The death of print media

The following column can also be found published by The Felix, the student voice of Imperial College London. On-line version here:
http://felixonline.co.uk/comment/1452/the-death-of-print-media/

 I am not a journalist. I have never hacked a phone, written a meticulously-researched piece about an obscure detail concerning Princess Diana that would only be published because she was she, or lain doggo in one of Boris Johnson’s rhododendron bushes with pencil and paper at the ready to record indiscretions with his woman-who-does in assiduous detail. If I were a journalist, I would want these skills, but not just these ones. I would also want to be able to act.
By that token I should look upon the recent performances by Rebekah Brooks, and Rupert and James Murdoch, with damp-eyed admiration. In truth it is more like damp-trousered disappointment. The sliminess, the falsity, and the show of contrition were, in the words of Arnold Rimmer, as plain as a Bulgarian pin-up.  James Murdoch tried to sound like the informed and honest junior manager chap who cannot really bear to upset anyone. Rupert Murdoch tried to sound like a quiet old man who has been doing this for a while and is more than mildly diverted by the problem. Rebekah Brooks tried to sound slightly stupid and more than slightly vulnerable, and like the other two, as non-threatening as possible. It was the humble nature of it that stuck out for me. I am simply not willing to believe that people that ‘humble’ rise to the top of the second largest media corporation in the world. Despite that, the act seems to have been believed.

Although what else were we expecting? From asking a few questions about a particular issue, the answers to which were easily revised for, no revelations were going to be forthcoming. 
Does that mean there was not more to find? It is almost inconceivable that there is not more to find. Rebekah Brooks justified the closure of the News of the World at the select committee in the terms that it had “lost the trust of its readership” and that this had been going on for “some time”. If this is the case, the effort made towards the situation is not consistent with the problem. If a paper had lost the trust of its readership some time ago, why would the owners not re-invent it swiftly (and co-incidentally)? Why would they wait until something else had happened which forced them to close it? Even if we ignore this flaw, the argument has limited appeal; quite how Rebekah Brooks measures trust amongst News of the World readers I do not know. In truth, what seems far more likely is that that paper had become a liability and there was no way they could assess how disastrous it might turn out to be. In other words, the phone hacking scandal was pretty tame or ordinary and the last thing they want is for the really bad stuff to come out. So they ditch the title. The phone hacking scandal only became a proper scandal because it was linked to something that no one wants to be negative about – the murder of a school girl. Of course it is not really any worse than anyone else being hacked, and the argument that messages being deleted was some sort of an indicator as to whether or not she was alive is, objectively, breathtakingly weak.
But it still happened, and it is still disliked. Naturally the Murdochs and Ms Brooks used the most cutting language when describing their feelings about the fact of phone hacking – they could not afford to be anything less than the most scathing. I suspect that tactic probably will be seen as effective in pushing the issue away from the front pages. It is of course not over, there are still countless inquiries to be gone through whose findings will drift in at regular and toothlessly late intervals over the next three years until we are all thoroughly sick of it. I am still wondering what will happen next. Will all of the News International titles fold? Will print media be forever tarnished and be regulated to the point of pointlessness? Certainly it seems unrealistic for the defence ‘self regulation is best’ will be allowed any further credence. And so we can look forward to a castrated print media? My suspicion is that print media is a wily old bird and I think it will survive this cold winter. It has survived the introduction of radio, and television, and satellite news. And even the internet. It even manages to survive being monstrously loss-making: something that makes no sense given the basic principles of the free market in which it apparently operates. Compared to that list of setbacks, a bit of phone hacking by the vulgar press will very quickly become as pale and forgotten as any of yesterday’s headlines. 

#hacking up not much

Is it me or is the Millie Dowler aspect of the phone hacking scandal a bit over-blown?  Obviously I do not wish to sound unkind to the family, no one deserves what they have been through, but this has been going on a while, but one cannot help but feel that it is time to move on from this now.  But I must confess I thought that before the phone hacking scandal.  The latter has of course been covered in enormous detail, not least by The Telegraph. 

            This does not bode well for their involvement in the current saga.  The logic for their being a protagonist in this story is, as I understand it, that the interference with Miss Dowler’s mobile phone meant that messages on the answering service associated with it, were deleted.  This was apparently taken as objective evidence that she was alive.  Is it me or is that logical argument just a bit weak?  If someone is rushed into hospital, medical staff do not attempt to telephone the patient as a worthy alternative to checking for vital signs.  Why would they?  This may seem a harsh comparison, but even if we take the argument on its own merits, there are enough holes in the logic for the whole thing, whether one is in an emotional state or not, to fall apart very quickly.  There was apparently a focus on which messages were there or not, not apparently when they were left nor when the phone itself was turned on, nor where it was.  All of this information is well available and any assiduous investigation would have taken it up.  Further, it would have been a far better indicator of when and where the phone had been used.  But even if it had not been available, or not seen as reliable, the fact that messages were listened to or not proves nothing.  There is, as it turns out correctly, that it was she who was listening to them.  One would probably not have suspected hacking, knowing what we did then, but the killer may easily have done this, either out of curiosity or boredom or a host of other reasons.  This would all have been days, or even weeks after the beginning of police involvement anyway, after they would or should have taken action.  It just does not add up.

            This is not a defence of hacking or of News of the World,  or indeed anyone else, right or wrong, I hasten to add.  It just seems a very intellectually thin justification for publishing the story.  What this suggests is that there was an ulterior motive for publishing this.  The Guardian is not a News International paper, so they could publish it in a way that News International papers could not.  Did they want to see it fall?  Perhaps the NewsInt Empire had over-reached itself and it was a time bomb waiting to explode.  This was the straw that broke the camel’s back, then.  If you will forgive the mixed metaphor.  I wonder which camel we will have after the dust has settled.  

It's a red light for fat bottoms

Healthy eating is desperately over rated.  It is not that I believe we should not think about what we eat.  Or that we should not do something about it if we are obese, or plan things so we ensure we eat all the things we need to.  What I am referring to is how we measure ‘healthiness’ in eating.  You may be nursing doubts that the following is another boffin about to bang on about some obscure point that does not really concern anyone.  But, in the immortal words of Miranda Hart (On the BBC website), “Bear with…”

Going to a large supermarket, where surely most people do most of their shopping, can be bewildering for the uninitiated shopper.  One of the turmoils facing many a student who is out shopping for the first time is the question of how to choose between Sainsbury’s Basics and the cheapest branded product.  The array of types of baked beans is frankly dizzying.  More generally, I have seen many a shopper tight with anguish about which sugar to buy or which milk will be best.  (Supermarkets are great places for watching people.  You just have to make sure you are doing enough yourself such that if you are being watched, you do not arouse the suspicion of the security staff).   But the problem can go a stage further.  What if the shopper has it in mind that they should eat less salt or more fibre?  Or, more complicatedly, less saturated but more unsaturated fat, with less fat over all?  Difficult stuff.  In Britain we are lucky and well organised that the food packaging we have tells us what is in something – both the ingredients and the nutrition information.  This may seem obvious but it is far from universal: the Americans have a list of ‘nutrition facts’ which is manifestly token, and say very little.  However, even though we have all the information, this does not necessarily make it easier to judge what we should or should not buy.

Enter, the ‘Wheel of Health’ from Sainsbury’s and the less pretentious but equally useless ‘Guideline daily amounts’ on Tesco packaging.  In case you cannot recall them, these little note-diagrams comprise 5 of the entries from the Nutrition Information listThis list is: calories, fat, saturated fat, sugars and salt.  I imagine the list has been chosen quite carefully by marketing types and focus groups.  It certainly has not been chosen by scientists.  Typically, the information is also used to give the listing a colour code – apparently red is dangerous, amber is not that good for you, and green is fine.  Despite my blustering tone you might be wondering what all the fuss is about – it is perfectly reasonable to want to advise and inform people on what they are buying.  And that is fine.  If it is that.  But it is not.  

The trouble with telling people how low in fat or amazingly sugarless a product is, especially with a  crass colour-coding system, is that the logical outcome is that a set of five green wedges in the Wheel of Health is something to aspire to.  Now these quintupletly-green-wedged foods may or may not be more profitable than others (fat is cheap, emulsifiers are not), but there is seemingly no understanding of where this leads.  Their website (See here) explains the Wheel of Health (also called the traffic light system) very breifly, and suggests rather patronisingly that we should “Try to go for more greens and ambers, and fewer reds”.  Yes.  Well.  Should we, though? 

It has been true for years that people could do with eating less fat and doing more exercise.  Various gimmicky inventions have been marketed to help with this.  My favourite is the caffeine tights.  Though, in the words of Stephen Fry, they are “not going to dissolve a fat arse”.  Do these colourful labellings help with that?  Of course not.  The trouble is that this system presents the ‘healthiest’ foods as being the ones that contain the least of anything: five green wedges means no energy, fat, sugars or salt.  This makes about the healthiest thing in the supermarket a 250 mL bottle of soda water.  What a load of tosh!  Soda water is great but if it were to disappear it would not be a great loss to humanity.  A loss to the drinks cabinet perhaps, but we would survive pretty well.  What it would not be would be a loss of the healthiest food in the cupboard.

An opposing argument might be that people probably do not take much notice of these diagrams.  I have not done any research on that—much as I would love to stand in a supermarket with a clipboard and a nauseating market-research-type-jolly manner, obviously—but a lassez faire attitude, or simply not having the time for them is believable.  And obviously someone on a diet or who is geeky (myself included) will probably ignore such parts of the label and repair immediately to the full nutrition information list.  In which case it begs the question of why it is there at all.  This is redoubled if we factor in seeing a nice-looking lemon tart that has been reduced in price and we buy it irrespective of the fact of having gone in to the supermarket only to buy the 'healthiest' thing in the shop in our jodhpurs.  Or is that just me?

Either way, these systems are long over-due for a re-think.  The list of nutrition information is a great idea, and even things that make this information accessible to consumers is also good.  But it is only good if it has a point.  This does not.  

The Scourge of Aspartame...

‘Aspartame is really bad for you’.  ‘You should avoid foods with aspartame in them’.  These appear to be the take-home messages from a variety of websites that state clearly that they think this compound is bad for human health.  They claim that this compound is the cause of a plethora of illnesses from passing headaches to Gulf Warsyndrome and cancer of the brain.  Needless to say they are not the BBC News website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news) or the latest issue of The Lancet (http://www.thelancet.com).  What is from The Lancet are a variety of articles that make interesting reading on the subject. 

            It is well known that aspartame breaks down into aspartic acid, phenylalanine and methanol.  Aspartic acid and phenylalanine are both amino acids and are thus a necessary constituent of the proteinous parts of our bodies.  Methanol is not required in our diet and is toxic in higher doses, however Alan Meyers, of the Boston Medical Centre, did a basic calculation with respect to the products of the breakdown of aspartame (PDF here for subscribers).  Here, he notes that there is approximately twice as much methanol in the equivalent volume of fruit juice as there is in a soft drink containing aspartame.  As one might expect, Harriet Butchko, a representative from NutraSweet, also put forward strong evidence that Aspartame is not the known cause of brain cancers (PDF here for subscribers) in response to a claim that it is mutagen.  ‘Mutagen’ sounds like something out of Red Dwarf but is deadly serious – literally.  Mutagens cause mutations (these scientists are cunning with their words, as you can see).  Mutations are the name given to damage to strands of DNA.  This damage can cause changes to the ‘blue prints’ that our cells rely upon to make themselves.  Mutations can lead to cancers.  However, the evidence to date suggests that aspartame and its metabolic products are not mutagenic. 

          This is a big relief all round, given the number and types of foods that we would have to avoid if we wanted to avoid this compound.  What the argument reminds me of, and in particular the sort of arguments put forward by those trying to sell books on the subject (PDF here for subscribers) is why we buy into these ideas – intellectually if we believe it, and financially if we buy the book.  Is it sensational excitement?  This sells newspapers, and so we know it exists by that token of course.  I think it is partly this, but I also think it has much to do with human nature and how we have evolved.  A recent BBC series about Homo sapiens, that was almost completely scientifically sound, included episodes on our struggle against similar human species, namely Homo Erectus (iPlayer video here  for viewers in the UK, for a limited time), and Neanderthals (iPlayer video here, again for UK views for a limited time) .  Of course we cannot be sure what these other species were like precisely, but one way or another we outdid them.  Although they still haunt us: between 1-4% of our genome (the ‘full set’ of DNA that makes up a species) is Neanderthal.  Is one of those reasons we survived and they did not the fact that we are a bit more nervous than the others were?  We panic, we can imagine a danger to be imminent, in order to protect ourselves from things that could hurt us?  Perhaps aspartame is one of those things.  Perhaps climate change is too (the last decade has seen the six warmest years on record but the industrial-scale release of carbon that has been happening for hundreds of years has failed to produce Armageddon), or the perils of travel by railway (Spartacus link here). 

Either way, we are still here, and one day extinction will occur, whether or not we put sugar in our tea.