Economics, Politics and Public Policy

It probably isn’t too controversial to complain about politicians wages. In these times of economic uncertainty it probably isn’t controversial to say that they should definitely be reduced. I’m going to talk firstly about why we shouldn’t pay them expenses (or at least reform the system). Then to the controversial bit, I’m going to talk about why we should consider not paying them at all. I’m going to use mostly an examination of incentive structures to examine that thesis.

So firstly, to expenses. In no other job do you receive an allowance to go to work. Extraordinary expenses, yes. Mundane expenses are expected to be covered by your salary. That’s why you’re paid one. The furor about Ivor Callely is made all the more ridiculous when you think, why exactly was he allowed to claim these expenses at all? They receive a handsome salary in the first instance; do they really need to have this topped up further? Not going to put a lot of analysis into this, just thought that it needs to be said.

Secondly then, what is it we desire in politicians? Intelligence, charm, wit, local issues at heart, ideologue, polite and goes to lots of funerals? I’m going to qualify my examination of what kind of politician is good by stating that I am in favour of a strong local government and I believe that many of the current “parish pump politics” carried out could easily be transferred to a strengthened local government. My conception of what makes a good politician is someone with ideals, cares about their locality but has an understanding of national concerns, who is representative of their electorate and flexible enough to do what is best for them. I would submit that most of the politicians operating today do not fit this description. We have on one extreme, Jackie Healy Rae who displays a frightening ignorance of elocution and matters out of Kerry. Let’s take him as the paragon of the regionalist. On the other hand, we have many senators who are completely out of touch with everyone. The talking shop of failed politicians all drawing salary from the public purse. Both of these are problems are due in part to the fact that politics is seen as a career and not a vocation. This will be the main crux of my third point.

As anyone who has read Freakonomics will know, incentives are strange and wonderful things. With the correct incentive structure you persuade people to conform, to jump through hoops or to brave untold perils. The arguments for the current wages of politicians are – 1. High wages attract the best, we would lose the smartest people to the private sector without them. 2. High wages prevent against corruption by making sure they have a high enough salary that any bribes will be less attractive. 3. It acts as a balance to enable poor people to enter politics and not be bankrupt by it. I will deal with each of those in turn.

Firstly, this “brain drain to the private sector argument”. I’m going to argue that money is not the correct incentive to use to attract the smartest people. Lets look at exactly what a politician receives now – a salary, expenses but more importantly power and influence. A pre-school in Tel Aviv brought in a charge for parents who picked up their kids late. Instead of dissuading latecomers, it allowed parents to rationalize their lateness, leading to a worsening of the problem. Even when the charges were removed this shift in social mores lead to the problem persisting. What this shows is that the standard model of how humans respond to incentives is not immediately obvious. People think in interesting and devious ways. MP wages in the UK are low and yet they have a plethora of talent that Ireland could only dream of. Why is this? The problem with the current conception of politics over here is that it is an alternative career move in many areas of Ireland.

With TD wages starting at €130,000 it’s also a quite lucrative career choice. Just like the parents in Tel Aviv, this view of it as a job has enabled politicians to rationalize their existence as one that is fundamentally self-serving, forgetting their primary duty as an elected public representative. Just like the parents thought, “$5 for an extra 15 minutes childminding, great!”, Irish politicians have become consumed with getting more for themselves. If everyone is trying to get as much as possible for themselves, does that mindset then easily transfer to doing the best for everyone? So what would be the effect of removing TD wages, or at least sharply reducing them?

We might see a mass exodus of the current political cadre. (That’s not necessarily a bad thing.) But who would take their place? A group of malcontents, cranks and morons? I doubt it. They wouldn’t get elected. The disincentive of public embarrassment and the incentive for better candidates, which I will explain shortly, would remove their ability to get votes or even to run. More than likely it would be a mixture between highly paid people with free time (so non-executive directors, academics and trust fund kids) mixed with people from lower socio-economic backgrounds that are legitimate activists – trade unionists, civil rights activists and outspoken local people. So not a massive difference from today.

One of the reasons for this is one of the reasons why capitalism has been such a resounding success – the backward bending supply of labour. Despite the disagreement of Environmentalists, Socialists and Anarchists, capitalism has enabled unprecedented environmental protection, living standards and activism. This is due to the ability of people to devote their free time to things they love, as well as the generation of tax revenue that can be spent on them.

Why is this the case? Well at low incomes, work is the most pressing priority. Each marginal addition of labour earns a high proportion more living standards. However as income levels rise, the marginal addition of labour has an opportunity cost of fun, which at this point increases living standard more than earning money (you have to have some time to spend all the piles of cash you earn). So as people earn more, they start to take free time. And what do they spend their free time on? Things they are passionate about. This isn’t a new idea (read Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs) but this is what has allowed capitalism to let people devote time and energy campaigning for causes like environmentalism; which lead to the establishment of the EPA and other watchdogs. This kind of action is politics at its most desirable and we need to gear the conception of politics as a public service once again. Because throwing money is an incentive at its most infantile; conceptions, duty and social conditioning create the best incentives.

Secondly, this idea of cognitive surplus. People in the Developed World have so much free time and communication ability that increasingly they are not just passive consumers of information, news and policy – they create it. It turns out that if you give someone a lot of free time and an ability to reach people they immediately start to churn out original matter. Whether it be a LOLcat, this blog or crowdsourcing information like Ushahidi – people like to help other people, they like to create and they like to do it for free when given the chance. The modern world is often bemoaned for its loss of the local. By making politics more like the internet, ironically, we can recapture the essence of what politics should be.

Ok so, quickly to round up the other two – Bribe and Poor people.

Bribes – no matter how much you pay someone there will always be someone with resources that will pay more. Politicians have something that people will always be willing to pay for – hands on the wheel of power. This isn’t an argument to pay them more, it is an argument for more checks and balances on them.

Poor people – politicians as we have them today are mostly lawyers, academics and teachers. Hardly the poorest of people. Those who aren’t predominantly come from political dynasties or the middle class anyway. There is an endemic problem in Irish politics as it stands regarding the involvement of people from lower socio-economic backgrounds. This doesn’t solve that, but since the status quo doesn’t solve it either, I’m ok with that. Perhaps a grant to politicians below a certain income threshold would help them. I might be ok with that.

One last thought – I may have dismissed the constituency clinic and local issues concern a little lightly earlier. I think that it is possible to do these well and yet not receive pay for them. But I honestly believe that a lot of the constituency work can and should be left to local politicians. A politician in the Dail should not be interfering to get a Council to fix a broken window in a council house.

Read More: http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/quelle-horreur-our-funloving-politicians-will-escape-the-knife-2293614.html

NB: These views are purely my own and do not reflect the opinion of my colleague on this blog, who has his own different opinions on this kind of incident.

Over the years, football has seen more than its fair share of cheating, foul play and general rule breaking, quite a lot of it in crucial matches at a high level. From Maradona’s infamous Hand of God to Michael Owen’s dive against Argentina in 1998 to Stéphane Henchoz’s blatant handball on the line in the 2001 FA Cup final, there have been all kinds of game-changing, advantage gaining actions made in contravention of the rules that have gone un-noticed and unpunished. In these cases it is easy to know what to do – to say that the match officials failed to notice what was going on, failed to do their job properly and allowed themselves to be fooled by mendacious, cynical players.

This summer’s World Cup has scarcely been devoid of controversy in terms of this kind of behaviour. Even before it started, Thierry Henry’s handball in the qualifying play-off had caused a furore. In the competition itself, we have had the likes of Luis Fabiano scoring after a double handball, Tevez scoring while miles offside – which he has admitted to being aware of – and Manuel Neuer pretending Lampard’s shot didn’t cross the line. Yet on each of these occasions, the players gained advantage by the rules not being applied. They gambled on the referee getting it wrong. The incentives were based around not getting caught – if they had been, they would have suffered an overall loss, or at the very least, no gain.

However, a different problem arises when the rules are applied and the player who broke them still benefits. In this case, the incentives are such that to break the rules regardless of whether or not you yourself are caught and punished is, if a player is of a certain mentality, a decision that can be justified in pure cost/benefit terms. And this brings us to the most recent major controversy – that of Luis Suárez.

For those who don’t know, in the last minute of extra-time in the quarter-final game between Ghana and Uruguay, Uruguay striker Luis Suárez blocked an effort on goal that was definitely going in with his arms. He was sent off, but Ghana missed the resulting penalty and then proceeded to lose in a shoot out – effectively by his actions he kept Uruguay in the tie and allowed them to go on to win. His reaction to events shows that he didn’t regret what he did at all – claiming to have made “the save of the tournament” – and the sad thing is, why should he? Through his misbehaviour, a greater gain had been won, and that was all that mattered to him.

Obviously though, there’s more to this than Suárez himself. He engaged in an odious act of cheating, breaking the rules to his own benefit, and sending another team out of the competition. Ghana had a definite goal before his intervention, and were reduced to a penalty – merely a goal-scoring opportunity. This is the difference to if he had brought down a man while he was the last defender – in that case, the lost opportunity is replaced with another opportunity (around 75% of penalties are converted), and there is a rough level of equitability due to the indeterminate nature of what would have happened if the foul had not occurred. In this case, there was no indeterminacy. The ball was going in, it was illegally blocked and at the end of it all, Ghana ended up without a goal. When this is the scenario that arises, there is something very wrong.

There are two minor but important points I feel are worth addressing at this stage: firstly, some people are saying that it is Ghana’s own problem for missing the penalty. In a way, yes, this is true. However, the point is that they shouldn’t have been put in that scenario of reduced opportunity in the first place – without Suárez’s handball, there would have been a goal scored and the penalty issue would be completely and utterly moot.

Secondly, I don’t agree with the people calling for extra punishment for Suárez. Yes, he broke the rules, yes what he did was unfair and reprehensible and ultimately eliminated Ghana. However, the referee gave him the punishment laid down in the rules for what he did, and he should not be punished beyond what the rules said at the time that his piece of foul play occurred – anything else would be cheap politicking by FIFA and a deflection from what actually needs to happen here.

That thing that actually needs to happen is a look at the bigger picture, beyond this one incident in isolation and see what the problems are that lead to this kind of behaviour, and to make sure that deprivations of this nature do not happen again in future – including the flaws in the rules of the game that allow players to commit acts of this nature as a completely rational choice, albeit one considered reprehensible and abhorrent by the laws and, more importantly, spirit of the game.

All the inevitable excuse making that has occurred for Suárez’s actions, and the attempts by people to justify it within the context of the game miss one very crucial point – the purpose of the rules is not to make cheating a less preferred default option that can pay off in certain rare circumstances, but to eliminate it from the game altogether. If that is not possible, then the rules should be formatted in such a way that anyone who does break them should have their potential to benefit from doing so eliminated, or at the very least minimised as much as possible.

Furthermore, Suárez’s action is, as far as I’m concerned, completely in violation of the way the game is meant to be played. Some have defended him by claiming that it’s okay to do whatever you like as long as it helps your team to win the game (Suárez himself seems to be very much of that opinion, given his post-match comments). However, I don’t believe this is right at all. Firstly, on a basic level, how galling is it to lose a game because your opponent refused to play by the rules? Yes, all teams are guilty of this to some extent, but when it comes to as blatant a denial as this, of stopping what is a guaranteed goal, there has clearly been a violation above the normal level of petty gamesmanship that plagues football. Quite simply, if you don’t want to play by the rules, and are willing to cast them aside to this extent, you probably should be playing a different game.

In addition to this, it speaks of an astonishing level of disrespect to your fellow sportsmen, to your fellow competitors, when you engage in this kind of behaviour. Regardless of what they have done or what effort they may have put in, you are still willing to break the rules to deny them what otherwise was unavoidable, their victory and their moment of glory. At this point, it ceases to become about the game – you may have been beaten at it, but you go outside of the rules to alter the result, which is fundamentally unfair on your opponents and a disgrace to the sport, it renders the boundaries within which the game is supposed to be played moot and shows utter disrespect for the abilities and efforts of your opponents.

Simply put, the ability to accept defeat, and act like and adult and not a child about events that legitimately don’t go your way seems to be sorely lacking among players. The attitude of doing anything you can, even if it is illegal, to win is bad for the game – it more or less provides a rationale for excusing all kinds of dangerous or simply dishonest foul play. When the rules re-enforce this idea by allowing you, even if caught, to benefit from these kinds of actions, it’s fairly simple to observe that there is a problem.

We are told, both by people defending him and by the man himself, that anyone in Suárez’s position would have done exactly the same thing, done what is best for their team and by extension, in the long run, themselves. This is in a way both true and untrue. Plenty of players do, as outlined at the start of this post, engage in this behaviour, often with the stakes set much lower and the juncture of the match less crucial. However, the vast majority of players do not – every week, dozens of goals are scored around the world because players opt not to handle on the line, sometimes in situations as crucial as the one where Suárez did.

In the World Cup qualifier between the USA and Costa Rica, the Latin American team needed a win to go through and were leading 2-1 when, in the 95th minute, they conceded a goal from a corner that the player on the line could have easily blocked with his arm. Instead he swung his leg at it and, owing to the awkward height, missed, resulting in Costa Rica being pushed out of automatic qualification and into a playoff, which they lost – the victorious team from that tie was, coincidentally, Uruguay.

The stakes here were just as high and the player opted to obey the rules, even if that meant failure. Funnily enough, there was no outcry from the people of Costa Rica asking why he didn’t cheat and handle it and give his team at least a chance of keeping out the penalty. A choice in these scenarios definitely exists, and nobody would have pilloried Suárez for not being a cheat. The problem is that the laws as they stand create an incentive structure in these instances based entirely around the integrity of the individual player, and their mentality towards the rules.

The cost/benefit analysis of performing this kind of action essentially comes down to whether or not players feel that the value of obeying the rules and not cheating is sufficient to outweigh the potential material benefit to the team of breaking the rules – and when it comes down to this, one can understand how easy it is for a player to rationalise cheating. This is the fundamental issue with the rules as they stand over this kind of incident. The incentive structure needs to be re-balanced away from one that allows this kind of flagrant foul play to be a subjective rational choice, and make it an objectively irrational one.

Unfortunately, at the end of the day it’s not that simple to decide what the solution should be, even though it is in my mind fairly clear that something is quite seriously wrong. The status quo compensates the definite loss of a goal with the possibility of a goal – and this is not good enough. The kind of behaviour that leads to this scenario does need to be eliminated by ensuring that there is nothing to gain from doing it – and there is, as far as I can see, no good reason not to give changing the rules consideration. Exactly what the change should be, however, is the difficult part. One of the more interesting suggestions I that have seen is using a system similar to the penalty try in rugby - when a definite goal is denied by foul play of this nature, then the goal should be awarded regardless. It’s possibly not a perfect solution, and there are certainly difficulties with implementing it, but at the moment I can’t see a fairer alternative to recompense those who would otherwise be cheated into a position of disadvantage.

“The “Stranger Danger” program that was widely shown in public schools was the most damaging campaign ever in terms of child abduction. It taught children about the “scary man in the trench coat hiding behind the tree” instead of warning children that strangers are only a fraction of the offenders. Most people who hurt and abduct children are family members, teachers, neighbours, people they see every day.”

RTE ran a “damning” exposé of paedophile rings in Ireland, determined to show that the creeps are just a click away. Posing as a young child they proceeded to try and entice paedophiles into soliciting them for sex.

There are ethical and taste issues with such a practice (Just watch “To Catch a Predator” to see every single one of them) but while I personally found the show crass and distasteful (the quotations from the paedophiles in trying to solicit the “child” were particularly unnecessary and disturbing) my main issue is with the blatant scaremongering that the show was based on. Your children are probably least at risk, statistically, from the pervert behind a webcam. Who you really need to be wary of is the pervert teaching them history, the pervert who lives next door, the pervert who trains the football team or the pervert that you're married to.

You may say, this isn't a problem. We can at once warn parents about the dangers of predatory paedophiles and explain the warning signs of child abuse at home. Except we don't. We don't run the same type of dedicated program to shining light on child abuse by people in these situations. The whole paedophile priest fiasco typifies the Irish attitude to such circumstances. It took years and years for those abuses to come to light. And they were far more prevalent than instances of child grooming online.

And what if both the parents are abusive? What if they haven't the concerned mammies and daddies who look through their MSN chat logs and secretly check their bebo; like many internet safety advocates have trumpeted during the week since the program. What if it is the parents who are neglectful or sexually abusive? Well due to the disgraceful anachronism which is the Irish constitutional regard for children, many of them get away with it. Our constitution is a document that places a higher regard for the stability of the “family” than it does for the children being damaged within that unit. A relic of the days of strict Catholicism, children in Ireland can often be left in horribly abusive scenarios due to this ridiculous line of precedent. Even the reforms introduced after the Kilkenny Incest report in 1993 haven't stamped out the issue – as illustrated by the continuing appearance before the courts of issues of failure in the protection of children, many of which are based on the absence of adequate rights for minors.

But in the week following this Prime Time program, were the airwaves flooded by well spoken Bernardos officials, experts in Constitutional Law and people who work with the abused? No. The week immediately following was filled with under informed members of the general public terrified that their children were inches away from abduction and rape on Facebook. Has the campaign for children's rights ever gotten the level of attention that the Prime Time program managed to attract this week? Not once.

There is no doubt in my mind that the vast majority of the 700-odd people who set out on the recent aid flotilla to the Gaza strip did so with nothing but the best of intentions. These people saw human suffering and decided that this area of the world was, for whatever reason, most worthy of their attention, and went off to try and make a difference in whatever way they could.

As it is, they stumbled into a series of events that spiralled out of control, leaving ten people dead and dozens injured. It is, of course, deeply regrettable and very sad that these deaths and injuries were suffered, both among those on the flotilla and the members of the Israeli Defence Force, especially given that the whole fiasco was both eminently avoidable and depressingly predictable.

To provide some background, the initial intentions of both the majority of those within the fleet and the IDF were perfectly legitimate. As said above, people were trying to get aid to a region suffering a humanitarian crisis, the IDF were trying to prevent contraband material falling into the hands of an organisation whose primary goal is the destruction of Israel and the creation of an Islamist state.

The inspection of the boats should not have constituted a problem. It is easy to see why Israel feelt the need to search the boats, given that they planned on passing through Israeli controlled territory and given that weapons have repeatedly been smuggled into Gaza under the guise of being aid convoys in the past. Reasonable suspicion existed, therefore under international law it was legitimate to search the boat, regardless of it being outside of their territorial waters, though it would doubtlessly have been wiser to wait until the flotilla was within them. This has always been past policy with aid deliveries – stop them, inspect them for contraband, discard illegal goods and then distribute the rest to Gaza through appropriate channels.

Indeed, five of the six boats stopped when asked to by the Israelis and only on one of those five did some people refuse to fully co-operate. If that was what it took to get the aid delivered, they were willing to do so, even if it may not perhaps have been completely what they wanted. If they were victims of violence from the Israeli soldiers, it should rightfully be condemned. The flotilla had a dual purpose – delivering aid and protesting the blockade, and when push came to shove, the people on board needed to show what they prioritised, whether they were primarily pro-Gaza or anti-Israel, whether the aid getting through as quickly as possible mattered more, or whether making a show and a statement did. The vast majority of people prioritised the first.

Those on the sixth ship, the MV Mavi Marmara, evidently did not. This is where everything went wrong. The details have been rehashed elsewhere a thousand times, but in short, the Israeli soldiers who tried to board were assaulted by the supposed aid workers on the deck, things escalated, shots were fired and as a result the soldiers were authorised to use lethal force – and people were killed. Those who had set out to make an anti-Israeli statement and see how far they could push things had, in a twisted and tragic way, got what they wished for.

The IDF reacted in the face of provocation, of that there is no doubt, and it is easy to see how troops under threat would have reacted to put their own safety first and neutralise the threat facing them. The problem from the Israeli side is that the nature of the inspection was at best ill-advised and careless, as they did not expect or properly plan for what would happen if there was heavy resistance, not being armed with any kind of heavy crowd control equipment, and at worst stupid and unnecessary as they could have chosen an easier and safer way to deal with the boat, being better aware of what they would face when they boarded.

Either way, it certainly did absolutely nothing to further Israel’s cause. As such, the simple outrage of people over the killings is understandable. However, there is a problem both with how the ire of people is being directed and with what people appear to be considering to be legitimate forms of protest – that is to say, what is being seen as acceptable, and indeed preferable, methods when it comes to highlighting what you think is an injustice in society and attempting to draw attention to, and ultimately change that.

People have been trying to compare the members of the flotilla to the Freedom Riders in America who campaigned against segregation. Naturally, things here are not that simple. What we have in this instance is, as outlined above, two groups reacting differently. The former had dignity. They accepted a level of what they saw as injustice to achieve the greater good, and acted in such a way as to minimise potential harm coming to those around them. They were willing to make a sacrifice and suffer to an extent to get through what they wanted – these people have done essentially nothing wrong. Were they to suffer violence, it would be unwarranted, regardless of how right or wrong one may consider their beliefs to be.

But when we get to the second group, the analogy breaks down completely. Here we have, on the Marmara, a group whose first recourse when presented with the face of what they objected to was to break into violence. These were people who wanted to be hard men, who wanted to make a fuss and be as active as possible, consequences for their cause and others who support it be damned.

This kind of resistance – launching an assault on the objects of their hatred – is not in any way, shape or form dignified or constructive. It is as abhorrent as the use of force against peaceful protestors. If the Freedom Riders had gone around beating up policemen, you can be sure that they would be seen differently right now and would have received nowhere near the level of sympathy and eventual solidarity shown towards them by many of their contemporaries.

However, things suddenly seem different. Few meaningful attempts seem to be being made by the supporters of those involved in the flotilla to distance themselves from those who chose violence. They are being presented as having acted in as legitimate and positive a fashion as the people who chose not to engage in reckless, self-absorbed behaviour that put the lives of themselves and innocent people around them into very real danger.

This is an extraordinarily odd and hazardous attitude that not only denigrates those who act with dignity and put their cause above themselves, but encourages people to act in as bull-headed and violent a fashion as possible, and that going to the extremes, eschewing any attempt at dignified engagement, compromise or understanding is the best possible thing you can do for your cause, so much the better if you can get yourself martyred for it. A martyr is a tragic thing to be, and noble under certain circumstances – but to engineer things so you can create martyrs where there need be none, especially when those martyrs are innocent people who may not want to become so, who consider you their ally and comrade, is despicable. The Israeli soldiers may have been the ones who pulled the trigger, but the circumstances leading to the deaths of any innocent people on the flotilla were engineered elsewhere.

The fact that these people are somehow almost universally escaping condemnation, and are instead being mourned, sympathised with and even in some cases lionised, is a sad indication of how polarised and one-eyed people are becoming when they engage in public discourse on controversial issues. Condolences are being offered by the Irish to Turkey, a nation whose entire involvement in this is a result of a weak Prime Minister trying desperately to placate the Islamist wing of his party, who allowed the aid to be transported by an organisation with past ties to terrorist groups, without any thought being given as to whether or not those who are dead were innocent or were among those who brought violence upon themselves and others.

When we do this, when we allow this to happen, we fall into the trap of legitimising the extreme elements of a movement. The most damning item found on the Marmara was, as far as I’m concerned, not the contraband goods or the knives or the bullet-proof vests or even the rifle scopes. It was the flag of Hamas. Similarly, at the funerals of the Turkish activists, the flag of Hamas has been draped across their coffins. This should be unacceptable for any organisation who wish to be fighting for Palestinian freedom – Hamas are a repressive government, whose policies do more harm than good in Gaza. Indeed, right now, Hamas are refusing to take the aid from the flotilla into Gaza, presumably as a protest against Israel, once again putting the welfare of their citizens in a secondary role. Much like the extreme elements on the fleet, they have shown a clear disregard when it comes to putting innocent people in harm’s way if they think it will help their cause.

The people in this flotilla and supporting it should be aware of the presence of these extreme elements, and if they are not, once they become so aware they should distance themselves from them, not put aside morality in the name of solidarity. The sight of the Labour LGBT flag next to a Hamas one in the protest in Dublin is a great example of this – you should not tolerate marching side by side with the supporters of those whose disregard and disrespect for human dignity allowed innocents to be killed or wounded. What they are marching for is not what you are marching for. All that leads to is a win for the crazy elements on both sides; those legitimised by solidarity from moderates, and those who are able to condemn moderates due to their apparent association with extremists – all that results is further alienation of people and division of discourse towards the extremes, all this leads to is the risk of further undignified, reckless, violent protest and more innocents being hurt.

Praise those with lofty aims, by all means, but to paint all those on the flotilla as the same is wrong and dangerous. Israel acted stupidly, for sure, but that we condemn them and not those who selfishly endangered the lives of others, and betrayed their ulterior motives, is an unsettling turn of events. Remember that there was a group among them who set out to abuse and exploit the naïve among them and use them as a tool to further their own agenda. As tragic as the actual fact of the loss of life is, the self-interested cynicism that led to it is something that should not be forgotten, and the lack of public outcry, indeed, the apparent acceptance of these actions as a legitimate method of protest is something very worrying indeed.

It is a bizarre habit of human beings, and one that seems to repeat itself time and time again, that whenever we create something to act as a facilitator for our desires, it ends up shaping them. The slave becomes master and the technology, organisations or frameworks we create ultimately seek to become self perpetuating in order to maintain their relevance within the world through manipulating what it is that people want, rather than simply providing a service.

This spans across an almost universal set. On the basic level, something as simple as money, created to better allow economic interaction, became the basis for economies in and of itself. The internet, designed to allow us to access information, has become a bombard of advertisements and offers, trying to get people to purchase or engage in certain things. Facebook, recently, has been the centre of controversy over its sudden and overbearing attempts to pressure its user base into engaging with advertisers (and indeed, when people don’t respond to this, simply ripping away privacy protections – though that is a separate issue). More tellingly, even political parties have fallen into this paradigm, trying to lead electorates to follow their policies rather than trying hard to genuinely represent what people actually want.

However, where this attitude is most significant – and possibly most harmful – is within the sphere of the news media. When it comes down to the institutions that are supposed to be the distributors of information, entering into a paradigm of trying to manufacture opinions through the abuse of fact is something dangerous, deplorable, counterproductive and yet utterly, utterly ingrained within our society. Media has ceased to be, if it ever was, about the satiation of the desire of the public to be informed about the world and is now about the bottom line – how many copies you can sell, how many advertisements you can carry, how many people will pay to use your website and so on – essentially, the maximisation of revenue.

This is incredibly dangerous for the simple fact that more or less all information, regardless of the source, is in some way, shape or form, delivered to the public at large through the filter of some kind of media organisation.

This takes three forms – firstly, through the moulding of viewpoints of readership, secondly through affirmation of the biases they have created in or are already held by those they distribute information to and thirdly – and perhaps most sinisterly – through a system of news creation, whereby the media doesn’t report on or look into events, but actively causes them to happen so it has something large, flashy and scandalous to write about and sell their product with.

The first is the most obvious. Almost every news source – the exceptions being the state-owned ones in Britain and Ireland – have naked and obvious institutional biases that in general they make little attempt to hide, happily running articles designed to lionise those who support their agenda and demonise those who oppose it, prioritising “issue” stories over “event” ones that allow them to cast everything through a filter, coming out in favour of certain political parties and generally looking to tie negative events back towards whoever or whatever person, organisation, institution or cause they don’t like or want people to like.

The fact that this bias is clear insofar as opinion columns go doesn’t make it any less insidious, especially because it is also present in a big way in the supposedly factual reporting that media sources are supposed to engage in. This fusion of information and opinion is something worrying and insidious, as it encourages events to be seen in light of a certain worldview rather than be analysed by each individual, whereby conclusions are drawn for the audience rather that allowing them to draw their own. In this way, the primary goal becomes not to inform people of what is happening, but to use what is happening as a tool to make people think in a certain way and assume certain inferences to be true.

So why do media sources do this? It’s not for it’s own sake – news sources are not by default evil. Obviously, there is the issue of news sources trying to get their owner’s interests preserved, or viewpoints expanded. If you had the tool to make tens of thousands agree with your politics, it’s fairly natural that you would take it as that is probably going to benefit you in terms of social or political impact, as well as provide you with significant influence over events.

In addition to this, and this is the second form – the idea of re-enforcement and affirmation, which ensures people will keep reading and keep buying your product. Once people think a certain way, either through media sources or their own conclusions, it’s much easier to provide people with affirmation from what they perceive as an authoritative source than it is to suggest they are wrong about something, even when they are.

On a simple level, people like to be told they are right, especially by authority – it makes them feel as though they have significance. Similarly, people react poorly to authority sources telling them they are wrong and try to manipulate it mentally so that they are actually right and the authority wrong – see the deep resonation of the bizarre demonisation of “elitism” within American politics, which is increasingly creeping into Europe.

People are drawn to media sources that they seem to agree with. The biggest selling newspapers in Britain and Ireland are those who engage in populist reporting, telling people what they want to hear and setting things out in broad, un-nuanced terms. This is the tabloid media, where everything fits into three categories – right, wrong and tits. Treat your readers like utter cretins, tell them what they want to hear and tell them they are great, while pushing whatever your agenda is. The system is at its most naked and in-your-face here, but the same categorisation is essentially true of most media sources, where political bodies or causes are set up as being bogeymen, heroes or women – this is what shifts copy. Blast the EU, back Britian and throw in a few random pictures of Carla Bruni wherever France is mentioned and you essentially have the level of sophistication on display in the Sunday Times’ coverage of European affairs.

These first two issues are two sides of the same thing. Identify a demographic in line with your interests and appeal to their beliefs by re-enforcing them and encouraging them to harden, by painting them as absolutes and relevant to everything, that every event should be viewed in terms of them. The follow on from this is that when new issues arise, they can be integrated into this, and the readers who already trust you since you agree with them, will be much more open to suggestion on these issues. This is not to mention the huge significance of those beginning to encounter news media for the first time, like children growing up, seeing the world for the first time through specific lenses, and are thus more likely to fall into the cycle of affirmation outlined above.

This explains the uselessness of the so-called “independent media”, which like commercial media acts to confirm the pre-suppositions of a certain social group, and to spread the agenda of those behind the source, getting the influence and readership without necessarily profiting – though it shamefully claims to be above this level of exploitation which adds gross hypocrisy to the accusations that can be correctly levelled against it.

However, what truly exemplifies the manner in which the media has utterly abused its role and become an agent for change with agendas, self-entitlement and a general disregard for actually keeping people informed rather than pursuing its own ends is the third initial form, the habit of news manufacturing that so many sources seem more than happy to engage in. This comes in three main ways, all of which are reprehensible abuses of the position held by the media in society.

The first of these is hugely indicative in terms of the sense of undeserved entitlement felt by the media – and that is the tendency of media sources to use themselves as news and as part of the news story. How much is it we hear about the travails of specific journalists, reporters and analysts? How much coverage becomes about personalities, about what the person employed by the media will do next, rather than about the story they are supposedly covering? Sky News provides in Adam Boulton perhaps the best example of a supposed journalist who seems to dearly wish he was a talk show host. The message is clear – who cares what is happening?

What you should care about is what Boulton says about what is happening, and how he reacts to the individuals involved. And heaven forbid that he and his ilk are ever questioned – else they will be outraged as to why you are not co-operating with the great Boulton, and why you are trying to push him off centre stage. Similarly, I recall his colleague Kay Burley, who possesses similar desire for self-aggrandisment, physically assaulting a reporter who had the temerity to arrive ahead of her in a media scrum.

The reporting and coverage of the story become the story, the lengths to which the media go to cover a story is extensively reported on in the media itself, and if a challenge is made to that limelight-hogging, you can be sure that the response will not be pretty.

Secondly within the idea of news manufacturing is the actual creation of stories where there are none, often through what can only be described as entrapment. This is some kind of deformed progeny of investigative journalism that has somehow slithered into acceptability, whereby rather than actually looking into events that may be happening, it makes them happen. This is all kinds of morally questionable, not to mention that is has devastatingly negative effects on what were, until the media became involved, frequently legitimate organisations or causes.

In recent weeks, there have been two examples of this that received astonishing coverage, not just in the two papers responsible for them, but all across the media – the stings executed on Lord Triesman by the Mail on Sunday and on Sarah Ferguson by the News of the World. Ignoring the fact that these should by all rights be two utter non-stories, that people only care about because the media whipped them into a frenzy over them – that a minor lord expressed paranoid thoughts in what he thought was a private conversation and that a former royal is not very bright and desperate for cash (not to mention the implausibility of a scenario where anyone would be willing to pay £500,000 for an interview with Prince Andrew) – there are huge problems with both that apply to similar stories.

What on earth is there to suggest that Ferguson would ever have actually acted corruptly? Once the money was placed in front of her, at that particular juncture (bear in mind that she is hugely indebted, which the News of the World, exploitive as they are, can scarcely have been ignorant of), she did – but would the money have been there otherwise? Would she have acted in this way if not for the encouragement provided by the so-called journalist masquerading as a businessman? Would she act this way at a future point if her finances recover – which is unlikely if these scandals keep ruining her attempts to recover her reputation? All of these are unknowns, and it is reprehensible of the media to provoke action in this way. The only outcome of this has been her personal reputation being damaged – all to get a bit more publicity and sales for a tabloid rag. This is cynical and no more than the media taking advantage for their own ends, regardless of who gets hurt.

The Triesman incident is similarly unethical. Frankly, in private, Triesman can think the Russians and Spanish are bribing officials all he wants. He can think that the Russian World Cup bid is, in fact run by unicorns from the centre of the earth. None of it matters unless it actually affects how he performed his job as head of England’s World Cup bid – which it obviously was not doing, as if it had, there would have been genuine, not manufactured, controversy due to it affecting his interaction with FIFA and the other parties involved. We don’t even know he thought it genuinely, given the circumstances, what is to say it was not just an idle boast to impress and intrigue the younger woman he was talking to? Yet due to the media’s destructive determination to make stories where there are none, to follow otherwise innocent men until they trip up over the traps laid for them by the media, the whole World Cup bid may well have been ruined – this just to satisfy the vanity of those who run the newspaper and, once again, to shift some more copy, regardless of what is sacrificed in the process of doing so.

The media possess, as we can see here, very little ethical considerations beyond their own self-interest, and yet, due to what was mentioned in the first two forms, people look to them for moral guidance, which forms the third way in which media sources manufacture news. This was alluded to before in this post – this is through the active and overt attempts to shape public opinion. The media is more than willing to fling itself after any campaign that suits the agenda it pursues and that will gain it sales, regardless of the actual truth behind the campaign, or even the harm that may result from it.

Controversy generated by taking a side against the government or similar authority is the most simple and widespread way in which media sources try to do this, again with no concern for who gets hurt in the way. The amount of media sources, that out of this self-interest and out of sheer lazy journalism went and campaigned against the MMR jab is deeply indicative of this, in spite of the fact that this ultimately led to a significant rise in the number of cases of measles in Britain. To make it worse, in an act that would be funny were it not so depressing, many media sources have, in the aftermath of the Wakefield trial, turned around and shamelessly castigated all and sundry – except themselves – for being so suckered into the whole scam.

The media generates these campaigns so it has something to report on. It takes issues and makes them stories, makes facts suit them, gives them exclusive coverage so the audience care, so they turn to the source who have the big issue, who have the inside scoop. They are told to care about this and then through their actions give the media something to report on, which more people will now want to read about and will turn to that media source for. It’s an exploitative and manipulative cycle that effectively gives a tiny organisation incredible leverage over what happens in a country by being able to manipulate large portions of the population.

The worst example of just how scandalously cynically motivated the whole campaign thing is, how it is morally bankrupt and merely designed to lead to self-aggrandisement and what all of the behaviours mentioned in the article actually culminate in is the Daily Mail’s line on the cervical cancer immunisation scheme, utterly disgustingly campaigning for it’s introduction in Ireland and for it’s banning in Britain. Both stances cannot be right – one of those outcomes is going to lead to untold future harm for a significant amount of young girls, either through the increased risk of cancer or through the horrible side effects the Mail claimed. The welfare of these people, these vulnerable people who put their trust in journalists to inform them accurately, is being callously tossed aside, their trust spat upon, in order to stir up things a bit and cause a bit of a fuss so they can sell a few more issues of their newspaper. This is beyond disgusting. It’s a violation of ethics and humanity on a grand scale. This is the action of self-serving, power abusive scum – that being about the kindest thing they can be called – who pass judgement and attempt to dictate societal views on everyone else while escaping scrutiny for their own horrendously irresponsible and materially harmful actions.

I will close with the words of another, since I am having trouble finding my own after seriously considering the enormity of the above. In 1891, Oscar Wilde wrote the following:

“In old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralizing. Somebody — was it Burke? — called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time no doubt. But at the present moment it is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism.”

The fact that this statement is every bit as valid now as it was almost 120 years ago is, to say the least, a damning indictment of how the media has kept society in its thrall, allowing it to pursue its own self-interests, spread its own agenda, and manipulate political and social events with absolutely no meaningful accountability.

The United States of America, by and large, is a deeply conservative country by European standards, even in the areas branded by the media as “liberal”. The nation tends to be inward looking, steeped in history and proud of its culture, proud of its success on the world stage and most of all, proud of the freedoms and liberties that are the founding principles of the nation. This is no bad thing in and of itself, but it has led to the creation of an unfortunate political dialogue within the United States, whereby one achieves victory not through rationality, but through using these principles as a weapon, trying to out-blindly-adhere to them more than your opponent without considering why or what they are.

This has become co-opted as the weapon of choice of the political right in America. Since, as I have said, American political discourse tends towards the conservative in general, I should clarify what I mean by “political right”. This is the reactionary, generically anti-government movement, once on the fringes of the Republican Party, that has in recent times been pushing itself to the fore through several different movements. This would include, for example, the extreme libertarian, anti-state but pro-business, religiously minded and essentially nationalist Tea Party and its poster girls Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, or the followers of the conspiracy-pushing, radically anti-liberal media demagogues Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. This by no means representative of the Republican Party as a whole, but groups with increasing influence in it, who are in a position to hold sway over the leadership.

The attitudes of these organisations and individuals should be simple – a return to basics, to the freedom, justice and equality they claim to be upholding, to the most basic ideals enshrined in the US Constitution. However, on a number of issues, their attempts to achieve this have taken an utterly paradoxical path, whereby in striking for what they claim to believe in, they are in fact taking retrograde steps, a fact that brings into question whether or not their motives are as pure, noble and representative of the true “will of the people” as they claim them to be.

Let us being with the issue of the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Lest we forget, this basic founding principle of America states that:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

There was a very recent incident where a book discussing teenage homosexuality was banned from a school library following a campaign by an organisation of Glenn Beck supporters,[1] on the basis that it was “obscene and inappropriate”, presumably due to the fact that it invited frank, potentially positive discussion of homosexuality and was thus did not suit their moral outlook.

Yet these groups are among the first people to cry foul and wave around the First Amendment as sacrosanct the moment something comes along that poses a threat to their own capacity to air their moral or political viewpoints – hence the opposition of these groups to the proposals to re-institute the Fairness Doctrine, or the attempts to create campaign finance reform that could potentially limit the potential of candidates to get their voices heard.

Indeed, the Tea Party organisation, and similar, rest their entire ability to do what they do – assemble in what is for the vast majority a peaceful protest, and air their grievances, legitimate or not – on the integrity of this Amendment. Yet they try to cling to their rock while at the same time trying to fling those with differing political opinions off of it.

Not only is this morally hypocritical, it is also a legally incorrect stance – an odd thing to say if these people truly were acting as defenders of the Constitution rather than of their own private morality. The Miller Test, which is used to define whether or not something is legally “obscene” and thus not subject to first amendment protection. To be “obscene”, the subject matter has to meet three requirements:

The book in question, quite frankly, fulfills none of these criteria, so the campaign is wholly without merit in terms of the protection of the the Constitution from erosion – indeed, it is in and of itself and attempt to undermine the freedoms enjoyed by others under it.

To qoute Justice William Brennan’s judgement on the 1989 flag-burning trial, “if there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea offensive or disagreeable.” This is doubtlessly a better idea than the message being sent with campaigns such as the one against this book, which is “it is obscene because I don’t like it”. The political right’s attempts to make the latter true, but only from their own perspective, is a disgraceful double-standard that betrays the paradoxical agenda at the heart of their movement.

This is not something that can be taken in isolation, either – it is symptomatic of a broader problem of double standards within the movement as regards general equality and rights. Whether it be the attempts at re-writing history in schools in Texas to promote and perpetuate a certain worldview, the shouting down of any opposition on populist talk-shows, or even the anti-Obama smear campaign based on his past association with left-leaning intellectuals, there is an increasing attitude that only certain ideas, ones that fall within the range of acceptable to this minority group, should be tolerated in society – which goes against the very core of the principles America is founded upon.

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[1] Thanks to Paddy Rooney (http://twitter.com/paddykr) for drawing my attention to this. Follow him on Twitter, he’s excellent.