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Articles by Dan Hind
We Are All Living in Rupert Murdoch’s World
It’s hard to know exactly when Rupert Murdoch’s alliance with the conservative right began. In his early days, his politics were eclectic. As a student at Oxford, he even flirted with socialism. But January 1974 is as good a moment as any to situate his rightward turn. It was then that he turned against Gough Whitlam’s reforming Labor government in Australia.
Another Media Regime is Possible
After the 2017 General Election it seemed that the Labour Party’s combination of a mass membership, a transformative policy platform, and an effective online strategy might be enough to counterbalance the right-wing bias of the print media and the establishment orientation of the BBC. But this turned out to be an illusion.
A Monstrous State
The so-called ‘populist’ far right does not express a specific xenophobic passion that emanates from the depths of the body of the people. Rather, it is a satellite that trades on state strategies and distinguished intellectuals’ campaigns, to its own advantage. Jacques Rancière The political entrepreneurs of the far right have always viewed the exploitation of women and children as an issue on which to build popular support. Their approach tends to reproduce two themes.
What if there is a wonder drug?
On December 8th, Dr Pierre Kory gave evidence to the US Senate’s Homeland Security committee. There he pleaded with the federal government to review the evidence supporting the use of ivermectin to help people avoid COVID infection and to reduce the danger of serious illness in those who have contracted it. Ivermectin is very widely used as an anti-parasitic and has a good safety profile. The coverage in the New York Times could not have been more dismissive.
Globalization demystified?
Around the year 1320, the Plague broke out in Hubei, the same central Chinese province, with its capital Wuhan, where COVID-19 originated. Despite all the historical differences, there are striking parallels between the course and consequences of both epidemics. It took 25 or 30 years for the Plague to reach the Chinese coast and take hold in the trade ports and the termini of the Central Asian caravan routes that connected China to Europe.
Flooding the zone
Eurozine newsletter 8/2020 Subscribe to the Eurozine Review and Newsletter! It is now common sense that the ‘all roads lead to Putin’ narrative is a convenient distraction. Bellingcat’s recent embarrassment of the New York Times over its story on Kremlin-orchestrated disinformation on US health science felt like the nail in the coffin of this particular misconception. As a useful contribution in Foreign Policy argued, the new propaganda thrives best under democratic conditions.
Mind the gap
Antje Scharenberg: You have been living and working in Gothenburg for several years. How do you see the political situation in Sweden at the moment? Rasha Shabaan: I actually still consider myself to be an external observer of Swedish society, culture and politics. But let me answer your question with an example of something that happened recently.
Hysterics do not help in crisis
As we enter a new decade, in which both the politics and the weather seem to be becoming more extreme, I have to admit the world we live in is far from the one I was hoping for 10 years ago. In December 2009, after six solid months of taking direct action on climate change, I was camping in Trafalgar Square calling for radical measures at the Copenhagen COP, a summit generally deemed a catastrophic failure.
The BBC bounces back
As I write this at the beginning of April, the BBC has launched a new set of educational programmes to help parents home schooling their children during the pandemic and its arrival is being lauded by government ministers. One of them is the UK Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden, who said: ‘This is public service broadcasting at its best and will make a big difference to millions of children across the UK while schools are closed.
Verso
A vital defence of the Enlightenment as a democratic force against state and corporation. Today, media commentators, intellectuals and politicians declare that western science and rationality are threatened by irrational enemies. Evangelicals, postmodernists, and Islamists are on the march, they say. The Rome that science built is under siege. But there’s a problem with these stirring attempts to defend the truth. They aren’t true.
The business of disinformation
Many stories have been written about the Macedonian teenagers who earned a pretty penny writing and disseminating fake news stories during the US presidential elections in 2016 (and about whether there may be more to their story). Academic literature into the fake news phenomenon also abounds. Yet research into the commercial aspect of disinformation has largely been lacking.
The business of disinformation
Many stories have been written about the Macedonian teenagers who earned a pretty penny writing and disseminating fake news stories during the US presidential elections in 2016 (and about whether there may be more to their story). Academic literature into the fake news phenomenon also abounds. Yet research into the commercial aspect of disinformation has largely been lacking.
An Indian writer discovers Europe
After the rupture caused by World War Two, Britain began to drift further away from Europe. The Fifties and Sixties were the decades of the Movement poets in English literature, with Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and their Little Englandism setting the tone for their contemporaries. For a British writer of that time, there was nothing less fashionable than to dream of a European life.
The Confused States of America
Every day for the past several weeks I, like millions of other Americans, have been glued to the tv watching two reality shows – the Trump Show, and the daily press conference of New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo. Other state governors hold their own daily press conferences, but no one does it with quite the same flair as Cuomo. Virtually overnight he’s become a kind of Anti-Trump: a model public official who exudes strength and empathy.
Democracy and the Great Pestilence
Our world has been ravaged many times by pestilence, yet every season of disease is a life-pounding moment when normality flounders, anxieties flourish and thoughts turn darkly inwards. Pandemics tear apart old habits. They break hearts. People grow fearful. Death looms. Certainties are tossed to the wind.
When trust defines everything
A comment breaks through the dozens of alerts on my mobile: ‘The government isn’t communicating enough’. Since president Zelensky announced initial lockdown measures on 11 March, the very same day that the first Ukrainian COVID-19 case was confirmed, opinion has been divided. The Ministry of Healthcare’s CovidInfo Viber channel has almost 3.6 million subscribers. The chief healthcare officer and city mayors release daily briefings on TV, YouTube, Telegram and even TikTok. So why isn’t it enough?
Utopian dreams beyond the border
A decade ago, the Hungarian philosopher and former dissident Gaspar Miklos Tamas observed that the Enlightenment, in which the idea of the European Union is intellectually rooted, demands universal citizenship. But universal citizenship requires one of two things to happen: either poor and dysfunctional countries have to become places in which it is worthwhile to be a citizen, or Europe has to open its borders to everybody. Neither is going to happen anytime soon, if ever.
Of viruses and men
We currently face a global health crisis without seeing yet another that has left us unprepared – an eclipsed vision in the social sciences. Sociology and economics textbooks apparently disagree on almost everything except the virus, on which they are silent. So far, they have not acknowledged the power of pathogens.
Trajectories of ecologism
Revue Projet publishes a dossier exploring ecological thinking — its past mistakes, the complex present, and some possible futures. Climatologist Hervé Le Treut argues that ecologists need to ‘move on from the teacher-pupil relationship’ with the public. Ecology’s frequent abstractions and standard ‘danger narrative’ have led to anxiety and fatalism, something Le Treut observes even among his own students.
Blind in one eye
The ‘Hungary question’ has been hanging over the EU ever since the European Parliament voted back in September 2018 to call on the Council to trigger the Article 7 procedure against the country. Suspension of a member state’s voting rights requires unanimity. But because there is currently no chance of that happening, it is the European right that now finds itself under pressure to act.
The degradation of politics
Digital media’s impact on democracy was initially expected to be highly positive. It was hoped that the dissemination of information online would facilitate a rich, open and inclusive public domain characterized by broader, pluralistic debate. However, the reality has been quite different.
Orbán's political product
Many people consider Hungarian to be a particularly difficult language. They must include Hungary’s justice minister Judit Varga. How else to explain the rest of Europe’s failure to understand the finely phrased Hungarian penal code?
From national threat to oblivion
The first officially reported cases of COVID-19 were found in Rome at the end of January, when two Chinese tourists were admitted at ‘Lazzaro Spallanzani’ Institute for Infectious Diseases, displaying all the symptoms with which Italy soon developed a sad familiarity. The WHO immediately declared a National Public Health Emergency, and the Council of Ministries approved the declaration of the state of emergency on 31 January.
A loaded gun
Anti-liberalism and anti-globalism resonate with people who feel marginalized by globalization. Precarious life fuels populism worldwide. But the populist wave of the last decade is not merely spontaneous. In Bulgaria and North Macedonia, for example, populist narratives are disseminated in an entirely instrumental and intentional way. They stem not from the Kremlin, whose propaganda of course tries to reinforce them at the local level, but which is certainly not omnipresent.
Disease control
Journalists beaten with batons in India, Brazil’s president lashing out, a reporter arrested in Niger: these stories are tied together by a common thread – people who dared to report on the coronavirus crisis. As the world’s attention turns to fighting the pandemic, many leaders want to fight the media instead. If anything, they’re taking the opportunity of this distraction to silence journalists. This is why Index on Censorship has launched a map in which we document these cases around the world.
D.R.E.A.M.W.E.A.P.O.N.S.
Should young people read Aristotle? That is a question. ‘No, they shouldn’t’ would be a perfectly good answer. ‘Why shouldn’t they?’ is the sort of follow-up question many people might ask and the answer is: because Aristotle puts humans front and centre in his theory of poetics.
As the fog lifted
More than twenty years ago, “it seemed to the western mind that through the Manichaean division into East and West a whole section of Europe had been swallowed up by the fog”, as the Serbo-Hungarian Jewish writer Danilo Kis put it.1 Today the fog has lifted. But the landscapes that were once veiled have in some cases altered to the point of being unrecognizable.
Ordinary propagandists
A common opinion among journalists, academics and experts across the political spectrum is that the hegemony of the liberal order has become increasingly insecure. However, definitions of the ‘liberal order’ vary greatly. In some cases, the term refers to globalized financial markets; in others, to individualism and its ‘excesses’; and in others still, to the rule of law based on individual rights and the separation of powers.
We created this beast
Two areal maps of China. The map on the left, from early January 2020, shows how orange-coloured nitrogen clouds extend over the entire country. On the map on the right, from a month and a half later, those same clouds have disappeared. What happened? It was French philosopher Bruno Latour who shared these satellite images in a tweet, pointing out that a virus was able to achieve political measures that the Chinese state had always believed to be impossible.
The role of the sceptic: A conversation with John Gray
René Scheu: Mr. Gray, you are one of the philosophical voices that is really listened to in the United Kingdom. You yourself once praised Hayek for his lucid analysis of the market economy. Today you praise Karl Marx for his critique of the economic system. Why this change of heart? John Gray: The destination of intellectual journeys is unknown at any one time. Judgments are always subject to revision. I would say: let’s start with Hayek. RS: Shoot.
Why here?
I live in the epicentre of the contagion, a few kilometres from Alazano’s hospital, the heart of this disaster for Bergamo province. According to major of Bergamo, Giorgio Gori, there are way more deaths than the official counts, because not everyone who recently died had been swab-tested. Indeed, already on March 8, city hospitals started having issues admitting those in need, therefore some have to stay home and cure the disease on their own as long as they can.
Gone viral
Conspiracy theories and rumours often especially if these events are new and partly unknown. This is exactly what happened in the case of the coronavirus. The problem goes well beyond the clickbait disinformation sites.
The climate-migration-industrial complex
Thirty years ago there were fifteen border walls around the world. Now there are seventy walls and over one billion national and international migrants. International migrants alone may even double in the next forty years due to global warming. It is not surprising that over the past two decades, we have also seen the rise of an increasingly powerful global climate security market designed to profit from (and help sustain) these crises.
Zine renaissance and hyperlocal news
Listen to “Eurozine Podcast Part II: Local journalism in the digital age” on Spreaker. Globalization was supposed to connect people, but instead ended up connecting the powerful. Local news is rapidly disappearing and leaving crucial stories unreported, communities unrepresented and disconnected, a side-effect of digitalization and the ownership concentration in media markets. But local and hyperlocal media play an important role in sustaining robust and resilient regimes of public service.
Feminist reads for Women's Day
Photo source: unsplash.com Theory Ann J. Cahill says there is a distinction between rape and ‘unjust sex’, when a woman is pressured into sex but her agency still plays a role, a term used to address the grey areas between unwilling yet consensual sex and outright sexual violence: Unjust sex vs Rape Ghalia Djelloul, meanwhile, asks whether feminist critique can intersect with religion, particularly Islam: Islamic feminism: a contradiction in terms?
We’re not Beauvoirians, but...
In 2016, two books were published by conservative women intellectuals seeking to settle scores with what those on the right pejoratively call ‘neofeminism,’ and with the movement’s ostensible patron saint, Simone de Beauvoir. One of the books, Adieu Simone! Les dernières heures du féminisme (Goodbye, Simone! Feminism’s Final Hours), was written by the journalist Gabrielle Cluzel, a contributor to the conservative website Boulevard Voltaire.
Big Tech: The law of power?
The technoliberationism that accompanied the early days of the web and that resurfaced with the Twitter revolutions a decade ago now belongs to myth. Deleting Facebook is the new rebellion. Surveillance capitalism is the buzzword. Regulating is radical. Postmodern technology critique, which saw technology in the abstract, as pure medium, is no less dated. Today, the ‘black box’ has been demystified. Algorithms have programmers, platforms have designers, and tech companies have shareholders.
The end of anonymity
In mid-January, The New York Times revealed that hundreds of law enforcement agencies and private companies across the world use a software called Clearview. It allows images of people to be identified within seconds, together with their name, address, occupation and contacts. The revelations are controversial for two reasons. First, Clearview identifies people using its own database of more than 3 billion private photos. By comparison, the FBI photo database has ‘only’ 640 million photos.
A computer is all you need
In her 2015 book Reclaiming Conversation, Sherry Turkle describes ‘one of the most gut-wrenching moments in my then fifteen years of research on sociable robotics’, one which ‘changed her mind’ after years as an enthusiastic advocate of the emancipatory potential of connected technologies: One day I saw an older woman who had lost a child talking to a robot in the shape of a baby seal. It seemed to be looking in her eyes. It seemed to be following the conversation.
Game over for the monopolists?
Here’s the problem with big tech, in a nutshell. A few years ago, Mark Zuckerberg said the following: ‘In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies.’ Zuckerberg is seeking to establish a supreme court for content moderation, to structure the media environment with a quasi-cartel of publishers, and even to create his own currency.
Eastern exodus
Many were mystified when, in December, a Croatian member of the European Parliament became the European Commission’s new Vice President for Democracy and Demography. Not least people in her own country were taken by surprise. Dubravka Šuica, a former mayor of Dubrovnik, is not known for contributing to either of the fields for which she is now in charge.
Democracy is losing the online arms race
Democracy is threatened by an arms race that the forces of deception are winning. Microtargeted computational propaganda, organized troll brigades, coordinated networks of bots, malware, scams, epidemic misinformation, miscreant communities such as 4chan and 8chan, and professionally crafted rivers of disinformation continue to evolve, infest, and pollute the public sphere.
Digital socialism
First, the bad news. When it comes to Big Tech, we have lost the plot. By we, I refer to those of us who, in one way or another, feel a relationship with social democracy or socialism. And by the plot, I don’t mean just our understanding of the dynamics of the digital economy and digital capitalism, but also of capitalism as such and the role that social democracy and socialism should be playing in either countering or counterbalancing it.
Information: A public good
Reactions to the Mueller Report, published in March 2019, focused more on what it didn’t find than what it did. People had been hoping for conclusive evidence that the Trump campaign had in 2016 colluded directly with the Russian government. That Trump had ‘merely’ welcomed Russia’s ‘sweeping and systematic’ interference was felt to be insufficiently damning. That says a lot about how the issues of electoral interference and ‘information war’ play out in domestic politics.
Talking a tightrope
While studying at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, Elif Bereketli was intrigued by fierce political debate about Turkey. After graduation, she returned to Istanbul to see the situation for herself. She found a complex society beyond the hardliners whose views often inform foreign perceptions.
Disinformation, hyper-partisanship and the limits of regulation
Disinformation, hate speech and hyper-partisanship pose an increasing challenge to the democratic functioning of our public spheres. Developments suggest a new readiness for regulation on the part of governments, publics and companies themselves. But does regulation set a new set of traps for free speech and media diversity? Moreover, is it even adequate to the problems facing the public sphere? Or do we need to be asking more fundamental questions about how the media are structured?
The role of the journalist in the age of disinformation
The Russian aggression against Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 introduced a new type of warfare which has proven very effective in the digital era. This new type of war is no longer aimed at taking over territories or resources, but at influencing human behaviour.
Another Media Regime is Possible
In response to political pressure, digital platforms are abandoning their laissez-faire approach to content and allying with legacy media to provide ‘reliable’ news and information. But this is the wrong way to create the conditions in which disinformation becomes vulnerable to challenge.
Another media regime is possible
‘Media regimes’ can be described as distinct historical combinations of technology, regulation and professional norms that have come to seem natural but are the result of an intensely political and fiercely contested process.1 Until recently, English-language media regimes were characterised by a mixture of regulated broadcasters and privately owned print media.
Political immortalism and its extremes
On 10 September 2019, 79-year old sociologist Albert Razin set himself on fire in the centre of the Russian city of Izhevsk, capital of the Udmurt Republic. Razin was an Udmurt language rights activist; his act of self-immolation was the culmination of years of protests against Russia’s language policies that he believed led to the Russification of the Udmurt people and their consequent loss of ethnic distinctiveness.
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