What a great movie! Simple, thought out, well-written, well-acted, and completely unassuming. It also has Nik Kershaw's songs in a soundtrack! Who can ask for anything more? :) And yes, you can see a portion of William Baldwin's naked ass. Ricky Lake has a great character, who says something that Silda Spitzer should have told herself long time ago... Click the image above to go to the movie's well-designed website!
MUST SEE....
 Squad |  Different Lesbians |  Clown |  Father |
 Accountant |  MouthWomb |  Funny Story |  Magnifique!!! |
Lesbian Fave Things |  Choir Practice |  Corporate Trust | Lesbian Rules |
In Most Species, Faithfulness Is a Fantasy
By NATALIE ANGIER
You can accuse the disgraced ex-governor Eliot Spitzer of many things in his decision to flout the law by soliciting the services of a pricey prostitute: hypocrisy, egomania, sophomoric impulsiveness and self-indulgence, delusional ineptitude and boneheadedness. But one trait decidedly not on display in Mr. Spitzer’s splashy act of whole-life catabolism was originality.
It’s all been done before, every snickering bit of it, and not just by powerful “risk-taking” alpha men who may or may not be enriched for the hormone testosterone. It’s been done by many other creatures, tens of thousands of other species, by male and female representatives of every taxonomic twig on the great tree of life. Sexual promiscuity is rampant throughout nature, and true faithfulness a fond fantasy. Oh, there are plenty of animals in which males and females team up to raise young, as we do, that form “pair bonds” of impressive endurance and apparent mutual affection, spending hours reaffirming their partnership by snuggling together like prairie voles or singing hooty, doo-wop love songs like gibbons, or dancing goofily like blue-footed boobies.
Yet as biologists have discovered through the application of DNA paternity tests to the offspring of these bonded pairs, social monogamy is very rarely accompanied by sexual, or genetic, monogamy. Assay the kids in a given brood, whether of birds, voles, lesser apes, foxes or any other pair-bonding species, and anywhere from 10 to 70 percent will prove to have been sired by somebody other than the resident male.
As David P. Barash, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle, put it with Cole Porter flair: Infants have their infancy; adults, adultery. Dr. Barash, who wrote “The Myth of Monogamy” with his psychiatrist-wife, Judith Eve Lipton, cited a scene from the movie “Heartburn” in which a Nora Ephronesque character complains to her father about her husband’s philanderings and the father quips that if she’d wanted fidelity, she should have married a swan. Fat lot of good that would have done her, Dr. Barash said: we now know that swans can cheat, too. Instead, the heroine might have considered union with Diplozoon paradoxum, a flatworm that lives in gills of freshwater fish. “Males and females meet each other as adolescents, and their bodies literally fuse together, whereupon they remain faithful until death,” Dr. Barash said. “That’s the only species I know of in which there seems to be 100 percent monogamy.” And where the only hearts burned belong to the unlucky host fish.
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Even the “oldest profession” that figured so prominently in Mr. Spitzer’s demise is old news. Nonhuman beings have been shown to pay for sex, too. Reporting in the journal Animal Behaviour, researchers from Adam Mickiewicz University and the University of South Bohemia described transactions among great grey shrikes, elegant raptorlike birds with silver capes, white bellies and black tails that, like 90 percent of bird species, form pair bonds to breed. A male shrike provisions his mate with so-called nuptial gifts: rodents, lizards, small birds or large insects that he impales on sticks. But when the male shrike hankers after extracurricular sex, he will offer a would-be mistress an even bigger kebab than the ones he gives to his wife — for the richer the offering, the researchers found, the greater the chance that the female will agree to a fly-by-night fling.
In another recent report from the lubricious annals of Animal Behaviour entitled “Payment for sex in a macaque mating market,” Michael D. Gumert of Hiram College described his two-year study of a group of longtailed macaques that live near the Rimba ecotourist lodge in the Tanjung Puting National Park of Indonesia. Dr. Gumert determined that male macaques pay for sex with that all-important, multipurpose primate currency, grooming. He saw that, whereas females groomed males and other females for social and political reasons — to affirm a friendship or make nice to a dominant — and mothers groomed their young to soothe and clean them, when an adult male spent time picking parasites from an adult female’s hide, he expected compensation in the form of copulation, or at the very least a close genital inspection. About 89 percent of the male-grooming-female episodes observed, Dr. Gumert said in an interview from Singapore, where he is on the faculty of Nanyang Technological University, “were directed toward sexually active females” with whom the males had a chance of mating.
Significantly, males adjust their grooming behavior in a distinctly economic fashion, paying a higher or lower price depending on the availability and quality of the merchandise and competition from other buyers. “What led me to think of grooming as a form of payment was seeing how it changed across different market conditions,” Dr. Gumert said. “When there were fewer females around, the male would groom longer, and when there were lots of females, the grooming times went down.” Males also groomed females of high rank considerably longer than they did low-status females with nary a diamond to their page.
Commonplace though adultery may be, and as avidly as animals engage in it when given the opportunity, nobody seems to approve of it in others, and humans are hardly the only species that will rise up in outrage against wantonness real or perceived. Most female baboons have lost half an ear here, a swatch of pelt there, to the jealous fury of their much larger and toothier mates. Among scarab beetles, males and females generally pair up to start a family, jointly gathering dung and rolling and patting it into the rich brood balls in which the female deposits her fertilized eggs. The male may on occasion try to attract an extra female or two — but he does so at his peril. In one experiment with postmatrimonial scarabs, the female beetle was kept tethered in the vicinity of her mate, who quickly seized the opportunity to pheromonally broadcast for fresh faces. Upon being released from bondage, the female dashed over and knocked the male flat on his back. “She’d roll him right into the ball of dung,” Dr. Barash said, “which seemed altogether appropriate.”
In the case of the territorial red-backed salamander, males and females alike are inclined to zealous partner policing and will punish partners they believe to have strayed: with threat displays, mouth nips and throat bites, and most coldblooded of all, a withdrawal of affection, a refusal to engage. Be warned, you big lounge lizard: it could happen to you.
Carla Bruni, the first lady of France, is on her first state visits. Here's how she and her husband are being feted by the Queen.... Notice the empty plates and glasses...
So it is quite different... No plot, no decorations, no costumes, no show tunes, no other characters - just one dominating Narrator (Stew), who is also a co-composer, co-orchestrator, THE GUY in question. Since Stew has eaten quite a lot in the last 20 years, his younger "Self" is also present on stage, with a voice quite different from the real STEW. Everyone on stage is black, all four musicians are white. Stew is full of self-importance (he goes from I to we), spouting basic existential drivel while music goes from basic acoustic to deafening screaming and back and forth.
BAD!
_____________________________________________________________________
Sit back, relax, click the play button on the mp3 player below,
listen to the music and read the poem.
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
For the Cosmonauts
by Meirion Jordan
I, Yuri Gagarin, having not seen God,
wake now to the scrollwork of a body,
to my own white fibres leafing into the bone:
know that beyond this dome of rain there is
only the nothing where the soul sweers
out its parallax like a distant star and truth
brightens to X, to gamma, through a metal sail.
So I return to you, cramming your pockets
with the atmosphere and the evening news,
fumbling for gardens in the moon's shadow,
in its waterfalls of silence. I wish for you
familiar towns, their piers and amusement arcades
unpeopled at dusk, the unicorn tumbling by
on china hooves behind the high walls
of parks, among congregating lamps.
May you find Earth rising there, between
your steepled hands. May your voyages
end. May you have a cold unfurling
of limbs each morning, when I am fallen
out of the world.
Visiting Europe
by Bill Manhire
Visiting Europe. We rush around and look at famous stuff.
Once in the Louvre, late afternoon with my six-year-old son,
- he has truly had enough - we meet the Mona Lisa.
It's 1981. I lift him above the world's admiring heads.
That lady, I say - we don't know why she's smiling.
What do you think she's thinking about?
Money, he says. Money.
Punk Revolution
by Will Eaves
She sat facing us, back to the telly, as we looked over her shoulder, laughing, and she laughed too because we were funny that way when we, her children, were laughing, happy, and she was happy too.
She couldn't see the band gurning, the faces that were pulled behind her, though some part of her wanted to - because she was funny that way when she heard young voices calling, angry, and she was angry too.
I sit facing her, back to the present, as she looks over my shoulder, smiling, and I smile too because she is funny, that way, when she, my mother, is smiling, happy, and I am happy too.
Beforehand
I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success. My most persistent memory of stand-up is of my mouth being in the present and my mind being in the future: the mouth speaking the line, the body delivering the gesture, while the mind looks back, observing, analyzing, judging, worrying, and then deciding when and what to say next. Enjoyment while performing was rare—enjoyment would have been an indulgent loss of focus that comedy cannot afford. After the shows, however, I experienced long hours of elation or misery depending on how the show went, because doing comedy alone onstage is the ego's last stand.
My decade is the seventies, with several years extending on either side. Though my general recall of the period is precise, my memory of specific shows is faint. I stood onstage, blinded by lights, looking into blackness, which made every place the same. Darkness is essential: If light is thrown on the audience, they don't laugh; I might as well have told them to sit still and be quiet. The audience necessarily remained a thing unseen except for a few front rows, where one sourpuss could send me into panic and desperation. The comedian's slang for a successful show is "I murdered them," which I'm sure came about because you finally realize that the audience is capable of murdering you.
Stand-up is seldom performed in ideal circumstances. Comedy's enemy is distraction, and rarely do comedians get a pristine performing environment. I worried about the sound system, ambient noise, hecklers, drunks, lighting, sudden clangs, latecomers, and loud talkers, not to mention the nagging concern "Is this funny?" Yet the seedier the circumstances, the funnier one can be. I suppose these worries keep the mind sharp and the senses active. I can remember instantly retiming a punch line to fit around the crash of a dropped glass of wine, or raising my voice to cover a patron's ill-timed sneeze, seemingly microseconds before the interruption happened.
I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a by-product. The course was more plodding than heroic: I did not strive valiantly against doubters but took incremental steps studded with a few intuitive leaps. I was not naturally talented—I didn't sing, dance, or act—though working around that minor detail made me inventive.
I was not self-destructive, though I almost destroyed myself. In the end, I turned away from stand-up with a tired swivel of my head and never looked back, until now. A few years ago, I began researching and recalling the details of this crucial part of my professional life—which inevitably touches upon my personal life—and was reminded why I did stand-up and why I walked away.
In a sense, this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know. Yes, these events are true, yet sometimes they seemed to have happened to someone else, and I often felt like a curious onlooker or someone trying to remember a dream. I ignored my stand-up career for twenty-five years, but now, having finished this memoir, I view this time with surprising warmth. One can have, it turns out, an affection for the war years.
From Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life by Steve Martin. Copyright © 2007 by 40 Share Productions, Inc.
from the New York Times obituary
The author of almost 100 books, Mr. Clarke was an ardent promoter of the idea that humanity’s destiny lay beyond the confines of Earth. It was a vision served most vividly by “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the classic 1968 science-fiction film he created with the director Stanley Kubrick and the novel of the same title that he wrote as part of the project.
His work was also prophetic: his detailed forecast of telecommunications satellites in 1945 came more than a decade before the first orbital rocket flight.
Other early advocates of a space program argued that it would pay for itself by jump-starting new technology. Mr. Clarke set his sights higher. Borrowing a phrase from William James, he suggested that exploring the solar system could serve as the “moral equivalent of war,” giving an outlet to energies that might otherwise lead to nuclear holocaust. Mr. Clarke’s influence on public attitudes toward space was acknowledged by American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts, by scientists like the astronomer Carl Sagan and by movie and television producers. Gene Roddenberry credited Mr. Clarke’s writings with giving him courage to pursue his “Star Trek” project in the face of indifference, even ridicule, from television executives.
In his later years, after settling in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Mr. Clarke continued to bask in worldwide acclaim as both a scientific sage and the pre-eminent science fiction writer of the 20th century. In 1998, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
Mr. Clarke played down his success in foretelling a globe-spanning network of communications satellites. “No one can predict the future,” he always maintained. But as a science fiction writer he couldn’t resist drawing up timelines for what he called “possible futures.” Far from displaying uncanny prescience, these conjectures mainly demonstrated his lifelong, and often disappointed, optimism about the peaceful uses of technology — from his calculation in 1945 that atomic-fueled rockets could be no more than 20 years away to his conviction in 1999 that “clean, safe power” from “cold fusion” would be commercially available in the first years of the new millennium.
Picked up this quite forgettable movie on the strength of Val Kilmer and anti-Haliburton theme. 3 out of 5, no more :) but the last sequence is quite a byoot :) see if you agree.... Not quite sure what the vertical adjustment at the end meant to be - probably, just bad panning....
It is, I claim, the fault of Silda. A sexually satisfied at home husband would not visit prostitutes. For that amount of money. Silda obviously was having way too many headaches to keep her husband sexually happy. Not that she had a career - she "abandoned" that and "sacrificed" it for him. I guess she abandoned her sexual obligations to her husband as well.
It was she who should have been sorry to all of us for driving a moral crusader into the hands of prostitutes ready to satisfy the guy. The least she could do is to blow the guy daily for all of us.
Yes, I do blame Hillary for Monica, and Linda Hart for Gary. Even McGreevey's wife kept her mouth shut to continue being the guv'nor's wife at all costs. I would never believe that a wife in the full biblical sense of this word would have been oblivious to the gayness of her husband.
Political wives are a new species of predators on ambitions of their men. For shame, Silda! For Shame!
Sex Infections Found in Quarter of Teenage Girls
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
The first national study of four common sexually transmitted diseases among girls and young women has found that one in four are infected with at least one of the diseases, federal health officials reported Tuesday. Nearly half the African-Americans in the study of teenagers ages 14 to 19 were infected with at least one of the diseases monitored in the study — human papillomavirus (HPV), chlamydia, genital herpes and trichomoniasis, a common parasite.
The 50 percent figure compared with 20 percent of white teenagers, health officials and researchers said at a news conference at a scientific meeting in Chicago. The two most common sexually transmitted diseases, or S.T.D.’s, among all the participants tested were HPV, at 18 percent, and chlamydia, at 4 percent, according to the analysis, part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
Each disease can be serious in its own way. HPV, for example, can cause cancer and genital warts. Among the infected women, 15 percent had more than one of the diseases.
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Women may be unaware they are infected. But the diseases, which are infections caused by bacteria, viruses and parasites, can produce acute symptoms like irritating vaginal discharge, painful pelvic inflammatory disease and potentially fatal ectopic pregnancy. The infections can also lead to longterm ailments like infertility and cervical cancer.
The survey tested for specific HPV strains linked to genital warts and cervical cancer.
Officials of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the findings underscored the need to strengthen screening, vaccination and other prevention measures for the diseases, which are among the highest public health priorities.
About 19 million new sexually transmitted infections occur each year among all age groups in the United States.
“High S.T.D. infection rates among young women, particularly young African-American women, are clear signs that we must continue developing ways to reach those most at risk,” said Dr. John M. Douglas Jr., who directs the centers’ division of S.T.D. prevention.
The president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Cecile Richards, said the new findings “emphasize the need for real comprehensive sex education.”
“The national policy of promoting abstinence-only programs is a $1.5 billion failure,” Ms. Richards said, “and teenage girls are paying the real price.”
Although earlier annual surveys have tested for a single sexually transmitted disease in a specified population, this is the first time the national study has collected data on all the most common sexual diseases in adolescent women at the same time. It is also the first time the study measured human papillomavirus.
Dr. Douglas said that because the new survey was based on direct testing, it was more reliable than analyses derived from data that doctors and clinics sent to the diseases center through state and local health departments.
“What we found is alarming,” said Dr. Sara Forhan, a researcher at the centers and the lead author of the study.
Dr. Forhan added that the study showed “how fast the S.T.D. prevalence appears.”
“Far too many young women are at risk for the serious health effects of untreated S.T.D.’s, ” she said.
The centers conducts the annual study, which asks a representative sample of the household population a wide range of health questions. The analysis was based on information collected in the 2003-4 survey.
Extrapolating from the findings, Dr. Forhan said 3.2 million teenage women were infected with at least one of the four diseases.
The 838 participants in the study were chosen at random with standard statistical techniques. Of the women asked, 96 percent agreed to submit vaginal swabs for testing.
The findings and specific treatment recommendations were available to the participants calling a password-protected telephone line. Three reminders were sent to participants who did not call.
Health officials recommend treatment for all sex partners of individuals diagnosed with curable sexually transmitted diseases. One promising approach to reach that goal is for doctors who treat infected women to provide or prescribe the same treatment for their partners, Dr. Douglas said. The goal is to encourage men who may not have a physician or who have no symptoms and may be reluctant to seek care to be treated without a doctor’s visit.
He also urged infected women to be retested three months after treatment to detect possible reinfection and to treat it.
Dr. Forhan said she did not know how many participants received their test results.
Federal health officials recommend annual screening tests to detect chlamydia for sexually active women younger than 25. The disease agency also recommends that women ages 11 to 26 be fully vaccinated against HPV.
The Food and Drug Administration has said in a report that latex condoms are “highly effective” at preventing infection by chlamydia, trichomoniasis, H.I.V., gonorrhea and hepatitis B.
The agency noted that condoms seemed less effective against genital herpes and syphilis. Protection against human papillomavirus “is partial at best,” the report said.
When you're sick, it re-boots your gut with good bacteria.
by Josie Glausiusz
In September, a team of surgeons and immunologists at Duke University proposed a reason for the appendix, declaring it a “safe house” for beneficial bacteria. Attached like a little wiggly worm at the beginning of the large intestine, the 2- to 4-inch-long blind-ended tube seems to have no effect on digestion, so biologists have long been stumped about its purpose. That is, until biochemist and immunologist William Parker became interested in biofilms, closely bound communities of bacteria. In the gut, biofilms aid digestion, make vital nutrients, and crowd out harmful invaders. Upon investigation, Parker and his colleagues found that in humans, the greatest concentration of biofilms was in the appendix; in rats and baboons, biofilms are concentrated in the cecum, a pouch that sits at the same location.
The shape of the appendix is perfectly suited as a sanctuary for bacteria: Its narrow opening prevents an influx of the intestinal contents, and it’s situated inaccessibly outside the main flow of the fecal stream. Parker suspects that it acts as a reservoir of healthy, protective bacteria that can replenish the intestine after a bacteria-depleting diarrheal illness like cholera. Where such diseases are rampant, Parker says, “if you don’t have something like the appendix to harbor safe bacteria, you have less of a survival advantage.”
This amazing guitarist plays DIVINELY! The piece is from his 1997 solo album Ana! MUST HEAR :)
Consider this my gift to all women for the March 8th, the International Women's Day!
finally, most of the pictures for the three days of my ultra-rapid visit to Egypt have been posted. Very sorry it took me such a long time to process them, but you may have noticed that in the process I have changed the slideshow software - it should be loading much faster....
Advice for those who may want to visit Egypt - you can do it all in about 4 days, you can see Cairo, Luxor and Alexandria (as I did) and add a day for a flight to Abu Simbel from Luxor to see the Ramses Temple. That would be 90% of the pharaonic Egypt. The rest is in London, New York and Paris :)
Absolutely stunning directorial work from Sean Penn. I have been a long-time fan of his work, both acting and directing, and this film has even further cemented his status of a solid cinematographer.
A straightforward story, quite banal and trivial, is told with such a great panache and with such masterstrokes of narrative efficiency, that I quickly stopped paying attention to all the pompous insanity of the original material.
Eddie Vedder's songs are extremely appropriate to the brooding intensity of the visual row, which prepares us for the gradual reduction of palette to Alaskan plains. No wonder that Sean Penn himself donned a camera throughout the movie.
It's a MUST SEE movie, but strangely not for the reasons the press praises it. I am glad that this feeble material of a runaway boy at odds with civilization and who read pathetic and sentimental Tolstoy too late in his life to make odds and ends of his weird life. I am still not sure what the moral of his life, what the lesson we are supposed to learn from his life - that it is ok to run away, that one should read flora guides more carefully, that life in a cabin prepares one either for an early death, or imprisonment after instanity, like in the case of an Unabomber?
Riots, Terrorism etc
by John Lanchester
‘Important’ is a cant word in book reviewing: it usually means something like ‘slightly above average’, or ‘I was at university with her,’ or ‘I couldn’t be bothered to read it so I’m giving a quote instead.’ Very occasionally it might be stretched to mean ‘a book likely to be referred to in the future by other people who write about the same subject’. Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News, however, is a genuinely important book, one which is likely to change, permanently, the way anyone who reads it looks at the British newspaper industry. Davies’s book explains something easy to notice and complain about but hard to understand: the sense of the increasing thinness and attenuation of the British press. It’s not literal thinness: the papers, physically, are bigger than ever. There just seems to be less in them than there once was: less news, less thought (as opposed to opinion), less density of engagement, less time spent finding things out. Davies looks into all those questions, confirms that the impression of thinness is correct, explains how this came about, and offers no hope that things will improve.
His book starts at the point at which he got interested in the story of what he calls ‘flat earth news’: ‘A story appears to be true. It is widely accepted as true. It becomes a heresy to suggest that it is not true – even if it is riddled with falsehood, distortion and propaganda.’ That’s flat earth news, and Davies became interested in the phenomenon, via the story of the millennium bug. How on earth did so many papers get sucked into producing so many millions of words of, it turns out, total nonsense about the impending implosion of all government, all commerce, all human activity, by the catastrophe which was going to be caused by the bug? ‘National Health Service patients could die’ (Telegraph); ‘Banks could collapse’ (Guardian); ‘Riots, terrorism and a health crisis’ (Sunday Mirror); ‘Pensions contributions could be wiped out’ (Independent); ‘Nato alert over Russian missile millennium bug’ (Times). The British government spent a figure variously reported as £396 million, £430 million and £788 million. And then, on the big night, a tide gauge failed in Portsmouth harbour. That was pretty much it. Countries which had spent next to nothing – Russia, for instance, whose government of 140 million citizens spent less on the bug than British Airways – had no problems.
There are several ways of looking at this story, which has some of the aspects of a panic and some of those of a hoax or job-creation scheme.[*] Davies chooses to focus on the fact that of the millions of words written about the bug, all of them were written by journalists who had no idea whether what they were writing was true. They simply didn’t know. Flat Earth News makes a great deal of this. The most basic function of journalism, in Davies’s view, is to check facts. Journalists don’t just pass on what they’re told without making an effort to check it first. At least, in theory they don’t. In practice, contemporary journalism has been corrupted by an endemic failure to verify facts and stories in a manner so fundamental that it almost defies belief. The consequences of that are pervasive and systemic.
Nick Davies is an unusual figure in British journalism, mainly because he has persisted in holding the admirable belief that reporting is the central task of the trade. Journalists report much less than they used to, and much less than they should, as the papers have switched over to a reliance on columnists and opinion. Back in the day, an ambitious young toad going into journalism would have seen All the President’s Men once too often, and would dream of bringing down governments with a single scoop. Good luck to them. Davies was like that. Today the equivalent ambitious young toad would dream of having a column with their picture at the top, as a precursor to a well-timed move to TV or politics or some other form of showbiz.
Davies, however, is still a believer in legwork and in getting the story first-hand. This led him to recruit researchers at Cardiff University’s school of journalism to quantify what was happening in the British press. The result is illuminating and grim. The team looked at a fortnight’s production from the posh papers and the Daily Mail, and analysed in the process 2207 UK news pieces. They focused on two things: the number of stories that were derived directly from press releases; and the number that were taken straight from the main British news agency, the Press Association. The results were amazing, and not in a good way.
They found that a massive 60 per cent of these quality-print stories consisted wholly or mainly of wire copy and/or PR material, and a further 20 per cent contained clear elements of wire copy and/or PR to which more or less other material had been added. With 8 per cent of the stories, they were unable to be sure about their source. That left only 12 per cent of stories where the researchers could say that all the material was generated by the reporters themselves. The highest quota proved to be in the Times, where 69 per cent of news stories were wholly or mainly wire copy and/or PR . . . The researchers went on to look at those stories which relied on a specific statement of fact and found that with a staggering 70 per cent of them, the claimed fact passed into print without any corroboration at all. Only 12 per cent of these stories showed evidence that the central statement had been thoroughly checked.
So only 12 per cent of what is in the papers consists of a story that a reporter has found out and pursued on her own initiative; and only 12 per cent of key facts are checked. The rest is all rewritten wire copy and PR. This remaining 88 per cent is, in Davies’s stinging coinage, ‘churnalism’. No wonder the papers feel a bit thin.
As for the wire copy, most of it comes from the Press Association:
When the queen wants to talk to the world, she gives a statement to the Press Association. When the poet laureate wants to publish a poem, he files it to the Press Association. Every government department, every major corporation, every police service and health trust and education authority delivers its official announcements to the Press Association. It is the primary conveyor belt along which information reaches national media in Britain.
The boffins in Cardiff found that 30 per cent of home news stories are direct rewrites of PA and other news agency copy; another 19 per cent are ‘largely reproduced’ from this copy; another 21 per cent ‘contained elements’ of it. That’s 70 per cent of news stories wholly or in part from wire copy. The general rule in journalism, increasingly honoured more in the breach than the observance, is that a story has to have two sources to be confirmed, but according to BBC guidelines, ‘the Press Association can be treated as a confirmed, single source.’ That practice is widespread.
As a result, it matters deeply what the PA actually does – and here Davies has more grimness to impart. The agency’s network of reporters is stretched increasingly thin, with, for instance, four reporters (including trainees) to cover the whole of Cardiff, South Wales and the Welsh Assembly. The staffers, according to one of them, write an average of ten stories in a single shift: ‘I don’t usually spend more than an hour on a story.’ The emphasis is on catching what people say accurately. As its editor, Jonathan Grun, puts it, ‘our role is attributable journalism – what someone has got to say. What is important is in quote marks.’ If the government says Saddam has WMD, that’s what the PA will report. Because the PA is the basis for such a huge proportion of what’s in the papers, and because its stories tend not to be checked, it is a highly effective way for PRs to plant stories across all the national media simultaneously. ‘It is infinitely preferable logistically to send it to the PA than to try and contact 150 journalists,’ one of Davies’s sources, a PR who works for one of the political parties, told him. ‘And we are rarely subjected to the sort of cross-examination that, say, the Sun or the Times would give us. PA does not do as much of the probing and difficult questions. They are journalists but to some extent they are an information service.’
So we have arrived at a place where ‘the heart of modern journalism’ has become ‘the rapid repackaging of largely unchecked second-hand material, much of it designed to service the political or commercial interests of those who provide it’. In the old days, at this point in the story, it would be time to Name the Guilty Men. They would once have been the evil proprietors, top-hatted cigar-smoking manipulators of public opinion. I don’t agree with the conspiracy theory of the proprietor press, nor does Davies: he thinks that it’s sheer commercial pressure that is to blame. It’s the pressure on costs – to produce more, cheaper copy – that is the ultimate culprit for the state of the modern press.
Flat Earth News breaks down the specific ways in which pressure is exerted on the practice of journalism, on a daily basis. Stories need to be cheap, meaning ‘quick to cover’, ‘safe to publish’; they need to ‘select safe facts’ preferably from official sources; they need to ‘avoid the electric fence’, sources of guaranteed trouble such as the libel laws and the Israel lobby; to be based on ‘safe ideas’ and contradict no loved prevailing wisdoms; to avoid complicated or context-rich problems; and always to ‘give both sides of the story’ (‘balance means never having to say you’re sorry – because you haven’t said anything’). And conversely, there are active pressures to pursue stories that tell people what they want to hear, to give them lots of celebrity and TV-based coverage, and to subscribe to every moral panic. That’s the effect on the texture of journalism, the culture of the newsroom. Of course, the pressure on costs has other, simpler effects too. There is more space to fill – in the British papers, three times as much – but no equivalent expansion of the resources to do the work. Elsewhere, the pressure on resources is just as bad. In 1970, CBS had three full-time correspondents in Rome alone: by 2006, the entire US media, print and broadcast, was supporting only 141 foreign correspondents to cover the whole world.
As the pressures on journalism have increased, so the PR industry has come along with what appears to be a solution. Want news? We’ll give it to you. Britain now has 47,800 PR people to 45,000 journalists. It isn’t the case that PRs just beg for coverage for their clients: they’re much more cunning than that. Once one grows alert to the question, you can see PR influence almost everywhere in the press. The greatly missed Auberon Waugh used to say that behind any claim in any way interesting, striking or surprising in the news, there was either someone demanding more government money or a press release. That is truer than ever, only these days the press release will announce the result of a survey (a favourite PR tactic) or a ‘release’ statement from a phoney pressure group, such as one of the many set up to create uncertainty over the question of climate change. These pressure groups are known as ‘astroturf’ in the PR industry, because their grass-roots are fake, but that doesn’t stop their statements and surveys from getting on the news.
PR is not exactly the villain of the piece, but Davies is persuasive about its all-pervading nature in modern journalism, and also about the increasing sophistication of its techniques. He cites the way the ‘NatWest Three’, the British bankers involved in the Enron frauds, managed to have themselves depicted as victims of the American legal system, with businessmen, civil rights pressure groups and MPs all campaigning on their behalf, when, in truth, they were total crooks. There are plenty of other examples in Flat Earth News. Davies, informed by his knowledge of PR, even has a fresh angle on Alastair Campbell and the Kelly affair. In his account, ‘Campbell used it as a decoy to distract attention from a highly embarrassing story, which was emerging slowly in May and June 2003, that the long-debated Iraqi weapons of mass destruction did not exist.’ Four weeks after the broadcast of Andrew Gilligan’s Today story, Campbell had not asked for an apology for it specifically, had not referred it to the BBC complaints department, and had not mentioned it at lunch with Gilligan’s boss, Richard Sambrook. But he then made ‘three key moves’: on 25 June he denounced Gilligan’s story to the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs (‘Until the BBC acknowledges that is a lie, I will keep banging on’); on 26 June he wrote to Sambrook demanding a reply that same day, and released his own letter to the press; on 27 June he more or less invited himself onto Channel Four News to attack the BBC, live. Davies observes: ‘This move finally established the decoy story as the main media line. The original questions about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were shunted into the sidings. Several political reporters wrote at the time that this looked like a diversionary tactic. Nonetheless, all of them agreed to be diverted. PR works.’ This explains what Campbell meant, as recorded in his diary for 25 June: ‘Flank opened on the BBC.’
Davies adds a few chapters of detail on the ways in which the papers have gone astray: the industry-wide use of bent private detectives, the culture of error at the Daily Mail, the ease with which the government co-opted the Observer to make the case for war in Iraq. These chapters aren’t really necessary for the central thrust of the book, even though Davies’s specifics are uncheering. For instance, in Britain only the rich can sue for libel; everyone else has to seek remedy via the Press Complaints Commission, set up by the industry to regulate itself. But the PCC rejects 90.2 per cent of all complaints on technical grounds without investigation. Of the 28,227 complaints received by the commission over ten years, 197 were upheld by a PCC adjudication: 0.69 per cent. The one or two points at which Davies disses fellow investigative journalists have a strangely ad hominem feel; there are moments when it seems old grudges are playing a role. This has in turn led to something of a backlash in early reviews of Flat Earth News, including a bizarrely hostile (as opposed to merely negative) review by Peter Preston, editor of the Guardian, Davies’s paper, from 1975 to 1995. Preston had a number of harsh things to say about ‘Saint Nick’, one of which had some traction: that he exaggerates the extent to which there was once a golden age of the British press. True. But all these details are less shocking than the more general data about the broad trend towards churnalism.
So this is Davies’s ultra-bleak portrait. The British news media are crushed by commercial pressure, squeezed by the need for speed, corrupted by PR, indifferent to their own best traditions of independence, recklessly indifferent to the central functions of reporting and checking facts, systematically lied to by commercial interests and governments, and in far too many respects, simply indifferent to the truth. There is a growing, industry-wide failure to be sufficiently interested in reality. I would add a couple of details to the indictment, to do with the way in which the papers have succumbed to their own internal celebrity culture of columnists, most of whom make no attempt to report on the world, in favour of sermonising about it. I would also add – borrowing a point from a journalist I spoke to, who was in depressed and reluctant agreement with Flat Earth News – that the collapse in news leads to a huge knock-on in the rest of the papers. Most columns and features are hung on a news-related peg, so if the news isn’t fulfilling its basic function to report and to check, then nor is anything else. Davies doesn’t mention that, but it doesn’t matter much, since his portrait of the British media could scarcely be any darker, or more convincing. His conclusion is in the same key as the rest of the book. ‘I’m afraid that I think the truth is that, in trying to expose the weakness of the media, I am taking a snapshot of a cancer. Maybe it helps a little to be able to see the illness. At least that way we might know in theory what the cure might be. But I fear the illness is terminal.’
*As a nerd, I feel a duty to point out that computers do sometimes have these problems. Nasa has never had a space shuttle in the air at the end of a year, over the transition from 31 December to 1 January, precisely because it’s not confident about the onboard software coping with the switch. (Nasa’s annual budget is $16 billion.) The truth, according to Davies, seems to be that the bug, while theoretically a problem, would only occur in computers which fitted all the following conditions: they a. had internal clocks (most big, ‘embedded’ systems don’t), b. had clocks which calculated time using an internal calendar, rather than just by measuring the gap between dates, c. used two rather than four digits to calculate the date and d. were in use by programmes which were calculating dates across that boundary. The number of computers that ticked all those boxes turned out to be vanishingly small.
John Lanchester is a contributing editor at the LRB. His latest book is Family Romance, a memoir.
Since I just came from Egypt, I was listening especially carefully to the Arabic spoken by the characters, and I was very happy to have recognized "Enta masri?" - "Are you Egyptian?".
An Egyptian in America, speaking accent-free American, looking as good as any other "american", gets "rendered" to Egypt, the homeland. Now, I understand the need to make it slightly complicated by rendering the character as "unEgyptian" as possible. Obviously, the character with an accent and alien looks would not have solicited the same emotional response and the same willingness to be accepted as the good guy.
if you don't care about learning an element of a plot, click here
It would have been much more interesting, if torturing they "good guy" produced intel. This way it would have placed the CIA liaison guy into a much more dubious moral position, and made the tale more complicated and less straightforward.
Still, the presence of Meryl Streep, Jake Gyllenhaal and Reese Witherspoon makes this movie a "worth seeing" one.
review of Peter Chapman's BANANAS How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World. 224 pp. Canongate.
by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan
When the Banana Company arrives in Macondo, the jungle town in Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” it brings with it first modernity and then doom. “Endowed with means that had been reserved for Divine Providence in former times,” García Márquez writes, the company “changed the pattern of the rains, accelerated the cycle of harvests and moved the river from where it had always been.” It imported “dictatorial foreigners” and “hired assassins with machetes” to run the town; it unleashed a “wave of bullets” on striking workers in the plaza. When the Banana Company leaves, Macondo is “in ruins.”
If Macondo is meant to represent Latin America, it is fitting that “the Banana Company” plays so central a role in its development and decline. For much of the 20th century, the American banana company United Fruit dominated portions of almost a dozen countries in the Western Hemisphere. It was, Peter Chapman writes in “Bananas,” his breezy but insightful history of the company, “more powerful than many nation states ... a law unto itself and accustomed to regarding the republics as its private fiefdom.” United Fruit essentially invented not only “the concept and reality of the banana republic,” but also, as Chapman shows, the concept and reality of the modern banana. “If it weren’t for United Fruit,” he observes, “the banana would never have emerged from the dark, then arrived in such quantities as to bring prices that made it available to all.”
Today, “the banana is the world’s fourth major food, after rice, wheat and milk.” But when a Brooklyn-born twentysomething named Minor Keith planted a few banana cuttings next to a railroad track in Costa Rica in the early 1870s, it was virtually unknown outside its native environs. Keith and his partners soon realized how great the potential profits were — especially if, along with growing bananas, they could control railroads, shipping and Central American governments (to that end, Keith married the beautiful daughter of a Costa Rican president). Only then did they set out to turn the banana into a product for the masses. Until its demise a hundred years later, United Fruit controlled as much as 90 percent of the market.
Throughout all of this, United Fruit defined the modern multinational corporation at its most effective — and, as it turned out, its most pernicious. At home, it cultivated clubby ties with those in power and helped pioneer the modern arts of public relations and marketing. (After a midcentury makeover by the “father of public relations,” Edward Bernays, the company started pushing a cartoon character named Señorita Chiquita Banana.) Abroad, it coddled dictators while using a mix of paternalism and violence to control its workers. “As for repressive regimes, they were United Fruit’s best friends, with coups d’état among its specialties,” Chapman writes. “United Fruit had possibly launched more exercises in ‘regime change’ on the banana’s behalf than had even been carried out in the name of oil.”
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In its final pages, Chapman’s witty, energetic narrative veers off into polemic, straining to flaunt some direct contemporary relevance. Today’s supporters of multinational corporations, Chapman declares, “would have us all as banana republics.” But his heart is more in the storytelling than in the lecturing, and he never does much with these sweeping proclamations.
Still, that is not to say there are no echoes of United Fruit today. Chapman could have noted, for example, that the company’s successor in the banana business, Chiquita Brands International, has admitted to paying nearly $2 million to right-wing death squads in Colombia. And the blow-back from United Fruit’s way of doing business still haunts Latin America. Just look at Guatemala — once United Fruit’s most treasured possession, now one of the Western Hemisphere’s most violent countries.
“Guatemala was chosen as the site for the company’s earliest development activities,” a former United Fruit executive once explained, “because at the time we entered Central America, Guatemala’s government was the region’s weakest, most corrupt and most pliable.” When a left-wing democratic president named Jacobo Arbenz tried to roll back the company’s dominance in the 1950s (by, among other things, redistributing its fallow land), United Fruit executives saw it as an affront — and set out to help pressure the United States government to engineer a coup. Fortunately for them, virtually every major American official involved in the plotting had a family or business connection to the company itself.
A young Argentine traveler named Che Guevara happened to be in Guatemala when Arbenz was overthrown in 1954. After that, Che told his mother, “I left the path of reason.” And so, too, did Latin America. That day marked a turning point, the end of a hopeful age of reform and the beginning of a bloody age of revolution and reaction. Over the next four decades, hundreds of thousands of people — 200,000 in Guatemala alone — were killed in guerrilla attacks, government crackdowns and civil wars across Latin America.
A resident of García Márquez’s Macondo provides an epitaph: “Look at the mess we’ve got ourselves into just because we invited a gringo to eat some bananas.”
Daniel Kurtz-Phelan is a senior editor at Foreign Affairs.
The realm of liberty begins where work stops being a necessity.
Karl Marx
from the series of promotional ads by Le Monde for its new series of philosophical writings.
Later Posts/Вперёд
