The Tax Payers' Alliance and the BBC

I'm getting fed up with the bloody Tax Payers' Alliance. They seem to crop up more and more on the news and in newspapers, trotted out to provide a comment about council or government spending which usually involves them saying that whatever it is is bad news, and that tax payers demand better.

The Guardian has been giving them some attention recently, exposing their funding and ties to right wing politics. It's ironic that many of their highest profile supporters are also people who benefit most from government spending such as those involved in building the 2012 infrastructure (the Olympics being a TPA target) or transport subsidies (don't get the TPA started on that). The contradictions are rife.

As the cleverly named anti-TPA group The Other Taxpayers' Alliance points out, journalists seem keen to include quotes from an organisation that only has 20,000 "members" (they don't pay, just sign up to an email) rather than, say, a union that represents a million or more taxpayers.

It's worth visiting The Other Taxpayers' Alliance for some excellent analysis of the TPA and an amusing quote generator.

I read a story on the BBC's news website earlier that typifies the sort of crap we're having to put up with. Kent County Council has spent £20,000 on producing an online soap opera to help educate young people about issues such as sexual health and personal safety. Sounds interesting, sounds innovative, sounds like the sort of thing that other councils and organisations would be interested in hearing more about. Let's see some samples, let's hear from the people involved, let's hear from some of the target audience. What a great story! Does it work? Does in not work? £20,000 seems quite cheap...

Oh but I'm sorry! The story doesn't cover any of that. Instead it simply says how much it cost and then devotes a third of the story to a quote from Matthew Elliot, chief executive of TPA which the BBC describes as a "pressure group which campaigns for lower taxes."

Here's the section:

The TaxPayers' Alliance said people would prefer to pay lower council tax than spend money on experimental drama.
Matthew Elliot, chief executive of the pressure group which campaigns for lower taxes, said: "I'm sure most taxpayers would rather their money was in their pocket in the form of lower council tax, especially in the middle of a recession.
"Most young people will see through such blatant propaganda.
"It would be better to teach them about these issues in the classroom than try to be young and hip, reaching them by online television."

So here we have a problem. It's clear Matthew Elliot hasn't seen the video, or spoken to the people involved. He says "I'm sure most taxpayers would rather their money was in their pocket in the form of lower taxes". So he's not talking about research here - he hasn't gone out and asked anyone. He's offering an opinion. But he hasn't offered any evidence or context. For example, how much does Kent County Council spend on youth education and other projects each year? What's £20,000 as a proportion of that? How much does it cost to get someone off drugs? Or help a single teenage mother?
He then says "Most young people will see through such blatant propaganda" but hey, if a journalist at the BBC can't see through the TPA's blatant propaganda I think it's a fairly safe bet that young people will fall for anything too. Never mind, because there's another contradiction here: "It would be better to teach them about these issues in the classroom" because of course, young people will fall for anything if it's taught in the classroom in front of their peers rather than watched privately at home, won't they? You don't have to be a genius to know why online video is likely to be more successful than forcing a lesson on teenagers from a teacher who'd rather be talking about anything other than underage sex.

The Other Taxpayers' Alliance has a very funny media guide on their site which includes an analysis of a story on Moray council's advertisement for a street football coordinator. The TPA spat feathers and their press release was dutifully printed in various newspapers without any attempt at seeing the bigger picture. Their assertion was that spending money on someone to set up street football was a waste of money as all it takes is a couple of jumpers for goalposts and a football. Er, wrong! Street football is actually an excellent scheme that has managed to reduce petty crime and vandalism in areas where it's been tried out. It saves more money than it costs, but it needs coordinating because just dumping a couple of cardigans in the road doesn't cut it.
Street football is an excellent example of an easy, cheap scheme that gets results and should be encouraged. It saves taxpayers money, it doesn't cost them anything. But the arses at TPA don't care about that. They don't do research, they don't network, they don't think.

Well I give in. I just sent a complaint to the BBC which I've asked them to reply to. I'll post their response here when it comes. I think it's ironic that the BBC, a taxpayer-funded organisation that really should know better, is stooping to the same level as tabloids by failing to give value for money by simply recycling a press release and not entering into any actual journalism beyond getting a balancing quote from the council rather than, oh I don't know, talking to the people involved?
It's also ironic that the BBC is reporting this story without realising that the biggest producer of educational video tackling similar topics is... the BBC! Brilliant.

Here's my complaint:

In your story on an innovative scheme in Kent to educate young people on social issues using online drama, the report gives a great deal of coverage to criticism from the Tax Payers Alliance. There is no analysis and there are no examples of the videos in question.

There is no attempt to interview people who work in the area - for example social workers or teachers - or who have worked on the project, or to talk to the intended audience. Neither is there any context provided, For example, have similar schemes produced results? What are the costs associated with the issues being dealt with (for example, how much does it cost taxpayers to deal with the consequences of poor sexual health or personal safety?)

The quote from TPA is clearly one from someone who knows nothing about the issues involved, or who has seen the materials, or who has entered in to any research on the matter. The UK has many academics and professionals who would have been better options for comments based on knowledge, rather than politics.

This is a potentially very interesting story but has been turned in to the sort of thing I'd expect from a tabloid newspaper - hardly the standard I expect from the BBC. Perhaps the TPA should be asked if this is the sort of quality journalism we expect from our license fee?

I am particularly concerned that you have used the Tax Payers Alliance, yet again, for a comment. This organisation is not representative of tax payers, undertakes no research other than a trawl through local papers looking for odd-sounding stories and, as demonstrated in this story, is clearly willing to come up with some damning reactionary quote rather than look in to the story more carefully before offering a considered opinion.
It's "membership" is tiny, especially compared with, say, the unions that represent the people concerned here: social workers, teachers, council staff. Or, indeed, the many voluntary organisations that work in this area. These would have made far better sources.

This is a very poorly written story, and relies on an uneducated non-specialist comment to frame the project as "a waste of money" when in fact it could be money very well spent. A better-researched story might have offered illumination. Instead it demonstrates poor practice and poor journalism.

Why eBooks must fail

John Naughton, writing in The Guardian, identifies excellent reasons why eBooks must fail:

I own my copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four and can do with it what I wish. I can, for example, lend it to friends, family and students. I can, if I wish, tear out pages and send them to people in the post, or stick them up on noticeboards. I can sell the book - if I could find a buyer. I can donate it to the local Oxfam shop. I can read sobering or inflammatory passages from it at political demonstrations. And so on.

But if I had purchased an electronic copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four to read on my Kindle device, I would have none of those freedoms

[...]

Up to now, the debate about eBooks has been dominated by technical issues: ergonomics, portability, storage capacity, the readability of display screens, the quality of the user interface and so on. These are important matters, but ignore the biggest issue of all, namely the ways in which the technology enables content owners to assert a level of control over the reader that would be deemed unconscionable - and unacceptable - in the world of print.

He's right - designers tend to focus on the aesthetic and affective aspects - how useable is the technology, how open is it, does it replicate the "experience" of reading a paperback... but the real "experience" of reading a book is bound up in the tactile and the social. Lending a book to someone - or even just saying you'll lend it to someone, is an important part of reading.

All the hoo-hah about Amazon deleting books and tracking what you do with what you buy aside, the real issue with eBooks is that all the focus and research has gone into the technology and completely missed what it means to read a really good book.

(Via MediaGuardian.co.uk.)

Graphic designers and cabbies

In a discussion with a journalist from Times Higher Education last week about Twitter he asked how I responded to critics who said Twitter threatened to "dumb down" education and research I speculated that the same complaint was probably made about moveable type (Guttenberg, not the blogging tool).

Stephen Bayley over in The Observer asks if technology makes us stupid.

All new technologies, going back to fire and the wheel, by way of movable type and light bulbs, de-skill people. Old crafts are abandoned or lost in favour of automation. And when you de-skill someone, you alter not only his culture, but his personality. Satnav has done this to black-cab drivers. Once this proud tribe had a private religion known as the Knowledge; all of London's streets had to be memorised. It was an amazing feat achieved only after great effort, and consequently it was admired and therefore empowering and dignifying. The Knowledge gave black-cab drivers what the marketeers call a "point of difference".

Now any larrikin can buy a satnav for £199 and tell you how to get from Edmonton to Peckham by using rat runs. The USP of the black cab has disappeared in a miasma of pixels. As a result, some urban anthropologists have noted a change in behaviour of cab drivers. Once known for courtesy and reliability, many have become sullen and aggressive. This is because technology has democratised their proprietary knowledge and beliefs.

When I read that I thought "you could say the same about graphic designers as for cab drivers". By which I mean the invention of Photoshop, QuarkXpress and so on. I know, I was there at the time. My first job interview consisted of a guy throwing me out of his studio because he wanted a paste-up artist - a skill - not a Mac operator. His business didn't last long after that.
Funny thing is, I still hear it. Bitter old men (and not so old, and not always men) bemoaning the loss of respect for their once proud profession.

The thing is, being a cabbie is more than just taking someone from one address to another. Surly cabbies are missing their real USP if they think the satnav has castrated them.
There is a difference between "skill" and "craft". And "the knowledge" is more than knowing the quickest route from A to B.

Designers need to bear that in mind, too.

New design-related schools diploma - competition or support for product design degrees?

The Guardian reports that:

The government's qualifications regulator, Ofqual, has accredited five new diplomas that will be taught from September next year.

The diplomas will be in business, administration and finance, environmental and land-based studies, hospitality, and manufacturing and product design.

Whether this diverts potential design students straight in to industry rather than in to colleges or universities remains to be seen. And of course, whether that's a good thing or a bad thing also remains to be seen. But the immediate(ish) implications are clear: in the next few years product design courses will start to see applications from students with diplomas, not A-levels. That needs some preparation.

What the New Yorker teaches us about visual literacy

Richard Adams on the New Yorker cover 'scandal' makes a valid point:

John McCain can say that he doesn't know much about economics and later deny it flatly, then have one of his top economic advisors say it will take one term for a McCain presidency to balance the budget, only to turn on a dime and say it will take two term, and almost nothing of it gets reported in the media. But hey, Jesse Jackson gets overheard using the word 'nuts' and it's time to break out the ink.

If that's what the 'mainstream' news media can do when left to their own devices, a cartoon is nothing.

Seems to me, as one of the commenters on this article says, this is another example (like the 'nuts' episode) of the media reporting on itself rather than on the stories.

But it also suggests something else: when we start summing up complex issues in illustrated form the scope for misunderstanding is huge.
At the New Views conference it was asked why critiques of design have to rely on words, why can't we use design? (Similar arguments are made in favour of letting students create 'visual dissertations') Because writing depends on redundancy - it contains clauses, clarifications, opportunities to go off on tangents or rehearse devil's advocate positions. Create a design to critique a design and you can't guarantee that the message will be decoded correctly. The irony here is that I've just read several thousand words explaining what the New Yorker cartoon is supposed to be saying.

I think the New Yorker cover is a brave attempt to highlight the way the media and others pick apart minutae like the Obamas' fist bump, unpicking images (often because there's not really enough real news to fill a 24 hour news 'culture') but falls foul of precisely the same problems: images have no redundancy. The article that accompanies the cartoon is a few thousand words long and makes it clear what it is saying. The cartoon has no words and is consequently translated differently depending on who reads it, or (importantly in this case) reads about it. If the cover had instead been a cartoon alongside the article it might have made sense. As a cover, it doesn't and simply exacerbates the problem it seeks to analyse.

Barthes famously said that images are polysemous, they have multiple meanings. Text, he said, fixes meaning.
I don't think we've yet reached a level of visual literacy (or ever will?) where images like this can be divorced from the textual context.

"Do let me know if Mr. V. Williams has an important premiere in the future as this findability might allow us to reconsider"

There's a great (and somewhat worrying) article over at The Guardian about a forthcoming documentary on one of my favourite composers, Ralph Vaughan Williams:

One of television's most imaginative film-makers has condemned Mark Thompson's leadership of the BBC as a 'catastrophe' and accused the corporation of undermining its worldwide reputation by insulting the intelligence of viewers.

Tony Palmer, who has won more than 40 awards including Baftas, Emmys and, uniquely, the Prix Italia twice, criticised the director-general after the BBC turned down a documentary of his. The film, about English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, has been produced by Five instead.

Palmer said he received an extraordinary rejection letter from a BBC commissioning editor explaining that, 'having looked at our own activity via the lens of find, play & share', it had been decided the film did not fit with 'the new vision for [BBC] Vision'.

Bizarrely, Palmer said, the letter concluded: 'But good luck with the project, and do let me know if Mr. V. Williams has an important premiere in the future as this findability might allow us to reconsider.' Vaughan Williams died in 1958.

It's worth pointing out that Palmer is refusing to show the letter to anyone or name its author, and the BBC claims ignorance (and that it is already making a documentary on Vaughan Williams). If it's true, though, it's very sad in so many ways, as it suggests that there are people acting as gatekeepers at the BBC who have no knowledge of British culture, and that what Private Eye refers to as 'Birtspeak' is alive and well. 'Findability'? What the hell's that?

However, The Guardian has a nerve. A later paragraph in the article says "Vaughan Williams, whose best known symphonies include The Lark Ascending and Fantasia on Greensleeves"... Duh. RVW wrote nine symphonies and not one of them was called The Lark Ascending or Fantasia on Greensleeves. They are works for orchestra (the former for violin and orchestra), but most definitely not symphonies.

Fools.

The good news is the 2.5 hour documentary did get made and will be shown on Channel 5 (the former soft porn channel, no less) on New Year's Day. Can't wait.