PR & Journalism: The Buddy Cop Movie

(Image: Tango & Cash/Warner Bros.)

By Elliot ‘Theodore-Rex’ Adams

I’ve got a buddy cop movie pitch for you. As for setting, any generic not-quite-noir city will do – what’s import is our lead characters, PR and Journalism. Yes that’s right children, it’s time to crowbar in an overworked metaphor!

One of them an uptight manipulator who will do and say anything – regardless of how true it is – to help his shadowy client get ahead, the other a gruff maverick who isn’t above biting the PR hand that feeds him and wants to get the truth from PR’s client and loathes that he has to go through him to do so.

Forced to work together by circumstance and a temporary common purpose, they fight crime and save the world as a team, but they sure as hell ain’t happy about it.

Okay, they don’t often fight crime together or save the world you smartass – do I come round your house and deconstruct your convoluted metaphors? No.

For once my ramblings aren’t completely irrelevant, because boys and girls – this shit just got real.

A few days ago Duke Nukem Forever‘s PR drone had a minor meltdown on twitter over the terrible reviews the game was getting.

Threatening to blacklist journalists and critics from receiving review copies of future titles if they didn’t provide a positive review of the apparently execrable Duke Nukem Forever – I’m not entirely convinced that it isn’t secretly a work of genius, maybe more on that later. He later tweeted that he was irked by the game’s Metacritic score, saying that “for a game with such a large marketing budget and name recognition, [it was] shockingly low.”

He has since apologised to those who were sent review copies of Duke’ and performed some wider damage control. But much internet drama has already ensued.

Journalism is too old for this shit (Image: Lethal Weapon/Warner Brothers)

To be honest, despite the fact that the PR drone has clearly misunderstood the function of reviews – they are not a measure of marketing wankery spending – those who were outraged by this are fundamentally misunderstanding the function of PR.

PR is not a friend of quality journalism, PR is a temporary ally who would prefer if the quality gaming press was declawed entirely and by some accounts has been trying to do just that.

By the industry’s own admissions PR doesn’t have a duty to tell the truth, PR doesn’t have a duty to get their client’s games fair coverage in quality publications. PR’s only duty and purpose here is to gain it an mild first reception in the press, as such, review copies serve the same function as NDAs – to give exclusivity to publications that will not harm sales.

If you are a proper journalist and could potentially give that game a range of evaluations – positive or negative – then why should the PR goblins take that chance and give you a review copy. When they could so easily give one of their limited supply of review copies to an amateurish operation they can manipulate, or media giants like Sky that can likewise be manipulated because they are so out-of-touch with technology they still preface everything with ‘Cyber-’, e.g. ‘Cyberhackers’.

together they fight crime! (Image: 48 Hours/Paramount)

The only thing that is surprising about what Redner said is that he said it in the first place. Several people over the years have told me of similar blacklisting measures – it is rarely talked about in print, but apparently a commonplace practice regardless. This is why so many online reviewers rarely score anything outside of the 60% – 95% range; a larger scale gives the illusion of range, while pressure from PR is limiting evaluation to a narrower spectrum.

But my feeling isn’t that games journalism necessarily needs to shake off PR involvement, nor that PR should be attempting to do the same to journalism. They need to work with their respective buddy cops(just reminding you of my shaky premise for this post) to learn to better deal with each others foibles and clean up this city one scumbag at a time provide fair and insightful reviews.

Preventing Terrorism With Petit-Fascist Distractions?

Home Secretary Theresa May accused past anti-extremism strategies of engaging with groups that they "should have been confronting" and proscribing (image: ukhomeoffice)

By Elliot Adams

I’m unsettled by the shift in purpose in the governments counter-terrorism measures. I was rather hoping this would be one of the issues where the Lib-Dem part of the coalition won out over the Tories. Unfortunately, in the run up to last week’s release of the government’s updated Prevent counter-terrorism strategy there were numerous concerning hints in the press that this was not going to be the case.

These showed a coalition that was shifting from a strategy of preventing violent extremism by engaging with non-violent radical groups, to one of pursuing extreme views(violent and non-violent) and survielling the communities that harbour these views.

Notably, there was the revelation that National Health Service doctors will be required to identify and report people who may be “vulnerable” to future recruitment by terrorist groups. This was one example of how the new Prevent is intended to bring an end to “ungoverned spaces” in education, in the NHS, charities and discussion forums. To this end, May criticised Muslim organisations for allowing extremist speakers – and under the updated Prevent allowing such views to be discussed could lead to the gathering of organisation members being proscribed.

Furthermore, in a stunning bit of scape-goating that could not possibly aid efforts against radicalisation, May accused Universities of “complacency” in tolerating radical views on campus. I had a crack at this on the day Prevent was published, needless to say I think such attitudes do more harm than good.

I’ve had a more in depth read through of the publication since, and I find myself returning to this issue of refusing to engage with – or even to outlaw – non-violent Muslim groups that give air to extreme views(it is almost entirely Islamist extremism addressed by Prevent, despite a few cursory nods to extreme right-wing or Irish terrorism).

In the past, to counter violent extremism, previous governments have worked with groups like Jamiat-e Islami who were ideologically supportive of some forms of non-violent political Islamism.

I’m not sure if anyone is really qualified to speak as to the efficacy of this, but to me this just makes sense in our national context. Many British Muslim families are of fairly recent immigrant origin, with early migrant communities being built at a time when their countries of origin were held together by a political Islamist social infrastructure. Therefore, the ideologies of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood shaped these communities on an organisational level.

Despite their possibly illiberal views, they were non-violent, connected and were a valuable communication point between these British Muslim communities and the anti-terrorism initiatives of the Police and government.

But the updated Prevent, precludes such communication. Prevent claims that the real problem is a dangerous ideology shared by both non-violent and violent groups, and as such, the government should not work with them at all.

Adding to these problems is that ‘extremist’ isn’t adequately defined in Prevent, nor has it been outside the report. It apparently encompasses those who have ‘un-british’ values, those who do not engage in ‘full participation in society’ and those who ‘implicitly tolerate the killing of British soldiers’.

But this is so vague you can contort it to include just about anyone you want to, This is the rare occasion that I agree with the Archbishop Cranmer Blog that “By codifying a set of values to which Muslim groups will need to subscribe, the Government is effectively reintroducing a Test Act: only those who profess adherence to the orthodoxy will be eligible for … government engagement.”

This will make impossible many valuable partners for the government and police against terrorist security threats. The little guidance Prevent gives on the matter implies that problematic views on gender rights would be enough to exclude a group, which is a subject that could exclude even moderate faith groups.

I understand the hesitancy to engage groups with Islamist influences that may have sympathy for more violent organisations, but we already have heavy-handed and impractical laws that forbid such groups from inciting violence
or religiously-based hatred. The conviction rate with these laws is miniscule, but as these groups haven’t even been threatened with prosecution surely they should be acceptable on those grounds?

To counter Islamist terrorism I can’t see why we wouldn’t want to work with – rather than against – the British Muslim community. They have been conducting a debate on these issues for a long time and, I think, because of these in-group discussions the influence of Islamism is nowhere near the strength it once was. I fear the attitudes revealed by Prevent risk undermining moderate positions in that debate, and legitimising more radical elements by publicly making a Pariah of politically-engaged Muslim groups.

What Your Email Address Says About You

by Elliot Adams

It says absolutely bugger-all, contrary to popular belief it is just an email address.

Your handwriting says nothing more about you than how you hold your pen and how you have learnt to scratch out your rudimentary mark on pieces of paper with an inkstick. Your preference for the colour red doesn’t mean that you’re “optimistic and can’t stand monotony”, it means you like the colour red. Your hair does not, as some claim, reveal the inner workings of your sexuality, it is a hairstyle not a psychiatrist – the difference is subtle sometimes, but concentrate and you’ll get it. One “professor” may claim that your sleeping position shows your personality and garnered much coverage of his claims, but as his website brags of their ‘holistic methods‘ I’m willing to guess this is utter bollocks too. Your lipstick, browser, iPod, sneeze, car and alcohol are not magic – though the latter may sometimes feel like it, especially absinthe. They cannot tell the future or read your mind, not every choice you make will reveal a fundamental unshakable truth about your personality.

If you really want to learn the deep secrets of your personality and how they are revealed by everyday minutiae, then there is but one way;

Take a square of paper and fold the corners into the centre, flip it over and do the same on the other side, pull the new corners in and up towards each other making a pyramid and pulling out the finger tabs at the bottom – congratulations you have made a fortune-teller.

Image: Paul Blais

Now slap yourself across the face and grow the fuck up.

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Addendum: If you are a journalist and have covered one of the above as though it were a story, I want you to follow this slap up with some cigarette burns to the eyelids, well done you rightfully self-loathing hack. Stop crying, journalists do not cry.

Universities “complacent on Toryism” Islamic Extremists Warn

Worthy organisations like the Bullingdon Tory Studies Club, which were set up to monitor Tory extremism and promote more moderate views, have in fact become Tory recruitment centres giving the world the extremism of David Cameron and Gideon Osborne.

By Elliot Atherton-Adams 1st Earl of Edinburgh

Extremist Islamic group,  Harkat-ul-Jehad, have accused top British Universities of complacency in dealing with people openly preaching the kind of extremist views one would normally expect to hear from the Conservative party. These Universities they warn, have become a training ground for Tory extremist groups.

Hafiz Saeed from the influential terrorist thinktank said, “Too long has Oxbridge been complacent in tolerating Tories on campus. They are completely blinkered, I think they have secretively placed a fatwa supporting of Tory extremist preaching on their campuses.”

Harkat-ul-Jehad has claimed that Oxbridge universities were at risk of becoming “recruitment centres for Conservative Future[a.k.a. 'The Cameron Youth]‘.

Guy Maquillé the National Union of Students president shares a concern about the threat identified by Islamic extremist groups.

“There has indeed been growing problem of conservatism within universities, these Tories have braisenly peddled attitudes to public services and society that amount to anti-Western propaganda.

He went on to say that there has been an increasing problem on campus of pelting the poor with pennies and taunting the underclasses. There had been troubling incidents of “barbour-jacketed, hunter-booted toffs chasing the the working classes through campuses for sport on horseback”. Most disturbingly, there is evidence of students in possession of copies of Tory literature, for example the novels of Edwina Currie – we can only hope that the dangerous deviants checking these books out of the library will be executed in due course.”

However, the Prime Minister’s lib-dem vassal, assures us that there is “no case for claiming that universities are complacent about Tory recruitment on campuses.”

“We have to distinguish between extreme views, and violent extremism. We must allow Tory perspectives that do not break the law to be expressed, no matter how repulsive and offensive we find those perspectives.”

He claims, “British universities are working with student associations and the police to swiftly deal with anyone who is dismantling welfare, the NHS or other public services.”

Tory propaganda being circulated in universities

Gerald and Ollie, two young British Tory students in the Purple Turtle Union Bar however paint a different tweed-shaded picture. It is a portrait of Britain under Tory law; horseback hunting of single mums and ‘hoodies’ would be legalised, Thatcher would be made Britain’s patron saint, double-barrelled names would be compulsory, the BBC would be replaced with mandatory clockwork-orange-style Sky news propaganda absorption sessions and Cameron would rule over us from atop a throne made from union leaders’ skulls – while Andy Coulson and Gideon George Oliver Osborne squatted at his feet rasping and picking their teeth with the bones of librarians.

Gerald made his position clear, “Labour left our university system infested with the working classes, the burden of poor students is one we all face, we are all in this together, we simply need to drive these rapscallions into the ocean and make it impossible for the damnable poor to go to university in the future.”

“Whiff whaff?” enquired Ollie, confused.

There are many young Tories in our universities like Ollie, who clearly lack the capacity to notice their indoctrination into more extreme forms of Toryism, “this the sad fact we need to address” says Hafiz Saeed, so that “our universities return to being a mecca for “only those with a healthy thirst for knowledge and burning hatred of the decadent west.”

Addendum: apparently a fellow by the name of ‘Spacey‘ fabricated a similar  comical confabulation over on his blog – so all credit to him for that, and clearly being a gentleman of infinite jest.

100 Apologies on Twitter in Malaysia Defamation Case

Malaysian courts have given a modern take on being forced to repeatedly chalk up your misdemeanors on the classroom blackboard, Bart Simpson stylee.

He is spreading the apologies over the next three days and in accordance with the court order is typing by hand the hundred tweets which must come from his own account.

Fahmi Fadzil  has been ordered to apologize 100 times on Twitter, after tweeting to his mates that a pregnant friend of his wasn’t being treated particularly well by her employer – Female Magazine.

It’s yet another example of how people are starting to be held legally accountable for the utter guff they bleat on the internet, and to be honest I rather like it as a solution – it befits the absurdity of the transgression, which really just amounts to ‘talking bollocks’.

I rather hope that all the people who were tweeting various rumours about who had taken out superinjunctions and why, or tweeting spurious claims about Obama’s birthplace, will soon receive court orders ordering them to tweet ‘sorry guys, I’m full of shit’ a few hundred times.

No word from anyone’s legal representation on who suggested the terms. At this moment, Fahmi Fadzil has 76 apologies left to tweet.

Al Jazeera Vs. the BBC’s Faltering Global Voice

The BBC claim they aim to continue being the world's best known and most trusted provider of high quality impartial and editorially independent international news. But considering the alternatives to BBCWS is that enough?

By Elliot Adams

As much as I like to claim I hate blogging, it does provide an alternative outlet for my irritation to that of repeatedly bitching to my girlfriend about the same topics untill my fickle humming-birdesque mind flutters off to extract chagrin-necter from a new source. Of late she has been putting up with my gripes about presumptions old people, the borderline-corruption of the SNP and, most frequently, the painful cuts to the BBC World Service.

World Service is facing severe reduction of non-news programming, losing radio broadcasting in seven languages, stopping service fully in five further languages, closing hundreds of posts, cutting airtime down across the board and through all this reducing its audience by a conservatively predicted 30 million.

I have posted before praising the work the BBC World Service do globally – specifically the World Service Trust which provides media infrastructure as a form of international aid – so it isn’t surprising that I consider these cuts a loss. But my concern goes further than this, weakening the World Service at this time poses a threat to democracy and the international free press. For how and why, we should look to the small Gulf state of Qatar.

Qatar is the home of ever-controversial news broadcaster Al Jazeera, the strongest contender of a number of state-funded broadcasters ready to fight for a monopoly in territory World Service is being forced to withdraw from.

It’s not that I’m taking a dig at Al Jazeera here, there is much the fledgling broadcaster should be commended for.

They have been refreshingly progressive, as with their creative commons release of photographs and video footage(free to publish as long as you attribute it correctly) or their social media experiment The Stream, which, instead of reporting, merely use a selection of extracts from twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other social networking sites – it has predictably been an abject failure, but the point is they tried to stir things up technologically.

Likewise they stir things up politically, they haven’t just been reporting recent

As BBC Worldwide is closing its Serbian radio service, Al Jazeera is stepping in with 'Al Jazeera Balkans'.

pro-democracy uprisings, they have been catalysing them and one can’t help but feel sympathy for their plight in facing the threats and attacks of government forces in Cairo. As they did before in Iraq, being bombed by both the US airforce and by factions loyal to Saddam. Yet in both situations they provided fast on-the-ground coverage where others could not.

But this is Al Jazeera English, a slick and professional media operation – shaped in its early days by BBC staff and now itself staffed by many former employees of the BBC and it’s counterparts from Australia, the USA, Canada and the rest of the English-speaking world. It has no significant bias and covers the needs of a large international news agenda. But Al Jazeera Arabic is a different story. Long anti-western rants commonly pass without evidence or counter argument, there is a suggestion that its sympathies lie wholly with Islamist extremism as an ideology and its bias becomes disturbingly clear on a number of issues, especially on Israel and the occupied territories.

for example, watch this Al Jazeera English coverage of Lebanese man Samir Kuntar’s release from the prison term he served for remorselessly murdering a four-year-old Israeli girl – caving her skull in on the ground with his rifle butt. The coverage uses journalistic distance to observe and record the positive welcome he receives on release.

Now compare this footage from Al Jazeera‘s normal service, where the sycophantic interviewer tells us beloved “brother Samir” “deserves more than this” at the party Al Jazeera throws for Kuntar – complete with fireworks and a personalised cake.

This fork-tongued coverage is the least of it though, more troubling is when Al Jazeera walks in hand with the will of Qatar’s absolute monarchy. For example Al Jazeera has enthusiastically embraced pro-democracy movements in Yemen, Egypt, Syria and Libya, but has strangely been downplaying events in Bahrain. This point is subjective and just my opinion, but it is one shared by Al Jazeera’s Beirut bureau chief who resigned on that same opinion. The Emir of Qatar, like Al Jazeera supports change in Libya, Egypt, Yemen and Syria – but not in neighbouring Bahrain, where he has sent Qatari troops to quiet the revolt.

Al Jazeera allows Qatar to exert cultural influence on a scale previously unavailable to it through military or economical means, which perhaps explains the Emir’s astronomically great investment in a cutting-edge communications satellite to extend Al Jazeera’s reach deeper into Africa and Central-Asia.

The Emir of Qatar isn’t the only one to be trying to exert international power through the opinion-shaping power of international state-funded broadcasting. Iran has its Press TV, President Putin has The Voice of Russia(previously Radio Moscow) now broadcasting in 38 languages, and on television Putin’s media advisor Mikhail Lesin created Russia Today – broadcasting in English, Spanish and Arabic to echo Putin’s interests and prejudices. Whereas President Hu Jin-tao of the People’s Republic of China has already committed billions to the “fierce struggle in the domain of [international] news and opinion.” Lobbyists are getting in on he fight too, with billionaire Alex Mashkevich announcing what has been dubbed the ‘Jewish Al Jazeera’ to broadcast Pro-Israel opinion internationally.

I know that it may seem like an expensive extravagance to be providing news and other broadcasting around the world. But being selfish for a moment, I honestly don’t think that we can afford to leave large parts of the world with their international news dominated by propaganda outlets, denied impartial and honest news, to be aggressively lectured everyday by powers who’s aims and values are so directly opposed to that of the free society. I do not agree with this notion (that Clinton, Putin and Hu Jin-tao suggest) of a global war for influence in the airwaves, if BBC World Service(whether you believe they are truly impartial or not) is there to insure that there is more than one voice, more than one account, more than one truth – then it limits the options of those who would seek a monopoly for their voice, they must debate, they must engage with democracy and then their war is already over.

In Defense of the Burkha Ban

By Elliot Adams

France’s far-right appeasing Burkha ban has been writ in law for a while now, though it hasn’t been enforced and there has been some further political wrangling over just what the law means for France.

If you’ve managed to miss this part of Sarkozy‘s scheme to win the support of fools and fascists, it constitutes a full ban on covering the face in public – with the exception of people wearing motorcycle helmets and attending festivals. This is bad news for protesters, scarf-fanciers and people with excessive facial hair, but the main thrust of this attack is against muslim women who choose to wear the Niqab, Burkha or the Snood.

Now this sounds like an idiotic idea the 1st, 2nd and 99th time you hear it – but give it that magic 100th chance. You should do so because, properly enforced, it also means a ban on these fuckers;

The minarets of Disneyland’s castle represent the greater threat to western culture

When they’re not peddling cheap plastic child-silencers with the Disney brand’s formidable pester power, sexualising children or indoctrinating them with the many questionable ethical lessons of their films and characters, Disney are just busy being hella’ creepy.

With this new law we can hope that Disneyland Paris will be depopulated of its grotesque denizens. These tortured chimeras are victims too though, they cannot speak(their mouths stuffed with blackened gauss) and they cannot leave the confines of their phantasmagorical realm. As Sarkozy said, “We cannot accept … prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity” and quite rightly so, I can only assume he was thinking of the creatures in the ghetto of Disneyland Paris, their curse is to forever shamble through unreal streets with permanent smiles stretched over their faces and their unmoving dead eyes glaring for the next child to ensnare.

Disney's advertising publicly sexualises children, Burkhas publicly desexualise women - I think the former is worse.

Disney raises the West’s children, championing the bland and the insipid, replacing parenting with a multimedia feast of bright colours and unimaginative stories of outdated morality.

Disney is a bigger threat to Western culture than any act of religious devotion and this new law would strike a mighty blow against its heart of darkness in Disneyland paris – if I had my way Cinderella would be dragged from her home and shot behind the chemical sheds, but more moderate voices prevail for now. That is why the Burkha ban should have our support, only perhaps we should rename it to recognise our real enemy – henceforth it shall be known as ‘The Magic Kingdom Final Solution’.

Ready to be shipped to Paris at a moments notice.

We must of course make an example of their leader, Mickey ‘lord of the woods’ Mouse. Construction has already begun on his means of dispatch, to be placed in Place du Carrousel where the Parisian guillotine once sat.

Officials insist the Burkha ban is not discriminatory because it would apply to everyone, not just Muslims. By that logic however I would be unsurprised, though horrified, to see the suggestion of new laws prohibiting the possession of a yarmulhah, or the wearing of a crucifix. But I can hold out hope for the outlawing of oversized mouse ears and *shudder* child-like glee.

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Let's make it happen France, be cheese-eating victory monkeys. (Image: Unknown)