Painting The News: notes towards the redefinition of reporting

August 25, 2012

What defines the reporter? It used to be that reporters went out to look at events, and came back with answers to four or five questions: who, what, where, when, and, sometimes, why? They covered events by capturing basic information, writing it up in the form of a ‘story’. But the basics are now readily available – more easily and at lower cost to the reader than ever before. It does not take a reporter to answer the first four of these questions when we can gather as much from open access, user-generated platforms such as Twitter; and these platforms have all but dispensed with the form of the ‘story’. From the traditional list, that leaves only one question for the reporter to answer; and just the one answer to be formulated. True, the outstanding question – why? – is also the most difficult, but this still amounts to a reduction in the reporter’s role; especially since separating the fifth question from the other four Ws means that the last remaining answer often comes better from analysts, commentators and leader writers rather than reporters.

So what is the reporter for? Now that basic information is often provided not by reporters but by people-formerly-known-as-readers, it is surely time to reconsider what the people-formerly-known-as-reporters should be doing instead of supplying the basics. Consideration of this question is especially timely since, unless we make a point of addressing it directly, chances are that the Leveson Inquiry and its legacy will redefine the reporter in terms of how well he behaves and what codes of practice he has been seen to follow. Although this process may demonstrate who is and who is not considered fit to be a reporter, it cannot show what purpose reporting is fit for. British journalism will have wasted a good crisis if it checks in for moral rehab instead of seizing the opportunity to reformulate itself. Whereas Leveson et al pose the current situation as a moral crisis, what the reporter really faces is a fundamental question of purpose – what am I here to do?; and a supplementary question – if I am to fulfil a modified purpose, now that the basics are covered by non-reporters, what form should this fulfilment take? read more

Phew, it’s just the Recession (not Terrorism)

August 24, 2012

Later pictures show only a brown hand peeping out from beneath the white sheet. But there is one fuzzy photo, taken before the police covered the body, which shows the victim of New York gunman Jeffrey Johnson. The shape of the body seems more womanly than male, although it’s hard to tell from the baggy pants and big shirt s/he’s wearing. Let’s just say it’s a she. Her head and torso lie flat on the pavement. But her legs are jumbled up against the wall (the wall of a shop and office building in Manhattan), as if her feet started walking at the very moment when her top half slumped to the floor. Death came untidily, then. Not a clean, cool, smart, wind-in-your-hair death, if there ever is such a thing. Meanwhile Mayor Michael Bloomberg, speaking at a press conference two hours later, was relieved to file this fatality neatly away under ‘not terrorism’. Ditto the fate of the gunman himself, shot dead by police a few minutes later. In the shadow of the Empire State Building, in the run up to the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, this might have been another iconic killing. If it had been a suicide shooter, the plump police chiefs and the onlooking crowd (dressed down in the late summer heat: 75 degrees at the time of the 9am slaying), would have been automatically recruited as extras in another Gotham City epic. But because Jeffrey Johnson came back to kill someone he used to work with, or for, at the women’s clothes firm which sacked him when it downsized a year ago, this whole episode was swiftly demoted to a B-movie. Of course he, and only he, was personally responsible. But in another sense both Johnson and his victim were casualties of recession; and unlike terrorism, everything to do with recession is banal, non-iconic. Even when it bleeds, it doesn’t lead. read more

Prince of Ginger

August 23, 2012

‘Embarrassing photos’ is the phrase used by the Daily Telegraph online to link to the TMZ celebrity website photo-story of Prince Harry in a Las Vegas hotel suite ‘getting BARE ASS naked during a game of strip billiards’. The two pix are of such poor quality you can barely (ha!) make out, first, a naked man cupping his balls while a topless woman holds onto him round the waist; and, second, from the rear, the same naked man (the crack between his buttocks modestly X-ed out) holding onto a naked woman by her waist (the two of them seemingly skewered together with a pool cue). But the photos are far from embarrassing. They serve to upload the third-in-line to the British throne into the semi-fictitious life world realised in television shows such as The Only Way Is Essex. Check out the abundance aesthetic! Flesh – pots of it. Ascetic, it ain’t! Not that the ‘strip pool’ episode is merely a stunt designed to update the British royals; although this is likely to be its long-term effect. But almost as it if were a set-up, it so happens that the colour scheme of the hotel suite fits perfectly with the prince’s natural colouring. Brown walls, latte carpet, cream soft furnishings; even the pool table baize is tan, not green. Every element is aligned to Harry’s reddish hue. Cue billiards, bazoomas and the Ginger Prince.

Spot the difference

August 22, 2012

‘Thank you and God bless you, and God bless the United States of America’ (1). ‘Thank you and God bless you, and may God bless America’ (2). Once again (1), and then again (2), Barack Obama invokes God and America to draw his speech to a close. POTUS is one of the few political performers who knows how to commute between vocal registers, moving effortlessly between public rhetoric and apparently private conversation. On the campaign trail prior to the presidential election in November, he’s been demonstrating this ability to good advantage. Over and over again. But now a study of Obama and his teleprompters (quoted above) by a Reuters photographer, seems to show that even the variations in what he says, the bit of Barack that comes out differently because that’s how the moment has moved him – yeah!, is really scripted in advance. Just as Dean Martin acted drunk, Obama is performing a patina of confidence and ease. Will it be enough to start a fire this time?

Korean workers across the centuries

August 21, 2012

On the inside, the factory is more like a laboratory. No impurities here, though not all-white; instead, peppy colours (yellow, blue, tan) that could have come from Ikea. With its flat planes, immaculate surfaces, and a shop floor so highly polished even the toughest sar’nt-major would have to acknowledge his reflection, the place is pristine as a brand. But this ‘brand’ is not merely decorative; it’s the Hyundai plant at Ulsan (250 miles from Seoul), where cars get made by the million. Conveyed along the spotless track, ministered to by men and machines, slowly the vehicles take shape. Or they would, if production had not been suspended. Hyundai autoworkers are on strike for more pay, better hours, and the integration of subcontracted employees into the regular labour force. Outside the engine plant where the night shift is massing, we are back in another century. Neon lamps give off a sepia light in which the strikers and their clothes are grey and grainy. They way they look tonight, these workers have taken on a rough, old texture, as crude as the long, long poles they carry to keep the police at bay. But this is only an appearance, a trick of the light that shows people lagging behind the world they themselves have made. Or is it?

Pale Freedom

August 20, 2012

Gangly Julian fills the frame of the French windows leading onto the tiny embassy balcony. Trademark Albino bob now shaved to short-back-and-sides. Pale skin and a soft mouth. Ever-so slightly sibilant speech. Assange’s statement is framed by reference to legendary libertarian struggles: the world is watching – Chicago, 1968; freedom of speech and the American Declaration of Independence. Appealing to Obama to ‘do the right thing’, he evokes both civil rights activism and Spike Lee’s world-weary re-make of it. But the resonance for Assange comes from none of these. Instead he echoes the new compulsion to make a spectacle of ourselves. His Wikileaks observes the principle that manifesto ergo sum and applies it to the state. Unthinkingly.

South African Surrealism

August 19, 2012

The body of a miner, nose and chin nuzzling into the crook of his own arm. Shot by the thin blue line, down on one knee to fire into a straggle of strikers, already regretting the heat of their action. Was this man comforting himself at the moment of death? More likely his head and arm arranged themselves arbitrarily, same as the other bodies strewn around at random. If only this were a Surrealists’ Convention, and they were suffering for their art.

The Show Must Go On And On And On

July 28, 2012

Between choruses Sir Paul McCartney shouted, ‘I can’t stop it’. He was kidding himself if he thought that audience participation in ‘Hey, Jude’, the closing number in the London 2012 opening ceremony, was unstoppable. At 12.50am in Stratford’s Olympics Stadium, SingAlongAMacca was more gently simmering than boiling over; and plenty of seats were already empty by the time Sir Paul stood up to conduct the final chord. But supposing he meant Britain compulsively remixing itself – frantically sampling itself in a bid to hold the world’s attention, then the ceremony up to and including his own participation in it, proved him right. Out of the mouths of baby-faced old men….. Out of the ground: in the opening ceremony’s most compelling representation of British history, concertina-ed chimneys sprang from the turf to symbolise the rise of Britain’s smokestack industries. Industrialisation really did make men as mobile as molten metal, so the scene in which a dramatised facsimile of ‘industrial Britain’ actually went on to mould the five Olympic rings, rang true. (How apt that a disused building on the former Ford’s Dagenham estate was used as a rehearsal room for this sequence.) So, too, the parade of iron bedsteads representing the formation of the National Health Service in 1948. Never mind that Sir Kenneth Branagh, the actor presiding over relentless industrialisation in the role of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, politely refrained from lighting his cigar; or that few Brits would have recognised Brunel without the aid of TV commentary, helpfully scripted in advance. The section highlighting Britain’s formative experiences between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth, managed to keep its line. In accordance with the original, historical period, there was certainty in the tableaux, too. By comparison, the lengthy retrospective of British pop culture, with the athletes’ parade sandwiched into it, was circuitous rather than directional. Scores of micro-samples – from ‘Pretty Vacant’ to ‘Tiger Feet’; from Queen to the Queen, were pasted into the presentation like so many examples of clip art. Old Man McCartney was there as a replica of his younger self – a sort-of hologram with sadly sunken cheeks. As they buzzed around a world audience of ‘up to one billion’, these relics made for a messy mixture. Yet all the ones-I-made earlier (why no Blue Peter?) comprised an accurate reflection of London as it really is today: the place where things produced earlier (culture from the past, commodities from elsewhere, capital derived from global production) are continually re-mixed, re-branded, and re-launched around the world. So if this part of the opening ceremony was no more purposeful than a merry-go-round, that’s telling it like it is. True to form, television coverage of the ceremony had not even finished before images from two hours earlier or even two minutes ago were being recycled and beamed around again in a brief reprise of the ‘historic’ occasion. (Commentators describing an event as ‘historic’ when it has not even finished yet, have already pinged it into a higher orbit of continuous recycling.) On last night’s showing, this part of the world really ‘can’t stop’ circulating itself; even while the Olympics are on, it’s the only game in London town. read more

Inability to Complete

July 14, 2012

Nick Buckles: man out of time. Nick Buckles: man of his times. The head of G4S, the security firm that failed to recruit enough guards in time for the Olympics, is also a man of the moment, perfectly synchronised with the way London is today. £5.3m earnings last year. Cheesy grin like David Dickinson. Central Casting for the fat cat that only knows how to cream? But Nick Buckles does not lack integrity. His operation was fully integrated with London’s current way of being. ‘They are all working through a process of interview, two or three different degrees of training, licensing, accreditation’ – Buckles describing the applicants who didn’t make it onto the company’s books in time. He went on: ‘Our review process was around the number of people applying for interviews, we had 100,000 of those, the number of people interviewed which was 50,000. So basically you work through that process of numbers….’ Process, process, process. Not only his keyword but also the key to a city – the City, which processes value for and on behalf of global capital. Accordingly, Buckles has been carrying out a ‘process of numbers’ for and on behalf of the International Olympics Committee and its London brokers, Locog. His company does not seem to have fully grasped that the outcome of this process was to be finalised before the opening ceremony. But its inability to complete is consistent with London’s everyday priorities: continuous financial processes; continuity of finance. Buckles’ manner of speaking is similarly inconclusive. (And not only about G4S and the Olympics. He once said ‘I can’t say I have ever read a book, particularly’.) Yet when circling around a topic, not quite getting there, it isn’t simply that he is being evasive. Speaking inconclusively, he is articulating a whole way of life – process, process, process – which is how London lives today. To repeat, Nick Buckles – man out of time; Nick Buckles – man of his times. read more

Dispossessed and Re-possessed: Spanish-style hardship

June 10, 2012

Robocops fanned out in a line across the city street. Studiously not looking at the camera, the unemployed line up…who knows what for? First thing you learn is you always gotta wait. Protestors, preponderantly and preposterously middle aged (clenched fists and berets, for goodness sake), have all gone home, assuming they still have homes to go to. Give it a few weeks and some will be back out on the street. This time to sleep.

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