Media Democracy Pod

The Boris Johnson who bestrode British politics like a Colossus in 2019 is no more. In his place is a hapless figure, who can't seem to stop breaking his own regulations again and again last December. What happened? Why have the British public finally lost patience with him? Was it the media, by any chance? Tom and Dan come back to the Media Democracy studios to discuss the ongoing campaign by political insiders and their allies in the press to get Boris done.

What a vintage year it's been! Tom and Dan look back on 2020 and talk about the highlights of the UK media's performance. We touch on mainstream satire (bad), the BBC (cosily familiar but also bad), the Murdoch press (very, very bad) and the current state of relations between the media and economic reality (absolutely awful). There's also some talk about what the hell the two hosts have been up to this year. There'll be Media Democracy one offs in the future, but we aren't going to pretend to be regular podcasters any more. But look out for new work on media reform in 2021. Music by Makaih Beats. Show links: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1461670X.2020.1852099 https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/after-corbynism-where-next-english-socialism/

This week your intrepid co-hosts enter BBC Radio 4's flagship forum for ethical debate, The Moral Maze and talk about its February 12th episode 'The Moral Purpose of the BBC'. Confronted with the labyrinth of the BBC's assumptions and dogmas, its lopsided balance and general inability to think or see what's in front of its nose, Tom and Dan soon realise that there is no easy way out. At the beginning of the show Media Democracy explains who you should vote for in the forthcoming elections for leader of the Labour Party. Music by Makaih Beats.

This is the second part of our interview with Juliet Jacques. In the intro, Tom and Dan talk briefly about Rebecca Long Bailey's recent proposals to reform the BBC and the response of liberal intelligentsia: why think through what public media should look like in the digital age when you can fixate instead on court gossip? Music by Makaih Beats.

In the first instalment of a two-parter, this week Tom and Dan talk with author and critic Juliet Jacques about the depiction of trans people in the media, the trouble with liberal pluralism, and whether or not a secret cabal of Norwich City fans is pulling the strings of the British power elite. Music by Makaih Beats.

Dan and Tom return to podcasting after the Christmas break to discuss the media's behaviour in the General Election and the implications for the Labour Party of trying to operate in a communicative space that is as deceptive as it is hostile. Along the way we touch on some familiar themes - the awfulness of PPE, the awfulness of the New Statesman, liberalism's inability to distinguish between basic sociology and conspiracy theory, and much, much more. Peter McColl's article on deliberative democracy as a superior alternative to technocracy and market forces can be found at his blog: https://petermccoll.wordpress.com/2019/09/02/from-the-crisis-of-meaning-to-challenge-focused-democratic-economy/ Shout out to Andy McDonald, Labour's Shadow Transport Secretary, for pointing out that 'the conduct of broadcasters in this election demonstrates the urgent need to debate democratic reforms to our media.' https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/labours-unfair-treatment-shows-broadcasters-21222653.amp Music by Makaih Beats.

On 22 October Peter Oborne broke the silence that surrounds Westminster journalism with a damning article on the relationship between Downing Street’s press operation and senior correspondents like Robert Peston, Tim Shipman and Laura Kuenssberg. We talk about the article, the responses from Robert Peston and Amol Rajan, and what the reaction tells us about the state of UK journalism. Peter Oborne’s original article - https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/british-journalists-have-become-part-of-johnsons-fake-news-machine/ - Robert Peston’s hilarious response - https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/my-job-draw-back-veil-robert-peston-responds-peter-oborne/ and Amol Rajan’s pretend-brave interview with Oborne https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0009lhr Music by Makaih Beats.

Barely days after Facebook began trialing a news feature on its app Tom and Dan talk about the journey the company is on, from content agnostic charnel house to halfway convincing approximation of a civil public sphere. What does the platforms' emerging compromise with elected politicians, legacy media and the secret state look like? And how do we stop it? We also talk about Ofcom’s recent review of the BBC, the difference between quantity and quality in news coverage, balance in theory and practice, and Rupert Murdoch, the GOAT in the production and dissemination of fake news. We end with a bungling attempt to persuade our listeners to like and subscribe. Music by Makaih Beats.

This week Tom and Dan talk with Jodie Nesling of the Isle of Thanet News, an awarding winning monthly newspaper covering Margate, Broadstairs, Ramsgate and a handful of villages inland in East Kent. Jodie began her career as a journalist in one of the corporate conglomerates and she talks about her experiences there and about the challenges facing a start-up aiming to give its community the reporting it deserves. The Isle of Thanet News is published as a free monthly newspaper and its reporting is also freely available online at https://theisleofthanetnews.com. Music by Makaih Beats.

This week Tom and Dan are joined by author and activist Tamasin Cave of Spinwatch. We talk about the Climate Crisis and the individuals and institutions determined to preserve business as usual, whatever the cost. We explore the geography of the Westminster Village, the politics of proximity, and the gap between the lobbyists' outward facing propaganda and their growing internal anxiety about the threat of democracy. For the avoidance of doubt, at one point Dan makes a joke. Tamasin will be at Extinction Rebellion from Monday October 7th. For more information, follow her on Twitter at @CaveTamasin. Check out Influence Map: https://influencemap.org to find out more about the geography of lobbying. For more about the Climate Emergency and what to do about it, check out Desmog https://www.desmog.co.uk/. Spinwatch works to promote transparency in the lobbying sector Spinwatch.org. Music by Makaih Beats.

In a one-off special to promote the Media Democracy Festival on March 16th, Tom and Dan fail utterly to mention said event. Instead they noisily take credit for the BBC's nervous flirtation with the audience-as-editor and the New Statesman's tentative moves away from pallid centrism. Along the way there is talk of Jordan Peterson, the role of experts in democratic reasoning, and these notorious thugs of the hard left identify the next target of their 'reforming ambition'. Music by Makaih Beats. Entering the secret castle: A small step towards democratic public media? https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/entering-secret-castle-small-step-towards-democratic-public-media/

Tom and Dan are back after a long break throughout which the media class have behaved with scrupulous professionalism and disinterested rationality. This week we talk a little about Tom Watson's recent speech on digital policy before moving on to the main order of business, an interview with Trebor Scholz. Trebor Scholz is an associate professor at the New School in New York and in April of this year Trebor will launch the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy there. His publications include Uber-Worked and Underpaid: How Workers are Disrupting the Digital Economy. Music by Makaih Beats.

This week Dan and Tom are joined by journalist, author and Blue Tick Twitter Personality Hussein Kesvani to discuss celebrity columnists and the Twittersphere. Over the course of the show we cover the politics of newsrooms, unpaid internships, Aaron Sorkin, David Aaronovitch, The Spectator and, regrettably, Jordan Peterson. Music by Makaih Beats.

This week Tom and Dan go back to basics and spend an hour chatting about recent events in media/politics. The takes range from the stone cold and frankly unappetising - Dan's outrageous treatment at the hands of Ed Miliband - to the sizzling hot and oh-so-current - Poppygate and the uses of insincerity in the politics of remembrance. Along the way we discuss Tom's baffling online encounters with David 'Dave' Aaronovitch, the Stalinist left as a training ground for centrist shitheels, and Dave's well remunerated inability to notice vast criminal conspiracies in his own workplace. We end with proposals for democratic reform of the charitable sector under socialism, naturally. Music by Makaih Beats.

This week on the podcast we're joined by Jack Frayne-Reid of the Reel Politik podcast to review Nick Robinson's podcast, 'Political Thinking'. It's a podcasting hall of mirrors. Music by Makaih Beats.

This week we bring you a recording from the Parliamentary launch of the Media Reform Coalition's 'Draft Proposals on BBC Reform', featuring Natalie Fenton, Zoe Williams, Amelia Womack, Clive Lewis and Media Democracy's very own Tom Mills. Music by Makaih Beats.

We're joined by Joe Kennedy (@joekennedy81 on Twitter), the author of 'Authentocrats: Culture, Politics and the New Seriousness', to discuss the history, politics and aesthetics of the 'New Statesman'. Our apologies for the sound quality, which at times is not great even by our low standards. Music by Makaih Beats.

James Stern-Weiner returns to the show to discuss the structure of the debates about Israel-Palestine and Labour's alleged antisemitism crisis. Jamie is the editor of 'Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel-Palestine's Toughest Questions' (http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/moment-of-truth/). He is a graduate student at the University of Oxford. Music by Makaih Beats.

This week we're joined by author and journalist Matt Kennard and talk about how he came to write his 2015 book, 'The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs. the American Elite'. As a graduate of Columbia University's School of Journalism and a former employee at the Financial Times, Matt has first hand experience of how the media legitimates and assists state and corporate power across the world. Reporters rarely investigate the people who pay their salaries, and hardly ever publish what they find out. Matt has done both, and he has a hell of a story to tell. Music by Makaih Beats.​

Fifty years ago Enoch Powell gave his racist 'Rivers of Blood' speech. In it he trailed themes that have given undead life to right-wing populism ever since: effete elites in the service of alien subversion, violent crime as an inevitable accompaniment to demographic change, a respectable and long-suffering civilization on the brink of cataclysmic collapse. It's all there and was given the full BBC radio treatment in April of this year on Archive on Four. We talked with academic and author David Wearing about the speech, its framing by the BBC, and how the monsters Powell summoned in 1968 still walk among us. Music by Makaih Beats. David’s article for the New Socialist that we mention in the show: https://newsocialist.org.uk/stephen-lawrence-and-hostile-environment/.

On April 5th 2018 author and journalist Laurie Macfarlane came to Resort Studios in Margate to give a talk about the economics of housing and the politics of regeneration. This is a recording of his talk and the Q&A that followed. The recording is by Dan Scott, who co-produced the event. Laurie is the co-author of Rethinking the Economics of Housing and Land, published by Zed books.

We're back after an action-packed hiatus in media democracy land. This week Tom and Dan talk about balance, about Andrew Adonis' Twitter jihad against the BBC's pro-Brexit Bias, and about the prospects for an alliance between liberals and leftists against the gathering menace of the far right. At the end Dan tries to drag the centrists away from their George Orwell lookalike competition with a problematic, and all too predictable, historical analogy. Music by Makaih Beats.

This week Tom and Dan are joined by Will Davies, Reader in Political Economy at Goldsmiths and author of 'The Happiness Industry' and 'The Limits of Neoliberalism'. Will is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and his most recent article there looks at the scandals and anxieties that intersect at the Cambridge Analytica story. We talk with Will about the relationship between digital technology and the political process, about the liberal public sphere, and much else besides. Music by Makaih Beats.

This week Tom and Dan are joined by Professor Christopher Simpson to talk about his 1994 book The Science of Coercion. We explore the drivers of innovation in coercive communication, its origins in the military and the ways in which its techniques and assumptions have bled into academia and business. We go on to talk about the state of the art in modern propaganda and about the communications challenges facing democratic and egalitarian politics. Music by Makaih Beats.

This week Tom and Dan are joined by Wendy Liu (@dellsystem) and Hettie O'Brien (@hettieveronica) to take another bite out of the emerging tech monopolies. We talk about Silicon Valley start-up culture and how to stop it, about the Tech Workers' Coalition and the emerging revolt against capitalist command and control, about the challenge the new monopolies pose to regulators, and what an enabling socialist state would look like in the context of new technologies. Wendy Liu is economics co-editor at the New Socialist and Hettie O'Brien is a writer who has recently been researching monopolies and anti-trust legislation in Washington, DC. Music by Makaih Beats.

Dan and Tom are joined by Alex Nunns, author of the award winning book, 'The Candidate', a second edition of which has just been published. They discuss the media strategy and policies of the Labour Party, social media and the embarrassing failures of Jonathan Freedland, Polly Toybee and the rest of them.

This last week has seen the UK media engage in one of its increasingly absurd bouts of Cold War re-enactment. Meanwhile, a shadowy group of hard right Brexiteers are busy plotting a domestic revolution in league with foreign plutocrats. Kam Sandhu joins us to discuss both stories, and their implications for our media and our politics.

It’s the difficult second episode of the difficult second season. But Dan and Tom style it out with the help of Nick Srnicek and Laurie Laybourn-Langton. The learned guests discuss the political economy of platform capitalism, the evils of advertising and algorithms and the scope for the development of new public platforms. Music by Makaih Beats.

2.1 Conspiracy! by Media Democracy Pod

Dan and Tom meet IRL for a Media Democracy Christmas Special and discuss the Philosopher King and Twitter personality A.C. Grayling, the Enlightenment, centrism, Tony Blair and the media’s general obduracy in the face of political change.

Matthew Brown has played a leading role in Preston City Council's work to maximise the benefits of public and quasi-public spending in the city. Changes to the culture of procurement in the city is having important redistributive effects and helping to foster a stronger co-operative sector. Here he talks with Dan Hind about the origins of Preston Model, the ways in which it has developed over the years, and what it can teach us about the potential for far-reaching reform in the English regions and beyond. The Centre for Local Economic Strategies has produced a short video about community wealth-building - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNQKaDYtmjs

Tom and Dan reflect on the first season of Media Democracy and the Summer of 2017: Corbyn's electoral breakthrough and a brief moment of media introspection; Snow, Robinson and Harris; everyone waking up to Facebook; the need to connect media policy with a wider programme of democratisation. Plus, Tom is accused of spreading fake news by Nick Robinson and Dan has been drinking coffee. Naturally we finish on a song.

This week we speak to Jamie Stern-Weiner about reports of antisemitism at the Labour conference. Jamie is a graduate student in Middle Eastern Studies. He was co-founder of New Left Project and is the editor of 'Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel-Palestine's Toughest Questions', forthcoming from OR Books.

How does the financial and monetary system work? One thing's for sure, you won't get the answers from the Establishment media, which seems incurably incurious when it comes to the mysteries of money. So this week, after a quick chat about the launch of the Media Fund, and a few pops at the Guardian and the BBC, Dan and Tom speak to author and public banking advocate Ellen Brown about money, debt and banking.

This week Tom and Dan chat briefly about the Labour Party Conference and the discussions there about the politics of the media. The episode ends with an extract from John McDonnell's speech at the World Transformed, where the Shadow Chancellor talks about role new technology can play in democratising policy making in the Labour Party and beyond.

As activists head for Brighton, Dan and Tom discuss the power of the new media oligopolies and a media reform agenda for an incoming Corbyn Government.

This week Thomas Barlow joins us to discuss our political and environment crisis and how the Media Fund is seeking to address it through organised support for independent media.

In the second part of our interview with Sarah O'Connell we talk about the growing distance between journalists and the people they cover, and about how this gap can be closed.

Sarah O'Connell talks to Media Democracy about the class and cultural differences that separate broadcast journalism from its audiences. Sarah began her career as a broadcast journalist in 1999 and has worked at the BBC's Political Research Unit, Panorama, Newsnight, Al Jazeera and Sky News.

In this week's show we chat about 'Traingate' and Jon Snow's MacTaggart Lecture before speaking to Hicham Yezza about Islamophobia and how it plays out in the British media.

Having spent a week as daily readers, Dan and Tom review 'The Sun' and discuss the rise and slow decline of Britain's highest circulating daily newspaper.

This week journalist and campaigner Caroline Molloy joins us to talk about the current state of the NHS, the media's coverage of healthcare, and the way back from the brink. Caroline's work, and unrivalled coverage of the NHS, can be found at the OurNHS strand on Open Democracy.

In Episode 5 of Media Democracy we speak to David Wearing about British foreign policy and its underlying political economy, how it is discussed in the mainstream media and what the opportunities are for challenging a dangerous elite policy consensus.

This week on Media Democracy, Dan and Tom discuss the debate over online abuse in politics and the media over the last fortnight.

In Episode 3 of Media-Democracy, we speak to Spinwatch's Tamasin Cave about the lobbying industry in the UK.

In episode 2 of the Media Democracy podcast, Tom Mills (@ta_mills) and Dan Hind (@danhind) discuss the role, and conception, of the public in public service media in the UK.

Episode 1 of the Media Democracy podcast with Tom Mills (@ta_mills) and Dan Hind (@danhind). In this show we talk about the recent UK general election and begin to explore some of the themes we'll be looking at in more detail over the coming weeks and months.