The Last Ditch

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers

Carter-Ruck in new move to stop debate in parliament | UK news | The Guardian.

I understand all the concern about injunctions preventing the reporting of Parliament, but why are the lawyers at Carter-Ruck the villains (and partner Adam Tudor in particular?) There have been flash mobs outside their offices and they have been vilified across the British blogosphere.

Why is the headline to the linked article not "Trafigura in new move to stop debate in Parliament?" Lawyers do nothing without instructions. Those instructions come from their clients and whatever actions they take are on their clients' behalf and in their name. If Mr Tudor has been asked to block publication, then that is what he must try to do - whether he personally approves or not. You may say he is liable to criticism for failing to advise his clients that their actions would be counter-productive (as they certainly have been - who had heard of Trafigura before?). However, you don't even know whether the actions were on his advice or against it. He can't tell you without his client's permission, which is hardly likely to be forthcoming.

Perhaps Adam Tudor is the ass or the villain you think he is. A first class degree from Oxford doesn't speak to his morality or his common-sense. You should at least accept that he is the agent of his clients in these matters. If you want to be angry, be angry with them. Except maybe you shouldn't. At least not just yet.

If there is anything to make Adam Tudor smile in the media today, perhaps it's this quote from Prodicus, in the course of roundly criticising him and his partners and calling them asses;

These are the world's smartest legal brains with vast collective experience.

If the partners of Carter-Ruck have a collective sense of humour, they will use that quote on their website, to the irritation of the world's smartest legal brains. After all, they didn't go into defamation work to be loved. As I am sure they are reminding themselves today.

An independent legal profession, free to serve the interests of (popular or unpopular) clients, is a pre-requisite of a free society. You may not like how much some lawyers earn for doing this important work, but if you want the big bucks what's stopping you? There's almost always a shortage of legal talent. Get the qualification, put in 20 years of hard work, and maybe you can nose through the flash mobs in your Porsche too.

Because that's really why the lawyers are the villains here, isn't it? The English Vice: Envy. I can understand "rich bastard" rhetoric from the envious left, but the rest of the blogosphere should really know better.

[I am a partner in a City law firm. I am not, and have never been, a partner or employee of Carter-Ruck]

Guardian TV poll: let's keep up the pressure

Poll: What's the best TV show of the decade 2000-09? | Media | guardian.co.uk.

Come on, ladies and gentlemen, please click on the link above and infuriate the Guardianistas who are posting such exasperated comments as;

Top Gear is not fit to grace any list that has the likes of the office, the west wing and arrested development on it.

The Wire is catching up fast on Top Gear with one day of polling still to go, so if you want to see Jezza ending the show with the poll results and the words "...and on that bombshell..." you need to get over there and vote. Urging on family, friends and work colleagues, not to mention posting a link to the poll on your blog (and in comments to every blog you frequent) would do no harm either.

Does Shahid have a point?

Twitter / Shahid Ahmad: When Theo van Gogh was mur ....

 Blogger Shahid Ahmad of Suspect Paki is tweeting furiously about this shocking story. A Russian in Germany was being prosecuted at the instigation of a Muslim couple for "insult and abuse". The accused strode across the court room and stabbed complainant Marwa el-Sherbini 18 times in front of her 3 year old son, killing her. She was pregnant. It is a disgusting crime, which in the Muslim world is now giving rise to rage against "the West" in general and Germany in particular.

Of course, no decent human approves of the crime. Of course, the killer will be prosecuted for murder and (unless proven insane) convicted. But Shahid is convinced that, not the incident itself, but the way in which the media have reported it is evidence of "islamophobia" and "racism."

He makes the point that when Theo van Gogh was murdered it was treated not as the act of a madman, but as an expression of Muslim extremism. He asks why this incident is viewed differently. Perhaps one answer is that it's because there are no organised groups encouraging such behaviour or applauding it when it occurs. Another might be that "Western" public opinion is united in considering the action wrong and the actor evil. So where's the story?

One has to ask though. If one strips away his hyperbole does Shahid have a point?

The truth. Is it out there?

 Golliwog row: Mad, or just morally muddled? - Telegraph.

It has been such an odd week that I have even found Libby Purves amusing for the first time ever. Normally, I find her smug mumsiness infuriating. A thought came back to me, as I read her "Man from Mars" piece, that has been occurring to me all week. What if the journalism about the economic crisis is as hysterical and inaccurate as that about the "snow event?" What if the journalists are striving as hard to make it "a story" as they did the meteorological circumstances of this week?

Perhaps I am having a late onset of optimism. However, I have long known that journalism (even specialised journalism) about my own field of expertise is always so utterly wrong that mere ignorance on the part of the journalists scarcely suffices to explain it. So why do I assume that there is any merit in their effusions about the subjects I know less well?

Journalistic Armageddon

Link: FT.com / Home UK / UK - Last-ditch effort to save a column from Armageddon.

I noticed years ago that every time I read an article about something I knew, it was wrong. I am not sure why it took so long to realise that all the other articles were wrong too. By definition, journalists are experts in nothing but journalism.

Some are sensible however. Some are witty. Lucy Kellaway's writing in the FT, for example, is a regular source of delight. She has a delicate way of skewering pretensions with no apparent malice. In the linked column, she writes about the current spate of linguistic inflation. I linked to it without logging on to my FT.com account, so you should be able to read it too;

"This is the worst column I've written since 1929.

In scenes not seen in living memory, last Thursday in a late night session, I hammered out the fiendishly complicated details of this article in a last-ditch effort to inject some sense into the system. At 8.05pm, the lights were on in my first floor study and, anticipating a long and tense night ahead, I put in an order to the local curry house for a balti. When the foil wrappers had been cleared and with the clock ticking, I started feverishly drafting sentences about the changed landscape that we are in, the most toxic since the Great Depression. Ashen-faced and reeling, at 1.40am I rose. How would the package go down with shell-shocked readers? Would they roar their approval? Or would their confidence plummet in the worst collapse since the 1930s? Only time would tell."

Do click through and read the whole thing. She lays into the ludicrous comparisons with 1929.

"Irving Kahn, now 102, was last week interviewed on the BBC World Service and crisply said that today "things are a great deal better. People are spoiled". The main villains, he said, were the journalists - "the reporters who want to get attention writing up headlines saying how bad it is".

So is he right? Certainly the current reporting has been bad. So bad, in fact, it has been the worst since . . . 1929."

Bloggers are often unkind about MSM journalists. Sometimes with good cause. Their profession certainly has its full quota of rogues, charlatans and fools. Yet while it may be true that the best bloggers are better to read than the best journalists, it's beyond doubt that the worst of us is worse than the worst MSM hack. We should occasionally acknowledge that not only is journalism our meat and drink, but that sometimes it tastes pretty good. If Lucy Kellaway's column were a restaurant, it would rate three macarons.