Falsetto

I'll admit that I haven't bought Standpoint and that I'm probably not going to. This could be a problem here because I can imagine times when print articles have some kind of introductory paragraph added by a sub-ed which the online version omits thereby depriving those in the cheap seats (ie me) with vital context.

In the absence of said context, I'm going to have to improvise. Nick Cohen reviews Shooting History by Jon Snow for reasons we can't work out at present. There are no footnotes, links, or other references to where Snow said the things attributed to him - everything should be taken as Ibid.

Snow published his autobiography in 2004; as Nick mentions near the end of his piece, it was reviewed thoughtfully by Denis MacShane in the Independent. Nick gets MacShane exactly wrong by the way, quoting the last sentence from this, the last paragraph:

Now he presents Channel 4 news, the thinking person's Newsnight. The rainbow ties, the stiff collars, the undimmed boyish enthusiasm for great stories and important causes, the trouser bottoms stuffed in socks as he gets ready to ride home to his beloved partner and children, have turned Snow into a national treasure, whose pastoral interventions have more impact than those of most bishops. But after three decades of brilliant reporting, one senses Snow asking himself an awful question. "I have reported the world. But have I made it a better place to live in?" Therein lies the existential dilemma of all engaged television reporters. Like philosophers, they offer an interpretation of the world. Snow, one suspects, would prefer to have changed it.

Nick:

MacShane’s use of past tense was instructive. For if you want to change the world, you go into politics, or argue your case as a polemicist or join a campaign group.

(Nick has already noted that Snow did, in fact, work for "Lord Longford’s drop-in centre for homeless teenagers". I don't know Snow's reasons for leaving; but he did start at the "doing something" end.) But this isn't MacShane's point. He started with this:

There has been endless chatter, since Marshall McLuhan, about television turning the world into a global village. The science fiction writer, Arthur C Clarke, who first described the possibility of satellites bringing instant reports from trouble spots, argued that the immediacy of such broadcasts would expose the folly of, and thus prevent, wars, famine and violence.

We know better now.

That is what MacShane is suggesting that Snow wanted: for journalism to change things. That wasn't so naive when Snow started as a journalist. Perhaps Snow does regret that the world didn't turn out that way. If so, I don't blame him.

I don't know what suggested to Nick that he take on a book approaching its fourth birthday. Perhaps it was ...

The American critic, Paul Berman, wrote recently that “neocon” had become a show-stopper in upmarket liberal circles. The mere use of the word was enough to convince an audience that a man was a monster. “You should say it out loud in falsetto, as if a mouse had just run across your foot,” he explained. “Otherwise you will not have captured the right tone.”

(Interlude. Thanks to comments on my last post. Jonathan Bate, also a Standpoint writer, wrote to the Times Higher Education Supplement to complain about an article which quoted Nick's higher education piece in the Observer. ("Officially, our universities are now world leaders in the study of French literature but awful at studying English literature." My emphasis - to highlight Bate's claim that "My article (freely available online) made clear that the startling discrepancy between research assessment exercise results in English and French occurred in the 1996 exercise, when it was much remarked upon, whereas Cohen writes about it as if it were a more recent phenomenon.") Nick has an interesting approach to the present tense himself.)

Paul Berman's "recent" "writing" was in an interview for Decentiya (probably conducted via email, so he did write it):

Paul Berman: The very word 'neoconservatism' has become troubling. There are a vast number of fantasies about who 'the neoconservatives' are, what they stand for, and what role they have played. It has reached the point that whenever you read the word you should say it out loud in falsetto, as if a mouse had just run across your foot. Otherwise you will not have captured the right tone. At some level I don't like to use the term. Many people who are called neoconservatives, it seems to me, are just Washington operatives who have worked for Republican and Democratic administrations, and who have held a variety of views.

"The interview was conducted on May 24 2006." I don't call an interview two years ago 'recent'.

While I was writing this article, the Ministry of Defence announced the death of the 100th British soldier in Afghanistan. Channel 4 News said that it was “duty-bound” to examine Gordon Brown’s claim that our soldiers had died in a noble cause. “Reliable measures” were hard to find, it concluded with a shake of the head. The conservative Spectator went wild and pointed out that the army had pushed the Taliban back to the Pakistani border, allowed the preparations for the upcoming elections and prevented al-Qaeda from re-establishing an Afghan base.

Wikipedia entry on the War in Afghanistan:

The Tora Bora Mountains lie roughly east of Afghanistan's capital Kabul, which is itself close to the border with Pakistan. American intelligence analysts believed that the Taliban and al Qaeda had dug in to a fortified networks of well-supplied caves and underground bunkers. The area was subjected to a heavy continuous bombardment by B52 bombers

They've been there, in other words, since the invasion. It's true the army "pushed" them out of Kabul, but not such a long way. That was six years ago.

MacShane, BTW, comes up with a much more damning - to me - flaw of Snow's.

Snow has been a witness to the high moments of drama in recent history. But history is made up of connections that the TV journalist cannot show. In Central America, Snow recalls the plight of the guerrillas fighting to take power. But he did not report Daniel Ortega acting as an altar boy in Berlin in 1985 at a high mass of Stalinist reaction, where the Sandinista endorsed the repression of Solidarity in Poland. The world's then most fashionable anti-American icon said no to Somoza's rule over Nicaraguan campesinos but si to Communist dictatorship over Polish workers.

Nick finishes with:

Broadcasting brings the politically engaged presenter or reporter celebrity and money, but extracts a dreadful price. It allows them only to push the impartiality rules so far by, say, asking tough questions of a political opponent but giving powder-puff interviews to a friend. When challenged in debate, their employers will not allow them to stand and fight their ground. They must scuttle away and pretend to be nothing more than civil servants of the airwaves. To use a word they would never use, their chosen careers are “unmanly”.

Conservatives should pity rather than condemn the liberal locked in the gilded cage of broadcast news. For these are lives half-lived.

Wow. Et tu, Brute.

I'm not sure about the Drudge/Prince Harry thing. I sort of see Snow's point. The Daily Mail covered it better than Nick does.

And then it gets really weird.

The bias feels all the more insidious because of the huge advantage politically committed broadcasters enjoy. Politicians realised long ago that taking them on is like swearing at the ref or throwing your racket at the umpire — a mug’s game they can never win. As soon as they are challenged, broadcasters retreat behind the mask of impartiality and present themselves as mere adjudicators. It is no good using the normal tactics of argument against them by pointing out the previous failures of their ideology or their hypocrisies and blind spots.

So politicians are supposed to use "the normal tactics of argument" - ie ad hominems, rather than justifying their policies. Does any politician think this is actually a good idea?
Finally, damning evidence of Jon Snow's treacherous support for fascistic regimes, etc.