The war on fake news

As usual about this time of year, I am sitting in a hotel room, thinking that this must be very much what it is like to be a foreign correspondent in general and a war correspondent in particular.  Except of course it’s not.  The hotel room is in central London and so unless I have undergone an unexpected and unnoticed transformation of nationality, I’m not a foreign correspondent.  Having said that, English does appear to be the minority language here in the hotel, a consequence of the continued popularity of London as a tourist destination, a weak pound making it even more popular and lots of worried Europeans getting in a visit while they can before a fucking huge fence goes up all round Britain, or something.  But as has been stated before on this blog, there is something about staying in a hotel room and having a laptop open on the desk that suggests something of the war correspondent.

Previously, I was in the happy position of exaggerating the foreignness of places when the most exotic thing about them was that they had not one but two Chinese take aways.  I was also in the happy position of inventing the ‘war’ element of the correspondent bit.  And actually, as anyone who has read this post this far will know, inventing the ‘correspondent’ element too.  Sadly, this is no longer true.

Of what war do I speak?  Certainly, the next few hundred or few thousand words could be about the war on terror, a war where the front line is on our streets, or actually on our high street.  Various nutters with pokey things have made right nuisances of themselves in 2017, but they don’t really deserve a mention here.  If you want one defining image of the war on terror, it’s that bloke fleeing from the attack at Borough market, still holding his pint.  When the little fuckers roll up in a tank, we might put our drinks down.  Until then, cheers!

Nor is it the war that is being fought over inappropriate touching, usually by celebrities, occasionally of people who wish to become celebrities.  This is not a war as such, merely a continuation of the battle of the sexes, which appears to have somewhat hotted up again.  The view from the G&P trenches (not, you will note, the view from the feminine equivalent, which I guess would be ‘Lady and Spectator’ or ‘Lady and Person Responsible For Cakes’ or something) is that that bastard Wienerstiener has ruined it for all of us.  Basically, if I call somebody ‘Love’ in the office, I’m fucked.  Not that I ever would.  I call everyone ‘chaps’.  ‘Chaps’ is a gender neutral form of address.  In all my tears of using it, I only ever had one person comment that one of those addressed was a woman, or a chappess.  The person complaining was not the lady in question, because she was a bloody good chap and would not do that sort of thing.  No, it was, I stringly suspect, the same person who complained when I brought doughnuts into the office for a treat that I had neglected to provide a fruit alternative.  FFS.

The war in question is the war on fake news, or as Fox News calls it, ‘news’.

London is, of course, the home of the BBC, a corporation with correspondents both foreign and domestic, both war and peace.  The BBC is funded not, as you might imagine, by flogging episodes of ‘Top Gear’ to China and a TARDISload of ‘Doctor Who’ merchandise, but through the license fee, which everyone is happy to pay even if the BBC only ever broadcast ‘Blue Planet II’.  That alone would be worth it and you won’t find anyone that will contradict that because nobody wants to look like an idiot in public.  Recent voting patters demonstrate that people are happy to be idiots in the privacy of a booth, but in public, unwise social media posts aside, it’s a different matter.

Because everyone pays their license fee, two mind-sets simultaneously evolve.  They can be held by the same person at the same time.  The first is that evey license fee payer feels that they have the right to criticise any aspect of the BBC.  The second is that when anyone who does not pay a license fee tries to criticise the BBC, they defend it like Horatio defends a bridge.

Case in point.  The BBC loves to cover extreme weather events by sending presenters with usually immaculate hair and make up to report live from the scene.  This usually involves wellies but it’s not unusual to see a BBC presenter in a North Face parka, screaming into a microphone held to their lips, trying to make themselves heard over the screaming wind that is driving the rain into their face.  So essentially you have a BBC reporter doing their bit from where was until yesterday a busy high street, but is now the Little Puddling Water Recreation Centre.

Then you have one of those masochistic BBC programmes where the viewer gets to make their point, usually that a presenter has been too rude, or too Tory, or too Leftie, or too female, or too black.  And the complaint in question, that the BBC reporter was giving advertising to a particular brand of anorak.

Now, the benefit of this sort of attitude is that there is no other broadcaster of news, in the world, with such rigorous oversight.

Which is why fake news does not happen on the BBC.

Admittedly, some of the correspondents and editors can give an opinion on something that is about as palatable as a Bush Tucker Trial, but that’s part of the fun and it all balances out.

The problem now is that the BBC is reporting on certain individuals, naming no names, who lie, and because the BBC has a duty to report, those lies get broadcast.  It’s like retweeting fake news.

And that’s the soft end.  The hard end is the truly terrifying boiler rooms in malign states that are pumping out fake news clickbait.

By the way, I can assure you that G&P is not written in a vast warehouse just outside of Minsk.  If it was, it would be so much more better writtener.

Every screen is the front line in the war on fake news.  And right now, I’m not sure who is winning.  Certainly, fake news has gained considerable ground.  It used to be that fake news was confined to the playground and the pub.  Not any more.  Thanks to malicious minds taking the innocent internet, that used to be used for such lofty pursuits as porn and bickering about Star Trek, and using it to drip poison into the ear of Joe Public, fake news is a Key Opinion Influencer.

Maybe though things will change.  Fake news is getting easier to identify.  Everyone should have the fake news equivalent of one of those aircraft spotter posters showing the silhouette of enemy aeroplanes, except that they would show the signature shapes of fake news, such as ‘anything that you really want to believe is true, probably isn’t’, or a picture of a fox.

And those that peddle fake news need to be identified too.  It’s a pity that the entire established media hate Facebook because they fear it so, and also a pity that facebook does appear to be a home for fake news.  But so what, who cares?  The Internet is the wild fucking west, there are no rules.  And really, what sort of person believes something they read on Facebook.  Unless it’s about kittles.

Trusted sources, that’s what it’s all about.  Like the BBC.  Never knowingly fake.

Finally, a note on the hotel.  It’s in the centre of London which is a big area I admit, as any area connected to the tube might make that claim, but this really is, there are more busses and cabs than cars.  The hotel is discreet but posh, and judging by the fluffyness of the towels is luxurious.  My room is on the first floor, meaning that the window, with views of a typically cosmopolitan London street, is a few fee above the windows of the top deck of the busses that stop outside at the lights.  Nobody has waved yet.  The bar looks like the sort of place a foreign correspondent might frequent in that it sells cocktails, which is hard liquor mixed with more hard liquor or, if you’re a lady, some fruit.  There was also what appeared to be a fashion shoot going on.  Rude to stare.

Brexiteers would loath this place.  It’s full of foreigners, coming over here, boosting our economy.  And that’s just the staff.

Typewriter 2.0

I am once again in a hotel, and I am once again thinking about journalism in general and war correspondents in particular.

It’s a rather pleasant hotel.  It’s in the centre of London, with a view out over the docks to the city (and there is almost everything you need to know about London, if you wrote that on the back of a postcard from the past anywhere else in the world, you would have the mental image of a place of transit smelling of desperation and mackerel, populated by wanton types with earrings, and that’s just the sailors.  The only boats bobbing in the dock here are Sunseekers and the city is the City, proud to leave all the lights on in their huge office blocks to create the impression that everyone is still hard at it after dark, shouting into telephones, Like In The Movies).

The air conditioning is hidden and efficient, there is no lazily rotating ceiling fan that can cross fade to become the rotating blades of a helicopter.  Maybe it’s stealth?

Nevertheless, there’s something about being in a hotel and not being on holiday that makes me think about journalism in general and war correspondents in particular.  I’d like to say it’s the mutual incompatibility of pool toys and AK47s that make any holiday hotel a haven, but sadly that’s no longer true.

So on the strength of my previous post about ambient soundtracks, I should probably be putting together the faux war correspondent soundtrack, era by era.  Let’s start with the 1970s.  Busy traffic, foreign murmuring, farting scooters, the occasional mooing of an ox, the whup whup whup of a Huey passing overhead and the clackity clack (‘don’t talk back!’) of the typewriter.

Vietnam was, I have read, the first televised war.

There have been plenty since.  I remember ITV reporting Afghanistan.  Film reports of Sandy Gall sitting in a cave somewhere in Afgan, breaking (unleavened) bread with the Taliban, who were off to beat back the Russians. 

And of course the Falklands.  ‘I counted them all out, I counted them all back’.  A Union Flag waving from the top of an aerial as a squaddie yomped to Port Stanley and Victory.

Gulf War I and Gulf War II.  Gulf War I was night vision cameras on tanks streaking across the desert.  Gulf War II took things to the next level, that next level being vertical as we were treated to footage of the nosecone cam of a bunker buster.  Not to mention the ‘shock and awe-shit there goes that little place that does great falafel’ of the opening night bombardment.

Gulf War II was the last television war.  Now, conflict plays out on snapchat and Twitter, barbarism on Youtube.

What the medium of the next Big One will be I’m not sure.  Possibly when the nukes start flying, the next war will be recorded by the cave paintings of the survivors but actually I think a more realistic prospect will be that the next major conflict will be reported by ABC when it’s a throw down between the Red and the Blue, rather than the Grey and the Blue.  I think Blue won last time?

Vietnam was certainly a reporters’ war.  It also produced memoirs and collections of reportage and, of course, a load of great movies (although the greatest war movie ever made is ‘Where Eagles Dare’, followed by ‘The Eagle Has Landed”, followed by ‘Heartbreak Ridge’.  Basically, if it has ‘Eagle or Clint, it’s all good).

As previously reported from the front line in Salisbury, I’m pretty sure that my ancient Powerbook could stop a .303 round that would take down a Decepticon, but I would rather like it if the keyboard sounds could be set to different themes.  Obviously ‘space’ and ‘rainforest’ or similar would be popular, but I’m attracted to the idea of ‘quill’ and, of course ‘Imperial typewriter’.

For the (written) record, I once owned an electric typewriter, a Brother, once plugged in and placed upon a table, typing generated a report like a fucking artillery barrage.  Hardly the sort of thing to write tender love poetry upon, that ladies could then read, and frot themselves senseless to.

Write on Beer II

I’m writing this in a hotel room.

It occurs to me that in my 2014 blog entry about writing on beer, I described the fiction writing process.  If I recall correctly, drinking ‘wifebeater’, as Stella is loving known, in a pub in the daytime drove me to outline a not-entirely-original idea of a series of books based on a martial family.  The idea has, ahem, never got beyond development stage.

But it did make me think that I was unjust in entirely overlooking a class of writers who drink, and drink beer.  Journalists, particularly, war correspondents.

This may not be entirely unconnected with the fact that I am currently drinking warm beer from a bottle in a hotel that is in a place I have never visited before and which I arrived at after dark.  If I had arrived in a Hercules transport firing off flares to distract surface-to-air missiles and then jumped from the tailgate thingy to a dusty desert airstrip, the picture could not have been more complete.  I am even toting my laptop, an ageing Apple Powerbook G4 that weighs about as much as a fucking manual typewriter (maybe even less because although those old Imperials may have been made out of steel and gravity, they didn’t have batteries that are apparently constructed from the same stuff they make black holes out of), in an canvas camera case.

An Imperial is probably better at stopping a WWII sniper round (other ballistic armour includes a notebook, but nothing beats a Bible) but I’m betting my Powerbook could be used to swat away incoming up to an including depleted uranium rounds.

As it is, I’m in Salisbury, but can assure you I am very much on the front line of civil unrest, as the town had its Christmas festival thingie tonight and there are loads of road closures and angry motorists.  Nobody has let rip a burst of AK47 fire from the back of their Toyota pickup, yet, but I noticed some pretty serious tutting going on in at least one Range Rover, which might sound innocent enough but to those in the know is as sure an indication that things are about to kick off as that fuse opening credit sequence in Mission Impossible.

Anyway, drinking warm beer (‘Brooklyn Lager’, got hooked on the stuff in NYC), is redolent of foreign correspondents.  That and secretly despising the locals, the warm beer selling fuckers.  Not really, big shout out to Salisbury, woo hoo! love your Tesco Metro).

Bars, back in the day before wars moved to places where the combatants don’t drink alcohol (hence, you know: wars), were places where you went to speak to the generals, the gun runners, the generals selling guns to the gun runners, also freedom fighters, terrorists, and other journalists.

Especially journalists.  Especially the Wall Street Journal correspondent shagging the local consulate girl, because he had great local information and because he was always, always, C.I.A. and hence could always afford to get a round in.

Also, anyone freshly arrived off the ‘plane who had British or American cigarettes.

Of course, that was back in the days when journalists stole stories off of one another and fact checked by getting in a jeep, and thought nothing of driving three days through swamp and minefields, rather than getting their stories off Twitter and their ‘fact’ ‘check’ off of Wikipedia.

A lazily rotating ceiling fan, so much like the rotor blades of a Huey, curling cigarette smoke (Christ, those were the days), cigar smoke, pipe smoke (Telegraph correspondent) and booze, and sweat.  Because the great thing about war in the tropics is that you sweat the stuff out as fast as you can drink it.  You could sit in the bar at the Choi Choi Mai from lunchtime to deadline and never have to go to the loo, thanks to the climate.

Not like now, tweeting ‘being shot at, LOL’ from the front while running like hell for the rear.

If being shot at in a war zone is an occupational hazard, but you are not a soldier and are hence allowed to booze, then who wouldn’t reach for a beer or two with lunch?

Postcard from Winchester - the inn

The Wykeham Arms in Winchester is astonishingly good. The place is decorated with the stuff that the landlord has collected - which appears to be everything in the world, and then every pewter tankard ever made. A bloke would describe it as the interior of the ultimate shed, a woman might describe it as charming, and tolerate it in a way that would baffle and annoy any chap who has been forced into disposing of his plastic dinosaur collection on eBay because the space in the back room is needed for a wardrobe, or a baby. I suppose the difference is that given the place is cluttered to the point where you suspect the landlord is a hoarder, it's all astonishingly dust free. I suspect dedicated staff, or elves. The place looks like a posh junk shop that's licensed. Luckily, it also has wonderful open fires, sells fabulous beer (Jack Frost) and has regulars that lend it, well, charm.

In a perfect world, my own home would resemble the rooms at the Wykeham, especially with regard to ale on tap. But it takes a lot of space to make a room look good by cramming it with curios. The ceiling has to be high to enable the tankards to dangle freely, and the art on the walls has to be arranged just so, with oil paintings cheek by jowl with framed post cards, cigarette cards and the odd Victorian porno shot in sepia to see if you are paying attention.

The regulars pack the place out, and one has to be careful where one steps for fear of treading on dog. The resulting look of hurt that any of the charming and well bred animals that litter the floor on a Saturday night would give you would be almost as bad as the savaging one might also expect if you tread on the wrong paw.

Idiosyncratic charm through cluttered curios can be a look that's hard to pull off. Beer helps, both serving it and drinking it. If in Winchester, this is the place to drink. There's a lot to see in the city but equally a lot to see in each room of the pub. They should do one of those booklets where you have to spot a certain item in each room, spot them all...win a pint!