building business. Note, though, that from then onwards, Marples’ preferred modus operandi was to have Richard Beeching as the front man for his plans to effectively close down one third of Britain’s railway lines and stations.

But it seems likely that a full scandal was also averted thanks to the fact that, as noted by the historian Richard Lamb, prior to the publication of Beeching’s The Reshaping of the British Railways, Marples and Macmillan reportedly had a ‘quiet word’ with the editors of at least two leading national newspapers(10). Although Lamb does not elaborate on this point, we may assume that the editors were asked to engage in self-censorship vis-à-vis the growing scandal regarding the proposed closure of railway lines and stations.

I also noted that key railway managers exercised self-censorship and refrained from criticizing Beeching and Marples in public. For politicians and other public figures in the 1960s, these and other forms of censorship meant that it was either easier to prevent mediated scandals, or once they started, to moderate their consequences. Of course, such strategies have not always proved effective.

Today the control or attempted control of mediated scandal is made far more complex—and censorship or self-censorship more difficult—in so far as the internet has made possible a proliferation of sites which may produce and reproduce, distribute and redistribute information at the heart of financial and other forms of scandal. The Thompson quote which I use as an epigraph in this series acquires a somewhat different meaning in the early internet era. The mechanisms of secrecy that might once be taken for granted by corrupt politicians such as Marples have been undermined to the point that it may be almost impossible to use raw censorship to hide any transgressions.

Almost impossible, but not impossible. Here again, the second case study is instructive. In early 2010, some two and a half years after the first hostile representations appeared in the media and in the blogs, the University of Liverpool Legal Department issued a complaint to WordPress, alleging that several of the posts in this and other blogs were defamatory (see my earlier post, ‘When the Exchange of Knowledge Is Threatened‘).

One way of interpreting this action was in terms of an effort to ‘scrub’ the internet ‘clean’ of at least some aspects of the scandal that continued to dog Newby thanks in part to the extended durability of messages on the internet. In the opinion of some critical observers, the legal department may have hoped that the number of sites was still small enough that any ‘evidential base’ (as Thompson might put it) for scandal might be completely erased, a policy that would almost certainly have been impossible to carry out in the case of one of Mandelson’s or other leading politicians’ more recent scandals. Put simply, an efforts to ‘scrub’ a reputation clean would only be successful if the number of websites was sufficiently small, or localised to make possible acts of censorship.

Whether there was an effort to scrub the web of the Newby/Carter & Carter scandal or not, and whether or not Newby himself played a role in any such effort, it seems clear that the action could only really be taken thanks to increasingly authoritarian libel laws in the UK. As I interpret them, one of the functions of these laws is precisely to attempt to control the developments that I have outlined in this post. I will explain this point in the final post of this series, in which I will argue that we are perhaps witnessing the end of an ‘early’ era of the internet, one which may well be replaced by a second which will be dominated by the kind of controls which Google was happy to observe in the context of China—the same country that many universities in the UK have been so keen to engage in business.

Whether this happens or not, the outcome of the effort to censor this and other blogs entailed a paradox which Thompson describes by way of the notion of ‘second order’ transgressions. As Thompson defines them, such transgressions occur when ‘attention is shifted from the original offence to a series of subsequent actions which are aimed at concealing the offence’ [or I would note, alleged offence](11). As Thompson notes, ‘The attempt to cover up a trangression—a process that may involve deception, obstruction, false denials and straightforward lies—may become more important than the original transgression [or alleged transgression] itself’(12). According to Thompson, in such cases there is a shift from a ‘simple’ to a ‘complex’ scandal. One of the hallmarks of mediated scandals is precisely this spiraling of transgressive actions.

Whether the actions undertaken by the University of Liverpool’s legal department constituted an effort to ‘conceal’ a real or alleged offence or not—the University’s legal department would doubtless suggest that it was simply taking steps to remove ‘defamatory’ representations—the effect was arguably to trigger such a spiral. The complaint also had the effect of generating a renewed interest in the back, or the alleged back region(s): surely a vice-chancellor with a distinguished academic and managerial record would not try to use illiberal libel laws in ways that flatly contradict the right to freedom of speech? Why, then, was the University’s legal department suddenly trying to silence Newby’s critics, in some cases more than two years after the criticisms had first been published?

Any effort to silence this and other bloggers was noted by entities such as the Index of Censorship (13) and by the national media, whose journalists enquired as to the nature of the allegations, and the consequences for this and other blogs. A financial scandal which by early 2010 had long since been forgotten by many academics roared back to life, fueled in my opinion by the growing suspicion amongst some academics that ‘Knowledge Exchange’ was a kind of prototype for the draconian changes demanded by Peter Mandelson (see Part 4 of this series). The upshot was arguably that, whether the intention was to ‘scrub’ the internet of any uncomfortable information or not, the censorship of this and other blogs had precisely the opposite effect: it resulted in a reactivation of the scandal, and thereby gave the representations at the centre of the scandal additional durability, new audiences, and in the context of the drastic cuts in funding demanded by New Labour, perhaps an even greater credibility.

Postscript: as I note above, just days before this post appeared, several of the webpages it referred to were removed, with the notice, ‘This Account has been Suspended’. Suspended by whom?

References

1) I’d remind readers that this post, like the rest of this blog, is just that: a matter of opinion.
2) J. B. Thompson (2000) Political Scandal. Cambridge: Polity Press.
3) In E. Goffman (1969) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
4) Thompson, Political Scandal, op cit p. 63.
5) See also J. B. Thompson (1990) Ideology and Modern Culture. Cambridge: Polity.
6) See http://bristle.wordpress.com/2010/01/06/bristolbloggergate-wot-private-eye-said-about-sir-howard-newby-back-in-2007/, accessed 2 May 2010.
7) As a good example, I’d refer to http://www.liverpoolstudentmedia.com/sos-save-our-subjects, which could be accessed as recently as 26 April 2010, but which has now also been removed.
8) See http://www.dcscience.net/?p=181, accessed 2 May, 2010.
9) This commentary appeared beneath an article by Melanie Newman titled ‘Unease over Liverpool’s plans for a ‘research-focused’ realignment’, at Times Higher online, 15 January 2009, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=405004, accessed 2 May 2010.
10) Richard Lamb (1995) The Macmillan Years 1957-1963. London: John Murray.
11) Thompson, Political Scandal, op cit, p. 17.

12) Thompson, Political Scandal, op cit, p. 17.
13) See ‘WordPress versus the Bloggers’, at http://blog.indexoncensorship.org/2010/01/18/wordpress-bloggers-libel/ accessed 2 May 2010.