Media Democracy

On April 5th 2018 author and journalist Laurie Macfarlane came to Resort Studios in Margate to give a talk about the economics of housing and the politics of regeneration. This is a recording of his talk and the Q&A that followed. The recording is by Dan Scott, who co-produced the event. Laurie is the co-author of Rethinking the Economics of Housing and Land, published by Zed books.

We're back after an action-packed hiatus in media democracy land. This week Tom and Dan talk about balance, about Andrew Adonis' Twitter jihad against the BBC's pro-Brexit Bias, and about the prospects for an alliance between liberals and leftists against the gathering menace of the far right. At the end Dan tries to drag the centrists away from their George Orwell lookalike competition with a problematic, and all too predictable, historical analogy. Music by Makaih Beats.

This week Tom and Dan are joined by Will Davies, Reader in Political Economy at Goldsmiths and author of 'The Happiness Industry' and 'The Limits of Neoliberalism'. Will is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and his most recent article there looks at the scandals and anxieties that intersect at the Cambridge Analytica story. We talk with Will about the relationship between digital technology and the political process, about the liberal public sphere, and much else besides. Music by Makaih Beats.

This week Tom and Dan are joined by Professor Christopher Simpson to talk about his 1994 book The Science of Coercion. We explore the drivers of innovation in coercive communication, its origins in the military and the ways in which its techniques and assumptions have bled into academia and business. We go on to talk about the state of the art in modern propaganda and about the communications challenges facing democratic and egalitarian politics. Music by Makaih Beats.

This week Tom and Dan are joined by Wendy Liu (@dellsystem) and Hettie O'Brien (@hettieveronica) to take another bite out of the emerging tech monopolies. We talk about Silicon Valley start-up culture and how to stop it, about the Tech Workers' Coalition and the emerging revolt against capitalist command and control, about the challenge the new monopolies pose to regulators, and what an enabling socialist state would look like in the context of new technologies. Wendy Liu is economics co-editor at the New Socialist and Hettie O'Brien is a writer who has recently been researching monopolies and anti-trust legislation in Washington, DC. Music by Makaih Beats.

Dan and Tom are joined by Alex Nunns, author of the award winning book, 'The Candidate', a second edition of which has just been published. They discuss the media strategy and policies of the Labour Party, social media and the embarrassing failures of Jonathan Freedland, Polly Toybee and the rest of them.

This last week has seen the UK media engage in one of its increasingly absurd bouts of Cold War re-enactment. Meanwhile, a shadowy group of hard right Brexiteers are busy plotting a domestic revolution in league with foreign plutocrats. Kam Sandhu joins us to discuss both stories, and their implications for our media and our politics.

It’s the difficult second episode of the difficult second season. But Dan and Tom style it out with the help of Nick Srnicek and Laurie Laybourn-Langton. The learned guests discuss the political economy of platform capitalism, the evils of advertising and algorithms and the scope for the development of new public platforms. Music by Makaih Beats.

2.1 Conspiracy! by Media Democracy Pod

Dan and Tom meet IRL for a Media Democracy Christmas Special and discuss the Philosopher King and Twitter personality A.C. Grayling, the Enlightenment, centrism, Tony Blair and the media’s general obduracy in the face of political change.

Matthew Brown has played a leading role in Preston City Council's work to maximise the benefits of public and quasi-public spending in the city. Changes to the culture of procurement in the city is having important redistributive effects and helping to foster a stronger co-operative sector. Here he talks with Dan Hind about the origins of Preston Model, the ways in which it has developed over the years, and what it can teach us about the potential for far-reaching reform in the English regions and beyond. The Centre for Local Economic Strategies has produced a short video about community wealth-building - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNQKaDYtmjs

Tom and Dan reflect on the first season of Media Democracy and the Summer of 2017: Corbyn's electoral breakthrough and a brief moment of media introspection; Snow, Robinson and Harris; everyone waking up to Facebook; the need to connect media policy with a wider programme of democratisation. Plus, Tom is accused of spreading fake news by Nick Robinson and Dan has been drinking coffee. Naturally we finish on a song.

This week we speak to Jamie Stern-Weiner about reports of antisemitism at the Labour conference. Jamie is a graduate student in Middle Eastern Studies. He was co-founder of New Left Project and is the editor of 'Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel-Palestine's Toughest Questions', forthcoming from OR Books.

How does the financial and monetary system work? One thing's for sure, you won't get the answers from the Establishment media, which seems incurably incurious when it comes to the mysteries of money. So this week, after a quick chat about the launch of the Media Fund, and a few pops at the Guardian and the BBC, Dan and Tom speak to author and public banking advocate Ellen Brown about money, debt and banking.

This week Tom and Dan chat briefly about the Labour Party Conference and the discussions there about the politics of the media. The episode ends with an extract from John McDonnell's speech at the World Transformed, where the Shadow Chancellor talks about role new technology can play in democratising policy making in the Labour Party and beyond.

As activists head for Brighton, Dan and Tom discuss the power of the new media oligopolies and a media reform agenda for an incoming Corbyn Government.

This week Thomas Barlow joins us to discuss our political and environment crisis and how the Media Fund is seeking to address it through organised support for independent media.

In the second part of our interview with Sarah O'Connell we talk about the growing distance between journalists and the people they cover, and about how this gap can be closed.

Sarah O'Connell talks to Media Democracy about the class and cultural differences that separate broadcast journalism from its audiences. Sarah began her career as a broadcast journalist in 1999 and has worked at the BBC's Political Research Unit, Panorama, Newsnight, Al Jazeera and Sky News.

In this week's show we chat about 'Traingate' and Jon Snow's MacTaggart Lecture before speaking to Hicham Yezza about Islamophobia and how it plays out in the British media.