The Death of the Book Review?

Over at Open University, there was (a few months ago) much discussion about what constitutes a good book review. Many of the conclusions seem obvious, but they bear repeating: in an environment, both academic and recreational, where far more interesting books are published than any one person could ever read, a good book review section can do much in filling in the gaps of public knowledge.

David Greenberg reports today that the Atlanta Journal Constitution is doing away with book reviews. This is undoubtedly a shame. Not only do book reviews fill in gaps in public knowledge, they can also highlight things that we really ought to be reading. It is sad that valuable content is increasingly seen as expendable – but then again, the number of people who buy a newspaper for its books section is decidedly limited.

Nevertheless, surely there is a simple solution these days. The Internet has allowed many gaps in markets to be filled, particularly as it has opened the prospect of publishing ones work to a large audience. Assembling a high quality team of reviewers may take time, and it takes no small effort to publicise a blog to the point that it becomes worthwhile. But if the decline of the book review is to be lamented, why not arrest the decline? After all, a slightly longer than average blog post is more or less the ideal length for a book review – long enough to highlight the interesting points of the book to whet the reader’s appetite, but not so long that the writer succumbs to the temptation to suggest what he would have written himself in the same situation. Moreover, a good group blog would have the immeasurable benefit of considerable eclecticism. It’s easy to lament the decline of the book review, but with the opportunities of the modern world, it’s a deficiency that could easily be solved.

The Use of Titles

There’s been a minor skirmish in Oxford recently, with a group of students calling themselves Student Action for Refugees(STAR) campaigning to have a professor sacked on account of his links to the anti-immigration think tank MigrationWatch.

The group, Student Action for Refugees (STAR), believes Professor David Coleman is bringing the University into disrepute by using his academic title to legitimise his views in the media.

The petition calls upon the University to “consider the suitability of Coleman’s continued tenure as a Professor of the University, in light of his well-known opinions and affiliations relating to immigration and eugenics.”

It cites his role as Honorary Consultant for the think-tank MigrationWatch UK, an anti-immigration think tank, and notes that he is currently a member of the Galton Institute, a charity that conducts research into eugenics.

The point I want to pick up on is the idea that Professor Coleman is using his title to give his views credibility in the media. For the article in question resolutely fails to mention that Professor Coleman is a professor of demography, and thus his professional expertise is very much concerned with questions of immigration. Indeed, his position is such that from the point of view of an ordinary member of the public, he could reasonably be expected to have a greater knowledge of issues surrounding patterns of migration and may well be able to shed extra light thereon.

The students may have had a point if Professor Coleman was a professor of mathematics, and was merely using his title as a vehicle for promoting his own views. For there’s a clear difference in terms of academic integrity in using your title to comment on matters of relevance to your area of study, and using it to bestow legitimacy on an area on which you are not necessarily more informed than the gentleman on the Clapham omnibus.

For their part, the media should disclose as much as possible when introducing a guest. That way, Professor Bloggs, Wilberforce Professor at Gladstone University can be clearly shown to have a knowledge pertinent to a discussion of the abolition of the slave trade, but may have less specific knowledge when dealing with questions of science policy. After all, it still wouldn’t be invalid for Professor Bloggs to seek to comment on any issue that he wanted, should he be able to find an organ willing to publish his views. But full disclosure of academic expertise allows the reader to decide with how much salt they want to take the political opinion expressed.

As far as STAR are concerned, it worries me that their sole basis for their campaign against Professor Coleman is based upon his political opinions. After all, what they are arguing is that someone whose opinions they disagree with has no place at their university. That sets a worrying precedent – university is supposed to be a place where all viewpoints are welcome, but only those that can stand up to academic rigour succeed. You cannot succeed at a university by closing your mind to opinions you don’t want to hear – you have to challenge them head on. Use proof and evidence to back up your assertions, and above all trust that the principles of scholarship, of dispassionately surveying the evidence at hand, will allow your research to stand up where others fall.

If STAR believe that Professor Coleman’s academic integrity is placed at risk because of his political opinions, then they should be able to demonstrate the flaws in his published work. If they come to equally or more plausible conclusions on the topics concerned, then they should confront Prof Coleman’s works academically. Instead, they are simply trotting out the last resort of the lazy undergraduate – the ad hominem attack. I’m pretty sure there are thorough refutations of Coleman’s work. But it would be nice if supposedly the brightest undergrads in the world could cite them, rather than relying on their own petty prejudice.

State Interference

Thelondonpaper ran a centre-page spread earlier this week about Bollywood’s leading actresses. Not being a film buff by any stretch of the imagination, the subject matter failed to grab my interest. Yet my gaze was averted long enough to note that in informing us about each of the leading stars, they made a comparison with a leading Hollywood lady. Shilpa Shetty was Sandra Bullock – rich and famous, without doubt, but last made a big film in the 90s. Another was compared to Renee Zellweger – not a traditional beauty, but my goodness, can she act. When trying to explore a new subject, there’s an undeniable tendency for us to relate knowledge to things of which we have a far better understanding. And that is where the most interesting story to come from this week’s Big Brother racism row lies.

Within the past 12 months, there have been three major news stories that have two main features in common: that they are primarily cultural in nature, and that they involve Westerners making negative portrayals of non-Western countries. I refer, of course, to the ‘cartoon wars’, to Borat, and to Big Brother. There’s a third thing that unites these stories, too – in every single case, the government of the denigrated country (or countries, in the case of the cartoon wars) has appealed to the Western governments to take action against the companies responsible for the cultural slight.

There’s a certain irony in seeing our political leaders being forced to comment on TV programmes which they almost certainly have no interest in. In particular, there’s an irony in Gordon Brown travelling to India to present himself as a statesman, and instead finding himself harangued at every turn by angry Bollywood fans, and having to find soundbites on Big Brother. But there’s also something unfamiliar about it. Politicians like to show they have the common touch by commenting on popular culture – although if this has any effect at all, it is normally to come back and haunt them.

Yet we would never, ever expect politicians to take an active role intervening in these matters. Denmark’s Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, earned a great deal of respect when he refused to bow to international pressure and take action against the editor of Jyllands-Posten over the printed cartoons, saying that as long as the newspaper stayed within libel laws, what it printed was a matter of editorial policy, and so it should remain. Nor did we ever expect George Bush or Tony Blair to take the Kazakhstani authorities seriously when they asked for Borat to be banned for the negative portrayal of their own country.

Perhaps we could understand the sensitivity of Kazakhstan in these matters, though. After all, its democracy is in its earliest stages; it has never experienced a transfer of presidential power since independence, and it had years of existing as one of the poorest relations of the USSR. This week, however, India’s government felt compelled to speak out on the supposed racist treatment of one of its national icons, making official representations from Cabinet Ministers to Gordon Brown in relation to the Big Brother affair. India, despite having a thriving cultural industry, despite having a stable democracy, still saw matters of broadcasting as something that should be subject to governmental interference.

This raises broader issues about the specific features of Western democracy and the legacies of colonialism. Here in the West, we’re more than used to the existence of repositories of power and culture existing outside of directly political structures. Indeed, it is the notions of an independent press, of the rights of people to have the freedom of speech, of very specific limits being placed upon the operation of political power, that define the Western notion of democracy.

How different is that outside of the Western world? As noted above, the traditions of democracy, and the traditions that inform the content of Western democracy, have far weaker roots. The legacy of colonialism, too, is one where an outside power exerted considerable authority. Military strength alone was not sufficient to perpetuate such control – there was a need to co-opt local elites and power groups into the ruling classes as well, so that colonial rule had a local power structure on which to lean on (for example, it is notable that when Saddam was emasculated militarily after the Gulf War, he increased the role that religious leaders played in Iraq).

The knock-on effect of all of this is a different conception of power relations. Where local control of the political system has arrived only recently, there’s an understandable desire for total control of the apparatus of the state. Whether this proves feasible in practice or not is a somewhat moot point – the fact is, by appealing on a government-to-government level, they reveal the attitude that they believe that cultural matters are an appropriate area for that sort of intervention. In the West, while I’d expect politicians in Britain to comment on, say, the racist taunts endured by England players in football matches abroad, I’d be very surprised if they were to appeal to the Spanish government to take action.

Of course, there is a model through which government can make a positive intervention on these cultural affairs. What it involves is an understanding of the way politics operates in the West – that is, that it keeps its nose out of trying to run the press. Instead, it plays along with the media game, exploiting opportunities for favourable write-ups. One government of the three I mention realised the error of its ways, and managed to win considerable support and publicity by playing the media exposure for all it was worth.

Kazakhstan’s government quickly realised that it was making no headway with its complaints against Borat – and worse still, it was committing the heinous crime of being unable to take a joke. So it turned away from railing against Western authorities for not listening to their concerns, and instead took the opportunity to send their ambassadors on goodwill missions, writing editorials and giving interviews in which they extolled the virtues of their country. Which, by and large, had the effect of making Borat appear the boor. Ultimately, their decision to fight a media war, not a diplomatic one, paid off handsomely.

India’s government could learn a lot from the approach. Rather than haranguing Gordon Brown as he attempts to establish strong links with an emerging economy, they would do much better by approaching Channel 4 for a right of reply, at the same time as launching a cultural mission to bring greater awareness of India’s heritage. Maybe they could even invite Jade Goody to spend some time travelling the country and opening her eyes to a culture that is more than just poppadoms. If they really want to influence coverage of the media row around Big Brother, they’ve got to understand the political culture in which they operate. Britain will respond far better to an information campaign than they will to any diktat from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.