No holds barred from Toynbee as she attacks Dacre

It wasn't totally unexpected to discover that Polly Toynbee has devoted her Guardian column today to attacking Paul Dacre's comments on privacy.

Dacre, the nation's bully-in-chief is, like all bullies, a coward: he refused to go on the Today programme yesterday to argue his case. He never dares face his critics, happy to fry alive all and sundry, never apologising, never explaining. There is a good reason for this: the stance his paper takes on just about everything is so internally contradictory and inconsistent that he could never survive even minimal scrutiny. The Mail's mishmash of lurid scandal, bitching about women and random moralising zigzags all over the place, dishing out pain and praise often according to who it has succeeded in buying with its limitless chequebook, or who has infuriated it by selling their wares to another bidder.

Tell it how it is Polly

Straws in the wind

Guido is reporing that Paul Dacre had breakfast with Gordon Brown on Thursday morning and points out the coincidence that the Mail’s leader praised Alistair Darling’s tax and spending plans.

despite the magpie taunts, it would be utterly wrong to deny that some of Alistair Darling's measures deserve support. Yes, he stole the inheritance tax plans from the Tories and his scheme is nowhere near as generous as he would like us to believe.
But it will free countless Britons from a pernicious tax on aspiration, and marks a Rubicon moment for Labour, which has accepted the right of hard-working people to pass on wealth (on which they have already paid tax) to their children.

Meanwhile in this morning’s Guardian Polly Toynbee turns against Gordon Brown,the straw that broke the camels back being the party’s move on inheritence tax.

This was more than a horrible humiliation for the prime minister. This was the week that social democracy ebbed away in England. Those words had already slipped from Labour's lexicon, never spoken by its leaders in public, rarely spoken outside the privacy of Fabian meetings and Celtic parliaments.
And she continues
To give the children of the well-off a £1.4bn inheritance bonus while the children of the poor only got another 48p a week in tax credits is symbolically far worse than that notorious 75p for pensioners. The halfway mark to abolish child poverty by 2010 will be missed by miles. Holding down public sector pay rises to 2% for three years, only half next year's expected private sector increase, will increase inequality. To cut capital gains tax on buy-to-let property, antiques, paintings and jewellery is as shameless as it is dysfunctional.

A question of ownership

Polly Toynbee's assertion that "Blair's speech omitted the root of the problem with the media - the ownership structure he did nothing to break ",will I am sure arouse a great deal of comment.

She agrees with Blair's pronouncements saying he was

"

dead right about the British media. It's a fleet of runaway JCB diggers without
driver or brakes, beyond accountability or control even by those who nominally
run them."

And her diagnosis is even worse than Blair's

The newspaper agenda, slavishly followed by the BBC,
reflects a profoundly dystopic image of a society where nothing works,
everything gets worse, public officials are inept, public services fail, tax is
wasted, lethal dangers proliferate, and everyone conspires to lie about it. Then
sententious editorials complain that children are being locked in by frightened
parents!

The problem is something that he has not addressed

"the ownership structure he did nothing to break. Had
he been brave, he could have restored media ownership rules to pre-Thatcher days. She let
Murdoch burn the rulebook to acquire over 40% of newspaper ownership. She
arranged a unique get-out clause in EU media law to allow him to launch Sky.
"

Of cause whether any future politician will tackle the issues seems at the moment unlikely.Without the support of the majority of the press,as both Kinnock and Major found to their cost,you will never be elected.If breaking the ownership monopoly is the way forward we need a major shift in political thought.

We are living in a golden age for media.

Well apparently so,according to Adam Thierer in the City Journal.(Thanks to Times online comment for the initial lead and link.)

Adam suggests that

"Throughout most of history, humans lived in a state of extreme information poverty."

But now

"we live in a world of unprecedented media abundance that once would have been the stuff of science-fiction novels. We can increasingly obtain and consume whatever media we want, wherever and whenever we want: television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the bewildering variety of material available on the Internet."

Adam blames the left for fostering a climate where the "media cornucopia"is derided for giving us less choice than we think thus making information scarce and secondly that too many outlets make it difficult to "share common thoughts or feelings"

"The report is based on the United States which has a bewildering amount of media outlets."

• 14 million radio stations
• 500 satellite Tv Stations available in 82%of households
• 18267 magazines.

Of course multiplicity doesnt necessarily mean diversity,(just flick through the channels on your Sky Box) but Adam backs up his argument with facts such as

"Nor do Americans lack a rich variety of “voices” in the media. Each new commercial media outlet must provide something at least slightly different from its rivals. If every book, magazine, TV channel, radio program, and website really said the same thing, citizens wouldn’t bother consuming any more than one or two of them. We simply wouldn’t have the media abundance that we enjoy today."

He maintains that informed citizen is so much easier today,not withstanding the internet

"You can get up in the morning and still read your (probably liberal) local paper and several national ones—say, the Wall Street Journal (right-of-center editorial page) and USA Today (more or less centrist). Walk to the newsstand and you’ve got political magazines galore, from the Marxist New Left Review to the paleoconservative The American Conservative. On cable and satellite television: CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, FOX News, PBS, local news, the big networks (at least for now), the BBC, C-SPAN, community access shows—all offer a wide variety of news and information options, some around the clock. Turn on the car radio and Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity booms out at you from the right; or maybe you can tune in to Sirius Left on satellite."

Quite why he thinks that the left is denying this state of affairs is rather baffling,although perhaps there is an American version of Polly Toynbee.

What do we think and can we say the same about the Uk.

Sour grapes from the Mail?

The Sun carries an article this morning written by Andy McNab that seeks to justify Faye Turney's selling of the story to the paper.

Andy,former SAS hero, is the Sun's security correspondent who argues that the captured sailors

"When they returned safe and well should have been given heroes’ welcomes.
Instead the armchair generals at home — led by an at times hysterical Daily Mail — have tried to pour scorn on these brave sailors."

"And the rent-a-quotes have suggested being taken hostage by the Iranians was like a fortnight in Butlins. "

He also suggests that one of the reasons for the Mail's hostility is that it was beaten to the story by the Sun after a“very substantial sum”.

Turney turned down the offer because the Sun is the paper of the forces and the Mail is rarely read in the mess halls.

update

Polly Toynbee joins the debate in the Guardian under the article"Our press, the worst in the west, demoralises us all

"The Ministry of Defence agreed to pass bids on to the sailors: the Daily Mail emailed an offer of "a very substantial sum". The Mail on Sunday combined its bid with the Sunday Mirror and jointly offered £100,000 in another email. The News of the World offered to outbid all others. Sky made an offer but the BBC did not. The Daily Express offered £30,000."

So both the Mail and the Express joined the auction,both papers the fiercest critics of the policy.

But Polly continues her tirade against the press describing them as

"The British press, the worst in the west, demoralises the national psyche. It makes people miserable. It raises false fears. It proclaims that nothing works, everything gets worse, and it urges distrust of any public official or politician. Now it has the government on the run and a chance for Tory victory, there is no holding back its doom-mongering in this most healthy, safe and prosperous age."

Harsh words indeed Polly but obviously not including the Guardian?There are some rather sweeping statements being made and the final paragraph also makes interesting reading

"What is so squalid about these newspapers is their use of figleaf sermons to cover their real business, done with corrupting chequebook, threat, intimidation, invasion of privacy, paparazzi aggression and vicious cruelty. Labour should use this disgrace to reign in chequebook tell-all by public servants, from those at the top such as Christopher Meyer to those at the bottom such as these sailors. It's time to look again at privacy legislation, a quid pro quo for the Freedom of Information Act the press abuses with petty assaults on government. The media is in danger of making government by any party impossible."

Much as I admire a lot of Polly writing I believe this to be really over the top.The main cause of this episode was not the press but the decision by the MOD to allow the sailors to sell their stories in the first place.

Is the Tory Press starting an anti Brown campaign?

Polly Toynbee writing in today's Guardian accuses the Tory Press of a campaign

" get low down and dirtyCameron's Brown-baiting and media spin are intended to divide and rattle Labour in the hope that it will self-destruct ."

Miss Toynbee beleives that the 10 year old news about Gordon Brown's pension policy is the start of this campaign which will reach the depths we last saw against Neil Kinnock in 1992.

She continues

"Media analyst Roy Greenslade, totting up national figures, finds 76% of daily readership belongs to the right - the Times, Telegraph, Sun, Mail, Express, Star. Only 24% belongs to the non-right - the Guardian, Independent, Mirror and Financial Times (though the FT has moved rightwards of late). This news distortion has been the abiding story of Britain, shaping the history of the last century. We have lived with it for so long we forget how far it explains British politics, its rightwardness and anti-EU xenophobia. From birth, the loud noise in the ear of every British citizen has always been the foghorn of the right. Broadcasters timidly follow the dominant press agenda. Opposing it, the small non-right press refuses to be as doggedly partisan and tribal, so the net effect is a media where Labour counts on very little favourable coverage."

I have to say that I agree to a certain extent about the attack on Brown orchestrated by the Telegraph and the Times over the weekend.It was after all the Times that dredged up the information through the freedom of Information act.With the aid of hindsight,Brown's decison appears wrong but does it justiy the coverage.The coincidence that this is 4 weeks before the local elections and that there is still noo haevyweight challenger to Brown is too great.