Robert Fisk, Gig Economy, Culture Wars, Wokeism, Facebook

 ... It was in his reporting of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 that the full range of Fisk's own formidable armoury, both as a human being and a reporter, was deployed to its greatest effect.

Bravery, honesty, knowledge, passion, experience, understanding, empathy and a gift for prose all coalesced in daily despatches that brought the Iraq war, with all its horror and chaos and human cost, vividly into focus for readers of The Independent...

The Combat
William Etty (1787-1848) (after)
Photo Credit: York Museums Trust [Public Domain]

War made Fisk angry, and he hated the way it was presented - sanitised, he'd say - by the world's media.

"If you saw what I saw in wars," he told Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs in 2006, "which you don't, because television cuts out the bloodiest scenes - oh no, we can't see the pornography of death. But we should. We should see the pornography of death. Because if you saw what I saw - dogs tearing corpses to pieces and women and children bombed in the desert - you would never support a war again. Never, ever."

Repelled or not, Fisk was drawn to the colouring-in of war's reality, what it meant to people who had nothing to gain and everything to lose - civilians, refugees, the innocent. His contempt for the merchants of war - of whatever hue - was a narrative thread that ran throughout his coverage, whether he was in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, the Balkans, Syria, Gaza or indeed Northern Ireland, where he covered the Troubles in the early 1970s.

Fisk was not a disinterested spectator of what he saw on the fields of conflict. His copy would coruscate with fury and indignation, and his rage, directed at those he regarded responsible for visiting suffering on civilian populations - primarily Western powers, it has to be said - brought him enemies as well as many friends and admirers...

Rival journalists, too, would sometimes be disparaging, arguing that he was a prejudiced witness. But that was the point, really. Not that he was prejudiced, but that he knew a lot, that he'd seen a lot, and that he was not going to let any official version of events get in the way of what he had himself observed and believed. His detractors, however, were in the minority and his reputation away from the the UK was astounding...

I did an event with him in Tunisia. The crowd he drew, the adulation he received, was hard to credit. He was a one-man phenomenon, the closest a journalist could come to a rock star...

The world of Robert Fisk was... where the rich and powerful would bear down on the poor and unfortunate. And now, no longer will we have him to monitor the centres of power; as he liked to explain his vocation. His voice, strident, excited, exuding passionate belief, has been stilled. This is a big claim, but I doubt we will see his like again...

(Simon Kelner, The i, 2020)

A truly great foreign correspondent and the epitome of what any critical commentator should aspire to.

*... After the 1982 massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps he talked to Palestinian survivors rather than the Christian Phalange militia and their Israeli sponsors... While he was an outstandingly poetic writer he developed an emotional obsession with the plight of the Palestinian people and a visceral dislike of the Israeli government and its allies, especially America. In the jargon of news reporting he "went native", unable to provide a dispassionate account of events and their context.

To some Fisk was a hero, bravely going where others feared to tread and asking questions that others feared to ask. To others he was guilty of hysteria and distortion in his reporting of the Middle East...

He was particularly adept at attracting the ire, or jealousy, of fellow journalists, whether through his trenchant views, his disdain of their "hotel journalism", his suspicion of western governments, or his network of contacts that in the 1990s landed him three interviews with Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda.

Many considered these to be beyond the pale, giving a mouthpiece to an enemy of western civilisation. As he saw it, no self-respecting journalist would turn down such an opportunity...

On seven occasions he was named international journalist of the year at the British Press Awards and was twice reporter of the year. He received the Orwell prize in 1999, the Martha Gellhorn prize in 2002 and UK media awards from Amnesty International on three occasions.

(Times Obituary, 2020)

Gig Economy

The Wreckers
George Morland (1763-1804)
Photo Credit: Nottingham City Museums [CC BY-NC]

Companies including Nespresso, BT and Npower are cutting call-centre costs  by using a network of "gig-economy" workers who buy their own phones and computers and pay for their own training.

Workers are not entitled to holiday pay, sick pay or paid lavatory breaks and some take home less than the minimum wage. They can spend hundreds of pounds before taking a single call... Unlike traditional call-centre staff, the customer service representatives are treated as self-employed and have fewer rights than employees.

The "freelance" call handlers are among millions of Britons in the gig economy which was little known before the 2008 financial crisis and accounts for an estimated 4.7 million workers, having doubled in size since 2016...

A former chief executive of Arise told a US trade publication the model's "biggest benefit" was to help companies "squeeze wastage out of a typical workday". "A typical employee has a utilisation rate of 65% because you're paying for their lunch, breaks and training," he said.

As well as saving on the costs of training and breaks, which are shouldered by the worker, businesses save huge sums in employer national insurance contributions, equivalent to 13.8% of each employee's pay above £169 a week.

Former Arise agents in Britain, who asked not to be named because they have  to sign confidentiality agreements, said they had to compete for 30-minute shifts and had no guaranteed hours...

Employment law experts and unions say the call handlers should be treated as workers or employees and not contractors, who have fewer rights...

(Shanti Das, The Sunday Times, 2020)

A far cry from the first principle of the founder of John Lewis:

"The happiness of all its members through their worthwhile and satisfying employment in a successful business. Because the partnership is owned in trust for its members, they share the responsibilities of ownership as well as its rewards - profit, knowledge and power."

Culture Wars

...Decline to pick a side in a culture war and you're accused of choosing by default... These are hard times for the habitually neutral, the impartial, and anyone even professionally required to zip it. The BBC is still tying itself in knots over a leaked instruction that journalists should avoid accusations of "virtue signalling" by not supporting campaigns, "no matter how apparently worthy the cause or how much their message appears to be accepted or uncontroversial"...

Poppies
Patricia havis (b. 1949)
Photo Credit: Buxton Museum &Art Gallery  [CC  BY-NC-ND]

Yet the BBC still fell foul of questions about why presenters can still wear Remembrance poppies, which suggests some undeniably worthy causes are still exempt from the new rule imposed on others. Why, some asked, isn't the idea that love is love regardless of who you love, or that black lives matter every bit as much as white ones, seen as just as non-negotiable, as the idea of honouring the dead?...

What may feel exhausting to older generations - the policing of language, the questioning of ideas they took for granted, the cultural landmarks now deemed problematic - is just life for their kids. Yet for cultural institutions supposed to reflect the life of a nation or speak to all generations, the definition of what is and isn't contentious remains, well, contentious in itself...

It's hard, in other words, to think of anything in 2020 so universally uncontroversial, so motherhood-and-apple pie, that someone somewhere won't object to it. But maybe it's a myth to think there ever was...

(Gaby Hinsliff, The Guardian, 2020)

If you don't have any knowledge about a subject how are you supposed to give a view on it? Opinion is a view or judgement  formed about something not necessarily based on fact or knowledge. As C. P. Scott reminded us: "Comment is free but facts are sacred". 

Wokeism

I was taking part in an online seminar with several hundred public servants recently when one of them started his question with an earnest apology:

Zusammenbruch
Ludwig von Hofmann (1861-1945)
Photo Credit: Leicester Museums and Galleries [CC BY-NC-SA]

"I am a man of white privilege..." I found it hard not to laugh out loud. Things have come to a pretty pass when people prostrate themselves in public for having a prostate gland, not to mention dumping on their parents for being the wrong colour...

Personally I find the appeal of this brand of ethno-masochism hard to fathom, but then I'm not white. Yet increasingly, such "woke" thinking is flooding our workplaces, schools and universities...

Much of this turmoil began with the best of intentions: a long overdue focus on ethical behaviour in corporate and public life... But the drive for decency is steadily being highjacked by extremists, bringing a dark edge of censoriousness to the quest for better workplace behaviour. JK Rowling, infamously, has been threatened with "cancellation" for sardonically pointing out that there is such a thing as a woman. Kevin Price resigned from Cambridge city council and faced pressure to leave his post as porter at the university because he refused to sign a statement that "trans women are women"...

In Scotland, the SNP government plans to outlaw speech, "stirring up hatred", even in private homes; if I lived in Edinburgh I imagine my own columns on race or religion out loud in my kitchen would provoke a visit from the police, ready with the handcuffs...

The advance of wokedom is made even more unsettling by the fact that the rules are a moving target, driven by a bewildering array of changing sensitivities and shifting language: should we talk about BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic - so yesterday), BIPOC (or Black, Indigenous and People of Colour, as they say in California) or people of colour (so whites are some kind of transparent creatures?). Confusion abounds...

In her excoriating resignation letter from The New York Times, Bari Weiss defined woke as "a mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality and the therapeutic mentality". But it's hard to pin down a movement which so far has no leader, or even a single cause, other than to condemn pretty much anything that somebody, somewhere considers offensive...

The greatest tragedy in all of this is that the gurus of wokedom have persuaded thousands of idealistic young people who rightly want to change the world into supporting what is actually a deeply reactionary movement...

(Trevor Phillips, The Times, 2020)

(See BAME, Nov 6, 2020, Tokenism, Nov 24, Trans Pronouns, Oct 20 )

*Comedy is in crisis because broadcasters are under the influence of "pathetic" woke culture, a leading producer has said.

Jimmy Mulville, 65, who produces the BBC's Have I Got News For You, said: "People who cause offence now can be cancelled. The BBC are worried about it, I know that Channel 4 is worried about it, they're all worried about it. I'm not blaming them, it's the culture in which we live. I'm just hoping we'll wake up."

He added: "I think the fear in broadcasting of giving offence to anybody now is cramping creativity...Producers must draw the line at openly hateful, racist, sexist, ageist content... I get that. But those remarks are never funny. But... I'm afraid that these poor souls who are hypersensitive, when someone announces their sensitivity, what they're really saying is 'I am a tyrant. You can't upset me. If you upset me I'll destroy you.'

(Arthi Nachiappan, The Times, 2020)

Facebook

A Terrier by a Rabbit Hole
George Earl (1824-1908)  (attributed to)
Photo Credit: The Cooper Gallery [CC BY-NC]

... For many, the existence of Facebook - and its sister products, including WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger - has been a lifeline in this period. The social network has always prided itself on connecting people, and when the ability to socialise in person, or even leave the house, was curtailed, Facebook was there to pick up the slack.

But those same services have also enabled the creation of what one professional factchecker calls "a perfect storm for misinformation". And with real-life interaction suppressed to counter the spread of the virus, it's easier than ever for people to fall deep down a rabbit hole of deception, where the endpoint may not simply be a decline in vaccination rates or the election of an unpleasant president, but the end of consensus reality as we know it. What happens when your basic understanding of the world is no longer the same as your neighbour's? And can Facebook stop that fate coming to us all?...

As the initial lockdown was imposed across much of the world, people's relationship to the internet, and to Facebook in particular, evolved rapidly. Stuck socially distancing, people turned to social networking to fill an emotional void.

Suddenly, the company found itself staring at unprecedented demands. "Our busiest time of the year is New Year's Eve," says Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebook's vice-president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, over a Zoom call from her London home. "And we were seeing the equivalent of New Year's Eve every single day. It was," she says, "the inevitable result of having almost the entire planet at home at the same time."..

(Alex Hearn, The Guardian, 2020)

If you are relying on Facebook or other social media for accurate news or factual information be very wary. Here the seeds are being sown that: the pandemic is a secret plot to impose a totalitarian world government, that 5G will enable mobile phone signals to transmit the virus, that accepting a vaccine will ensure that people will be able to be controlled, that there is a secret satanic, global network of child-abusing politicians and celebrities. (QAnon) There are many other rabbit holes available for the unwary.

(See Dec 29 - Social Media, Dec 18 - Instagram, Nov 6 Social Media)