Journalism, radio and stuff like that
This is the Daily Express, apparently showing crowds of “selfish rule breakers” during lockdown.
The photo is of Brighton and Hove seafront. Rob Shepherd lives there. See the cranes in the background? As Rob demonstrates, they aren’t there any more and haven’t been for some time.
To add insult to fatal injury, the headline that dominates the front page isn’t even true.
Something that you might not be aware of is how much newspaper, magazine and website publishers rely on affiliate marketing: if they link to a shop selling product X and you buy product X via that link, they get a small fee. Those revenues are particularly important during this coronavirus lockdown: the other big revenue drivers, print advertising and branded events, are effectively dead right now.
So naturally Amazon has decided to kick the publishing industry while it’s down. Starting next week, it’s slashing the rates it pays its affiliates, in some cases by more than half.
It’s terrible news for the industry, of course, but it’s also an indication of a wider problem: as print sales have continued their inevitable decline, publishers have repeatedly put their business eggs into single baskets – only to discover that by doing so they’re vulnerable to the whims of companies that see them as expendable. The giant tech brands have demonstrated again and again how ruthless they are. That’s how they became giant tech brands.
There are lots of examples. Many businesses find that when Google changes its search engine rankings, their traffic disappears overnight. YouTubers find that rule changes or arbitrary decisions leave them unable to monetise their channels any more. The most awful example is Facebook, which lobbied media firms to “pivot to video” to reach huge audiences; its figures were falsified – in some case viewing figures were inflated by as much as 900%. Media firms fired their journalists to embrace the new world of video; when it turned out that the new world was fraudulent and the promised money wasn’t there, they fired their video people too.
Whether you’re a publisher or an Amazon marketplace seller, a musician on Spotify, an artist on Etsy or a small business selling on social media, you’re ultimately trying to pretend that a furious, hungry tiger is a sweet little pussy cat. It’s not a question of if it’ll turn on you. It’s a question of when.
At the time of writing:
101,000 – total global deaths from Covid-19
8,958 – total UK deaths from the same virus, excluding hundreds more in care homes
The UK has nearly one in ten of the global deaths from this virus despite being one of the most recent countries to get it.
Today’s daily death toll, 980, means for two days running the UK has had more daily deaths than the worst days in Italy or France.
That’s despite having the benefit of time to see how the virus has spread in other countries, time to order protective equipment and ventilators, time to plan an effective response. Time other countries didn’t have.
Things could have been even worse. If the football authorities hadn’t become fed up with government inaction and decided to cancel multiple big games in March, the numbers  would be even higher.
This is a political failure on a truly horrific scale.
It’s time for the press to do its job and hold the government to account.
There is a campaign just now asking people to save newspapers. The gist: many are threatened by coronavirus-related advertising collapse; without them, especially plucky local ones, democracy will be under threat. The first stage is to ask the public to support them; the second, to demand government help.
We need to remember that the biggest titles – the Sun, the Mail, the Telegraph and the Times – have proprietors who are genuine billionaires; that they are individuals and come from families worth thousands of millions of pounds. And those billionaires and their companies pay their taxes only where it suits them, which means that they pay the least they can manage in the UK.
Before we hand them any money that has been paid as taxes by nurses and bus drivers in this country, we need to be certain that (a) none of the cash will swell the personal coffers of the Murdochs, Rothermeres and Barclays, (b) they themselves have spent everything they can afford to keep their newspapers going, and (c) in the future, they will pay all the tax that they should in this country – no more Channel Islands, no more Bermuda, no more Delaware.
The piece also makes a good point about local newspapers. While there are some genuinely wonderful local newspapers – the Yorkshire Post springs to mind – many local papers are nothing of the sort. They are centrally produced, low-quality publications run by firms who’ve sacked most of the journalists and asset-stripped the businesses.
when the industry talks about the ‘local press’, it wants you to think of a heroic little outfit in a small town with a hard-working staff who are in tune with the needs and habits of the community and who deliver, not just information, but also social cohesion and identity.
In reality, the press industry has been furiously trashing that entire culture for decades. Three rapacious multi-million-pound corporations – Reach, Newsquest and JPMedia – have been rolling through the local and regional press industry like asset strippers, sacking journalists by the thousand and closing titles by the hundred.
Year after year, these three have banked handsome operating profits which, to a striking degree, they have spent outside the local and regional newspaper industry.
The article suggests that any help should be conditional, and should be designed to protect journalism rather than bad and broken businesses.
as these newspapers are always quick to insist in the context of other benefit claimants – we must weed out the scroungers from those genuinely deserving of support. And we must do so with a clear eye on the future.
…Let the billionaires exhaust their own funds and pay their own taxes first. Let them make their practices and finances accessible and transparent to taxpayers. Let them make their journalism properly accountable.
Net magazine, originally know as .net, is closing after 25 years.
I cried at the news. Not just because it’s putting some lovely, talented people out of a job, but also because .net has a special place in my heart. It’s the magazine that gave me my break into journalism nearly 22 years ago, the magazine that taught me how to be a writer and the magazine that introduced me to some of my very favourite people. It literally changed my life.
Bye, .net. I’m heartbroken to see you go.
If you can afford it, this would be a very good time to subscribe to your favourite magazines. If you don’t, they might not be around when this crisis is over. One of the publishers I work for has already closed three titles. They won’t be coming back, and the industry as a whole is already in crisis.
A representative survey of PPA members taken last week showed an “extremely concerning†picture that advertising revenues are expected to drop by an average of 60 per cent in the next quarter, ranging between 20 and 95 per cent per publisher.
Events, upon which many B2B publishers have relied for years and which consumer brands had increasingly focused on as ad revenues declined, are down 90 per cent this quarter.
I understand that times are hard but many publishers are offering really great deals, and if you’re really skint you can still help the magazines you love by subscribing to their online editions or to digital services such as Readly or Apple News+. I use both: they’re really good on computers and absolutely fantastic on tablets, where they come very close to the feel of a real magazine.
The mainstream media has been quick to point the finger at social media for the conspiracy theory that 5G mobile phone signals spread Coronavirus. But the mainstream media played its part too.
Here’s the Daily Star, just before people started arson attacks on mobile phone masts.
Coronavirus: Fears 5G wifi networks could be acting as ‘accelerator’ for disease
You may be getting flashbacks to when the likes of The Independent, the Daily Mail and the Telegraph covered “fears” that wi-fi and mobile phones caused “electrosmog”. Or perhaps you’d like a more damaging example, such as the “fears” that vaccines could cause autism.
The headline is important, because many people read it and don’t read further. In this case, that means they’ll go away with the impression that 5G networks (not WiFi, that’s a different thing and a different conspiracy theory) affect Coronavirus.
They do not.
They can not.
There is no possible way in which they could*.
5G signals are just radio waves. They have the same effect on viral spread as the shipping forecast from Radio 4.
Now, I know the Daily Star hardly counts as the quality press. But it’s a newspaper nevertheless, and people believe what it prints. And from the headline down, this article is constructed in exactly the same way newspapers have covered other baseless scares from the MMR vaccine and electrosmog to trans healthcare, creating the impression of a danger that does not exist.
I’ve grown to detest newspaper stories with “Fears” in the headline because they’re so frequently baseless. People may fear that if we go beyond 30mph in a train, our faces will fall off (a genuine fear from the early days of rail travel) or that if we sail our ships too far we’ll fall off the end of the world (an old favourite that’s back! Back! BACK!), but fears are not facts.
Fears also require context: is this fear credible? Is the person expressing this fear credible? Does this person have any expertise that means we should take their fears seriously? For example, if the chief medical officer fears that a particular behaviour will put people at risk of a particular virus, that’s an informed fear. Whereas if a man who lives in a bin fears that if he ventures out before midnight a magical space owl will steal his eyes, that’s a slightly different proposition.
Unfortunately in these clickbait days it’s more important for something to be popular than for it to be accurate, informed or useful; if my imaginary man-in-a-bin actually existed, you just know he’d get 15 minutes on Newsnight, a column in The Spectator and a regular guest spot on Question Time.
Back to the Star. Since publication, the original story has been been rewritten to make it clear that the “fears” are really fact-free claims by “conspiracists”. But the original gave them hundreds of words to spout gibberish, which it didn’t try very hard to correct. For example:
The theory has been met with scepticism from experts, who have pointed out that coronavirus cases have been identified in many areas with no 5G networks.
“Scepticism” means doubt and implies that there’s a debate here. There is no debate here. Experts have called the claims “crackpot”, “rubbish” and “dangerous nonsense” because there is no conceivable way in which mobile phone signals can spread coronavirus. You might as well say that “the theory that putting custard in your ear cures cancer has been met with scepticism from experts”.
Activist Louise Thomas, based in Somerset, told Daily Star Online: “We can’t say 5G has caused the coronavirus, but it might be exacerbating it.”
Is Louise a credible person to base a news story on? Does she have expertise in virology or radiobiology?
Let’s look at her Facebook. She describes herself as:
Yoga, pilates, fitness, meditation teacher Truth advocate, mother.
But Louise is the warm-up act for another activist:
Tanja Rebel, another activist and philosophy lecturer at the Isle of Wight College, told us:
What is it with philosophy lecturers and science denial? They’re all over trans medicine too, shouting LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU at doctors and the WHO. She says:
“Many studies show that Electro-Magnetic Radiation (EMR) suppresses the immune system and that it helps viruses and bacteria thrive.”
Did someone mention the WHO? Yes. Me, just a moment ago. Here they are:
In the area of biological effects and medical applications of non-ionizing radiation approximately 25,000 articles have been published over the past 30 years. Despite the feeling of some people that more research needs to be done, scientific knowledge in this area is now more extensive than for most chemicals. Based on a recent in-depth review of the scientific literature, the WHO concluded that current evidence does not confirm the existence of any health consequences from exposure to low level electromagnetic fields.
Back to our philosopher.
“So EMR and in particular 5G could act as an accelerator for the disease.”
That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.
The article goes on:
Italy, now the country with the highest coronavirus death toll, had 5G networks installed in five cities in 2019 with plans to extend coverage throughout 2020.
You can see what the writer is trying to do here: she’s implying causation from correlation. But there is no correlation – the map of coronavirus cases in Italy bears no relation to the 5G coverage map; the technology is still only available to a handful of people – and of course there is no causation. The Italian death toll is multifactorial: an ageing population, an overloaded medical system in specific areas (notably Lombardy), inadequate testing, people not taking the danger seriously enough until it was too late.
As if that wasn’t enough of a reach:
A 2011 study from Northeastern University in Boston indicated that some single-celled bacteria, such as E.coli, may communicate with each other using “radio waves”.
First of all, bacteria aren’t viruses, so this has nothing to do with the story. Bacteria are living organisms; viruses are particles. Bacteria could be setting up video chats on Houseparty for all we know; it still has no bearing on viruses.
And secondly, oh no it didn’t. It wasn’t a study, it was a still-controversial hypothesis by theoretical physicists about a possible mechanism in which some bacteria may generate detectable radio signals.
Very little is known about COVID-19, the novel coronavirus at the heart of the current pandemic, but research has shown that viruses “talk to each other” when making decisions about infecting a host.
That’s a very misleading way to put it. Here’s Nature on that research:
when a phage infects a cell, it releases a tiny protein — a peptide just six amino acids long — that serves as a message to its brethren: “I’ve taken a victimâ€. As the phages infect more cells, the message gets louder, signalling that uninfected hosts are becoming scarce. Phages then put a halt to lysis — the process of replicating and breaking out of their hosts — instead staying hidden in a sluggish state called lysogeny.
That’s what we mean when we describe viruses “talking to one another”. They’re not sending each other messages on WhatsApp.
This particular monstrosity may have been in the Daily Star, but there are articles like it in all the press with increasing regularity on all kinds of subjects. The topics and mastheads may vary, but at heart the problem is universal: all too often, mainstream media tells us to ignore the experts and listen to cranks instead. The consequences of that go far beyond a few blackened phone masts.
* Radio is a spectrum. In much the same way that there’s a difference between your lover’s breath and a hurricane, some radio waves are harmless and some are harmful. For example, X-rays and UV-A light are known to damage us.
That kind of radiation is called ionising radiation, and it lives in the petahertz and exahertz frequencies. Mobile phone signals are not ionising radiation. They are much, much lower frequencies. It’s like the difference between the sun and a light bulb. The sun emits high levels of ionising radiation. The light bulb in your kitchen doesn’t.
You can still be damaged by lower frequency radio waves, but that requires a lot of power because it works in a different way. Ionising radiation breaks cells; non-ionising radiation heats them up but only if you give it a lot of power.
Think of your microwave: it uses radio waves to generate heat, and it does that by using a lot of power at a short distance. So your ready meal is being hit with 900 watts for four minutes at a distance of ten centimetres of so in a closed and reflective compartment. The result of so much power over such a short distance is that the water molecules in the food get hot. If you climbed inside a microwave and switched it on it would do the same to the water molecules inside you. This is why you shouldn’t dry small wet dogs in the microwave.
Back to the difference between your lover’s breath and a hurricane: they’re both moving air, but only one of them can throw a cow through the front of your house.  It’s the same with mobile phones. Where your microwave is 900W, a 5G cell is around 2W to 5W; where your microwave is right next to your dinner, the 5G cell is many metres – often hundreds of metres – away.Â
The chorus of anger at people supposedly risking everybody’s lives by going to the park is growing louder, especially in the right-wing press; the government is now floating the idea that going outside at all may be banned “if people continue to flout the rules”.
Don’t fall for it: it’s a deliberate attempt to bury bad news. The government (and its media cheerleaders) wants you to blame so-called “covidiots” because if you’re getting annoyed at them, you’re not getting annoyed at a government that’s gutted the NHS so badly that key frontline workers are being forced to make their own protective clothing out of bin bags.
Several healthcare workers in England have told the BBC of a lack of equipment in their hospitals. Warned against speaking to the media, they were unwilling to talk publicly.
these medical professionals, who continue to care for critically ill patients for 13 hours every day, are having to resort to fashioning personal protective equipment (PPE) out of clinical waste bags, plastic aprons and borrowed skiing goggles.
People are not going to die because your next door neighbour went for two walks today, or because someone sunbathed in the park. But people will die because of the decisions that left the UK short of health workers, of ventilators to treat the sick and of protective equipment for the doctors and nurses our politicians stand outside Downing Street to applaud.
In the wake of the Andrew Wakefield scandal and two decades of disastrous climate change denial, newspapers surely have a social responsibility to be calm and cautious when contradicting scientific consensus, not turn serious questions of health communication into flesh for bare-toothed columnists to spar over.
Despite continuing to spread confusion about the virus, the Tory press has been more than happy to denounce people who are confused.
…When responsibility is cast onto an atomised population, it doesn’t land evenly. It is channelled down the social structures which already exist. Race, class, gender, sexuality: blame is always mobilised against the already marginalised.