European Tribune - Community, Politics & Progress.

Imagine...

by afew
Mon Jun 29th, 2009 at 04:55:16 AM EST

Take one sober, informative article by two journalists (Nick Meo and Patrick Hennessy) on the state of play in the Lisbon Treaty ratification process - that says, essentially, that Germany is about to ratify, leaving only presidential signatures from Poland and the Czech Republic, and an Irish referendum likely to be favourable, to go - while the contradictions and difficulties of the UK Conservative Party in this regard are given a fair assessment.

Imagine you're an editor at the British newspaper, the Telegraph, and this article comes up on your screen. You have to headline and illustrate it. FULL STEAM AHEAD FOR LISBON, you type, along with a photo of fireworks/celebrations/Eurohugs? More quietly RATIFICATION MOVES INTO FINAL PHASE..? Well, no...

The eye of the casual reader picks up the photo of burning flags and the big lettering: FLAMES OF DISSENT ACROSS CONTINENT. Ah, so everywhere people are rising up against Lisbon.

A slightly less casual reader may read the photo caption: these are Catalan regionalists. So presumably regionalists are against Lisbon.

How many readers will go through the article to find there are no flames of dissent at all, and particularly to read what follows?

European Union's Lisbon Treaty fuels flames of dissent across continent - Telegraph

leaders of some of Europe's separatist movements are celebrating the progress of the treaty towards full ratification. They are convinced that the more powerful the EU's own institutions become, the weaker the nation state - and the stronger the case for granting breakaway regions their independence.

So: take one report; ignore what it says; stick in a photo; make the headline about the photo.

The Telegraph is about news? Information? Or Eurosceptic propaganda?

. Home
. About
. Contact
. New User Guide
. FAQ
. ET Editorial Guidelines
. Search
. Search (Google)

Username:
Password:

. Make a new account
. Reset password

Imagine... | 19 comments (19 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: Imagine... (4.00 / 4)

Hat tip to Fran in today's Salon.

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Mon Jun 29th, 2009 at 05:03:16 AM EST

Re: Imagine... (none / 0)

Oh my.

"Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. - Galbraith"

by Cyrille (cyrillev domain yahoo.fr) on Mon Jun 29th, 2009 at 06:17:11 AM EST

Re: Imagine... (4.00 / 2)

That's normal, and it carries through into all the discourse about the EU.

by Colman (colman at eurotrib.com) on Mon Jun 29th, 2009 at 06:21:40 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Imagine... (none / 1)

who gets the payoff for keeping us divided?

or is it just a ploy to sell papers by throwing filet mignon to the trad-brits?

"Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do." Jim Hightower

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Mon Jun 29th, 2009 at 06:50:58 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Imagine... (4.00 / 4)

The Terrorgraph has gone a little - well - strange, recently.

Editorial has deliberately started sensationalising everything in a tabloid-ish kind of a way.

There was also this.

Just another everyday comic strip about nuclear terrorism and totalitarian dictatorship, you might think.

Except then Justin Williams, the assistant editor, who was apparently the genius behind this idea, decided it would be fun to run a website with coded messages hinting at imminent nuclear doom, framed by a couple of countdown timers.

Not so much filet-mignon as rump steak.

As someone watching this on a different board said 'Justin - why don't you try something less annoying. Like yoga. Or journalism.'

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Mon Jun 29th, 2009 at 07:00:57 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Imagine... (4.00 / 3)

ThatBritGuy:

Just another everyday comic strip about nuclear terrorism and totalitarian dictatorship, you might think.

But this slide is fascinating, it associates Cameron with "Prime Minister".

A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds; a man of deeds and not of words is like a garden full of turds — Anonymous

by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Mon Jun 29th, 2009 at 07:04:20 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Imagine... (4.00 / 4)

That slide was changed once the series gained some notoriety. Supposedly the original January version showed Gordo. It was changed to show Cameron a few weeks ago.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Mon Jun 29th, 2009 at 10:09:51 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Imagine... (none / 0)

As in "Kiss my rump steak"?

by rifek on Mon Jun 29th, 2009 at 08:03:13 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Filet mignon (4.00 / 5)

Exchange from the Salon:

Helen:

Sweeping generalisation alert;-
"People don't choose newspapers that infrm them about things they didn't know, they choose papers that reassure them their prejudices are correct".
thus the Telegraph's readers feel no dissonance because that lede is exactly what they'd expect to hear about Europe.

afew:

Yes. As we often say, foreign correspondents send in what the home audience wants to hear. In this case, the copy not rising (or falling) to that standard, the editor does the job - most people are content with a quick scan anyway, and let them have their filet mignon, rump steak, or other haemo-dripping chunk of freshly-slaughtered mammal.
And others (Sven, for example) will tell us the whole business is about selling advertising space. So here we have the editor doing advertising for what is not in the article, so the readership figures stay up (as far as possible) and the newspaper can get advertising income.
These two explanations can be seen as concordant. But I don't think it's that simple, because it doesn't take into account the role of the media in dynamising and augmenting an existing tendency in public opinion. How many Brits were Eurosceptic/phobic in the 1970s compared to now? How many are more so than they were then? Whatever the failings of Brussels (and they are many), how much and how often have British newspapers played on the Thatcher theme of nothing good ever coming out of continental Europe? In other words, how responsible are those newspapers for creating and sustaining an appetite for Europhobic red meat in their readership, and not (for example, and I would not wish them to do this) for anti-American red meat? Or anti-something else?
And why, if newspapers are gradually failing businesses that time and technology will sweep away, are wealthy businessmen interested in owning them? Not for the profits they can pull out of them. But also not because newspapers are without influence. No doubt their capacity to spread propaganda still offers a good bang for the buck.

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Mon Jun 29th, 2009 at 09:22:50 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Belonging to the right gang. (4.00 / 5)

Of course it is not that simple, but it's close enough for government work: the dialogue between a paper and its readers is a relationship. And like all human relationships it conflates over time such that it is difficult to say which side is driving the conflation. It is also not possible to say that all journalists on a paper will toe the editorial line because there are different sections of a paper, which appeal to different sections of the audience. An editor will tolerate off-message articles if they elicit a positive reaction from readers.

The continuing fall in sales and advertising income for almost all newspapers means that content will become even more one-sided in an attempt to hold on to reader loyalty. Loyalty, in this case, means a profiled audience that advertisers use in their media planning. (An audience profile is a detailed analysis of spending habits and other behaviour - a quite surprising amount of statistical information BTW)

But, in the end, the costs of content production, printing and distribution are not met by sales of the paper. The bulk of these costs (and any minor profit) are met by advertising.

There is still relatively low income from online ads (in the case of the Telegraph, it's a premium banner and sponsored features). But for online media the business model has yet to be worked out. There are many of them. The most likely model to succeed, imho, is the "pay for no ads", where the online version is free, but loaded with ads placed within the content. You pay a period subscription to have content delivered without ads. It won't be much - and if you offer up some details about yourself, it will be almost free. Online will be a high volume, low margin business for the big media channels.

But the real way in which readers' views will be manipulated, and by which a media channel is already able run both a print and online edition without doubling costs, is CMS - content management. This means raw content can be automatically repackaged to appear in any programmed print or online layout - simultaneously.

When you hook this up with site visitor monitoring, other purchase behaviour databases and statistical tools, and combine them with <rules> for presenting content based on visitor information, the viewer will have a customized page of both advertising and content. I have not yet thought through the effects this will have, but I am ready to guess that it will allow both greater editorial freedom and a more complex calculation for the media planners.

You, the end user, will have a totally `personalized' edition in the future - whether it is the personalized edition you would have wanted or not. Most people are too lazy to set up their own parameters for content. If they feel they belong in the right `gang', they will accept what they are given (as has always been the case).

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Mon Jun 29th, 2009 at 11:17:32 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Belonging to the right gang. (4.00 / 2)

I don't believe that "personalised" websites are going to fly, for the simple reason that Computers Are Stupid. Even Google's ads - which are fairly well targeted and backed by an enormous database - are very much hit and miss. If they can't even get my gender and country of residence right more than half the time, I don't see them as sufficiently reliable to run a serious website.

Additionally, you'll have to have a "default" website anyway, that you can display to "virgin" users - that is, users about whom you have insufficient records to generate a custom site (the only identification you get, after all, is an IP - and they change every once in a while).

- Jake

"Terraforming your own planet to make it uninhabitable hardly counts as epic win." - ThatBritGuy

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Mon Jun 29th, 2009 at 02:02:44 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Belonging to the right gang. (none / 0)

We'll see ;-)

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Mon Jun 29th, 2009 at 02:07:19 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Belonging to the right gang. (none / 1)

I didn't mean to deny that, as I said, time and technology will put an end to newspapers as they are now.

What I meant by "not so simple" came after those words. Commercial forces and technology don't explain everything. Whatever destiny holds in store for them (da-dum!), newspapers right now are still fairly influential in creating and sustaining conventional wisdom.

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Mon Jun 29th, 2009 at 02:28:54 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Belonging to the right gang. (none / 0)

My point was, who is driving who in 'sustaining conventional wisdom'? It's a symbiotic relationship, imo.

Yes, owners (outright like the Barclays thru Press Holdings, or publicly traded like Murdoch) do choose editors, and thus editorials (and more) - but the slant of the paper has to have an audience. I don't think content is a wrapper for delivering editorials, it's a wrapper for advertising products and services. The 'conventional wisdom' is marketing ;-)

But I know we'll have to agree to disagree on this one.

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Mon Jun 29th, 2009 at 02:48:34 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Belonging to the right gang. (none / 0)

We've agreed to disagree for some time on this. ;)

But I still don't see (in your picture) why wealthy businessfolk like to own newspapers if it's such a constraining and unprofitable deal - unless there's another side to this, which is influence in the political debate.

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Mon Jun 29th, 2009 at 04:41:55 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Belonging to the right gang. (none / 0)

It is the difference between then and now. Ask Conrad or Rupert - it was a licence to print money 'then'. Now major newspapers are not profitable or enough profitable. The political influence is all that remains, and even that was more important in the corridors than on the street corner.

I see most of the major media owners as engaged in a charade of influence.

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Mon Jun 29th, 2009 at 05:06:42 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Imagine... (4.00 / 2)

it's always something I've wondered, One way it makes sense to me is if one of the main reasons is Private taxation. While the UK stays out of the Euro, which is obviously one of the consequences of closer integration, then theres a small levy taken on every cross border transaction. last years total trade between the UK and Europe amounted to roughly 320 billion and each transaction funnels 1 percent straight to the banks in transaction costs. Now if im right, thats roughly the equivalent of 2% income tax, going directly to the banks and finace houses, and not coming back as schools, hospitals and health services, rather dropping straight into a small but wealthy section of the populations pockets.

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

by ceebs (ceebs (at) eurotrib (dot) com) on Mon Jun 29th, 2009 at 09:59:09 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Imagine... (none / 0)

yup that might explain it as perfectly as i could wish, ceebs, thanks.

more than enough in that 2% to pay off the justins, libertas', and the other usual suspects, and still some left over for nest-feathering.

cui bono indeed...

why aren't more people yelling 'foul', don't you wonder?

"Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do." Jim Hightower

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Mon Jun 29th, 2009 at 02:44:13 PM EST
[ Parent ]