Rob, Rambling - A lot of things interest me...

Now, there’s nothing I love more than some absolutely rank hypocrisy from those who we elect to govern us. One of the news stories that caught my eye today involved Birmingham City Council making 2,000 workers redundant in an effort to balance the books.

This is despite saying in October last year that only 800 jobs would be lost, and that these would be through natural wastage, not redundancies. Of course, the latest news is that voluntary redundancies will be a big part of the 2,000 jobs to go.

It got me thinking about whether those at the top of Birmingham council are planning to undergo similar financial hardships this year, as a sign of solidarity with their underlings.

A little investigation later, and it turns out that council leader Mike Whitby and his fellow councillors aren’t exactly in step with their comrades.

Last June, Whitby and three other senior councillors awarded themselves an extra £15,000 for attending a few more meetings each year. Previously, attendance at these meetings came with no extra salary.

A mere two weeks ago, Whitby joined the board of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, which I’m pretty certain isn’t an unpaid role.

I hate to link to the Taxpayers’ Alliance, despite their well-placed apostrophe, but in June they looked at Chief Executive Stephen Hughes’ pay packet: a whopping £200,000+ per year. This is as a result of an 18.2% pay rise over two years, way, way above the inflation rate. Not exactly a minuscule salary, is it?

To cap it all, the council’s auditors have refused to sign off on the 2008/9 accounts, citing a number of shortfalls in the budget. Most notably, the council claims that their property assets amount to £6.6 billion, whereas the auditors value them at £5.5 billion.

This has lead to a “black hole” in the council’s finances of around £60 million, resulting in the job cuts.

There’s been no statement from either of these senior councillors that they will take any pay cuts or forgo bonuses because of the perilous state of Birmingham’s finances. No doubt they’ll quietly award themselves various bonuses for meeting targets…

Things that really, really annoy me:

• Handles facing towards you on ‘push’ doors.

That is all.

Ever have one of those days when everything you do is second-guessed? As if people expect nothing more from you than a mistake and a fuck up, like you can’t do your job properly.

It’s really, really fucking annoying and demoralising.

Hmm, when I get pissed off, the words just flow. The media and the law are two subjects very dear to my heart, and I have very strong opinions on them.

Thus it pisses me off when I can see that either one of them is abusing their position. Or, even worse, being abused by those in power.

I ramble on, I know, and it’s boring if you’re not interested, but these are things I genuinely care about. I could write for hours and hours about the topic, no doubt working myself into a frenzy and ending up frothing at the mouth at the sheer fucking incredulity of it all.

If you read these longer pieces, I appreciate it. I tag all my posts, so there’s more on my blog under media and law. Other subjects which get me hot under the collar include hypocrisy in the media and the Daily Mail.

If that’s all a bit too much, try the funny stuff instead.

Man, that last post has got me riled. I studied law at university, and it’s at times like these that I’m glad I did, because I can see how it is being used to stifle reporting and to protect big businesses.

The law in the field of libel has gone much too far in the direction of protecting individuals and businesses, and wholly against publishers and the media. This is having a real and noticeable effect on what the public is being told about, which in turn affects society.

Yes, there are times when the media does get things wrong, and deserves to pay compensation to those it slanders, but when the libel courts are being used purely as a silencing tactic, it’s chilling.

And it’s not as if the man on the street can sue for libel. You have to be rich to be able to afford the lawyers, as libel is a civil wrong, not criminal. You can’t get legal aid, so only those can pay barristers’ fees can go after the media. This means celebrities, politicians and businesses.

And with British libel law being so claimant-friendly, we have become a destination for libel claims worldwide, especially given the reach of the internet. One case that sticks out from my studies involved a Saudi businessman who sued in England over a publication which sold less than 20 copies on Amazon UK. The author was American, the publishing company was American, it was written for an American audience, and it concerned business dealings in the US.

Nevertheless, the British courts found in the Saudi man’s favour, and awarded him a stupid amount of money to be paid by the author. Oh, and the book had to be pulped.

Similarly, I think Polanski sued the US Vanity Fair magazine in Britain, and won. He didn’t even travel to London, for fear of being extradited to the US on the outstanding rape charge against him, instead giving video evidence from France. As the editor of Vanity Fair said, “I find it amazing that a man who lives in France can sue a magazine that is published in America in a British courtroom”.

Things got so bad that the US Congress has proposed legislation that would bar US courts from enforcing libel judgments from a foreign country against US residents if that libel case would not have succeeded under US law.

Honestly, the British libel law is an utter joke at the moment. It is incredibly heavily weighted in favour of claimants, and we’re seeing it used to muzzle the media right at the time when investigations into important subjects are absolutely necessary. The media needs to be able to report why certain companies led us blindly into a recession, or are fucking up the environment.

Judges issuing pre-emptive injunctions with no merit don’t help this one iota, and the long-term effects of this thread of legal precedence being set day by day are only going to be negative.

You see, this is what pisses me off about the media and in particular their reliance on attention-grabbing headlines that bear no resemblance to the actual story in question. Look at this piece of shit journalism on the Daily Mail website:

Has Amy Winehouse had a £35K breast enlargement before tonight’s appearance on Strictly?

That’s the headline. ‘Strictly’ refers to Strictly Come Dancing, which non-Brits will know as Dancing With The Stars.

The story essentially questions whether Amy Winehouse has had a boob job ahead of her triumphant (© BBC PR Dept) return to TV. Apparently her use of drugs in the last few years has removed all of her once-famous curves, and she wants them back.

Bluntly, I couldn’t give a flying fuck whether she has or not, and judging by the photos in the story it’s pretty obvious that she hasn’t.

My issue is with the number in the headline. Where the fuck did they get £35,000 from?! I’m no expert on boob jobs, but I understand the normal price is something like £5,000 at most. As you read the “story”, it’s pretty fucking obvious that the journalist has just pulled the number out of her ass.

The opening line says “She is said to have spent £35,000 on a procedure to give herself a more curvaceous figure”, but fails to make any reference to this at all for the rest of the article. Who “said” it? Where did they get it from? Why did she spend so much more than usual?

It’s a fucking terrible example of an opening hook which is swiftly forgotten and glossed over, and it’s something that happens far too often in modern journalism. Newspapers are taking readers for idiots, and we let them get away with it.

And that’s really, really, fucking depressing.

I’m not a huge fan of the recent upswing in statistics in football, copying the tradition of stats-obsessed American sports, but when these statistics are used to make a fool of Alex Ferguson, I can be convinced.

Ferguson complained that the referee for Man Utd’s match on Saturday, Alan Wiley, “was not fit enough for a game of that standard. The pace of the game demanded a referee who was fit. He was not fit. It is an indictment of our game. He was taking 30 seconds to book a player. He was needing a rest. It was ridiculous.”

Thankfully, we have this company called ProZone which provides a staggering amount of statistics about every facet of a game (for a sky-high fee), including the referee’s performance. As the Telegraph reports, “Wiley covered 11, 039.1 metres in the match compared with 10,700 for the average player.”

In your fat fucking red-nosed face, Fergie.

Fucking hell, even Gawker is parroting this Demi Moore/Sarah Brown twitter nonsense now.

Is there seriously such pressure on to get stories published that research just doesn’t happen in modern journalism? I’m at work myself (admittedly on a slow day), but I had time to look up the source of this story and was able to check the facts. It’s really not that fucking difficult.

Sorry, but this genuinely annoys me. It’s not the whole old/new media thing, nor is it about Twitter.

It’s about sheer fucking laziness on the part of journalists who would rather repeat something almost verbatim than bother to go and check the fucking facts them-fucking-selves.

It’s about the rush to get something out there so that people see it, and see the surrounding adverts, rather than making sure that something is true, or accurate. It’s about not wanting to be left behind or usurped by a rival.

It’s about the race to the bottom in terms of journalism, wanting everything faster and cheaper, and the accuracy of the “news” can simply go fuck itself.

And it’s really, really fucking depressing.