The Evening Standard on Alex Crawford

Just a quick note to draw your attention to this article on Sky superstar Alex Crawford, which was featured in a two page spread in last night's Evening Standard.

I found it infuriating. (Okay, that's probably a bit of an overstatement. I was highly annoyed.) Two pages on the woman who entered Tripoli with the rebels and probably 80% of it is about...her kids. And the fact that she's a woman.

Viv Groskop writes:

At the Edinburgh Television Festival last month Crawford complained that it was "insulting and very, very sexist" to be asked how she raised her children. Today she is less bullish. The woman thing irritates her but she understands it too. She recognises that people see it as unusual that she has chosen to live her life this way, even though that's an incredibly sexist assumption.

As if this article - focusing on Crawford's children, what it's like to be away from them, how her husband has to stay at home - is any different. Crawford's had incredible experiences as a foreign corrsepondent and, as the article touches on, had a really hard time getting to where she is.

How can it possibly be that out of her whole life, the most interesting thing to feature on two pages of a daily newspaper is how she deals with being away from her kids? Groskop's article reduces Crawford basically to just a mother who happens to have a job which is a bit time consuming and often takes her away from home. For all it really matters to the piece, she could be a business executive, an athlete, a cabinet minister, and nothing about the article would really fundamentally change.

It would be infinitely better to read two pages about the experience Crawford had in Libya, and to look more in depth at how she became a foreign correspondent at the age of 43, then to mention those facts in passing. What should be an incidental fact - that she has four children - becomes the central fact of her existence. Groskop calls Crawford's views on being a working parent 'refreshing', but there is nothing refreshing or new about this inane focus on how successful women deal with their families. Frankly, I don't care.

Johann Hari: The Indy basically says 'meh'

The Johann Hari saga at the Independent has come to a sort of sputtering, unsatisfying end. Hari's issued an apology in which he repeats his earlier admission that it was wrong of him to take quotes from other sources and pass them off as words said to him in interviews. This time, the admission comes without the attempt at justification which coloured his original apology, and instead with the concession that it was 'arrogant and stupid' of him not to have asked older, more experienced colleagues for their opinion on his unorthodox method. Hari's apology also includes an admission that he did in fact edit Wikipedia articles under the name of David Rose, making his more favourable and adding false, insulting 'facts' to the pages of people with whom he'd argued.

The actions taken to rectify the situation: Hari's returned his Orwell prize, which he admits isn't that big of a deal since rumour has it they were going to strip him of it anyway; he's taken an unpaid leave of absence from the Indy; and he's going to study journalism, to learn all of the things I guess people thought he picked up somewhere but never did. When he returns to writing, his articles will all be footnoted and accompanied by audio recordings of his interviews so people can check his work.

I think Hari's done pretty much everything he can aside from actually resigning from the Indy, which is what I had expected. He's admitted to the things he's been accused of doing wrong, he's acknowledged the way he would be treating someone he didn't like who had done the same things, he's returned his prize, he's gone off to get proper professional training, and he's agreed to a level of disclosure upon his return that is presumably unprecedented for a mainstream journalist. As someone who greatly admired Hari before this all happened, I don't think I'll ever read his stuff again and think of it highly, but I think he's handled this fairly well. Except that I really think he should have just admitted to it all off the bat and resigned, gone to journalism school, and seen if anyone would hire his new, improved self. But I mean, barring that, I guess this is the next best thing.

Unfortunately, the Independent comes out of this affair looking ridiculous, with its credibility in tatters. The Indy currently has no plans to release the report of its investigation in to Hari, saying it's 'private'. This means that any criticisms or revelations about the Indy's editorial practices, ie how this could possibly have been allowed to happen and what will be done in the future to sort that out, who is responsible, etc, are not going to be made public. The Indy's request that the Orwell Prize committee hold off on their announcement (to reportedly strip Hari of the prize) until they were done their investigation just allowed Hari to beat them to it, making the loss of the prize look like his gracious concession instead of a disgrace. The two-month long investigation into facts that were proven by bloggers in the space of a day or two and which one would think were admitted to by Hari pretty early on, just looks sluggish, reactive and desperate to buy time to figure out how to protect Hari and themselves.

I said I assumed Hari would resign - I assumed that he would resign to save both parties from having to say they sacked him, but that they would sack him if he didn't choose to resign. But no. Hari will be welcomed back in 2012 with a watchful eye (well, maybe, who knows since the Indy aren't saying!) and a pat on the head for his journalism degree. Despite admitting to repeatedly breaching two very serious rules (of journalism, of ethics, of basic decency and common sense, take your pick) and destroying the trust readers had in him, Hari will return to a prominent position at the Indy that most young journalists could only dream of; he won't, I imagine, be hired on as a local London news reporter who has to work his way up to the op-ed pages. He'll probably even be able to spin this whole thing and his subsequent foray into j-school (rumoured to be at Columbia) into a good couple of first articles.

In short, a year or so from now, the only people who will really remember will be the people that didn't like Hari in the first place. He'll gain new readers who aren't familiar with his past indiscretions. He'll be without his Orwell prize but will be relieved to have salvaged his job and, let's be honest, his reputation among those in the mainstream media who were never really willing to admit that he did very much wrong in the first place. The Independent has failed miserably in creating real consequences, either for Hari or for itself, and I for one will avoid reading it in the future as a result.

No News is Good News?

Well. I had been doing pretty well with posting fairly regularly up until the last two months. For a few weeks I was too busy with work and some family stuff to form a coherent opinion on anything, and then for a few weeks I was on holiday and had absolutely no clue what was going on in the world.

It's an odd feeling, being out of the news loop. My last few days in the UK before I headed home were consumed with trying to find the latest news on the London riots, but by the time I was home I had no real desire to follow up. When I was in Canada, I didn't feel adequately submerged in either Canadian or UK news. When NDP leader Jack Layton died, everyone was talking about his last news conference and how frail he looked. But I hadn't seen it, and indeed hadn't paid much attention to Layton since the election, so I didn't feel as connected to the story as everyone else seemed to be.

Equally, I had no real idea what was going on in the UK. Being on holiday, I was more scanning the front page of the BBC News website before starting my day than really poring over the news as I usually do. I was pretty much off Twitter, a regular source of comments and links that indicate what the big story of the day might be. And that was when I was in the civilised world, not at my grandparents' in rural Quebec, where the lack of a computer let alone an internet connection and the recent closure of the only deppanneur in walking distance meant I spent my days blissfully ignorant of anything that wasn't a canoe or a quad bike.

When I got back to London, I tried to catch up on what was going on. What were the big stories that happened between August 10 and August 30? Okay, things seemed to have progressed in Libya, check. There were rumblings of this Nadine Dorries abortion debate, so I was a bit behind on that one. Hurricane in the US. What else? Hmm, well...nothing earth-shattering then, I guess?

It was a nice reminder that sometimes in the little bubbles we build for ourselves - you know, following a bunch of people on Twitter who all talk about the same things, constantly refreshing news pages, having 24-hour news channels on every minute of the day - stories tend to get a bit over-hyped. Sometimes the big news of the day really isn't that big - we'll spend much of the day talking about it, tweeting about it, blogging about it, battling opinions on it...and then forget about it a few days later.

The abortion debate, for example. For days it's all anyone could write about, until eventually the coverage reached the kind of hysterical fever pitch point where you have to sit down and go, really, are we still talking about this? How many times and in how many fora can the same points be made over and over and over, with one side having absolutely no hope of budging the other? If there had been any real chance that the amendment would be passed, that would have been one thing. There would have been some real purpose in getting all worked up, in making sure that everyone's opinions were heard, in lobbying MPs, etc etc etc. But it was never going to come even close to passing, and everyone knew that. The final vote was 368 to 118.

I'm not saying it's pointless to debate anything that we know isn't going to come to pass, but I think that with the combination of the 24 hour news cycle and the blogosphere, where everyone is competing to make sure everyone else knows what they think and knows that they knew some scrap of information first, stories can just get massively blown out of proportion if there's not much else to talk about. And they can keep running for days. With the amendment not even close to passing, the whole thing will now fade away. The big story about that bill will always be the changes to the NHS that some people see as privatisation, and the yet-to-be-seen results of those changes. People will remember the debate as a footnote, another mad Dorries moment and not much else.

So I think I might go into a self-imposed news exile more often, especially when things seem to be getting out of hand with a story that doesn't really seem to be that big of a deal. If I can limit wanting to scream at my computer/TV/newspaper in exasperation to just once or twice a day, it can only be beneficial to my sanity.

Phone Hacking and the Future of Newspapers

Well. I feel like I probably should have written something about this whole phone hacking business a lot sooner, but I had kind of been waiting for it to settle down for a second first to allow for some perspective and clear facts. But with new allegations surfacing and executives resigning and being arrested on a daily basis (including Rebekah Brooks as of about three hours ago), we seem to be a long way away at the moment.

So far, then. I think 'appalled by hacking into phones of families of dead/missing people' goes without saying, so I'm not going to dwell on that. But there's been a lot of moralising about phone hacking/blagging full stop, and that's been a bit of a joke. While of course there are people who care about it as purely a privacy and/or legal issue, the vast majority of outraged people are outraged because of who the victims were. People were interested, but not especially angry, when they thought the News of the World had been hacking celebrities' voicemails. Much of the ill-sentiment back in January seemed to be aimed at Andy Coulson, then David Cameron's director of communications, and at least part of that was more about politics than anything. I mean, the general feeling just seemed to be that the people responsible had either gone to jail or lost their jobs, the victims were going to be getting compensation to the tune of £100,000, and NOTW apologised. Fine.

The interesting thing about the past couple of weeks is that the new allegations have brought the scandal to a whole other level. The old allegations didn't seem to threaten the BSkyB deal in the least, and the idea that the NOTW would be shut down was beyond imagination. The practices aren't new, but, for the most part, the victims are, and that's part of the difference (the other part being that it appears those old practices were far more widespread than initially believed). And it's not necessarily that there are so many victims, but the stories that were sought. No one can condone illegal activities used to get 'juicy' stories of grieving family members.

But there seems to be a grey area where these same activities don't seem to be so reprehensible if the stories are a bit more in the public interest. The tip of that is the somewhat 'meh' reaction to celebrities being hacked - the idea that the stories generated would just be bits of entertainment gossip, nothing too harmful, and certainly no dead children involved. Going deeper, there don't seem to be that many people fixated on Tom Baldwin, Ed Miliband's director of communications, in quite the same was as they were/are on Andy Coulson. That's not to say there's no interest - there is, both among those with a political agenda and those who simply say fair is fair, if Miliband's going to criticise Cameron over Coulson then he should have to explain Baldwin. And it was brought up in the House of Commons by Jeremy Hunt. But that allegation has so far not exactly scandalised the public in the way the NOTW allegations have.

And why not? Well, for one thing, Lord Ashcroft doesn't exactly elicit the same kind of sympathy as Milly Dowler's family does. For another, people don't seem to be especially bothered by the idea of looking into political donations and tax revenues for someone who's been accused of illegality on both counts. I somehow doubt we'd hear the same kind of moralising on phone hacking and blagging if those practices turned up a story that was actually in the public interest. For example, though the information for the MPs expenses scandal was probably illegally obtained, the public (and indeed politicians) were not particularly bothered by the ethics of that fact. So it's worth everyone examining whether they actually think certain practices are wrong, or if they only think they're unethical when they're carried out against certain kinds of people.

So what happens now? The full process of a police investigation, subsequent prosecutions (if any) and parliamentary and public inquiries is likely to take the better part of two years. And what will the UK media landscape look like at that point? Will there be tighter regulation? What will the relationship between politicians and press and police and press look like? What will the Sunday tabloid market look like? Will tabloid readers still expect the same kind of stories and information? Will anything really fundamentally change?

One idea that's been floating around (apologies for that picture of Ed Miliband - what were they thinking?), though it's too early to tell whether it'll amount to anything, is the possibility of changing media ownership laws. This isn't specifically about Rupert Murdoch (or, at any rate, it shouldn't be). Concentration of media ownership should always be a concern in terms of hurting freedom of the press by limiting the diversity of information available and giving too much power to one person or company.

One problem with more stringent regulations, though, is that newspapers are increasingly not profitable. For example: in 2010, News International-owned The Times reported pre-tax losses of £45m, and in 2009 News Corp. announced that its newspaper revenues were down 97%. But News Corp. can afford to continue running their papers at a loss (while making cuts and introducing paywalls to try to offset some of those losses) because their other operations (TV, specifically) are so profitable.

So if we want to regulate and limit media ownership, how picky can be about what prospective owners already own? When the NOTW was abruptly closed down, there was speculation that Murdoch was ridding himself of the paper in order to quash some concerns about media plurality around the BSkyB deal (which had not yet unravelled). Assuming newspapers continue to lose money (and the loss of advertising revenue and competition from online news mean that trend is almost certainly irreversible), if new regulations mean owners have to choose between profitable TV stations or tabloids and loss-making broadsheets, how long will those newspapers survive?

Plagiarism and media denial

So the Johann Hari saga lumbers on. Hari published his apology in the Independent and on his website on Wednesday, in which he denied plagiarism, but admitted that 'in some instances' he used practices that were wrong and which he wouldn't repeat:

Why? Because an interview is not just an essayistic representation of what a person thinks; it is a report on an encounter between the interviewer and the interviewee. If (for example) a person doesn't speak very good English, or is simply unclear, it may be better to quote their slightly broken or garbled English than to quote their more precise written work, and let that speak for itself. It depends on whether you prefer the intellectual accuracy of describing their ideas in their most considered words, or the reportorial accuracy of describing their ideas in the words they used on that particular afternoon. Since my interviews are long intellectual profiles, not ones where I'm trying to ferret out a scoop or exclusive, I have, in the past, prioritised the former. That was, on reflection, a mistake, because it wasn't clear to the reader.

Personally, I found the apology to be a bit more of a justification than anything, but as Hari's rejection of plagiarism and churnalism was in tune with what I wrote on Tuesday, and as he apologised and admitted he was wrong, I was willing to let that be the end of it, at least until Hari publishes his next piece, which will presumably be thoroughly vetted first by his editors (which no longer include Simon Kelner), and then by his critics.

But by this time, some of those critics had had time to go back through more of Hari's work, and what emerged was not a picture of occasionally or 'in some instances' finding a more accurate quote for a badly expressed thought. Blogger Cheradenine Zakalwe got the ball rolling by comparing Hari's 2009 interview with Malalai Joya with her memoir Raising My Voice. Zakalwe's work was picked up by author Jeremy Duns, who pointed out that in addition to the 42 quotes lifted in whole or in part from Joya's book, there were also passages which appeared not as quotes from her but as Hari's own writing. The New Statesman's Guy Walters reported Dunn's findings and mentions similar problems with Hari's 2004 interview with Ann Leslie. Blogger Guido Fawkes posted that Hari was sacked from both Cambridge University's student newspaper in 1999 and as a writer for GQ for embellishing stories. The Council for the Orwell Prize announced that it was investigating the situation further.

A lot of the controversy has centred around whether what Hari did should actually be called plagiarism. On Tuesday, I wrote that it shouldn't. On Friday, I changed my mind. Not only is some of what Hari did actually textbook plagiarism - as in, taking words that Malalai Joya wrote and passing them off not even as quotes from her, but as his own writing - I believe that the sheer extent of Hari's so-called 'cleaning up' of quotes goes beyond the courtesy he and his defenders try to pretend he was doing the reader and the interviewee. Where quotes were taken from earlier interviews, I feel Hari was plagiarising not the words of the interviewee but the work of the interviewer, who had to ask the right questions and take the time to record/transcribe/parse through their interview to include the quote in their story. Hari didn't only pretend that the quote was said to him - he also pretended that he put in all of the work that's involved in getting that quote from the interviewee's mouth to the page.

What I've found most bizarre about this whole thing is the defences that have emerged for Hari in mainstream media, all of which seem to deliberately treat Hari's practice as barely worse than just removing ums and ahs from a transcript. The Independent's C J Schuler posted a blog on Tuesday calling the accusations against Hari 'extraordinarily naive'; Schuler, for some reason, maintained that Hari was likely a victim of authors who trot out the same anecdotes and thoughts over and over on book tours, often in the same words. Schuler seemed to have missed Hari's own admission earlier that day, which showed this was clearly not the case.

The Guardian's Mark Lawson wrote a seemingly well-intentioned piece yesterday, which suggested that journalists should use the controversy as an opportunity to reassess their own methods. However, Lawson's article ignores the developments in the story, falls back on Schuler's bit about media-savvy authors repeating themselves, and basically dismisses what Hari did as 'being too kind' to interviewees by giving them the opportunity to be quoted at their best. 'A small sin,' he says, 'in comparison to the numerous media interviews that choose to cruelly distort what was actually said in the interest of news value, malice or political purchase.' Ah yes, the old, 'sure this was wrong but what about this other thing which is also wrong and possibly more wrong!' Many of Hari's defenders pointed out journalistic shortcomings at the Daily Mail or the Sun in his defence; luckily for critics, a logical response to this kind of reasoning was at hand, and from Hari himself, no less.

Frankly baffling was former Guardian editor Peter Preston's piece in today's Observer, which says it's 'ethically ludicrous' for anonymous bloggers to be able to whip up a controversy over Hari's 'occasional habit...of using a cleaned-up, pre-written version of his subject's answers rather than a ... you know ... more um! ... rambling live response.' I refuse to believe that someone with Preston's experience is actually so obtuse as to not realise by this point that a) what Hari's accused of is (once again!) more than removing ums and ahs, b) that his critics are not at all anonymous (he refers to leftist blog DSG, which started the controversy, but conveniently ignores, oh, everyone since), and c) that this charge of ethical ludicrousness makes absolutely no sense at all. Even if Hari's detractors were anonymous, how would that mean that they have no ethical grounds to find fault with Hari?

Strange though these defences are, they actually all have one common theme: the journalists writing them don't seem to believe that we, the readers, really understand. If only we knew what it was like to interview someone. If only we were real journalists and not 'anonymous' bloggers and tweeters. Schuler actually writes that 'anyone who has ever actually conducted interviews or attended discussion will surely smell a rat', while Lawson and Preston use their columns to pour scorn on these riff-raff who use Twitter and blogs to expose wrongdoings.

Despite the fact that comments on earlier articles and debates on Twitter clearly showed that many, many people believed that there was far more to what Hari did than cleaning up quotes, these defences continue to pretend as if that's all it was. Lawson and Preston's articles both make clear what others have merely hinted at: they think we're idiots. We rabble don't understand what an article would look like if we didn't allow quotes to be cleaned up. An exact transcript would be a nightmare! You don't want that! Both ignore the fact that no one has asked for exact transcripts, only an accurate portrayal of an interview that actually took place and not a synopsis of an author's thoughts from elsewhere.

But the Guardian writers insist on telling us what we're angry about, and then telling us that we're wrong to be angry, rather than admitting that there's more to it. To me, this implies that the journalists believe that only they can really set the news agenda. Aside from Hari's actual writings, this story has come entirely from blogs and Twitter. And honestly, there seem to be a lot of mainstream journalists who have a problem with that. I don't believe that the news agenda should be set by 'Twit mobs', as they've been dubbed, which I think I set out pretty clearly on my earlier blog on the Ken Clarke fiasco. But when non-journalists discover a story, and that story is supported by real facts, denial by mainstream press just looks like fear at best and snobbery at worst.

Johann Hari - it's not plagiarism, but it's not okay

In a way, it's unfortunate that Johann Hari is the person at the centre of this whole debacle. Not because I like him, though I've expressed admiration for him before, but because he is a high-profile journalist whose opinions tend to be fairly divisive among right and left, conservative and liberal, whatever. So even though the controversy that exploded today raises some legitimate issues about journalistic integrity, much of the discussion consisted of the usual suspects on the right calling for Hari's head (or job, or Orwell Prize) or on the left defending him in a way you know they wouldn't if he weren't on their side.

At any rate, a summary, in case you're not in the UK or haven't used the internet today: On June 17, DSG posted a piece noting glaring similarities between an interview Hari did with Italian communist Antonio Negri in 2004 and a previously published book called Negri on Negri by Anne Dufourmentelle. After reading the post, blogger Brian Whelan yesterday posted his own analysis of Hari's interview with Gideon Levy, and found that, again, large sections of quotes purportedly given during the interview were actually excerpts from Levy's previous writings or lifted from earlier interviews. Hari responded with this, admitting to the practice and defending it in the name of clarity and coherence.

Two of the accusations that have resulted are that Hari is guilty of plagiarism and churnalism. He's correct in saying that he did neither of these things. Plagiarising is passing off someone else's words or work as your own. Hari is using words that have already been said or written by the person he's interviewing, and attributing those words to that person - but not in the right context. And churnalism is the term given to copy where journalists have basically just reproduced a press release - clearly not the case here.

But what Hari is guilty of is journalistic and intellectual dishonesty. He is leading readers to believe that an interviewee said something to him that they did not. His portraits are always intensely personal, and the way the dialogue is laid out suggests that an equally intense conversation took place between the journalist and his subject. The question isn't whether Hari misrepresented the interviewee's ideas (and he and his editor Simon Kelner insist that he hasn't), it's whether he misrepresented the whole interview to his readers. Hari has taken sometimes very poignant and intelligent thoughts and deliberately created the impression that they were said directly to him; he even goes as far as to describe the interviewee's tone or body language while delivering the quote.

Even more disconcerting was Hari's contention that he had called other journalists and asked about this practice, and found it was normal. It doesn't seem that anyone's come forward to confess alongside Hari, but I'm not sure whether this is a sign that he's lying or that people saw the controversy and didn't want their own careers similarly affected. I sincerely hope this is not 'normal practice'. What Hari has essentially admitted to is quoting what he wishes his interviewees had said to him rather than what they actually did. It doesn't matter that they've said the quote before or written the thought in their books and articles. Either you ask the right questions to get the answers you want - and if they're unclear, ask more questions or request clarification - or you attribute the quotes to their original source.

Hari writes, 'My test for journalism is always - would the readers mind if you did this, or prefer it? Would they rather I quoted an unclear sentence expressing a thought, or a clear sentence expressing the same thought by the same person very recently?' He says if someone interviewed him and he was all ums and ahs and you knows, he would prefer that they just quoted his article from the previous week in which he said the same thing more coherently.

But this is disingenuous - it's (actually) normal practice for journalists to remove the ums and ahs from a quote, because this doesn't change the meaning, it just allows for a clearer thought. That's what I would prefer he do - quote a clear answer to the question he asked, not quote what he thinks the person would have liked to have said had they had the time to write down and edit their answers. I do mind what he's done; I admired his interviewing technique, the answers he was able to get out of his subjects, and I now know that some of that is fabricated. At the risk of sounding like his mother, I find the whole thing really disappointing.

I'm curious to see what the outcome of this will be. Rumour has it that Hari will run a piece in tomorrow's Independent (apologising? defending? explaining?), and I think it's unlikely that he'll stop working for them as a result of today's controversy. But the Media Standards Trust has already called for a review into Hari's 2008 Orwell Prize and his reputation has undoubtedly suffered. Will he continue with the same style of interview portraits that have been at the centre of the controversy? Will he be stripped of his Orwell Prize? I think the latter is unlikely - the prize was awarded years ago and so far there are no allegations that any of the work he received the award for is in question. But as to his writing - it's obvious that his next interview will come under very close scrutiny, by his editors and also by those who hope to catch him out.

And perhaps this is what should have been happening all along. Was Hari allowed to get away with this because he is so high-profile, or because of cuts in the industry, which meant that his work has not been subject to very close scrutiny for some time? If you're interested in that, I'd suggest reading this report on Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke, which was brought to my attention this weekend, and which touches on editors placing too much trust in reporters. Worth a read!

We need to talk about rape

I'm sorry, this is going to be a long one. But I think it's important.

On the occasion of today's SlutWalk London, I want to say this: we need to have an open, in-depth conversation about the way society views rape. 'We' is really every country, though the discussion that needs to be had in each society varies.

But here in the UK (and indeed in much of the Western world), we need to have a discussion that focuses on why the majority of rapes go unreported and why, of those that are reported, conviction rates hover around 6-7%.

In other countries around the world, there are cultural and legal reasons why women don't report rape; in some societies women are by law to blame, and can be punished for adultery if their rapist was married, or ostracised by their communities.

We don't have that problem here. And yet, by and large, victims (women and men) don't report sexual assault, and when they do, the perpetrators are seldom punished. Why is this and what can we do about it?

I have more answers for the former question than the latter. As to conviction rates: in order to be found guilty, it must be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the crime was committed. The vast majority of rapes (around 80%) are committed by someone known to the victim. This means that some of the more obvious signs of a violent crime - a break and enter into the house, a weapon, physical trauma - may be absent.

In cases where drugs or alcohol are involved, there are likely to be even fewer physical signs that a victim resisted (since they might be physically unable). So when it comes to evidence before a judge or jury, rape cases often come down to 'he-said-she-said', and as long as the alleged rapist says it was consensual, well, there's doubt. Evidently a lot of doubt, given the dismal conviction rates.

While a not-guilty verdict based on the 'proven beyond a shadow of a doubt' criteria doesn't necessarily mean that the judge or jury doesn't believe the victim, it is an element to consider. And this idea that the victim is lying - that she simply regrets consensual sex, that she was just too drunk to remember consenting, that she's trying to exact revenge for some reason, that she was some how at fault because of the way she dressed, because of her sexual history, because she led the guy on - it's pervasive. Anecdotal evidence from women who have gone to the police over sexual assault claims suggest that many women (in every country) are asked questions or otherwise treated in a way to suggest that they aren't to be believed.

So we need to have a conversation that looks at several things: we need to dispel some of the myths around sexual assault, we need to understand why we are so reluctant to believe that someone could be a rapist, and we need to figure out how to change the way our police and justice systems deal with victims.

As the SlutWalk phenomenon spread from Canada, I trawled through comments on news forums, many of which genuinely did not understand the outrage toward the police officer's comments that women should avoid dressing like sluts in order to avoid being raped. Isn't that common sense?, many asked. Isn't provocative clothing going to provoke? Isn't it like flashing valuables about only to complain about being robbed? Misguided people, I thought, but surely just a minority.

But no. After speaking to people I know - people who come from across the spectrum in terms of education and upbringing - I realised that this is not a minority view. Most people don't mean it in a malicious way. They aren't saying a girl in a short skirt deserves to be raped. But they do think that it makes her more likely to be raped. They've never heard the studies that say that rapists don't remember what their victims were wearing, and they don't consider the hundreds of women who are raped in institutions and care homes, or the elderly, or women raped wearing jeans or track suits or in some areas of the world burkas.

Rape is not a crime of passion and lust, it's a crime of power. Rapists don't attack their victims because they're 'sexy' or seem available. They attack them because they're vulnerable or perceived as weak, and because the rapist wants to exert their own power.

Even in a situation where one person has maybe gone home with another from the bar, possibly insinuating that sex will happen, and then changed their mind. Sure, the perpetrator may have initially been attracted to the person. But where a normal person would understand that no means no, and simply leave it at that (disappointed, sure), a rapist becomes angry that he has not gotten what he wanted. When he has sex with the person anyway, despite them saying no, he is not doing it because he finds them irresistibly sexy. He's doing it because he wants to exert his power to take something from them that they don't want to give. And this would be as true of a woman in a track suit as it is a woman in a low-cut top.

And yet, despite these facts, we still have Sandra Parsons in today's Daily Mail saying, 'Let’s be clear: rape can never be excused. Never. Yet I defy anyone to look at a group of teenage girls out on the town on a Saturday night, tottering drunkenly through the streets in micro-dresses designed to show as much thigh and fake-tanned cleavage as possible, and not feel a tremor of foreboding about how their night might end...the fact remains that dressing in such an overtly sexual manner appears to send a signal that the wearer is at the very least hoping to excite and provoke any men she encounters.'

And there it is. A girl dressing in a sexual manner sends the signal that she's available for sex. How stupid of her. She's provoking men. And men, well, they can't help themselves, can they? A man takes one look at someone dressed provocatively and his inner rapist just jumps right out?

Parsons misses the point. Women can dress however they please, and send whatever signals they want. Maybe they are showing themselves as sexually available, maybe they are out looking for someone to go home with. And they can choose who that someone is. Just because a woman is sexually available, it doesn't mean she's sexually available to all who apply. And the vast majority of men will understand that. They might ogle, they might make crude comments, they might try to buy her a drink and chat her up. But if she's not interested, they won't try to have sex with her. Those that would, would with anyone. They won't pick a girl tottering around in a group of friends, just because her dress is the shortest. They'll pick a girl who is walking home on her own wearing her work uniform, because she's the easiest target.

But again, Parsons' view about provocative dress is widespread. And it's part of the reason we're so reluctant to believe that certain men could be rapists. The myth goes: if a woman is dressed like a slut, she probably is one. She's probably slept with loads of people, she's not very discerning. So she went out, dressed like that, got drunk, met this guy...why wouldn't she have sex with him, same as she's probably had sex with a bunch of guys before him? Wasn't he right to expect that, given her dress and behaviour? And isn't it true that tons of women just claim rape the morning after, when they're ashamed of what they've done? (I'm not saying that's what Parsons believes - she makes it clear that she's not making excuses for rape in her article. But this is the victim-doubting thought process that stems from believing that what a woman wears matters.)

Well, first of all, no, it isn't true that tons of women make false rape claims. The false reporting rate is about 4%, which is similar to other crimes. Still, so many people believe that if a woman wasn't held down at knifepoint by a stranger in a dark alley, then we need more information besides the fact that she said no. If she knew the attacker, we need to know how well, in what capacity, and did she ever flirt with him? We need to know her sexual history, we need to know how drunk she was, we need to know if she's a 'slut'. Basically, we need to look for reasons he might have thought no means yes. We need to look for the fact that she's often said yes in the past, so, she probably said yes this time.

No always, always, always means no, whether it's to a stranger, a co-worker, a husband/boyfriend, a date, a person you've brought home from the bar, a careworker, a john, a family member. No always, always, always means no, regardless of what you're wearing, whether you've had sex before, whether you've been kissing, whether you've been drinking, whether you're in the middle of having sex. There are no exceptions.

So the discussion we really need to have is why, when people report sexual assault, society automatically begins looking for exceptions. We need to discuss why these prejudices exist in relation to rape, and why they are so effectively exploited in the legal system to let 93% of people off the hook. And we need to have this discussion with young people, so they understand as they grow up that there aren't any exceptions. Only when the myths around rape, which all serve to blame the victim in some way or another (too slutty, too drunk, too flirty, leading on, lying, money-grabbing) are brought to the forefront and dispelled, not least within police forces and the judicial system, can victims begin to feel both safe in reporting sexual assaults and confident that something will be done about it.

For that to happen, this conversation has to go far beyond this blog, newspaper comment sections, women's groups, and those who pretended to be outraged about Ken Clarke for a microsecond, to reach into communities, schools, institutions and people's homes. At the very least, if the SlutWalks make a few people sit up and question the myths society believes in, they'll have achieved some purpose.

On Syria

Lest you think I'm only partial to looking at the mistakes and shortcomings of mainstream media, I want to applaud the work being done in/about Syria.

Most major papers/networks/wires have a correspondent or stringer working in Syria, usually under a false name. These reporters are taking huge risks with their own safety to get information out of the country as government crackdowns become more violent and deadly. The Syrian version of the Arab Spring has more in common with Bahrain and Yemen than Egypt and Tunisia, as Bashar Al Assad's government has indiscriminately killed over 1,100 people, including, purposely, children.

The journalists reporting from Syria are at risk of being beaten, jailed, tortured and even killed if found out. Foreign journalists, who are likely to have big news organisations and national governments behind them, tend to fare better than their Syrian counterparts (well, relatively; I'm sure the time Al Jazeera's Dorothy Parvaz spent in Syrian detention was terrifying, but she was released unharmed. Several Syrian journalists and bloggers have simply disappeared. Similarly, when the four New York Times journalists were held in Libya, they were beaten and threatened, but ultimately freed. Their Libyan driver, Mohamed Shaglouf, is still missing.). Both are to be commended, but it's worth remembering that when all's said and done, the Syrian journalists will still be living there, and will have to deal with the future Syrian state, whatever it may be.

That journalists have continued to be able to get out reports on government atrocities, the refugee flow into Turkey and the deaths of 120 members of the Syrian security forces in Jisr al-Shughour (killed by police or protesters, depending on who you ask), despite a government campaign of misinformation, fear and chipping away at what internet freedom exists, is testament to their courage and ingenuity. So thank you to the foreign and national journalists, bloggers, tweeters and revolution organisers, who are putting themselves in very real danger to keep us informed and spur change in Syria.

And a mention, too, for domestic coverage. I caught then end of an excellent interview on Sky News yesterday afternoon. Colin Brazier was speaking to a Syrian government spokeswoman, whose name I didn't have the sense to write down at the time and now can't find. My favourite bit: after listening to the woman go on about how Syrian forces have never fired on anyone who didn't fire on them first, denying the number of people killed, etc., Brazier said something along the lines of: 'Let me ask you a question probably no one ever has. Suppose you are lying. Suppose you are acting as an apologist for people who are committing crimes that might well be investigated by the International Criminal Court. Does that concern you at all?' Would that all interviews included such difficult and important questions!

Does the IMF Need a European Leader?

Another cross-post from the work blog.

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Between now and the selection of the new IMF Managing Director on June 30, the three European countries responsible for 40% of the IMF’s current lending commitments will seldom be out of the spotlight. Portugal is due to choose the government that will ultimately have to implement the policies to secure its €78bn bailout. The Greek government will have to present yet more austerity measures and implement privatisation of €50bn in government assets in order to secure the next tranche of its loan, which is reportedly at risk of not being released, and faces GDP figures, bond repayments and in all likelihood a general strike before the month is up. Ireland will desperately seek a cut in the interest rates on its €85bn bailout as it fights off rumours that another one will be needed.

As the IMF leadership decision draws nearer, there can be no doubt about the importance of the relationship between the Fund and Europe. But what does that mean for the board tasked with selecting Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s replacement?

While there are nominally at least two candidates to become the next MD, and by some accounts as many as five, all eyes are going to be on the European candidate, France’s Christine Lagarde, when nominations close on June 10. And not because she’s the frontrunner: June 10 is also the day that France’s Court of Justice is expected to decide whether Lagarde will face a judicial review over her role in the 2007 Tapie affair.

Lagarde, who was widely tipped for the job even before Strauss-Kahn officially resigned on May 18 amid allegations of sexual assault against a New York chambermaid, was the first to declare her candidacy and did so despite the question mark over whether her intervention in a legal dispute between tycoon Bernard Tapie and Credit Lyonnais, which saw Tapie awarded €285m in damages from the then public owned bank, constituted an abuse of authority. But if judges rule next week that Lagarde should be formally investigated, can she still go ahead with the IMF candidacy?

When Lagarde was appointed Finance Minister in 2007, she became the first woman to be put in charge of the finances of a G8 country. If she goes ahead with her candidacy and is successful, she will be the first woman appointed to the head of one of the world’s most powerful financial institutions since its inception in 1945. However, if the judicial review goes ahead, Lagarde could become the second IMF chief in one year to go before the courts, a scandal the IMF would be keen to avoid.

There’s clearly a strong argument that Lagarde should not be touted as a shoo-in for the job with a legal black cloud hanging over her head. However, the long-standing tradition that says that the IMF chief is always European has been a hard one to shake, especially in an age of high-profile IMF lending to European countries. European leaders have thrown their support behind Lagarde, arguing that a European MD, and one that has previously shown support for bailouts, is needed to understand the fiscal and structural problems and solutions in Greece, Ireland and Portugal. At present, there’s only one candidate who fits the bill.

But does the IMF really need a European to solve a European problem? After all, during the Latin American debt crises of the 1980s and 1990s, nobody suggested that having an Argentine at the helm of the IMF would be a good idea. Could the experience of candidates from emerging economies be just the ticket? Banco de Mexico Governor Agustin Carstens is so far the only publicly declared candidate, with former South African Finance Minister Trevor Manuel and Kazakh National Bank Chairman Grigory Marchenko also rumoured to be contenders. Carstens argues that a Latin American who has experienced debt crises but has a good fiscal record is what’s actually needed to help mend the problems in the euro zone.

Aside from that experience, a non-European candidate also brings distance from Europe, which European leaders may fear, but could be exactly what the IMF needs. It may be that someone who doesn’t feel a national attachment to preserving the euro is better able to make critical decisions on IMF lending to the euro zone; it may also be that during the next MD’s five year term, focus will shift and crises will emerge elsewhere, mooting the current ‘need’ for a European leader.

The French judges’ decision next week should give us a clearer picture of where the IMF race is headed. If Lagarde is cleared by the Court of Justice, she is all but certain to be appointed MD, unless the US throws its support behind Carstens. If the Court rules in favour of a judicial review, Lagarde’s success is much less clear-cut. Barring the sudden, last-minute declaration of a second European candidate, a withdrawal would mean the likely appointment of Carstens.

Disastrous as an inquiry would be for Lagarde and the French political sphere, it need not be a crisis for Europe and the IMF. Any competent managing director will be able to negotiate and handle the existing EU bailouts, and the IMF could benefit from the opportunity to appoint its leader based solely on merit rather than at least partially on nationality, as well as the chance to be more representative of emerging economies.

The benefits of a non-European MD deserve to be considered whether Lagarde remains in the running or not, and certainly when the next appointment comes around. Europe will not be able to claim forever that it is at the same time most competent to run the IMF and most in need of its help.

Please use the...er, comments section

Earlier this week, you were very nearly treated to a full-blown rant on the banality and utter pointlessness of most of what makes up the 24-hour news cycle. Following Obama's visits to Ireland and the UK, where TV viewers especially were subjected to endless hours of journalists talking about BBQ menus, 'The Beast', Michelle Obama's clothes and the preparations at Downing Street before Obama's arrival there, I was just about ready to explode with a 'IF THERE'S NOTHING TO REPORT THEN GET OFF THE TV!' But, alas, I didn't have time to finish the post, and the next day Ratko Mladic was arrested and it seemed like a bit of an odd time to be complaining about the 24-hour news cycle when I was glued to the TV hoping for any new scrap of information on Mladic's extradition.

So instead, I'm having a ponder about something that rarely fails to get my blood boiling: the comment section of news websites. Their purpose, I suppose, is to foster debate, to allow for opinions on the story where the journalist has (hopefully) provided objective facts. Kind of a 'letter to the editor' section for each individual story. But where the letters section of a newspaper is usually a selection of at least somewhat thought out, intelligent, legible thoughts, the comments section on a story, as you'll know if you've ever ventured into those depths, tends to be a collection of the most venomous, ridiculous, moralising and just plain crazy 'thoughts', usually dispatched with no consideration for comprehension, let alone spelling and grammar.

I am a frequent comment reader and occasional comment poster. I comment usually only when my disbelief at the stupidity of either the article itself or the existing comments has reached a specific point, namely where I wish I could shake the writers and scream sense into their faces. I end up feeling like I'm on a crusade to just push a bit of common sense on people, even though everyone knows that the people who frequently comment on these boards are rarely the type to ever change their opinions in the slightest, regardless of the facts. I'm told it would be better for my sanity if I simply stopped reading them.

But I can't. I'm addicted, in a way. When the Globe and Mail's Judith Timson wrote an article on the SlutWalk phenomenon a couple of weeks ago, hundreds of comments followed (503, at last count). I was curious - I didn't really have a reaction to the piece, so I wanted to see what other people thought. Big mistake. The main focus of the discussion in the comments seemed to be about whether dressing 'like a slut' was the same as, say, leaving your car unlocked with valuables in plain view, or going to a bar wearing all of your most expensive clothes and jewelery, flashing wads of cash around, getting wasted, and leaving with people you don't know. As in, those actions are of course liable to get you robbed, and frankly you'd be to blame for acting so stupidly, and, as a consequence, of course dressing like a slut is likely to get you raped, and you're to blame for dressing so stupidly.

Now, I could write a whole post just about the misconceptions around that. I think my frustration with the comments section is that I think I have a chance to engage with this. This is false; posting is just like shouting as loud as you can into an empty cave, and seemingly has no effect on the people who have already formed opinions based on misconceptions and have no intention of hearing the facts. You can scream 'til you're blue in the face about studies that show that clothing isn't a risk factor for rape, that rape is in most cases a crime of power and not sex, based on exploiting weakness and vulnerability and not about being turned on, that while a short skirt might attract some unwanted attention, leers and whistles, it won't turn those oglers into rapists, that men are not just rapists waiting to be triggered by a low cut top, that a victim is never under any circumstances to blame for being raped...but none of these things matter. There will still be a hundred posts after yours perpetuating the same myths that only pretty girls in tight dresses get raped, and frankly they probably had it coming.

The Globe and Mail also seems to have changed its policy recently regarding stories on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It has long been the case that these stories are closed to comments because they more than most tend to devolve into racial and anti-semitic abuse. But I noticed last week following Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu's speeches that the comments were open and the, er, debate in full swing. And the racial and anti-semitic abuse, the old myths and hopeless stereotypes were all there.

My question is this: is the comments section a good thing? Does it allow for an exchange of opinions, a forum to offer differing points of view, a chance to educate people, and an opportunity to respond to the article? Or is it simply impossible to have a reasoned debate in a forum with no real moderation (aside from removing posts flagged as offensive or spam - I mean there's no direction to the debate)? Posters have long criticised the Globe for banning comments on Israeli-Palestinian stories. But now that comments are allowed, is there really any point? Can you have a meaningful discussion about the conflict when every post questioning Israeli policy is immediately deemed anti-semitic and terrorist-supporting, regardless of content, and every post criticising Palestinian leadership or tactics is deemed apartheid-supporting, racist or, the zenith of Internet criticism, akin to Nazism?

I'd genuinely like to hear ideas on this one. Do you read comment sections, and why? For the entertainment of finding posts exposing the most ludicrous opinions based on nothingness? In hopes of finding or contributing to genuine intelligent debate? Do they really have a purpose beyond letting people vent their pre-conceived opinions? Should I really just stop reading them altogether?

PS

Update: thanks to Tim Montgomerie for a nice collage of this morning's measured, not-at-all sensational headlines

On Ken Clarke

This is the second time in the last four days I've felt the need to write about the way rape is treated in the media, but now my responses to two different issues seem so polarised that I'm not sure I'll be able to discuss both without tripping over myself somewhere. And so I'll discuss today's Ken Clarke fiasco and leave my thoughts on the SlutWalk phenomenon for another time.

I don't even know where to begin with today's distortion of Justice Secretary Ken Clarke's interview on BBC 5 live. The audio is here and the transcript here; I beg you to listen/read (preferably listen, so you can hear tone as well) before you read the rest of this or form an opinion on the subject. Immediately after the interview aired, the reports began to come in: that Clarke doesn't think date rape is rape, that Clarke thinks some rape is trivial, that some rapes are not rape at all, that Clarke doesn't believe 'rape is rape'...and then began the flood on Twitter, with people who had clearly not heard the interview or even read a proper news report about it informing their followers that Clarke thinks rape isn't rape if you know the attacker, if you're wearing a short skirt, etc etc etc.

First of all: yes, absolutely, Clarke made some horrible choices in terms of the language he used, and didn't take any opportunity to correct himself. He repeatedly referred to 'serious' rapes, which is what has led a slew of people to accuse him of believing that some rapes are 'trivial' (ie the opposite of serious), or that rape in general is not a serious crime.

But in listening to the interview, it is crystal clear that Clarke is trying to distinguish between what he later calls a 'classic' rape scenario - one person violently pinning down another person and having sex with them against their will (the 5 live discussion is framed exclusively in terms of women victims, though of course men can be and are also victims of rape) - and other crimes that can be classified as rape but aren't in that same way. Actually, Clarke is specifically trying to distinguish between that 'classic' rape and statutory rape, or his example of consensual sex between an 18 year old and a 15 year old. It turns out that, actually, that crime would be a sexual offence with a minor and not classified as rape and so not included in the average sentence Clarke is trying to refute, but that doesn't change the fact that, at the time, Clarke's 'serious' was not a demarcation of some rapes as worthy of our attention and concern and others not, but an attempt to distinguish between the sentences given to violent, repeat offenders and those given in cases of statutory rape. I think Clarke made clear on the show, and then again in later interviews, that he views all cases of rape - sex against someone's will, regardless of the circumstances - as serious crimes.

He alluded to some 'confusion' around date rape when he was a practising lawyer, but unfortunately was never asked to clarify, and nor did he volunteer to. He did say that all date rape cases are different and that some cases of date rape are that 'serious' classic scenario - which is to say, violent, forceful. I would guess that the confusion he speaks of lies in cases where perhaps two people have been out together, are both drunk, and have sex, and where in sober retrospect neither party is sure if consent was given at the time, or whether a person can be capable of giving consent after a certain point of inebriation. I am emphatically not saying that a woman who has been drinking is in any way at all to blame for rape, or was 'asking for it'; a person has a right to say no to sex at any point up to and during the act, and the other person has an obligation to stop. But I think it's disingenious to pretend that society thinks that a man in the 'confusing' date rape scenario above is the same and needs to be treated the same as a predatory rapist (whether a stranger in a park or a colleague in the office) who intentionally commits a pre-meditated and violent rape.

And actually, I don't really want to get into that whole debate, though this blog fairly sums up my thoughts on it (and much more concisely, I might add). My main outrage today was not with people who were unwilling to see that rape is an incredibly complex and nuanced issue and not nearly as black and white as being able to say all rape is exactly the same. My main outrage was with the media and politicians, led by Labour leader Ed Miliband, who were determined to score political points and create a controversy by purposely ignoring the context and meaning of Clarke's words and reducing the interview to a couple of patently false soundbites, which were then repeated and further distorted through other media and Twitter.

Miliband demanded in PMQs that Clarke be sacked by the end of the day for his views on rape. This might have been justifiable if, say, Clarke had actually denied that rape was a serious crime, or actually said that date rape isn't rape, or actually said that some rape isn't really all that serious. But he didn't, and Miliband knew that. I hate to have to agree with David Cameron on anything, but when he accused Miliband of jumping on a bandwagon, he was absolutely correct.

The Telegraph followed with the headline 'Kenneth Clark questions whether date rape is really "rape"'. Er, no, he didn't. A blog on the New Statesman website said that 'a significant amount of people agree with [Clarke]' that there is a 'scale of rape', trotting out as proof a survey showing that 30% of people think that a woman is partially or totally responsible for rape if she is drunk. Except, since Clarke didn't say anything about drunk women asking for it, it was a lie to say that 30% of people agreed with him. Independent columnist Johann Hari, who I normally adore, posted a link to an old article on the prejudices that allow rapists to go free, saying the 'horrible views that Ken Clarke subconsciously revealed about rape are dismayingly common in Britain'. Except none of the views in the article are ones Clarke discussed.

I have no problem with journalists taking a current event and using it as a platform to foster discussion on important topics - and, as I had planned to write about in relation to the SlutWalks, common attitudes toward rape are absolutely something that need to be brought out into the open. But so many journalists and political activists today took the opportunity to purposely ignore Clarke's fundamental point, which was, ironically, that the BBC 5 live presenter Victoria Derbyshire was reducing a political policy covering all crime into a tabloid headline about Clarke reducing rapists' sentences to 15 months. Clarke was trying to clarify facts about the average sentencing (which, granted, he did not do very well at all), and to stop the discussion from becoming hysterical over figures that he believed weren't true.

Any discussions about the pitiful figures for rape reporting and conviction rates, about the way the police and justice systems treat rape victims, about funding for rape crisis centres, about public attitudes toward rape and the idea of victim-blaming and myths about false reporting - all of these and more would have been very valid questions to ask of Clarke and ourselves. There are enough real problems in the way society and the legal system treat rape - there was no need to create a fake hysteria around something that Clarke just clearly does not believe, and I was immensely disappointed in the media today for insisting on perpetuating sensationalist trash.

The Future of Libyan Foreign Relations

Cross-posted from my work blog, which I'll post the link to some other time - we're just getting up and running right now, sort of a work in progress.

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On May 12, the day that David Cameron invited Libya’s rebel leaders to set up a formal office in London, National Transitional Council Chairman Mustafa Abdul Jalil made a number of statements at a press conference at the FCO which, reading between the lines, could suggest that some of Libya’s trade agreements with Russia may be at risk in the future if the NTC’s forces manage to take power.

Russia has long seen Gaddafi as a key ally in the Arab world. In 2008, then-President Vladimir Putin visited Tripoli and announced that $4.5bn in Libyan debt would be cancelled in exchange for major contracts for Russian energy and construction firms, including an exploration and extraction deal for the state-owned Gazprom and the construction of a $13bn pipeline through Algeria and Niger. The debt deal also included a multi-billion dollar contract for Russian Railways, and, in January last year, Putin announced a $1.8bn arms deal, which reportedly included a fighter aircraft and tanks.

Though Russia abstained from the March 17 UN Security Council vote authorising the enforcement of the no-fly zone in Libya, Prime Minister Putin was later quoted comparing the resolution to a ‘medieval call to crusade’. Moscow has since criticised NATO forces for overstepping their mandate and called for negotiations between the rebels and Muammar Gaddafi, in contrast to the view espoused by most western politicians that there is no room for Gaddafi in the future Libyan state.

When asked about Russia, Jalil commented that Russia has made it clear that it supports Gaddafi, and that while the NTC respects Moscow’s decision and would continue to honour legal agreements between Russia and Libya ‘when’ they are victorious, Russia’s continued support for Gaddafi and failure to establish any relationship with the NTC could have an impact on relations in the future.

The real keyword here, though, is ‘legal’. Earlier in the press conference, Jalil made sure to distinguish between ‘legal’ agreements and treaties, which he said Libya would honour with all states, and those that were clearly made as a result of ‘obvious financial corruption’. With Russia and Libya ranked 2.1 and 2.2 respectively on last year’s Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index (on a scale of 0 to 10, 0 being the worst and anything under 3 being considered highly corrupt), it’s not a massive stretch to imagine that, in the event of an NTC victory in Libya, some of those oil investments and lucrative arms deals with Russia may be more thoroughly examined and found wanting.

Meanwhile, Jalil refused to be drawn on either the possible partition of Libya or the NTC’s views on relations with Israel. In fact, he initially refused to answer questions on either from BBC Arabic’s correspondent, calling them ‘provocative’. Eventually, he relented to say that Libya was indivisible, that the state the NTC sees itself representing is and always will be unified.

As for Israel, Jalil said simply that it would be ‘another matter to consider when victory is achieved.’ I’m not sure what, if anything, can be drawn from this latter response. To be honest, the NTC has enough to deal with right now without embroiling itself in a debate on Israel and angering either its Western or Arab allies in the process. Though Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE are the only Arab governments to have officially recognised the NTC, the revolution is highly popular on the Arab street and the NTC has been somewhat recognised by the Arab League. This position isn’t worth risking over a hypothetical discussion on Israel, and nor can UK and US support be jeopardised by coming out against Israel.

It’s worth considering that, while it’s unlikely that the NTC’s position on Israel will be a central issue any time soon – at the very least not until they are actually in control of the country – its policy may be shaped by other factors liable to come to the fore in the meantime. Before any new Libyan government comes to power or has a chance to formulate foreign policy, it will have time to observe the decisions (and subsequent consequences) of its Egyptian counterparts in the Supreme Military Council. Egypt’s relationship with Israel is, of course, more complicated, but the NATO involvement in Libya may mean that the West has more influence over the NTC than it does the SMC, or at least that the NTC might care what the West thinks a bit more. With the recent reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas in the Palestinian Territories and the Quartet’s September 2 deadline for a two-state solution looming, it’s also possible that, by the time the NTC has a chance to worry about its Israel policy, the situation on the ground will have changed.

On a final note – after all of the debate over the purpose of UK foreign policy and the motives behind taking action in Libya and not in other states where it may be equally warranted (Syria, Bahrain), it struck a slightly odd chord to see Jalil at pains to thank the UK government for taking a ‘moral stand’ based on humanity and not self-interest or future considerations. I attended a discussion on Libya at the Frontline Club back in March, in the early days of the Libyan revolution but before the UN Security Council had approved military intervention, where former UK Ambassador to Libya Richard Dalton advocated for a British foreign policy that is first and foremost self-interested; British policy toward Libya should be (and, Dalton argued, is) based primarily on what is in the long-term best interests of the UK.

The idea that none of the countries involved in Libya went in without considering the potential consequences for political relations, trade and migration is naive and, if true, would indicate a dearth of intelligence in the respective foreign offices. Not even the FCO would argue that British foreign policy is based solely on morality or humanity. In a July 2010 speech, the first of four setting out the UK’s new approach to foreign policy, Foreign Secretary William Hague spoke of policies that extend British ‘global reach and influence’ and use ‘diplomacy to secure our prosperity’. He also focused on the need to protect UK security in an increasingly globalised world. The fact that Jalil’s gratitude for Britain’s ‘moral stand’ followed directly after his discussion of illegal immigration into Libya and on into southern Europe suggests his statement is borne out of something more than naivety. So I can only guess at Jalil’s reasons for making a statement that is just so clearly untrue; was it just a soundbite that his UK hosts can use to defend intervention against critics who say they have no business interfering in Libya, to prove that NATO forces are wanted and respected by the Libyan rebels? Or perhaps an attempt at cosying up further to the UK government, which, despite authorising a UK office for the NTC has not yet officially recognised them as more than ‘legitimate interlocutors’?

On 'Super-injunctions'

So I've been trying to figure out which side of the super-injunction debate I'm on. If I had to choose, I'd have to say I'm against them, but I have a lot of reservations about the whole thing, although, to be honest, my issues are mostly with the invasive, celebrity-gossip-obsessed nature of today's media and not really with the injunctions themselves.

Do I think the public has a 'right' to know about celebrities' private lives? Not really, no. I'm not going to fight a freedom of the press/freedom of speech campaign based on my right to know who is cheating on their wife with whom. Those kinds of reports are flavour of the month gossip that people will forget about as soon as the next one comes along, but have lasting impacts on the lives of those involved (will she dump him or won't she? More gossip fodder!), including in many cases children, and it's just not something that I'm comfortable demanding some inviolable right to know.

And for the most part, that's the kind of stories these super-injunctions have allegedly been blocking, according to the recent Twitter 'exposure', if it's to be believed. And if that's all they ever were, I probably wouldn't have a massive problem with them; I know celebrities are in the public eye because they chose to be in some way or another, but I don't think that gives the other six billion of us the right to know every single detail about their private lives. But if the super-injunctions are allowed to continue, it's inevitable that at some point someone (a politician, most likely) will attempt to muzzle something that is in the public interest. And the public interest might include things like extra-marital affairs and naughty pictures if there are allegations that, say, taxpayer money was used to pay for hotel rooms or if a politician were being blackmailed. There is no clear line with these injunctions where we can say these things are definitely okay to keep out of the press in the name of privacy, and these things are not. There will always be a grey area and, as a result, I lean towards not setting a precedent of extremely strict privacy laws that are designed to keep anything and everything secret.

I'm curious to see what impact, if any, today's Max Mosley decision will have on these kinds of stories. Presumably super-injunctions have been brought in cases where celebrities have been informed beforehand in one way or another that their secrets are about to be plastered across the front page of the dailies. But if media now know that they definitely have no obligation to inform people before publishing details of their private lives, how many of them will skip seeking comment or confirmation at the source and just go straight ahead with publishing allegations to avoid the chance of the celebrity seeking a super-injunction? I do worry that the prevalence of injunctions may lead to a more irresponsible press, especially among tabloids who are desperate to get a juicy story out ahead of anyone else.

What I do wish is that there was less 'need' for these injunctions in the first place. The public craving for any scraps of information or photos about actors, models, top athletes and their partners is sickening. The culture of gossip and outright invasiveness that pervades the tabloids, websites and even the broadsheets allows otherwise unremarkable people to become Z-list celebrities because of an affair with an actor and Z-list celebrities a few more moments of fame for the same reason. That these people can sell their stories for so much money is indicative of the fact that the papers know these stories sell - big time. And as long as that's the case, reporters are going to continue to dig for the juicy tell-alls and years-old topless photos with little regard for the privacy of those involved. Unfortunately it's the case that privacy rights are ill-defined and weighed not against the public interest, but against how much money is to be made.

In the end, though, the super-injunctions just seem like a waste of time and resources given the fact that their top-secret contents seem to be fairly common knowledge online. If you want to know which footballer allegedly had an affair with which reality TV star, Google and Twitter can tell you, if one of your friends hasn't already. And even if these allegations haven't been published on the front page of the Sun and the Daily Mail, once everyone thinks they know them, the damage to the reputations of those involved is done, unless someone else comes forward and confesses it was actually them who had the affair. Whether the publication of these details online or in foreign media is right or wrong according to privacy ethics is a bit beside the point; until someone can somehow impose and enforce a worldwide privacy law, banning the UK media from publishing something that is already common knowledge is a bit absurd. And it may be this fact, above all ethical questions, that ends up being the game-changer.

Some Muddled Thoughts on Voter Apathy

Last one for today and probably until the weekend, I promise.

I have an embarrassing failure to admit. I live with a person who refuses to vote, and not only have I not yet managed to change his mind, but I very sincerely doubt that I ever will. This is embarrassing to me as a proponent of voting, as someone with respect for civic duties, as a general fan of getting to cast a vote (I am eligible in three different countries!), as a supporter of democracy, as someone who prides themselves on being good at arguing and wearing someone down until they finally just agree to shut me up, and as a very stubborn person. In short, it hurts.

Canadian election day having just passed and AV/devolved/local election day being just around the corner, my Facebook and Twitter feeds are currently flush with "GO AND VOTE" or "Did you vote?" or "If you didn't vote you can't complain" or "If you didn't vote you're an idiot" or "I didn't vote and I'm proud of it" or, you know, general voting discussion. First of all, I was actually really proud that my Facebook feed showed more posts about getting out and voting yesterday than it did about Osama bin Laden. But more to the point, these get out and vote posts and their equivalent variations, while well-meaning, almost always fail to properly address why a large segment of the population doesn't vote.

People assume that young people don't vote because they're apathetic and lazy, because they don't know anything about politics and have no interest in learning, and because they haven't been properly educated about their civic duty. So the solution is: bully/guilt them out of apathy online, have politicians pander to them in campaigns, make hip video ads to interest them, and add another helping of guilt on the civic duty front. But these are unbelievably superficial solutions that don't even begin to address the real reasons many young people don't vote.

The general underlying feeling is this: politicians are living in another world. They don't know about the problems that real people face and, what's more, they don't care to know. When they try to pander to young people, it's always a) incredibly obvious and forced, b) ineffective, and c) seemingly more pointed at parents, anyway. Part of it may be a chicken and egg thing - politicians know young people don't vote, so why bother trying to appeal to them, and what danger if you don't? At any rate, people who feel this way tend to feel this way about all politicians -Nick Clegg and Jack Layton are no different than David Cameron and Stephen Harper, really. The ones who say they're different will prove themselves when they get into power, and frankly, Clegg hasn't helped on this front. All politicians are, in their eyes, the same, only interested in sloganeering and mudslinging and not in discussing why it seems that some people get it way easier by being on the dole than people who have to work for a living, and why caps on non-EU skilled workers won't do anything to help the over-crowded employment markets for the working class.

The young people who are coming up in political parties and who are supposed to be out there encouraging their fellow youth to vote don't usually help. Anyone who is trying to make a career in politics tends to make the very early mistake of becoming a party hack who refuses to have any opinion that isn't the party opinion, and to start using their Facebook or Twitter to attack opposition parties. I guess this shows their staunch support for the party and will help them in their quest to move on up. But it endears them to no one. It shows that there is no fundamental shift coming, that politics will not change and will always be politics as usual, with people more interested in advancing their own success than in actually learning what matters to those people who feel completely left out of the process and completely disaffected with politics. These young advocates are moulding themselves to become the next generation of out of touch leaders who still can't bring themselves to discuss real issues.

And what do I say to that? I tried to convince him to vote in the upcoming referendum, thinking I could point to it as a way toward change, the possibility for getting new voices heard. 'Oh, you mean like the Lib Dems would have done better under AV? And for what? Nick Clegg turned out to be the same as the rest of them.'

My 20-year-old brother cast his first ballot yesterday. He told me that he was voting for one party because he didn't hate the leader like he did the other parties, and that he probably wouldn't bother at all except that he felt it was his civic duty (thanks, Ontario, and your mandatory civics classes!). This election, with the NDP's surge, is seen by a lot of people as an opportunity for something new, albeit as opposition. But the NDP has benefited from being a third party that was almost a joke for a long time; their policies have never had to be entirely realistic because they were never going to have to implement them. I'm afraid that if the NDP move toward the centre, as I think they'd pretty much have to do to make some of their policies viable, people will become disillusioned with what this new wave produced, the way they did with the Lib Dems here (though of course the Lib Dems are part of the governing coalition, which makes a massive difference).

I don't know how long civic duty will hold people like my brother, who are already fairly disaffected on their first vote, if there is no fundamental shift in the way politics is done to show people that their vote does matter a bit more than just replacing one thing with more of the same. And I don't know how anything other than a fundamental shift could possibly win over people like my boyfriend, who feel so removed from the political system as to be vehemently against participating in it. People need to feel that MPs and party leaders are something other than just professional politicians who are only interested in how much power they can grab and how bad they can make each other look.

Election Results and My Disappointment

My personal opinion on yesterday's election: disaster. I was shocked when I checked the news this morning to find out we now had a Conservative majority, an NDP opposition, a negligible Liberal party, a practically non-existent Bloc Quebecois and a Green MP.

I knew that a Liberal majority (ha!) or even minority wasn't happening. I was hoping for a reduced Conservative minority, and polls showed the NDP were doing well so I expected them to increase their presence. I think I was really hoping for a centre-left coalition, a government that could actually hold on for more than a year and that could be effective. Instead...this.

A lot of undecided voters, or disaffected Liberal voters, or people who didn't like Michael Ignatieff and didn't believe Jack Layton could really be Prime Minister, in the end seemed to think that there just wasn't really any choice besides Harper. Really? Harper? The one whose party has been found in contempt of Parliament, who has muzzled cabinet ministers and MPs, who has limited access for the press? The one who has cut funding to women's organisations and squandered a budget surplus, who claimed to have steered Canada through the recession by taking credit for policies enacted by the previous Liberal governments and then denied there was a recession at all? The one who twice prorogued parliament to avoid disclosing information and losing power? Yes, that one.

This is what has really disappointed me. It's not that the party that I don't support won. It's democracy, that can happen (though, to be fair, just under 40% of the country voted Conservative, which means about 60% did not. If that's not reason enough for an AV or PR system, I don't know what is...). No, it's the fact that, for whatever reason, Canadians decided that transparency, openness, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, respect for parliament and democracy and truthfulness were not really that important. (True, again, for 60% of people these things were important, but about 200,000 more people voted for the CPC in this election, so there's that.)

From the Globe and Mail's April 27 endorsement of Harper: "Mr. Harper could achieve a great deal more if he would relax his grip on Parliament, its independent officers and the flow of information, and instead bring his disciplined approach to bear on the great challenges at hand. That is the great strike against the Conservatives: a disrespect for Parliament, the abuse of prorogation, the repeated attempts (including during this campaign) to stanch debate and free expression. It is a disappointing failing in a leader who previously emerged from a populist movement that fought so valiantly for democratic reforms."

To me, these are not small failings that can be shrugged off. These are some of the most fundamental principles in a modern democracy. We don't say suppression of dissent and debate is okay as long as we have stability. That's what dictatorships do. And no, of course I'm not saying that Canada under Harper is a dictatorship; I'm saying that it's very important not to lose sight of the closed nature of Harper's government just because we didn't suffer as badly in the economic crisis as everyone else.

Now that we have four or five years under a Harper majority, it'll be interesting to see how these issues play out - will he relax his grip now that he doesn't have to fight tooth and nail for his government, or will he tighten it because, frankly, he can?

Election Results and the Slow Death of the LPC

I have many thoughts on yesterday's election, but I'll split them up into a few posts so if you're interested in some and not others, you don't have to be too bored.

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So that's that. Far from the result I was hoping for, Stephen Harper's Conservatives were elected to a majority government yesterday with 167 seats (all figures from Elections Canada). The NDP is now the official opposition with 102 seats, up from 37. The Liberal Party had its worst showing ever, going from 77 to 34 seats, and its leader Michael Ignatieff has resigned after failing to win his own riding. And the Bloc Quebecois was all but eliminated, winning just four seats, none of which belonged to leader Gilles Duceppe. Voter turnout was 61.4%, up from 58.8% in the 2008 poll.

Some people are talking about the left vote being split - that people who didn't want to vote Conservative went far-left instead of centre-left, voting NDP instead of Liberal, which helps to account for the LPC's dismal showing. There's some truth to that - 53.4% of the vote went to the NDP, Liberal and Green parties, and 39.6% to the Conservatives - but look at the seat changes. The NDP only took six of their seats from the CPC (and lost two to them); they took 16 from the LPC (and lost one to them), and, amazingly, they took 45 seats from the Bloc Quebecois. The vast majority of the party's gains were in Quebec, where, in the 2008 election, the party won one seat. That's right, one. And it was their first in 17 years. Most of the Liberal seats in the rest of the country went to the Conservatives, particularly in Ontario and the Maritimes.

So Quebec rejected the separatist BQ, threw out half of their Liberal MPs and a few of the Conservatives who'd managed a seat in the last election, and voted overwhelmingly for the NDP. And this was no question of splitting the vote - the Liberals polled the lowest of all of the major parties in the province (14.2%), while the NDP took 42.9% of the popular vote. The NDP is due credit for running a great campaign and for convincing people to give the 'third party' - who a decade ago barely qualified for official party status - a chance.

But the real issue is the demise of the Liberal Party, the failure of Ignatieff to connect with voters in his own constituency and in the rest of the country. Part of Ignatieff's failure is due to very effective attack ads run by the CPC, which have been running since before official campaigning began. The Conservative Party has done a very, very good job of painting Ignatieff as too intellectual, too American, too elitist, to aristocratic - too out of touch with Canadians to be Prime Minister. And Ignatieff never managed to overcome this image - a lot of people who wouldn't call themselves Conservatives were uneasy about his leadership, or disliked the man. I was shocked yesterday to hear my mom offhandedly mention that my dad wouldn't vote Liberal because he hates Ignatieff; I wasn't aware that my father even knew who Ignatieff, or any other politician, was.

Ignatieff wasn't elected at a Liberal leadership convention; he came in second at the 2006 convention behind Stephane Dion and served as deputy leader, and took over as interim leader in 2008 when Dion stepped down. His leadership was ratified at a party convention six months later. Neither Dion nor Ignatieff inspired voters; the party's seats in Parliament have been in decline since the Sponsorship Scandal and subsequent election in 2004 (that election was under Paul Martin, who didn't have much of a chance after the scandal was made public. I still maintain that Martin, whose work as finance minister under Jean Chretien left Canada with a budget surplus and with bank regulations that helped us weather the financial crisis, which Harper took credit for, could have been a great PM had he had a real chance). The Liberal Party has been in decline for nearly a decade and has tried a series of quick-fix solutions: a too-early leadership convention without enough consideration of candidates, propelling Ignatieff to leadership only two years after he became an MP for the first time, forcing elections without any clear policy vision.

The party has overlooked the fact that has become glaringly evident in this election: nobody trusts them to move this country forward. It's not because of the Sponsorship scandal anymore - if anything this election showed that transparency isn't actually that high up on Canadians' lists of concerns. It's because the party has no vision. In opposition, the LPC gave the average voter the impression that it was really good at opposing Conservative policies, but not great at coming up with alternatives. If you asked people what the LPC stands for, I don't think anybody would have an answer besides whatever is the opposite of what the CPC says. Much as I like Ignatieff and think he'd have made a good PM, generally people don't trust a leader that nobody had heard of five years ago and who has no real record to go on.

A Conservative majority means that there can no longer be threats of early elections, and there will now be four or five years until the next one. As the LPC doesn't even have the official opposition to worry about anymore, they can and should take this time to re-build the party. To take their time picking a leader people will be able to connect with (and to realise that it's still to early for that leader to be Justin Trudeau, who while good-looking and charismatic is still young and inexperienced and will have to prove himself more than anyone else because of his name and needs to be given time to do that). To develop a real policy platform that is proactive rather than reactive, and to bring back the left of centre votes that moved to the right for economics and stability or to the left for leadership, real opposition or lack of anything better.