Culture

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Frankly, We Did Win This Election review: a devastating dispatch from Trumpworld

      by

      BooksFrankly, We Did Win This Election review: a devastating dispatch from Trumpworld As well as grabby headlines about Hitler, Michael Bender of the Wall Street Journal shows us how millions have been led astrayLloyd GreenSat 10 Jul 2021 01.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 10 Jul 2021 03.11 EDTOn election night in 2016, Donald Trump paid homage to America’s “forgotten men and women”, vowing they would be “forgotten no longer”. Those who repeatedly appeared at his rallies knew of whom he spoke. Veterans, gun enthusiasts, bikers, shop clerks. Middle-aged and seniors. Life had treated some harshly. Others less so.Trump told chief of staff Hitler ‘did a lot of good things’, book saysRead moreSome had voted for Barack Obama, only to discover hope and change wasn’t all it was advertised to be. Regardless, the Democratic party’s urban and urbane, upstairs-downstairs coalition didn’t mesh with them. Or vice-versa. Politics is definitely about lifestyles.In his new book, Michael Bender pays particular attention to those Trump supporters who called themselves “Front Row Joes”. They attended rallies wherever, whenever. It was “kind of like an addiction”, Bender quotes one as saying.No longer did they need to bowl alone. Trump had birthed a community. Their applause was his sustenance, his performance their sacrament.One Front Row Joe, Saundra from Michigan, was a 41-year-old Walmart worker. On 6 January, in Washington DC, she made her way up the west side of the US Capitol.“It looked so neat,” she said.She also said she and other Trump supporters who stormed Congress did not do so “to steal things” or “do damage”. They had a different aim.“We were just there to overthrow the government.”The next day, Saundra flew home. Trump’s wishes, real or imagined, were her command. Later in January, two days before Joe Biden’s inauguration, Senator Mitch McConnell declared that the mob had been “fed lies” and provoked by Trump.Bender covers the White House for the Wall Street Journal. Frankly, We Did Win This Election is his first book. It is breezy, well-written and well-informed. He captures both the infighting in Trump’s world and the surrounding social tectonics.Trump goes on the record. The interview is a solid scorecard on who is up or down. He brands McConnell “dumb as a rock”. The loathing is mutual – to a point. The Senate minority leader has made clear he will back Trump if he is the nominee again.Liz Cheney occupies a special spot in Trump’s Inferno. The Wyoming representative, daughter of a vice-president, now sits on a House select committee to investigate 6 January. But to most of Trump’s party, six months after the insurrection, what happened that afternoon is something to be forgotten or at least ignored.Mike Pence dwells in purgatory.“I don’t care if he apologizes or not,” Trump says of his vice-president presiding over the certification of Biden’s win. “He made a mistake.”Once before, in their second year in office, the two men reportedly clashed over a political hiring decision. Back then, Trump reportedly called Pence “so disloyal”.Pence still harbors presidential ambitions. Good luck with that.Bender’s book is laden with attention-grabbing headlines. He reports Trump telling John Kelly, then White House chief of staff, that Hitler “did a lot of good things”. Trump denies it. Kelly stays mum. More than 30 years ago, Trump’s first wife, Ivana, let it be known that he kept a copy of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. Everyone needs a hobby.Bender writes of Trump urging the military to “beat the fuck” out of protesters for racial justice, and to “crack their skulls”. The 45th president’s asymmetrical approach to law enforcement remains on display. “Stand back and stand by” was for allies like the Proud Boys. Law and order was for everyone else. Political adversaries were enemies.Trump now embraces the supposed martyrdom of Ashli Babbitt, an air force veteran who stormed Congress on 6 January and was killed by law enforcement.“The person that shot Ashli Babbitt,” he said this week. “Boom. Right through the head. Just, boom. There was no reason for that.”To say the least, that is highly contestable.Members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, cowered behind the doors Babbitt rushed. Hours later, the bulk of the House GOP opposed certifying Biden’s win. The party of Lincoln is now the party of Trump.Focusing on the 2020 election, a contest under the deathly shadow of Covid, Bender conveys the chaos and disorganization of the Trump campaign. After a disastrous kick-off rally in Tulsa, Trump began looking for a new campaign manager. Brad Parscale’s days were numbered. He was a digital guy, not a major domo.According to Bender, Trump offered the job to Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee – and niece of Mitt Romney, the Utah senator, 2012 nominee and, in Trumpworld, persona decidedly non grata. Her reply: “Absolutely not.”Nightmare Scenario review: Trump, Covid and a lasting national traumaRead moreTrump also sent word to Steve Bannon, his campaign chair in 2016. He declined too. Bannon was banished from the kingdom for trashing Trump and his family. But he understood the base better than anyone – other than Trump himself.There was a reason Saturday Night Live spoofed Bannon as the power behind the throne, and that he appeared on the cover of Time. There was no return to court but Trump did pardon Bannon of federal fraud charges. Not a bad consolation prize.Parscale was demoted and kicked to the curb. Within months he appeared in the news, shirtless, barefoot, drunk and armed. His successor, Bill Stepien, brought Trump to within 80,000 votes of another electoral college win.Bender makes clear that Trump is neither gone nor forgotten. His acquittal in his second impeachment, for inciting the Capitol attack, only reinforced his desire to fight another day.“There has never been anything like it,” Trump tells Bender. So true.TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS elections 2020US Capitol attackUS politicsPolitics booksreviewsReuse this content More

    • 163 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      The Engagement review: a tour de force on the fight for same-sex marriage

      by

      BooksThe Engagement review: a tour de force on the fight for same-sex marriageDon’t let the length or density of Sasha Issenberg’s new book put you off – it is a must-read on the fight for true civil rights Michael Henry AdamsSun 4 Jul 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 4 Jul 2021 02.01 EDTSasha Issenberg’s tour-de-force, 900-word chronicle of “America’s quarter-century struggle over same-sex marriage” might have been even better had it been given even a few illustrations.This is the Fire review: Don Lemon’s audacious study of racism – and loveRead moreThe New Yorker contributor Michael Shaw’s cartoon of 1 March 2004 would have been one candidate. Its arch question, “Gays and lesbians getting married – haven’t they suffered enough?”, seems to encapsulate how an unlikely issue, consistently championed, achieved a broader vision of “gay liberation” than many dreamed could be attained so rapidly.Thanks to works of scholarship like Charles Kaiser’s The Gay Metropolis and The Deviant’s War by Eric Cervini, it has become clear that the seemingly impossible is often achievable. With The Engagement, Issenberg adds to such proof that one can write LGBTQ+ history in a way that is engaging, authoritative and impeccably sourced.He conveys a telling truth for activists beyond the campaign for gay rights. Brimming with a promise of inclusion, of acceptance beyond mere toleration, his book shows there are indeed more ways than one to skin a cat. Awakened and empowered by Black Lives Matter and Trumpism’s exposure of widespread white supremacist alliances, many progressives were certain that only the most radical policy positions – “defund the police”, anyone? – and candidates offered any real remedy. But older black voters were certain of a different way of maneuvering. And it looks as if they were right, just as proponents of marriage equality were right – to a point at least.If The Engagement lacks snappy cartoons or colorful or insightful photographs, Issenberg manages nonetheless to present compelling depictions of fascinating individuals. Their pursuit of gay marriage propels his narrative, lawsuit by lawsuit, legislative victory by legislative victory and political endorsement by political endorsement.False starts, setbacks, losses – they are all here too. But then finally, on 26 June 2015, with Obergefell v Hodges, the supreme court invalidated same-sex marriage bans all across the land. In time, a court-sanctioned right to self-determination expanded the rights of transgender people too.Gay marriage declared legal across the US in historic supreme court rulingRead moreIf the quest began with an almost stereotypically flamboyant figure, Bill Woods, Issenberg shows with deft sensitivity how for all Woods’ drive and flair for manipulating media and politicians, two more reticent lesbians played a pivotal role. Their relatable story is one of opposites determined to fashion a life together, just three months after meeting in 1990. Initially, the LGBTQ+ community was compelled to fight just to be allowed to love one another. But this committed couple’s saga goes a long way to showing how marriage, as opposed to a brave new world of sexual revolution and limitless pairings, emerged as the definitive cause of gay civil rights.When Genora Dancel, a broadcast engineer, presented a ruby ring to Nina Baehr, she “thought our love could withstand anything”. Coming home to find Baehr in pain from an ear infection, Dancel learned otherwise. Baehr’s university health coverage had yet to take effect. Her new “wife” had two policies from her employers but could not use them for her partner. She had to pay out of pocket to to aid her.Out of this practical desire to care for each other, the pair joined two other same-sex couples organized by Bill Woods. On 17 December 1990, in Honolulu, they applied for marriage licenses. When they were denied, Dan Foley, an attorney who was straight, sued the state on their behalf. After a battle lasting nearly three years, they were vindicated. The Hawaii supreme court was the first in the US to determine that the right to wed was a basic civil right.Many, like the lesbian feminist Paula Ettelbrick, were convinced there was an alternative to marriage and that “making room in our society for broader definitions of family” was better. They saw little utility in such a gain.Jasmyne Cannick, a journalist from Los Angeles, was dubious as well. Following the passage of Proposition 8, a ballot initiative to ban same-sex marriage in California, she outlined the looming disconnect between disaffected queers of color and our sometimes oblivious white brethren.
      The white gay community is banging its head against the glass ceiling of a room called equality, believing that a breakthrough on marriage will bestow on it parity with heterosexuals.
      But the right to marry does nothing to address the problems faced by both Black gays and Black straights. Does someone who is homeless or suffering from HIV but has no healthcare, or newly out of prison and unemployed, really benefit from the right to marry someone of the same sex?
      In books such as Nigel Nicholson’s Portrait of a Marriage and Elizabeth Drexel Lehr’s King Lehr and the Gilded Age, one gets a poignant look at how especially for upper-class gays, conventional alliances, with partners of the opposite sex and children, are as old as time, assuring inheritances and perpetuating dynastic ties. George Chauncey’s Gay New York tells of how in Harlem same-sex couples, from the 1920s on, staged elaborate nuptial ceremonies, anticipating current trends.The Deviant’s War: superb epic of Frank Kameny and the fight for gay equalityRead moreYes, one way or another, even in the realm of queers, marriage still seems to constitute a profound idea.Issenberg contends that without overwhelming opposition, gay marriage would never have subsumed gay activism; that conservatives, lying in wait, biding their time, are poised to try to take it away. When they do, will we be ready, armed with the lesson of Issenberg’s book?Today, self-segregated into competing camps of righteous activists and dogged pragmatists, freedom fighters still at struggle and insiders who just happen to be gay, do we sincerely value the efficacy of throwing down our buckets where we stand? Have we lost hope that every road leads to a common victory? That in a street fight, every contribution adds value to our effort?
      The Engagement: America’s Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage is published in the US by Penguin Random House
      TopicsBooksLGBT rightsSame-sex marriage (US)US constitution and civil libertiesLaw (US)US politicsActivismnewsReuse this content More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Nightmare Scenario review: Trump, Covid and a lasting national trauma

      by

      BooksNightmare Scenario review: Trump, Covid and a lasting national trauma Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta of the Washington Post show how bad things got – and how they could have been worseLloyd GreenSat 3 Jul 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 3 Jul 2021 02.21 EDTAs the world wakes from its pandemic-induced coma, Bloomberg rates the US as the best place to be. More than 150 million Americans have been vaccinated; little more than 4,100 have been hospitalized or have died as a result of breakthrough infection.Trump contempt for White House Covid taskforce revealed in new bookRead moreThe vaccines worked – but too late to save more than 600,000 Americans who have died. More than 500,000 were on Donald Trump’s watch.“This would have been hard regardless of who was president,” a senior administration official confided to Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta. “With Donald Trump, it was impossible.”Abutaleb is a health policy writer for the Washington Post. Paletta is its economics editor. Together, they supply a bird’s-eye narrative of a chaotic and combative response to a pandemic that has subsided but not disappeared in the west. Elsewhere, it still rages.At almost 500 pages, Nightmare Scenario depicts an administration riven by turf wars, terrified of losing re-election and more concerned about the demands of Trump and his base than broader constituencies and realities. It was always “them” v “us”. Sadly, this is what we expected.Under the subtitle “Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic that Changed History”, Abutaleb and Paletta confirm that life in the Trump White House was Stygian bleak. Trump was the star. Pain and insecurity were the coins of the realm.Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, laboured in constant fear of Trump and competitors inside the government. After taking a hard line against flavoured e-cigarettes early on, to Trump’s dismay, Azar never recovered. The pandemic simply deepened his personal nightmare.When Covid struck, he was all but a dead man walking. Then the White House Covid taskforce, headed by Mike Pence, neutered his authority. Think of it as a one-two punch. True to form, Trump told a taskforce member Azar was “in trouble” and that he, Trump, had “saved him”.Azar was forced to take on Michael Caputo, an acolyte of Roger Stone, as spokesman. Eventually, Caputo posted a Facebook video in which he claimed “hit squads [were] being trained all over this country”, ready to mount an armed insurrection to stop a second Trump term. Caputo embarked on a two-month medical leave. His “mental health … definitely failed”.Not surprisingly, Trump lost patience with Pence’s taskforce. It failed to deliver a magic bullet and he dismissed it as “that fucking council that Mike has”. For the record, in April 2020 Pence remarked: “Maybe I’m a glass half-full kind of guy, but I think the country is ready to reopen.” For all of his obsequiousness, Pence could never make Trump happy.Instead, Peter Navarro, Scott Atlas and Stephen Moore emerged as Trump’s go-to guys. Predictably, mayhem ensued.Navarro suggested his PhD in economics made him an expert in medicine as well. He jousted with Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease since 1984 – seemingly for giggles.Atlas was a radiologist whose understanding of infectious diseases was tangential. As for Moore, he played emissary for a libertarian donor base distraught by shutdowns and mask mandates.“Fauci is the villain here,” Moore intoned. “He has the Napoleon complex, and he thinks he is the dictator who could decide how to run the country.” Trump’s own authoritarian streak seems to have escaped him.Moore also referred to Fauci as “Fucky”, and advised state-based “liberation” movements against public health measures that served as precursors and incubators to the invasion of the US Capitol on 6 January this year.Going back to 2019, Moore was forced to withdraw from consideration for the board of the Federal Reserve after the Guardian reported on his bouts of alimony-dodging, contempt of court and tax delinquency.With one major exception – financing and developing a vaccine – the Trump administration left Covid to the states. Hydroxychloroquine never saved the day, though Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, ordered a bunch of it from India to sate Trump’s ego. Six days after the 2020 election, the National Institutes of Health issued a statement that insisted: “Hydroxychloroquine does not benefit adults hospitalized with Covid-19.” Trump was callous and mendacious before the pandemic. Yet even as he embraced medical quackery, bleach injections and self-pity, he presided over unprecedented vaccine development, the medical equivalent of winning the space race and the cold war at once.Preventable review: Andy Slavitt indicts Trump over Covid – but scolds us all tooRead moreWhen Trump signed off on Operation Warp Speed in May 2020, “he thought vaccines were too pie in the sky”, Abutaleb and Paletta report. When Trump learned the first contract executed under the program was with AstraZeneca, from the UK, he growled: “This is terrible news. I’m going to get killed.”Boris Johnson would “have a field day”, he said. Things didn’t work out that way.Right now, countries that relied on Chinese vaccines are experiencing a death spike in the face of the Delta variant. In the Seychelles, almost seven in 10 are fully vaccinated – yet deaths per capita are currently running at the highest rate in the world.Added to Chinese opacity surrounding its role in the outbreak, the limits of vaccine diplomacy and technology are apparent. From the looks of things, Trump has left multiple legacies, some more complex and alloyed than others. But things could have been worse.TopicsBooksCoronavirusInfectious diseasesPolitics booksUS politicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationreviewsReuse this content More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      The Constitution of Knowledge review: defending truth from Trump

      by

      Jonathan Rauch is among America’s more thoughtful and rigorously honest public intellectuals. In his new book, he addresses the rise of disinformation and its pernicious effects on democratic culture.Through an analogy to the US constitution, he posits that the “values and rules and institutions” of “liberal science” effectively serve as “a governing structure, forcing social contestation onto peaceful and productive pathways. And so I call them, collectively, the Constitution of Knowledge.”What he calls the “reality based community [is] the social network which adheres to liberal science’s rules and norms … objectivity, factuality, rationality: they live not just within individuals’ minds and practices but on the network”. This community includes not only the hard sciences but also such fields as scholarship, journalism, government and law, in a “marketplace of persuasion” driven by pursuit of truth under clear standards of objectivity.Rauch puts the Trump era at the heart of the challenge, as Trump felt no “accountability to truth”, telling reporter Lesley Stahl that he did so to “demean you all, so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you”.To Rauch, “Trump and his media echo chambers [lied] because their goal was to denude the public’s capacity to make any distinctions.” Thus “every truth was met not just with denial but with inversion … to convey … that the leader was the supreme authority”.The result is a crisis of democracy. As Senator Ben Sasse warned, “A republic will not work if we don’t have shared facts.” What emerges, in Rauch’s term, as “epistemic tribalism” effectively denies “the concept of objective knowledge [which] is inherently social”.There is much here and the diagnosis is superb, with clear explanations of how and why disinformation spreads. Rauch finds glimmers of hope and positive change, as digital media act “more like publishers … crafting epistemic standards and norms”. Solutions, though, involve self-regulation rather than government action. Rauch cites Twitter’s Jack Dorsey in noting “that the battle against misinformation and abusive online behavior would be won more by product design than by policy design”.True, yet Rauch admits there are “no comprehensive solutions to the disinformation threat”, instead hoping for reactions that will promote “something like a stronger immune system … less vulnerable”.Rauch is a “radical incrementalist”. Hearty praise for John Stuart Mill makes clear that he seeks solutions principally from within classical liberalism, which the analogy to a social network reinforces: individuals working as a community, not a collective. Thus he shies from using government to enforce adherence to the Constitution of Knowledge.“Cause for alarm, yes,” Rauch writes. “Cause for fatalism – no.”Surely there is a third perspective. Referring to a director of the National Institutes of Health known for rigorous science and deep faith, Rauch states that “a person who applied the Constitution of Knowledge to every daily situation would be Sherlock Holmes or Mr Spock: an otherworldly fictional character. In fact, when I compare Francis Collins’s worldview with my own, I think mine is the more impoverished. He has access to two epistemic realms; I, only one.”It shows Rauch’s generosity of spirit and intellectual integrity that he recognizes the validity and worth of other epistemic realms. They may, in fact, be a clue to solving the broader problem.Does the constitutional order contain sufficient self-correcting mechanism? Rauch’s response, in a forceful and heartfelt final chapter, is to renew engagement in defence of truth. This is right so far as it goes. Waving the white flag, or silence (as Mill, not Burke noted) enables and ensures defeat in the face of attacks on the concept of truth. It’s good that “Wikipedia figured out how to bring the Constitution of Knowledge online”, but that only works with a presumed universal acceptance of truth, a challenge in an era where a 2018 MIT study found falsehoods were 70% more likely to be retweeted than truths.One may heartily agree with Solzhenitsyn (whom Rauch quotes) that “one word of truth outweighs the world” and yet note with horror (as Rauch does) that a few powerful algorithms can overwhelm it in the heat of a tech-amplified campaign.Does individual action mean fervent defence in response to every inaccurate social media post? How to judge? (The individual rational response is generally to ignore the false post, hence the collective action issue.) And would that defence guarantee success when disinformation has destroyed trust in institutions and in the concept of truth itself?Rauch’s optimism is infectious but it may fall short. The reality-based community seems no longer to have a hold on the common mind, weakening its power in the face of organized and mechanical opposition.Shorn of an appeal to what Lincoln termed the “mystic chords of memory” – itself not subject to empirical verification – how does the reality-based community avoid consignment to the margins? If a pandemic hasn’t convinced many people of the truth of science, what will?Calling for “more truth” may not be enough when people don’t want to know the truth or cannot tell what it is. If “Trump was waging warfare against the American body politic”, why should that body not respond collectively? Lincoln’s appeal – a strong use of political savvy and rhetoric to call his hearers to something beyond ourselves – can help.That is Rauch’s challenge – and ours. One may agree with him about the progress of science and support its extension to fields of social and political science. But the very urgency of the situation demands wise prediction on whether that will be sufficient. Rauch states his case as well as possible, but repairing the breaches in the body politic may require more than he is willing to endorse.Rauch begins with Socrates (“the sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher”) and describes continued debate towards truth in Socrates’ words: “Let us meet here again.”Indeed, and with Rauch, we will. In the meanwhile, less Mill, more Lincoln. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Nashville review – Robert Altman’s country classic still sings

      by

      “This isn’t Dallas, it’s Nashville! SING!” The desperate speaker is rhinestone-suited old-time country singer Haven Hamilton, played by Henry Gibson, in this rereleased state-of-America ensemble classic from 1975, written by Joan Tewkesbury and directed by Robert Altman. The toupee-wearing star has just been shot in the arm by a lone gunman in the crowd at a political rally featuring wholesomely patriotic country music, and the crowd is on the verge of panic. Only soothing tunes will calm them, and eventually a sprightly number called It Don’t Worry Me finally gets them singing along, forgetting all about the murder attempt they’ve all just witnessed. (Like Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, from a year later, this is a movie that is attempting to deal with the trauma of the Kennedy assassination as much as, or more, than the Vietnam war.)It’s an appropriately sensational and bizarre set piece to close this unique film and, watching it again for the first time since its last revival 17 years ago, what strikes me is its complex attitude to country music itself. Nashville is of course the home of country, the home of the Grand Ole Opry; the music is not really ironised in this film, not mocked, even when the singers are at their most narcissistic and self-serving and when the songs are at their cheesiest – especially Hamilton’s toe-curling For the Sake of the Children, a mawkish song from a man to his mistress, piously saying he has to return to his marriage. The music, playing almost continuously, is the glue that holds the movie together. It may sound schmaltzy, but the city-slickers deriding it sound worse.This is Gerald Ford’s America, on the verge of the bicentennial in 1976 … an event everyone hopes will heal the agonies of Watergate. An independent presidential candidate is coming to Nashville, hoping to promote his new ideas: taxing churches, abolishing the electoral college, removing lawyers from government. But for some Kennedy lovers present, the final dismissal of Nixon just brings back unhappy memories of how Nixon actually won against Kennedy in Tennessee in 1960, and the Kennedy motif is an unhappy omen.So too is a public fainting fit suffered by the local country star Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), who has perhaps intuited the hysteria and anxiety in the air. Allen Garfield is great as her boorish husband-slash-manager Barnett. Geraldine Chaplin is insufferably patronising British journalist Opal, who has a fling with handsome singer Tom (Keith Carradine), who is also having an affair with Linnea (a superb Lily Tomlin), with whom Wade (Robert DoQui) is poignantly in love. Linnea is an unsatisfied married woman with hearing-impaired children whose sleazy husband Delbert (Ned Beatty) is working with visiting TV producer John Triplette (Michael Murphy) to set up a lucrative media-political deal. All these – and many more – characters’ lives crisscross, their dialogue overlapping in the middle-distance sound design while the candidate’s megaphone-van trundles around the city, blaring its choric political commentary, an ambient effect rather like the tannoy announcements in M*A*S*H.The film’s most brutal moment is the treatment of Sueleen Gay, the waitress and tone-deaf wannabe country star played by Gwen Welles, who is tricked by the unspeakable Delbert and Triplette into appearing on stage, purely because they want her to do a striptease for the braying good ol’ boys present. Poor Sueleen thinks they wanted to hear her sing. It’s an ugly moment of abuse and, perhaps tellingly, the band switch from wholesome country to traditional burlesque music for this humiliation.Altman’s control of this sprawling material is wonderful – though Tewkesbury’s screenwriting achievement should not be forgotten. This is the heart of the troubled mid-70s American zeitgeist: angry, sentimental, violent, comic, afraid. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in UK Politics

      Ministers launch bid to privatise Channel 4 in shake-up of British television

      by

      The government is to launch a consultation into the privatisation of Channel 4 as part of shake-up of British television, ministers have confirmed.The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport announced the move on Wednesday after bosses at the broadcaster were quizzed on the issue by MPs a day earlier.Moving Channel 4 — home to The Great British Bake Off, It’s a Sin and Come Dine with Me — into private ownership and changing its remit could ensure its “future success and sustainability”, the department said in a statement.The consultation will also review regulation of streaming services such as Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video.It will consider whether new rules around impartiality and accuracy are needed for documentaries and news content on the platforms to “level the playing field” with broadcasters, who are regulated by the watchdog Ofcom.Culture secretary Oliver Dowden said: “Technology has transformed broadcasting but the rules protecting viewers and helping our traditional channels compete are from an analogue age.“The time has come to look at how we can unleash the potential of our public service broadcasters while also making sure viewers and listeners consuming content on new formats are served by a fair and well-functioning system.“So we’ll now be looking at how we can help make sure Channel 4 keeps its place at the heart of British broadcasting and level the playing field between broadcasters and video-on-demand services.”Channel 4’s chief executive Alex Mahon, however, said the broadcaster could have “different priorities” if it is privatised, and cautioned against doing anything “irreversible” which could “possibly damage some of those things that we do for the sector”.Access unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows with Amazon Prime Video Sign up now for a 30-day free trialSign up More

    • 188 Shares159 Views

      in UK Politics

      Success of government’s ‘culture recovery fund’ in doubt as festivals teeter on brink of collapse

      by

      The effectiveness of the government’s culture recovery fund has been called into question by a new report highlighting how music festivals are currently teetering on the brink of collapse.The Public Accounts Committee is calling for better support for live music events, which are in peril for a second year due to the lack of government-backed insurance in the event of pandemic-related cancellations.Concerns were also raised about whether freelancers and supply chains that are essential to the culture sector have been able to access support from the fund.In March, The Independent reported how many freelance workers in the live music industry such as tour managers and sound technicians had been forced to take on jobs as shelf-stackers in supermarkets to make ends meet.Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak announced the £1.57bn support package, dubbed the “Culture Recovery Fund”, in July 2020. Its primary goal was to rescue 75 per cent of arts, culture and heritage institutions in the UK during lockdown. While the committee acknowledged the department’s efforts to support cultural organisations, it pointed out that there is a “survival threat” faced by Britain’s summer music festivals. In the past few months, Glastonbury, Download, Kendal Calling and Boomtown have all been forced to cancel their plans to go ahead in 2021.The government has ignored repeated calls to implement an insurance scheme so festivals have a safety net should they be forced to cancel due to Covid.In May, culture secretary Dowden told a DCMS committee meeting that the idea of a government-backed insurance scheme would only be explored once further lockdown restrictions lift, which will not be until 19 July, after Stage 4 of the government’s roadmap out of lockdown was delayed.With the original 19 June date in mind, Conservative MP Heather Wheeler said this would likely be “all too late” for organisers due to the months of planning required for festivals to take place.Enjoy unlimited access to 70 million ad-free songs and podcasts with Amazon Music Sign up now for a 30-day free trialSign up“This would have been a very cheap deal to have been done, because the government are confident that 21 June is D-Day… in which case, you didn’t need to spend any money on insurance,” she said. “But it’s too late for the planning for so many of these summer festivals. It’s just too late.”“We’ve probably lost another summer,” she added.Insurance companies are currently refusing to cover Covid-related cancellations, meaning festivals face massive financial losses and even risk bankruptcy if they are forced to cancel last-minute.Meg Hillier MP, Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said in the report: “The pandemic has exposed just how poorly departments across Government understand the sectors that they oversee. DCMS was clear that it ‘would not save every organisation’ but we are concerned about the impact of Covid-19 on those organisations vital to the culture sector – sound engineers, lighting and technical support.“The government must urgently consider support other than cash, such as insurance indemnity or parts of the sector risk as second summer of forced inactivity with all the devastating consequences to their survival.”Ms Hillier said that the sector, known for “making the show go on”, had been “hammered” by the pandemic and brought almost to a complete standstill for most of the past 15 months.“If the pandemic is allowed to steal a significant part of our creative and cultural sector it will have impoverished us indeed,” she said.The committee is recommending that the department should respond to its report within three months with details of how it plans to secure “longer-term value for money” with the cultural recovery fund, and what it intends to do to support overlooked members of the industry, such as festivals and freelance workers.The Independent has contacted the DCMS for comment. More

    • 175 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Philly DA: Breaking the Law review – a deeply thrilling, hopeful show to devour

      by

      Such is the tenor of our times that the first thing I did before embarking on the docuseries Philly DA: Breaking the Law (BBC Four) was research its subject, Larry Krasner. Because there has to be a catch, right? An eight-hour film about a civil rights defence lawyer winning a landslide victory to become the first progressive district attorney in a notoriously conservative, corrupt city just doesn’t scan. A chronicle of him fighting ceaselessly for genuine change from within? No. Not in 2021. I’ve been here before. I want to be forearmed against the big reveal. So I searched. For the charges of fraud, revelations of – oh, I don’t know – historical sexual assault. That’s normally it, isn’t it? Maybe child abuse, to match the high – remember, it was not just a simple victory, but a landslide! – with the low. I put nothing past 2021, nothing at all.But his record, as far as any awfulness is concerned, is like the Bellman’s map – a complete and perfect blank. Hard as it is to believe, Philly DA is a film about a good, not perfect man surrounding himself with good, not perfect people and trying to make a difference in a far from perfect world.The film’s makers, Yoni Brook, Ted Passon and Nicole Salazar, follow Krasner from 2017, when he was elected to the position – the election field was opened up by the arrest and indictment of the then DA on 23 counts of bribery (he resigned and pleaded guilty to one of them) – until halfway through 2020. The additional challenges of Covid are not covered by the film, and it ends with the protests about the murder of George Floyd inserted presumably last minute, slightly awkwardly but understandably, under the credits. Almost certainly, they started from a pro-Krasner position and, human nature being what it is, more than two years embedded with him and his team had its effects. There is a warmth running throughout and, of course, their access remains entirely in Krasner’s gift and could have presumably been withdrawn at any time no matter how publicly his commitment to transparency had been proclaimed.Nevertheless, Philly DA does not stray into hagiography. It is made clear Krasner is neither alone nor the Messiah, but was elected as part of a growing nationwide movement of people with progressive, reformist beliefs moving into prosecutorial positions they have tended to avoid (or been prevented from entering by the non-progressives already there). His inexperienced team’s missteps – notably losing control of the media narrative when they purge the office of the previous administration’s employees in what becomes known as “the Snow Day Massacre” – are on display. The problems caused by his unwillingness to smile, to gladhand just a little, to play retail politics and lubricate grinding wheels of the system where he can are noted. In episode six, for example, during a particularly antagonistic period between the old and new guard and between public concerns and the DA office’s attitude to the establishment of safe injection sites for drug users, his ally Councilwoman Maria Quinon-Sanchez threatens to withdraw her support if he cannot find it in himself to give just a little (he does).The trio of film-makers marshal a lot of material consistently well. Each instalment looks primarily at one subject, while continuing to tie it into the wider drive to change the policy of mass incarceration and break the harmful habits of career lifetimes among the remaining old guard. It fills in the city’s history while examining the result. It also looks at the effects of cash bail (which effectively criminalises people for being poor), the need for radical overhaul of a stunningly abstruse and uncompassionate juvenile system, the discovery of “damaged goods” files (secret records of police officers deemed too untrustworthy to testify in their own cases – wiped from employees’ computers but unearthed in hard copy in the archives).There’s also the need for probation reform, the pressures of standing against the death penalty and the growing frustration among the activists who helped Krasner get elected and for whom, perhaps, no pace of change was ever going to be fast enough.Transcending the directorial workmanship and production values, however, is the simple sight of unfashionable – which is to say good, ideologically informed but practically executed – work being done on behalf of the disfranchised, the powerless, the underserved. It is deeply thrilling to watch. An unfamiliar feeling stirs, and rises higher with each episode. The feeling is hope. “I don’t want to run for anything else,” says Krasner. “This is just an opportunity to do things that are really just about getting it right.” And remember, I checked ahead – you can enjoy it. Please do. More