The BBC has a real problem with social media. It’s delighted when something new appears. It slips into the patrician role that comes naturally to broadcasters – and especially the BBC. It can express childlike wonderment – Wow! – at something new and amazing. Getting beyond that though, is where the trouble starts.

Perhaps the BBC is haunted by the idea that people simply get on and use new communication tools without “Auntie’s” assistance. The viewers typically also have much more realistic expectations of the technology than, say, pundits. So we keep hearing wonderment, and advice on how get online, a bit like a slightly mad primary school teacher.

The gears really grind when something more critical is required. This week the corporation’s news flagship Newsnight – one of the last remaining TV programmes for grown-ups – asked if there was a “tech bubble”. Investment is pouring into social media startups. Would it all end in tears?

Yet having the posed the question, the report and discussion that followed were designed to dispel understanding and analysis. Before long it had turned into a gathering of the Unicorn Preservation Society. We were even told that only people who might want to describe the web investments a “bubble” were self-serving opportunists.

Bad people, in other words, thinking bad thoughts.

Newsnight turned to two dot.com era stalwarts: socialite Julie Meyer (a sort of lender of last resort to desperate start-ups) and LastMinute.com founder Brent Hoberman. Joining them for the panel discussion was a media studies lecturer called Chris Brauer, who has a vested interest in the outcome. He is a director of “a strategic advisory and interactive services firm solving digital media challenges for a global portfolio of clients”. It wasn’t hard to guess his view. Alongside him was – inexplicably – Boo.com founder Ernst Malmstein. And another man with a horse in the race, Bob Metcalfe, beamed in from the US. Metcalfe is a partner in Polaris Ventures, and the horses are here.

Was 2011 like 1999? No, insisted Brauer.

“They have all sorts of revenue models and are more stable than 1999,” he said. He went on to suggest that anyone who feared the speculation might end had dark motives. Don’t listen to the spoilsports, he said:

“We’ve got to be really careful about calling it a bubble. A lot of people want to be seen to be anticipate it,” Brauer mused.

“They want to be the ones to say we warned you,” chimed in the presenter, Mishal Husain, with the delight of someone at last recognising an idea they felt comfortable with.

Now as a thought experiment, try substituting the word “finance bubble” for “tech bubble”, and “credit derivatives” for “web startups” in the text you’ve just read. In each case, the viewer needs to know the basis for the valuation. How is it calculated? What is it measured against? What’s the track record of third-party web add-ons for turning into profitable companies? Do companies float, or are they bought out?

At no point did Newsnight try to explain where the value might be. Rory Cellan Jones might have been handy here, for although he’s a paid up member of the Twitter cult, he knows a bullshit-powered business case when he sees it.

In fact, the intelligent viewer will have spotted the flaw in the valuations, but Newsnight either didn’t recognise it, or if it did, moved swiftly on. Julie Meyer told us the companies receiving investments were largely revenue-free, but the valuations were justified because they might become a “platform”. This can only refer to Facebook and Twitter – not the start-ups – although this was never made clear to the viewer.

Many of the start-ups are simply third-party add-ons to Facebook, are not “platforms”, and have no chance of ever becoming “platforms”, either. Yet Facebook and Twitter themselves were struggling for revenue and were being forced to eat the third party. This effectively told us the bubble will burst. But it wasn’t allowed to spoil the discussion. The Unicorn was left to gambol about unmolested in the Magic Garden for a bit longer.

You may have your own theory about why TV has a blindness when it comes to covering web business in a grown-up way. Perhaps the producers secretly wish they were in Shoreditch, hanging out at Bar Barian with Steve Bong and Ophelia Whimsy. But I suspect that the real reasons are more prosaic.

Thinking of unicorns allows TV people to avoid thinking about technology. Right now, money is currently pouring into fascinating technologies such as synthetic hydrocarbons. But when the BBC or a marketing person says “tech”, they mean the wibbly, wobbly web. A focus on the web means the journalist can avoid all that complicated stuff like science – some of which, apparently, smells quite unpleasant. Far easier to mystify it.

The problem is much of this defies mystification. The social media bits and bobs are useful but quite dull bits of comms infrastructure: like a PBX switch, or a phone book. They’ll never be completely useless, or ever be in a position to be vastly profitable. (Software is easily copied, and users jump very easily between web services). But as long as journalists can continue to imbue them with “childlike wonder”, they can continue in their comfort zone, and avoid reality in another way: by not looking at a balance sheet. That too, they find difficult and unpleasant.

And this is what (most) journalists failed to do last time. The crash followed.

Calder invites us to have a giggle, but really it’s not a bad list at all, and compared with the (cough) ‘futurists’ who have come and gone since, Calder and the participants did a good job. Alvin Toffler was repackaging these ideas, particularly mass amateurisation, many years later. As are thousands of Web 2.0 consultants today.

Read more at The Register

The segment on Monday’s Simon Mayo drive time heard Madeley, who is filling in for Mayo, say:

“What a pain! I only got computer literate three years ago, just as I get wised up to it, they take it away.”

We don’t yet know how many car accidents were caused by the news of mass confiscations.

Madeley was following a segment of the show about the Digital Economy Bill (now Act). The sole ‘expert’ was Professor Lilian Edwards. Edwards was simply billed as “a Professor of Law” at Sheffield University.

Edwards made some curious statements about “disconnections” (not mentioned in the Act) and how libraries might have to put passwords on their PCs. Libraries already operate a pretty strict lock-down regime: requiring password authentication, firewalls, and prohibiting the installation of Third Party software. But she insisted: “Even if you do password protect it, policing it may get very expensive.”

Even this didn’t raise any suspicions amongst the show’s presenters. But then, why would it – Edwards presented herself an unbiased expert.

Asked why some Twitterers were upset about the Bill, Edwards replied:

“I’ve been thinking about this. It’s a hard thing to say on a music station, but the House of Commons thinks most important thing here is the music industry – which is of course important – but these people think the most important thing is the future of the internet, and I tend to agree with them.”

The problem for Radio 2 is that the show breached the Corporations’ editorial guidelines. Edwards is a member of the Open Rights Group’s Advisory Council, and she relentlessly blogs about the coming armageddon – not always accurately – here. As an ORG advisor her duties include to “Fundraise and/or make fundraising introductions” and “Be available for media contact if required”.

By failing to declare Edwards’ partisan affiliations, the show fell foul of the guideline, which states:

…we should not automatically assume that academics and journalists from other organisations are impartial and make it clear to our audience when contributors are associated with a particular viewpoint

A spokesperson told us on Friday:

“We are aware of the issues you have raised with us and are currently looking into the matter.”

It’s amazing what the title ‘Professor’ can do.

Is that surprising? It should be, because Clause 43 is the section that deals with ‘orphan works’ – and according to the Business department BIS, the only people who are supposed to benefit from the unique powers it confers are special parties: copyright libraries, such as the British Library. These are non-commercial operations. Clause 43 was never intended act as a leg-up for tight-fisted publishers.

But here they are.

As we noted recently, Clause 43 gives new powers to use an image for which the owner can’t be found. And the prospective user doesn’t really have to try too hard. Effectively the state “nationalises” orphans and gives a free collective licence to anyone who asks.

The Copyright Alliance has noted that the BBC has been lobbying hard along with two publishers groups (The Publishers Association and The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers), two collective licensing agencies (The Copyright Licensing Agency and the Educational Recording Agency) and the BFI are involved.
Photographers’ website Copyright Action, which revealed the lobbying, notes:

“Government has wandered a long way from assisting the British Library et al, to use orphaned and abandoned work for the public interest – a project we have never opposed.”

“We are instead facing wholesale changes to our copyright that Government has been persuaded will assist these ‘creative industries; to make more profit, not from creating more or creating better, but by enabling yet more brute power over the individuals and small companies who actually create the work they all depend upon.”

It shows how the anti-copyright lobby – which trades under the misleading banner of “digital rights” and insists that it’s fighting copyright middlemen – ends up strengthening those entrenched interests at the expense of the creator. Creators are collateral damage in the war against The Man.

Photographers have an excellent resource to rally against the clause: Stop 43. The deadline to take action against this landgrab is April 6.

First published at The Register

Usually when this happens, BBC producers often conclude “they’re doing something right”, and pour themselves a large, congratulatory drink. They shouldn’t, because while the program succeeded in trying to be “fair”, it failed in its larger mission to present the issue properly – something we already understand.

One luxury journalists have left is to call bullshit on self-interested parties – to ask whether they really represented anyone in particular or whether their arguments had consequences. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, TV journalism used to do this all the time. But not this time. The issue was viewed through lobbyists’ eyes. And because equal time was given to a cross-section of lobbyists, the BBC will doubtless insist this was fair and balanced. Yet if the Honourable Old Duffers in the House of Lords can make monkeys out of the lobbyists – and debate legal P2P – why can’t the BBC?

I’ve written many times that the anti-change contingent at record companies and the freetards are sides of the same reactionary coin. They both staked out a position many years ago, probably back when John Perry Barlow was giving his 1995 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace speech, and they like it there: they haven’t had a new thought since. It’s all very static.

On the one side is idea that coercion will cause “behaviour change”, leading to the public embracing the current set of retail choices. This permits them to apply the might and logic of physical distribution control in a digital world, and avoids embracing structural reform. On the other side is the idea that music just had to be free, just because some people demanded it must be – therefore it had no value. Or that the property right couldn’t be defended, because doing so was implicitly oppressive. Every technological revolution has made creators richer, yet in this one, they’re collateral damage. The possibilites that new technology opens all go legal eventually, as black markets go white. To deny this – as both sides do – requires self-interested and incredibly unimaginative arguments. We got no shortage of those.

Panorama simply didn’t dare raise questions on behalf of the viewer and look at the future of music delivery.

Dumb and dumber

The clue that the BBC would not dare ask bold questions came quite early on. Producers chose quite possibly the dumbest family in Britain. One dad of four said his teenage daughter used his work laptop every night and he didn’t know how to stop this. Uh. Password? (Obviously the kids ran this household.)

Mum said she depended on the household computer for two jobs, but didn’t know what was going on.

Towards the end, a residential student and heavy BitTorrent user whose connection was being throttled said she thought music should be free anyway… but now life wasn’t worth living. She looked very unhappy, her eyes glued to the screen, as the Torrents trickled in – now very, very slowly. Did she even have an offline life?

When the BBC chooses people this dumb as representatives of us, we can infer it thinks we’re all this dumb.

prompting a debate on the idea of creating a legitimate business out of P2P file sharing was discussed by the House of Lords last month. Some favour a compulsory tax. Others favour a legitimate market, which doesn’t tax people for a service they don’t use (that’s at least two thirds of UK users) and who prefer a la carte or nothing at all. But even the most naive Peers showed rather more thought than the artists (hello, Billy Bragg, yet again), industry people, or activists.

Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised because as the fantastic Tweets I’ve captured demonstrate, file sharing is the political issue for people who don’t want to do politics. It’s much more like a cartoon virtual reality game, where you adopt a character (eg ‘Hulk’) as you step into the cartoon arena. Just grunt and roar according to character. (The LibDems’ Lord Clement Jones has belatedly realised this – that whatever politics you try to please the freetards, you’ll always lose.) It’s the ultimate expression of democracy, Web 2.0, a parody of the real thing.

And so copyright has become the perfect issue for the eternal juvenile. It’s like the man who hated the Eiffel Tower so much, he had to go up to the top every day. It was the only place in Paris from which he couldn’t see the Eiffel Tower.

This is some way short of calling for the channels to be scrapped, as reported today. In fact, Hunt said exactly the same thing last September. It’s also less than the £172m the BBC overspent on three building projects (one of which is the £1bn – that really is billion – makeover of Broadcasting House), the National Audit Office reported last week. But it is a slow week for news.

Last week the BBC tried to pre-empt Tory cuts with a strategy review that committed to Reithian goals (ie quality programming) but which left as little as possible unchanged. 6Music was a token sacrificial lamb – and quite a badly chosen one. So Hunt is simply pointing out the obvious. The two channels are an expensive administrative overhead, if the goal is simply to have more quality.

Both channels broadcast only in the evenings, and only on digital. BBC4 is the corporation’s arts ghetto, set up to take the traditional highbrow programming away from BBC2, leaving it clear for cookery and makeover shows. While BBC3 is supposed to be … well, what exactly? The remit is to be ‘populist’ and attract young viewers, but since BBC staff rarely venture further north than Muswell Hill, it’s a strange mix of somebody’s idea of what ordinary people might like who has been away a long time, with the emphasis on the demotic. For example the ‘comedy’ has lots of swearing, to cover up the lack of wit.

There’s a funny echo from history here. North London BBC execs have great difficulty trying to imagine who a Daily Express reader might be. Churchill had the same problem.

In his memoirs, Anthony Burgess (who was raised in a Moss Side pub) describes how during World War 2, Churchill would try and engage with the working class. Having no idea who they were, or what they liked, the Prime Minister imagined that they swore a lot, so he’d steam into a crowd effing and blinding. The result was near riots.

Mark Thompson’s review, leaked to the Times today, was supposed to review the Corporation’s output, and it could have helped made inroads into this culture, but it hasn’t. And although the “cuts” are trumpeted to fall on digital operations such as web and DAB, you know what will happen next.

Of course bureaucracy has been the winner of the past ten years – the public sector middle manager on private sector wages and perks is as much a symbol of the era as was the Victorian mill owner. The BBC is no exception. Whether it’s a ‘crisis’ (Ross/Brand) or an opportunity (Web 2.0), layers of process are added at the corporation.

To give you an example of the scale of just the BBC’s new media gravy train, a year ago the Corporation advertised the replacement of one “social media executive” position with five social media executives at the same pay grade – almost £60,000 a year a piece. Before expenses.

The job means nagging hard-working producers (whose jobs and pay have been cut to make way for the Web2.0rhea suits) with “best practice” advice on how to Twitter, blog and handle Commentards. But really the job means drawing up Powerpoints, showing them at meetings, Twittering, drawing up codes of Twittering, and going to lots of New Media conferences. The tagline on one social media executive’s blog is “Talking Is Working”. No, really.

In Darwinian terms, a social media executive is an adaptation that isn’t really fit for any purpose.

But the cuts proposed to the BBC’s web operation for example, if reports are correct, leave many of this new class intact. A quarter of the web’s £112m budget will be cut, but this includes yoof “strands” that encompass the Switch and Blast websites.

Over £600m more has been found for “quality” programming, but there’s less money for imports, which can often be top quality. Radio 6 Music may have only around 25,000 people listening at any one time, but it’s cheap compared to BBC3 TV. BBC3 is supposed to be a ‘feeder’ channel, much like big football clubs have feeder clubs, to introduce and nurture talent before it’s ready for prime time.

But BBC2 used to do that. And BBC3 has the same bureaucracy and cost structure as a big club.

For the first time ever in the BBC’s history a majority of people want an alternative to the current compulsory tax of the Licence Fee. It’s under attack from all directions – for being too commercial, or not commercial enough.

But I have a theory: most people who carp about the Beeb would rather it just produced good stuff. It could start to treat people intelligently and use its resources to describe the wonders and flashpoints of science, the arts and history. When it tries to do so, rather than worry about offending people, or preaching, it can do it quite well.

I reckon that if it could do that consistently, the critics would find themselves in a minority quite quickly. But instead of trying to be amazing, the BBC has become defensive and unadventurous, scored unnecessary own goals by adopting tendentious positions on environmentalism and Europe (to pick two examples: the Post Office closures and Redcar), and added layers of bureaucracy. The most amazing creative output the BBC does today seems to be advertisements for itself. It’s become terrified of its audience.

Instead of becoming lean and mean and focussed on innovation, the BBC can always rely on evoking two myths: what I call the Horlicks myth and the Murdoch myth. The first is that the BBC’s roots in the British national identity are so deep that its funding and objectives can never be questioned. To do so would be like renaming the RAF the Luftwaffe.

The second is that only the BBC stands between national culture and “barbarism”, in the shape of Mr Murdoch. But the BBC has long been a ruthless commercial operator – swallowing up publishers such as Lonely Planet.

Meanwhile Murdoch’s fragile empire lost $5bn last year – the year the Beeb was adding layers of social media executives, and writing enormous producer guidelines about what is a rude word.

This looks like a review with the review part missing.

For the first time, a top BBC executive admitted that DAB radio isn’t inevitable. The Director of BBC Audio and Music told Radio 4′s Feedback programme that “since I have arrived at the BBC, I certainly haven’t seen it as inevitable that we move to DAB.”

Davie continued:

“We do believe that, if radio doesn’t have a digital broadcast platform, it will be disadvantaged. I’m pretty convinced of that logic. What I’m not saying is that we have to move at 2015 if we haven’t delivered the thresholds – the right levels of listening to digital radio and to DAB. I don’t think we are on a course that is unstoppable to 2015, although we are pretty committed to a DAB switchover over time.”

Davie was responding to a deluge of negative responses unleashed by Carter’s Digital Britain report. The report, the nation’s Media Correspondents told us, would order analog radio to be switched off in 2015. Incorrectly, as it turned out. Emboldened by this, it was suddenly open season on DAB. The Tories have sniffed a vote winner, although shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt shows the same reluctance to grasp the underlying problems.

Radio 4′s Today programme sent its radio car to the remote location of er, BBC Television Centre, and discovered DAB reception “is more irritating than Norman Collier’s broken mic routine”. That is, if they could get it at all. Back in the studio, former TalkSport owner Kelvin McKenzie listed more DAB closures and concluded: “There are no advertisers out there, no listeners out there. DAB is a technology whose day is done.”

Davie was merely trying to defang the backlash. Listeners don’t like to feel bullied, and especially not bullied onto a technology that is perceived to offer only disadvantages. No one talks about the much-vaunted crystal clear reception any more, or choice, or whizzy new features.

“What we might be seeing is the opening salvo of an action folder marked ‘Possible DAB Downgrade/Exit Strategy’”, mused the radio analyst Grant Goddard. “The nuclear button might never have to be pressed, but it’s always useful to know where the exit doors are and how you are going to reach them, however little you might want to think about the DAB plane going down in flames.”

I’m not so sure.

Carter’s report failed radio by ducking two serious areas. DAB’s problems are both technological and financial, and the two are interlinked. More modern codecs offered by DMB (the DAB technologists’ preferred route) or DVB-H could cut the transmission costs, lead to cheaper sets, and give us better and more complete reception. This required something stronger than what Carter proposed – an airy desire that sets should be forward compatible somehow.

As for the financial issues which beset commercial radio, it’s hard to see how anything short of a compulsory nationalisation of Arqiva and chopping up the spectrum could help. (Arqiva is where the BBC and the Independent Broadcasting Authority’s transmission facilities, along with DTELs, the Home Office’s radio network for defence and emergency services, have ended up).

The BBC doesn’t want half of its audience to disappear overnight, either (one of the two switchover criteria is 50 per cent of listeners), so here we see Davie steering it away from backing any kind of commitment. But nor does the BBC want a fragmented world where the audience wanders off to discover more engaging material, as they have since the very beginning of radio. That’s what Davie means by “a digital broadcast platform” – he means one single, nationwide, one-to-many broadcast standard, with presets in all the receivers. The sheep must not stray from the fold.

So we’re muddling along as before, without the carriage costs being addressed, and without a firm roadmap for DAB’s successors. One thought ought to keep radio executives awake at night. By 2015, IP networks will be fully capable of IPv6 multicast, as we’ll be well into 4G (LTE) deployment by then. If half of the terrestrial radio is audience is disenfranchised overnight, the mobile operators will only be too happy to offer them – and advertisers – a home from home.

Whitehouse relates how he was ticked off for taking a cautious approach to apocalyptic predictions when a link between BSE in cattle (“Mad Cow Disease”) and vCJD in humans was accepted by government officials in 1996. Those predictions “…rested on a cascade of debateable assumptions being fed into a computer model that had been tweaked to hindcast previous data,” he writes.

“My approach was not favoured by the BBC at the time and I was severely criticised in 1998 and told I was wrong and not reporting the BSE/vCJD story correctly.”

The Beeb wasn’t alone. With bloodthirsty glee, the Observer newspaper at the time predicted millions infected, crematoria full of smoking human remains – and the government handing out suicide pills to the public. Whitehouse feels his caution is now vindicated. The number of cases traced to vCJD in the UK is now 163 – and the only suicides were farmers who had feared their livelihoods destroyed.

Writes Whitehouse:

“Reporting the consensus about climate change…is not synonymous with good science reporting. The BBC is at an important point. It has been narrow minded about climate change for many years and they have become at the very least a cliché and at worst lampooned as being predictable and biased by a public that doesn’t believe them anymore.”

Whitehouse is a former astronomer (published academic papers listed here) who became a BBC science correspondent and Science Editor at BBC Online.

The threshold for introducing a climate change angle into an unrelated story can be pretty low – have a look at this example involving a fossilized giant snake. Meanwhile activists have discovered that getting the science in a “science” story changed can be relatively easy – it just needs a little bullying by email.

More than two years ago we criticized how the BBC’s TV science flagship Horizon had abandoned explaining science in preference to fantasy. Many of you agreed.

As Whitehouse explains, an epidemic or a natural catastrophe is a compelling and dramatic narrative, too good to be spoiled by contradictory facts. So perhaps all the producers want to do is make movies – disaster movies. And so reporting the catastrophe turns the reporter into a dramatic actor in the narrative: one who’s guaranteed to be top of the billing, as long as the story lives.

You can read the essay on the CCNet list website. It’s merely a pity that he had to leave before going public with such criticism.

Listeners to BBC World Service’s Science in Action program got a nasty surprise last week. In the midst of a discussion about the large snake fossil, a scientist dropped this bombshell:

“The Planet has heated and cooled repeatedly throughout its history. What we’re doing is the rate at which we’re heating the planet is many orders of magnitude faster than any natural process – and is moving too fast for natural systems to respond.”

Hearing this, I did what any normal person would do: grab all the bags of frozen peas I could find in the ice compartment of my refridgerator, and hunker down behind the sofa to wait for Thermageddon.

Hours passed. My life flashed before my eyes a few times, and a few times more. But then I noticed that the house was still there, and so was the neighbourhood. And so was I!

Then I remembered something else.

According to our leading climate institutes, global temperatures have been static for almost a decade now. (You have to look the graphs, not the institutes’ own press releases, which typically offer similar spine-chilling predictions) . The climate scientists are now predicting more of the same, or cooler. The latter, they explained, is because natural systems are at work.

So what is some random apocalyptic nutball doing in the middle of a discussion about paleontology. How did he get here? Did he just wander into to the discussion? Did the BBC producers find him on the street? “Say, you – we’ve got a feature about the world’s largest fossilised snake. Can you liven it up somehow? We can’t find Protein Man. Tell everyone the world’s ending.”

The R.A.N. turns out to be Jason Head, a faculty member at the University of Toronto, a palaeontologist with an eye for the publicity. In the media tarts directory for vertebrate palaeontologists, he notes:

“Areas of Expertise for Media Contacts: Reptile paleontology, climate change, dinosaurs, evolution, evolutionary developmental paleontology and morphometrics“

Notice anything odd, there? In the words of the Cookie Monster, “one of these things is not like the other”.

Like so much churnalism, this story originates with a press release. Here it is, and you’ll note Head makes no claims about future temperature – merely that rainforests 58m to 60m years ago were warmer than tropical rainforests are today.

The piece is immediately picked up by British weekly New Scientist, which allows Head to add some creative embellishments. Under the headline proclaims “Giant snake hints at a hotter future”, we learn:

This “refutes the idea of the thermostat”, says Head, and tells us “what equatorial temperatures will be as we continue to warm the planet: very hot.”

Eh?

How, you may ask, does a snake refute the idea of a climate thermostat? The science-free assertion is left unchallenged. The BBC then picks up the story, and Head makes his fridge-emptying soundbite.

But even the BBC producers must have noticed a strange whiff about this story. One of the corporation’s own environment correspondents, Richard Black, is wheeled in to qualify Head’s assertion.

“There may be other factors”, Black admits, that contribute to the size of fossil. A warmer climate he adds mean some species, for example fish, get smaller. So it isn’t possible to infer temperature from body size. Or future temperature from the fossil record.

Jason makes the observation that tropical temperatures were warmer than now 58m years ago. Then, vaulting through all known logic, he extrapolates that the climate must be getting warm now so quickly, natural systems can’t cope. It’s quite a ride, and entirely science free from start to finish.

The broadcast contains one false assertion, and one invalid inference.

We called Science In Action producer Peter McHugh to ask when the BBC would be issuing a correction. But he hasn’t returned our call.