Media Democracy Pod

In a one-off special to promote the Media Democracy Festival on March 16th, Tom and Dan fail utterly to mention said event. Instead they noisily take credit for the BBC's nervous flirtation with the audience-as-editor and the New Statesman's tentative moves away from pallid centrism. Along the way there is talk of Jordan Peterson, the role of experts in democratic reasoning, and these notorious thugs of the hard left identify the next target of their 'reforming ambition'.

Music by Makaih Beats.

Entering the secret castle: A small step towards democratic public media?

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/entering-secret-castle-small-step-towards-democratic-public-media/

Tom and Dan are back after a long break throughout which the media class have behaved with scrupulous professionalism and disinterested rationality. This week we talk a little about Tom Watson's recent speech on digital policy before moving on to the main order of business, an interview with Trebor Scholz.

Trebor Scholz is an associate professor at the New School in New York and in April of this year Trebor will launch the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy there. His publications include Uber-Worked and Underpaid: How Workers are Disrupting the Digital Economy.

Music by Makaih Beats.

This week Dan and Tom are joined by journalist, author and Blue Tick Twitter Personality Hussein Kesvani to discuss celebrity columnists and the Twittersphere. Over the course of the show we cover the politics of newsrooms, unpaid internships, Aaron Sorkin, David Aaronovitch, The Spectator and, regrettably, Jordan Peterson.

Music by Makaih Beats.

This week Tom and Dan go back to basics and spend an hour chatting about recent events in media/politics. The takes range from the stone cold and frankly unappetising - Dan's outrageous treatment at the hands of Ed Miliband - to the sizzling hot and oh-so-current - Poppygate and the uses of insincerity in the politics of remembrance. Along the way we discuss Tom's baffling online encounters with David 'Dave' Aaronovitch, the Stalinist left as a training ground for centrist shitheels, and Dave's well remunerated inability to notice vast criminal conspiracies in his own workplace. We end with proposals for democratic reform of the charitable sector under socialism, naturally.

Music by Makaih Beats.

This week on the podcast we're joined by Jack Frayne-Reid of the Reel Politik podcast to review Nick Robinson's podcast, 'Political Thinking'. It's a podcasting hall of mirrors.

Music by Makaih Beats.

This week we bring you a recording from the Parliamentary launch of the Media Reform Coalition's 'Draft Proposals on BBC Reform', featuring Natalie Fenton, Zoe Williams, Amelia Womack, Clive Lewis and Media Democracy's very own Tom Mills.

Music by Makaih Beats.

We're joined by Joe Kennedy (@joekennedy81 on Twitter), the author of 'Authentocrats: Culture, Politics and the New Seriousness', to discuss the history, politics and aesthetics of the 'New Statesman'.

Our apologies for the sound quality, which at times is not great even by our low standards.

Music by Makaih Beats.

James Stern-Weiner returns to the show to discuss the structure of the debates about Israel-Palestine and Labour's alleged antisemitism crisis.

Jamie is the editor of 'Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel-Palestine's Toughest Questions' (http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/moment-of-truth/). He is a graduate student at the University of Oxford.

Music by Makaih Beats.

This week we're joined by author and journalist Matt Kennard and talk about how he came to write his 2015 book, 'The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs. the American Elite'. As a graduate of Columbia University's School of Journalism and a former employee at the Financial Times, Matt has first hand experience of how the media legitimates and assists state and corporate power across the world. Reporters rarely investigate the people who pay their salaries, and hardly ever publish what they find out. Matt has done both, and he has a hell of a story to tell.

Music by Makaih Beats.​

Fifty years ago Enoch Powell gave his racist 'Rivers of Blood' speech. In it he trailed themes that have given undead life to right-wing populism ever since: effete elites in the service of alien subversion, violent crime as an inevitable accompaniment to demographic change, a respectable and long-suffering civilization on the brink of cataclysmic collapse. It's all there and was given the full BBC radio treatment in April of this year on Archive on Four. We talked with academic and author David Wearing about the speech, its framing by the BBC, and how the monsters Powell summoned in 1968 still walk among us.

Music by Makaih Beats.

David’s article for the New Socialist that we mention in the show: https://newsocialist.org.uk/stephen-lawrence-and-hostile-environment/.