Just how amateurish is modern journalism?

There's an utterly bizarre piece by Carl Packman running on Liberal Conspiracy at the moment entitled 'The Orwell Prize, Johann Hari and nicking words' which basically argues that Hari should not have the Orwell Prize withdrawn from him because George Orwell himself was guilty of much the same crime when he "copied" the plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four from We by the Russian author Zamyatin.  Packman specifically calls the two plots "identical".  Well, from memory, I've read Nineteen Eighty-Four three or four times and We twice, and indeed I read the two more or less back-to-back when I was studying English Literature many moons ago, so I think I might just have spotted it if they had been identical.  There are certainly many broad-brush similarities - both novels feature a protagonist who rebels against an ultra-totalitarian state by falling in love with a woman, whom he ultimately betrays after psychological conditioning by not caring about what happens to her.  But that kind of borrowing of ideas, which I gather Orwell openly acknowledged, falls light-years short of what Hari has done.  Packman's own title gives the game away - Hari quite literally "nicked words" by directly lifting responses from interviews conducted by other people, and by using passages from the published work of his interviewees.  In what sense did Orwell nick the words used in Nineteen Eighty-Four? He didn't.  Argument falls.

This is of course just another example of a sustained attempt by some to defend Hari on the grounds that everyone is "at it" to some degree.  But even if that were true, it's not so much a vindication of Hari as it is an argument for a root-and-branch reform of modern journalistic practices.  My own minor brush with this kind of thing came as a result of the fact that I used to be an active contributor to Wikipedia.  There were a number of occasions when something written in the mainstream media seemed uncannily close to my own Wikipedia edits, most notably parts of a Sunday Times profile of Alex Salmond that appeared in the run-up to the 2007 election.  That wouldn't constitute plagiarism, of course, because it's perfectly permissible to copy Wikipedia articles without attribution, but all the same it was startling to realise that some professional journalists operate - seemingly routinely - in such an amateurish way.

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Voluntary Work is Compulsory.

I'm really pleased to see Caron Lindsay state so forcefully that in her view Liberal Democrat MPs should vote down 'compulsory community service for the unemployed' - which, incidentally, I also think is a very fair characterisation of what is apparently being proposed. I suppose some might quibble that, in contrast to community service, the unemployed will have the option of not doing the work and simply losing their benefit - but if that benefit is all that's keeping them fed, it's a rather meaningless distinction. Nevertheless, Political Betting's Mike Smithson had his own name for the proposals last night (and, no, I don't think there was any irony intended) -

"compulsory voluntary work for job-seekers"

Orwell would have had a field day. It's a timely illustration of how pernicious these ideologically-loaded terms are that someone could ever unthinkingly put together such a phrase.

Here comes a candle to light you to bed...

So a Lords committee has condemned the erosion of citizens' privacy inherent in the storage of innocent people's data on the DNA database, and the fact that we now have the highest number of CCTV cameras per head of population in the world. The government's response is the familiar one - the impact on privacy is a justifiable trade-off for the reduction of crime, and is one that many people feel perfectly comfortable with. Indeed, they actually feel safer for always being watched. But, as I mused on Twitter a couple of hours ago, where does this logic end? After all, there are some people who believe sufficiently in the benevolence of the authorities that they would feel perfectly comfortable with - and safer because of - government-controlled cameras in their bedroom. Such an Orwellian vision may seem fanciful at the moment, but the logic of the current position has a kind of inexorability to it - after all, rape in particular is such a notoriously difficult crime to prove, and how else will that ever change without blanket surveillance extending to the most intimate areas of people's lives? If a marker isn't put down somewhere, a government camera in every bedroom could be sold as a price worth paying within a few decades.

PS. I set up the Twitter account last night to give me another way of at least keeping this page ticking over should my interest in blogging wane a little from time to time (if you've followed this blog you'll know that's not entirely inconceivable). Knowing me, though, now I've said that I'll probably end up not updating either one!