Old Media contemplating the leap into the New (Huma Mulji's 'High Rise'; Ozier Muhammad)
Dear Comrades, including those of you who once blogged with me on the books site of The Guardian – whether or not we’re still on speaking terms,
…The signs point to a victory over Goliath. . . Yes, we few, we happy band of bloggers … have won, by refusing to let that newspaper shut us up — behaving just like Tony Benn resisting the BBC’s attempt to silence him in this riveting clip @Hazlitt posted here.
The incontrovertible proof of our triumph? That the moderators on that site can no longer openly ban us.
Because they couldn’t ban for instance, me, in the last half of August, they stooped to imitating Richard Nixon’s Dirty Tricks Department – remember Watergate? — to keep me out.
Why? Because we have taught the Guardian’s managers that a banned blogger quickly becomes a cause célèbre – not least because this site, with one or two others, initiated a tradition of publishing any comments censored by the newspaper’s trigger-happy moderators. (see Salvage Operation, part 1 and part 2.)
It would have been hard for The Guardian to ban me outright. Far from attacking or abusing anyone in my only two attempts at posting there as @wordnerd7 since last winter, I wrote a comment praising a piece on the newspaper’s site.
Before I tidy all that out of sight — and to ensure that the newspaper’s editors will never be able to dismiss the incidents as paranoid and imaginary — I’m summarising the sequence of happenings in this spot. On August 22, I had an automated message informing me that a comment warmly supporting an article by Aaron Akinyemi on the books blog had been siphoned off into ‘pre-moderation’. While I waited, mystified and with misgivings, I pasted in a draft of that comment on this site. On August 26, four days after it disappeared into the bowels of the online Guardian, it reappeared heavily edited – with links to two articles on this site agreeing with Aaron’s argument lopped off. Sentences of mine were slyly inserted under the screen name ‘@wordnerd’ – and not ‘@wordnerd7’, as they should have been. At the bottom of the butchered comment, a remark addressed to ‘@nuges’ was added to my words – a remark never made by me.
When I saw that on August 27, I immediately wrote a new comment, protesting about the censoring, blatant distortion and additions to my original comment — asking the Guardian’s moderators for an explanation. This attempt at posting also vanished into pre-moderation, never to be seen again. I put an exact replica of that post here.
Another wait. Then, on August 28, a comment of which I never wrote a single line appeared in the Akinyemi thread under ‘@wordnerd’. The post attributed to me amounts to a simple-minded and crass statement about racial differences at the furthest extreme from my own beliefs (……………as anyone interested will discover in reading these threads: Will Barack Obama bring back heroism? and A bit more on heroes: Barack Obama’s odyssey, part 2)
Just to be perfectly clear about what must be obvious, The Guardian has never answered my question about why the first post was censored and doctored – and it prevented my enquiry from ever appearing on its site. (I have a copy of the second pre-moderation notice.)
So that’s what I mean by ‘dirty tricks’, and I’m creating this careful record of the incidents for anyone else who might encounter the same behaviour by the authorities responsible for that site.
Now this, mark you, is a newspaper that has a whole segment of its website labelled Liberty Central, advertising the image it likes to project – and can sometimes justify, in other spheres – as a friend of freedom and the oppressed.
As I pointed out at the time, it’s clear that The Guardian is severely rattled by bloggers questioning its authority with substantive objections. There is other – constructive and heartening — proof of our arrows finding their mark. Over the last few weeks, there have been several articles on the Guardian’s books blog objecting to the commercialisation of book publishing – for instance, this one about promotional author-videos and another about Margaret Atwood.
They make a striking contrast with the prevailing opinion of the editors on that site two years ago, when they ran piece after piece endorsing book publishing’s increasing dominance by marketing executives (at the expense of literary quality) – starting with one titled Selling Yourself as a Writer. As recently as last November, strong – but politely worded — objections to that unbridled philistinism were deleted by Guardian moderators.
An entry in this blog spelling out those objections in detail seems to have been heeded: Since when was a newspaper strictly a mercantilist tool?
In effectively banning me in late August, though, the authorities concerned appeared to have had a fit of acute irrationality – spiced with malice.
Arbitrary and punishing authoritarianism is out of temper with the times, dear Guardian. We know how difficult it must be for Old Media to adjust to online publishing, which needs new rules for all sorts of processes and procedures, including the correction of errors, as I demonstrated last month.
Look to the technocrats who gave us these magnificent new communication tools to see how you should be making every facet of your modus operandi more egalitarian. Power structures are flattening out. You don’t seem to have noticed, but they aren’t shaped like pyramids any more. Last March, Scott Rosenberg, who has just published a history of blogging, Say Everything, received a grant of $335,000 from the American Knight Foundation to explore a system for correcting errors in the media that mimics the cheerfully collaborative spirit in which coders of open-source software have debugged each other’s work for decades.
Instead of getting huffy and defensive about the mistakes they make when these are pointed out by readers, in Rosenberg’s vision, newspapers and other media will respond with a collegial graciousness. As he has explained, about his test site:
We’re a place on the Web (independent and not-for-profit) where you can bring specific errors, issues and problems you’ve found in media coverage in your community and try to get them fixed.
[…]
Q: Why should I bother?A: Because you know that good public information is the lifeblood of democracy. And that journalists are human beings who sometimes make mistakes. And that they work for institutions that don’t always respond to criticism. Instead of posting an angry rant on your blog or just shrugging your shoulders, MediaBugs will give you and those journalists a chance to have civil exchanges about the inevitable errors and problems that crop up in their work.
… As for my fellow-bloggers, with whom I began. Make sure that you have your own blog. I’d have been beside myself if I’d had no way to expose the behaviour of the Guardian’s moderators over the last two weeks. Get your own site, and think hard about commenting on newspaper articles there, not on the newspapers’ sites – to ensure that you will always own the words you write, and can make up your own rules about what you can and can’t say.
Withhold your clicks from their sites, if necessary, and put your weight behind the thrilling new democracy that the new communication technologies have brought us. And do not doubt for a second that our words are being read where it matters.
. . . We few, we happy few, we band of bloggers;
For we today who save our clicks for freedom
Shall e’er be comrades; be we ne’er so vile
Our band shall speed the media revolution:
And Grauniad moderators in their cups
Shall cry themselves a river they were so foul,
And took for monkeys commenters loyal and fair
Who looked for thanks and justice, all in vain.
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5 Comments
September 7, 2009 at 8:08 am
An ideal footnote to this entry in the blog — written for another site by someone posting here as, I think, @Desmond Swords … It’s a proposal for a discussion leader to share her Old Media public poetry platform with her loyal and enthusiastic commenters, from time to time.
What an excellent suggestion, Des.
September 8, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Hi,
I’ve been off the radar for a while with various family things and now busy writing up the first draft of novel 2. I just read your ‘to do’ with the Guardian Blog with disbelief. The fact that ‘Black Shoes ‘ is self-published is interesting. Stereo-typing of races and the Euro-centric obsession of publishers continues.More authors from every section of society also need to contribute to the mainstream and challenge such a status quo.It is a shame that you were misquoted, censored and misrepresented by such a prestigious newpaper.
September 9, 2009 at 8:55 am
==== It is a shame that you were misquoted, censored and misrepresented by such a prestigious newpaper. ===
My thoughts too, @Leela – precisely. I’ve been chilled to the marrow by the implications of such a paper doing what you only read about in reports about the worst police states – the attribution to dissenters of statements wholly fabricated by authorities or their minions.
And what if such newspapers were all we had to alert us to our own government’s surveillance tactics, invasions of privacy, and other instruments of control and repression? The Guardian certainly wouldn’t have a leg to stand on, protesting about anything of the kind. . . . Think of its editors trying to confront dictatorships repressing, torturing and killing people when they can’t tolerate free speech on relatively minor matters themselves. . . and in the land of Magna Carta.
I’d be as interested as you are to learn that paper’s reasons for deleting links to blog entries bolstering Aaron Akinyemi’s argument about Black Shoes.
About book publishing, … I’d suggest that ethno-centricity is one facet of the larger problem of accommodating outsiders and new perspectives of every kind. Both in London and New York, the most striking feature of publishing has been a cosy insularity, which made its managers lazy and unimaginative – as you can see in this clip from a recent interview in which a former head of Simon and Schuster says,
=== When I grew up in publishing in the 1970s, the process and the tools were relatively simple. Marketing worked like this: whatever book that Doubleday Bookstore chose to feature in its Fifth Avenue store window (now Prada) usually became a best seller. The Book of the Month Club judges — the Simon Cowells of their day — selected what they considered the very best. We were a small community of authors, editors and agents, …
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/jobs/06pre.html ===
Now the Blogosphere is challenging the complacency of the people in those small communities. Those who have climbed the ladder to the top in the usual way – usually with connections sparing them any great struggle – are hostile and defensive. They are furious with persistent questioners of their decisions who are complete outsiders, or people with insider-outsider status, like me. . . In the case of the Guardian, its smear tactics are destroying the last few shreds of credibility it had left.
… Sorry for this slow reply. Six hours on the road separate me from the last place from which I posted here. . . Still haven’t got around to ordering your book – but I can truthfully say I’ve had no time for any other novel, either.
September 9, 2009 at 11:43 pm
… About the links deleted by The Guardian — to discussions here of what Obama’s victory might mean (see the main post, above) … One of the strangest aspects of those debates was the commenters undisturbed by one blogger’s insistence that since Obama – as she saw him — couldn’t possibly be the man of refined literary and cultural tastes his autobiography described, he must have a secret yearning to be ‘ghetto-fabulous’. . . He had just two choices: to be (a) a man of high culture; (b) someone longing to trick himself out in bling and keep company with pimps and gangsters.
A few weeks ago, I came across this article by a first-rate analyst of cultural trends, Kurt Andersen … Pop Culture in the Age of Obama. It shows Obama readily naming what he loves in the pop scene – including The Godfather films … a far cry from a pretentious cultural snob:
October 20, 2009 at 10:40 am
[...] The idea seemed less surprising after I remembered the striking ratio in this very spot between the swarms of clicks, indicating reader interest, and the low comment count, for posts critical of The Guardian — taking it to task not just for silencing dissenting voices but far, far worse. [...]