That was the year that was

And so I've come to write my look back at 2010 – a sort of between Christmas-and-New Year special – in which I pick out the things that have made an impact on me this year from the political, to the personal, and the things that just didn't quite make sense. Or just or made me laugh.

As 2010 dawned I think I can safely say I was one of those people who would have put a bet on a hung parliament being the most likely outcome of the General Election. Six months on from that political soap opera in May I think the electorate probably think that overall, they made the right decision – namely, refusing to vote for any single party to have a whopping majority. Although the polls are looking positive for Ed Miliband's Labour with a backdrop of savage cuts to public services, most people aren't quite ready to trust them with government again just yet. They may even be prepared to give them a further drubbing with the Oldham and Saddleworth by-election early in 2011 – but for what it's worth, I don't think it matters. Labour's still my party and I want it to do well but Miliband is a wise man to play the long game, and not be forced into the sort of short-term tactics that damaged his predecessor.

Whereas, at the beginning of the year most people would have wagered on David Cameron becoming Prime Minister one way or another, I'm not sure many would have envisaged the stratospheric journey of Nick Clegg and his subsequent appointment as Deputy Prime Minister. It was hard to make sense of a new sort of Liberal Democrat party, half of them parachuted into ministerial positions by Cameron's 'open and generous' offer. In one bold move, Cameron enacted Blair's pre-1997 dream, except this time it was the Tories and not Labour who were joining forces with the third party in the 'national interest'. I'm still not sure whether LibDem ministers could quite believe their luck at being able to play with the big boys at last, but it's clear that there were many more of the so-called 'Orange Book' free market types able to work with some decidedly Thatcherite Tories in government. The Labour party has enough ideological baggage to permanently put them at odds with the Conservative view of the world – not so for the LibDems who didn't take too long to decide whether they wanted real power, and after all have happily worked with Tories in local government for years.

Despite the cosying up and the rose garden love-ins, we've already witnessed some of the bloodiest battles already and the next year could highlight more dividing lines in the Coalition.

The certainties of politics and I think, the nature of democracy have been called into question in other ways. We now have a spontaneous, radical student movement, united in opposition to tuition fees that has taken politics in protest to a new level. While it's fair to say that this movement haven't quite agreed what they're for – there may be a few disagreements down the line over the extent to which education should be funded by general taxation – there's a renewed engagement in ideas and the way in which debate is framed. Politicians themselves seem ever more terrified of the prospect of having to have a genuine conversation over these 'policy outcomes'. The only comparable 'movement' of any kind I can think of was the poll tax riots in 1990 – and possibly the anti-war movement, in which over a million people marched against an invasion of Iraq in 2003. The UK Uncut campaign will be interesting to watch too. I've already boycotted the January sales at Topman in solidarity.

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Technology – and in particular the web - has been a bigger part of my life this year than ever before. The edge-of-your seat political blockbuster of 2010 has been accompanied by a revolution in the media. Although the 2010 General Election was by most accounts a TV election, the part played by social media can't be ignored. I followed every development of the election campaign – and plenty of other big news – through the all-knowing Twitter and Facebook and many other sites through my trusty laptop, not to mention the background distraction of rolling news. And when you're me, it really is a terrible distraction. I love 'microblogging' and the conversations of the Twitterati, but I must learn in 2011 to focus my creative efforts on more than 140 characters. But cats in wheelie bins, Chilean miners, rogue Geordie gunmen and bigoted Daily Mail columnists all make up the rich tapestry of life and I suppose the media would have even more space for DFS adverts if these things didn't make the news.

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I got engaged in July. Andy caught me completely unawares, since I'd always assumed it had been my responsibility to pop the question. It all happened in a quite beautiful location on 2 July, in the garden of a pub overlooking the Millennium Dome – or the O2. There's nothing quite like that place to represent an exciting new beginning, marking the transition from my relationship with Andy over the last three years – to the beginning of the rest of our lives. It was lovely, and beautiful, and a bit soppy! Plans remain at what I call the 'storyboarding' stage but once I've got this MA out of the way I'll be in full wedding mode. 

Talking of the MA, I took a bold decision to apply for a Political Journalism course at City University in May, and subsequently got offered a place, accompanied by a generous bursary which was a much appreciated reward for my written efforts. It's going well so far, and I can't say I've ever been bored or unmotivated during the week-night lectures which have included some fantastic guest speakers. Over Christmas I became the proud owner of a new digital voice recorder (thanks, Dad!) which I think symbolises me becoming a 'proper' journalist at last – even if I'm not being paid for it just yet...

The next year presents just as many questions as the beginning of the last one, and I'm not going to make any more predictions here. Except to say that it won't be dull – and I hope that everyone who reads this blog will continue to read my occasionally thoughtful analysis of what's going on in the world.

THANK YOU FOR READING!

The 'dark arts' debated

The idea of a panel of journalists debating phone-hacking, alongside other interested parties, was always going to be an interesting discussion and one worth having, not least because the ethics of the 'dark arts' are very rarely de-constructed in public. I went along to yet another evening debate at City University last week for a session entitled 'How far should a reporter go – the lessons of the News of the World phone-hacking story' expecting to hear from a group of people split down the middle on the issue.

The specifics of the News of the World case were not really discussed, on the presumption that the chair and panel members found it safer to discuss broader themes around privacy and journalistic surveillance. I suppose it would have been tempting to steam away furiously on an anti-Murdoch rant, with equally strong opinions from the other side of the fence, although as panelist Nick Davies pointed out, every major national newspaper has engaged in phone-hacking – it just so happened that it was Clive Goodman and the News of the World who happened to get caught.

My views on the subject changed somewhat during the course of the evening, and made me realise that there's a whole tool-kit available to the investigative journalist which isn't always questioned – let alone justified - in the pursuit of a public interest story. There are indeed, as the chair Andrew Caldecott QC pointed out, 'many layers' in such a case.

The first big surprise of the evening was the argument put forward by Max Mosley, former president of the FIA, and offspring of the notorious Mr and Mrs Oswald Mosley, fascists and Hitler sympathisers. As you might expect, his successful suing of the News of the World pitted him against the activities of the paper – but for which he didn't make any money out of. It wasn't difficult to disagree with Mosley's defence of privacy, in which he scalded Daily Mail Editor Paul Dacre's self-assumed right to pillory on the paper's front page “someone who has a slightly more adventurous sex-life”. What did Dacre think sex was all about, Mosley asked? “Turning the lights off,waiting for three minutes then adopting the missionary position?”. More seriously, in response to the position of Roy Greenslade (Professor of Journalism at City and former Mirror editor, playing devil's advocate), who argued that the activities of celebrity 'role models' are fair game for adjudication by the national press, Mosley thought that if the morals of those public figures are considered unhealthy, “we shouldn't be publicising it”. (I did feel slightly sorry for Greenslade for having to put forward such a weak argument, but I'll be polite about him here as he's one of my lecturers).

The second biggest surprise was the view of Sir Ken McDonald, former Director of Public Prosecutions at the CPS. Having not heard him speak before, I expected an establishment, Civil Service standpoint on the question of how far journalists should go. He's also someone who's had his private life scrutinised by the jury of the press. Yet, according to McDonald “we could all imagine circumstances where we want journalists to break the law”. Privacy was, he argued “in danger of defeating the broader agenda of press freedom”. Supporting this view, the French press for example, were “not praiseworthy” in their supposed deference to their own public figures, failing in their pursuit of investigative journalism.

One of the more bizarre proposals of the evening came from Nick Davies, suggesting that because reconciliation between the free press and privacy was so problematic, there needed to be some sort of mechanism or process to deal with the question of public interest. Max Mosley seemed to prefer a judicial option, whereby a judge would make the decision pre-publication of an article. But Davies pondered as to whether there could there be some sort of 'tribunal of wise men or women', where the decision to authorise a journalistic investigation of an individual could be later made public, if say, the 'victim' were to sue. Picture, for a moment, the legitimacy of a tribunal made up of Dacre, Dominic Mohan, Richard Wallis, and Peter Hill – all editors of major national titles. I'm not suggesting any of them are fundamentally unethical people, but they're paid to do a job and ensure that their papers sell in an increasingly competitive and commercial environment.

With these sorts of pressures on them, there's no way that it a tribunal could be workable, let alone result in truly ethical decisions. Any members of such a panel would be the result of a judgement of someone, somewhere, who may or may not make a more valid editorial judgement than the individual who edits a newspaper. That's not to say that I agree with the casual fishing around for stories that some on the panel practised or supported (including ex-NotW features editor Paul McMullan) - I just don't believe that fundamentally speaking, journalism can allow for such cumbersome processes. What's really needed is a change of culture but that's a debate for another time.

We have a uniquely free press in this country, and some excellent, fearless journalists working on them. I'm not sure if we'll ever resolve that difficult question of public interest, or see the sorts of safeguards some people would like to see to protect the privacy of individuals, but that genuine spirit of inquiry for the public good is always worth fighting for. And the issue of phone-hacking isn't as black and white as it seems.

Wikileaks, the moral high ground, and the question of accountability

Julian Assange was swamped by a media scrum at the end of his talk

"Who put Wikileaks on the moral high ground?" A very interesting question indeed, posed by the right-leaning Times columnist David Aaronovitch at a debate to which I was invited at City University last Thursday evening, where, as a lot of people who read this probably know, I've just started a journalism MA course.

Wikileaks claims to be "an organisation to promote justice through the sharing and communication of knowledge". This, it has done, through the release of many hundreds of thousands of classified documents, emails, reports and correspondence: from Sarah Palin's Hotmail to shocking footage of a US helicopter attack killing innocent Baghdad civilians (note my deliberate value judgment there - I'm not in the game of criticising those who hold to account those who have been perpetuating barbaric and illegal wars).

I can't say I've looked at the site more than once before, when it leaked a slightly out-of-date BNP membership list, which was covered by a BBC News article amongst many other outlets. It has, after all, become something of an essential item in the investigative journalist's toolbox. But, like many people, I wondered what made Wikileaks tick. It is broadly seen as having a left-leaning, anti-war agenda, so there's an obvious political ideology in there somewhere. And, if so, who are the ideologues who call the shots? Who redacts information from the thousands of leaked documents that could be deemed to put peoples' lives in danger? More worryingly, is Wikileaks completely indiscriminate in the way it simply takes information from many, many sources and publishes it without making any kind of judgement on it first?

Taking the view that it would be preferable to pick up on and quote from aspects of the site first hand, I've unfortunately found it rather frustrating to write this blogpost since Thursday's debate because the site has been shut down for 'scheduled maintenance', making it difficult to make a more rounded judgement on what Wikileaks is all about, and why it exists.

The debate was framed by David Aaronovitch, who posted his own thoughts in Saturday's Times, as well as Julian Assange, the curious, evasive, and socially awkward face of Wikileaks. Chaired by the veteran broadcaster and panel chair Jonathan Dimbleby, I came away from this bizarre event not that much more aware of what the raison d'etre of Wikileaks actually is. The audience, of mainly students, academics and other journalists, consistently asked questions about what keeps Wikileaks going in the background (apart from its indeterminate number of volunteers), and consistently, didn't really get any answers.

And, like most of the rest of the audience - a sizeable chunk of mainly journalists or journalism students - I wanted to know what editorial judgements Wikileaks makes, if any. When faced with serious accusations that the actions of the site you run has contributed to civilian deaths in a warzone, you might be expected to respond to those accusations robustly, and with empathy. Someone asked whether it was a goal of Wikileaks to have people protected, and if so, how did they do this? What did they actively do? Did we trust Assange's 'harm minimisation?'

"We are a publishing organisation - we do nothing else. The public decide whether to fund us. You decide whether we continue on this course of action, looking at the fruits of our labour.

"I find it hard to see another organisation which is immediately accountable to the public".

This last point was fascinating, because, despite being asked at least once, Assange couldn't reveal a list of donors who funded the organisation. Maybe this is for a very good reason, but it's clear that a set-up of this nature can't compete with the likes of established national newspapers and mainstream media outlets. We know who runs them, we know who funds them - we quite often disagree with those who are in charge of these organisations and the political line they take, but it's pretty much all out there in the public sphere.

Assange wouldn't be drawn on whether Wikileaks was being bankrolled by the Chinese government, as has been rumoured, nor would he comment on any of the increasingly public disagreements with former volunteers such as Daniel Schmitt (also known as Daniel Domscheit-Berg) who, as a BBC Radio 4's PM programme pointed out last week, has had some serious disagreements with the way Wikileaks is being run, to the point where Assange has suspended him - and it doesn't look like he'll be going back.

"Fundamentally, [Wikileaks] needs transparency in the way it is working, and the way it deals with its finances" said Schmitt, suggesting that Assange, as the leader of the organisation if such a figure really does exist, needs to "focus again, calm down and get a holiday". Schmitt claimed also that the people he had been working with "are no longer involved as far as I can tell".

Responding to the allegations, Assange denied there had been any mass departures: "There have been no resignations other than a media statement. We're a complex organisation with a large, extended network. We make no apologies for not being transparent about the protection of our sources.

Asked whether Wikileaks was too focused around himself, Assange said "Of course it is founded around me. I started it." He also claimed that the level of public interest in Wikileaks was "annoying". Assange is beginning to panic now that the spotlight is beginning to shine very brightly on him. And, until someone more credible than Assange is put up by Wikileaks to defend the organisation and its guiding philosophy, I can't square that question of accountability.

Update on 13/10/10: City have now released the full video of the event, available on their website.

My hopes, dreams and ambitions for journalism

Today I’m taking my first steps towards a new career – something I really should have done quite a long time ago in fact – with my first evening of lectures at City University for an MA in Political Journalism.

The summer has given me plenty of time to read around my subject and I feel that as a new student, I’m already developing a worthy critique in my head of today’s journalism and its strengths, opportunities and dynamism, but also its weaknesses, frustrations and, in some cases, lazy and shoddy misreporting. The excellent Flat Earth News by Nick Davies has been a good starting point and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who wants to get a better idea of why journalism isn’t working as it should. And it should work better, because there’s an awful lot going on out there which needs to be taken note of by journalists and which is in danger of slipping away from public consciousness.

So why am I doing this? For the last six years, since my undergraduate degree, I have, in the main, been working in various civil service and public sector communications roles which, although they’ve developed my basic skills in writing good copy and finding stories, I’ve never been responsible in that time for any public or externally facing communication. My interests have always been more around speaking to a wider audience and that passion for the drama of politics and a long desired professional aspiration to journalism have never once waned. Right now seemed an opportune moment to embark on a new career once it became clear that British politics was experiencing a moderate earthquake – of which I’m sure the aftershocks will be felt for some time. A tired, chaotic government has been swept from power, the two-party system is on the verge of being dismantled, the Liberal Democrats are in government and there’s a wave of unpredictability washing through public life which makes things constantly fascinating for the observer of the British political scene.

So, I’m hoping that in order to help make sense of this brave new world, this Masters will help nurture a strong interest in good quality, investigative journalism that is – dare I say it – ethical, and that I can find a new career in helping to peel off what sometimes seems like increasing layers on, and barriers to the machinery of government. I’m not pretending to speak from some pious lectern on what’s wrong with the world – either in politics or in journalism itself – but I want to be able to do things my way, through a prism of values which might seem lofty or impractical – but hopefully true to myself and with independent, rigorous thought and research.

I am an optimist and an idealist by nature and I hope that, if you were to ask me, in five years time ‘where have your ideals and principles gone?’, you won’t witness my detached soul scuttling off down the road to the world of sensationalist celebrity gossip and the sort of pseudo-journalism I don’t think I’ll ever be interested in – let alone be any good at!

Keep following me on this blog, which, I’m advised, needs to be updated at least two or three times a week. I’ve had a blog since 2007 and I don’t think I’ve ever got anywhere near close to that sort of regularity of posting, but hope that over the next year at least, I can promise some occasionally interesting, insightful and thought-provoking articles. And, if you’re a potential future employer or you run a political or news website and you like what you read, please do get in touch.

So, pull up a chair and we’ll have a nice cup of tea as we put the world to rights.