Tomorrow is a BIG day: not only is it election day here, it's also what I call 'Niesewand Day', because one of my personal heroes, the 'protean' journalist Peter Niesewand (see below), who was solitarily confined on 20th Feb 1973, was released, 73 days later, on 5th May. As Time magazine reported:- > "In a stunning setback for Ian Smith's authoritarian regime, the > appellate division of Rhodesia's high court last week overturned the > conviction of Journalist Peter Niesewand for violation of the Official > Secrets Act. Chief Justice Sir Hugh Beadle, in announcing the > unanimous ruling, twitted the Smith government's case against > Niesewand: 'Factual evidence as opposed to opinion was never given.' > The court found that Niesewand's reports on guerrilla activity against > Rhodesian forces near the Mozambique frontier last year had not > damaged the state, but had merely embarrassed the government." > > "For two days after the verdict, Niesewand, 28, remained in jail—where > he had been since Feb. 20 under an order sanctioned by the > government's emergency powers (TIME, March 19). Until his detention, > Niesewand had been a protean freelance, representing the BBC, the > Australian Broadcasting Commission, U.P.I., Agence France-Presse and a > number of London and South African papers. His determined digging into > Rhodesian affairs consistently angered Smith's white-supremacist > government. Under unaccustomed fire from the Rhodesian press, > officials promised to 'review' the detention order. Late last week, > Niesewand was released and immediately deported—an act that turned the > reporter's personal triumph into professional defeat." [[ source: <https://web.archive.org/web/20070930073726/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,907255,00.html>, linked to from webpage <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Niesewand> which, as it happens, (yonks ago) I was priviledged to create. Gotta love 'protean' though, too, no? Protein I know. Protean? Not so much. ]] In November 2019, Ms Lucy Cooke, then employed by Highland TSI (she's now running Kinloch CT, see <https://www.kinlochleven.org.uk/about-kinlochleven-community-trust/>) arranged for me to attend a three-day workshop at the Scottish Universities Insight Institute in Glasgow designed to "reclaim collective knowledge, overcome separation and isolation, towards transforming our working, community and family lives." I still have no idea what the first part is supposed to mean, and I bloody went to it! But I met and made a true friend there, a US-born Glasgow-based academic researcher called Jennifer Seitz. We discovered that we shared a deep admiration and gratitude for fearless investigative reporting based on a conviction that liberal democracy rests upon a free press. (I was amused to learn than Americans, too, call this the 'fourth estate' - see eg <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Estate#The_press>; quite how this quintessentially British expression ever ended up crossing the pond I can't imagine.) We agreed, too, that the political hue of a given investigative journalist was far less important than their courage, diligence, and 'nose' - the almost uncanny ability to smell a story - that the very best of them have in common. Excellent examples are (to my left) the late Paul Foot** and (to my right) Fox News's Tucker Carlson. [[ **Award-winner Foot's finest hour was arguably his 'Not The Scott Report' published by Private Eye. ]] Inevitably, Jennifer and I rarely get to meet up because Glasgow's a hell of a hike, and we don't even converse much, either, because neither of us much likes talking on the phone (OK: that's probably more me than her). We both see ourselves as keyboard warriors, basically. At that workshop I proposed that, if we started working together online, say, we should adopt Peter Niesewand as a kind of secular patron saint. So that's how our community news bureau came to be called the Niesewand Room. Accordingly, when, about a month or so ago, NoseyPARCA (see <NoseyPARCA.WordPress.com>) entered a period of frenetic near-hyperactivity during the current election campaign, I was soon drafting emails to all five election candidates for Jen to polish and send out**. Here's a recent example:- [[ **Equally, she drafts stuff she wants me to polish and send. The trick is to write something entirely factual that the other person is therefore willing to put their name to, and to pack the opinion - especially the all-important ridicule ("man's most potent weapon" -Saul Alinsky) - into the quotations. We call this 'journactivism'. ]] > Dear Ward 21 candidate, > > I am writing to reassure all of you that we at the Niesewand Room > operate to the highest standards of journalistic ethics. We maintain > a 'Chinese Wall' between our news journalism and our opinion > journalism and journactivism. We respect confidences and we protect > sources. Our eponymous exemplar in this respect served seventy-three > days in solitary confinement for reporting the truth; Niesewand (see > <https://web.archive.org/web/20070930073726/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,907255,00.html>, > linked to from, inevitably, > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Niesewand>) is one of my personal > heroes and I for one would rather serve a prison sentence than reveal > a source. > > This has arisen because one or two candidates have shared confidences > with me recently, and one felt obliged afterwards to say that if I > made use of the information, they would deny ever having revealed > it**. So I want to make abundantly clear to all of you that, going > forward, any and all such confidences will absolutely be respected - > no ifs, no buts. > > [[ **or, as a theorist of acts of speech would put it (see my > <https://DraytonMark.SubStack.com/p/wed-head-xxxii>), they asserted > that, in the event of my violating the fulfillment condition of a > commissive utterance, they would retaliate by violating the sincerity > condition of a further assertive one. Two wrongs may not make a > right, but apparently they can dodge an electoral bullet - sometimes, > anyway. ]] > > [...] > A functioning free press is essential to liberal democracy. Without it, you cannot cast your vote on the basis of truth, only propaganda. This can have really catastrophic consequences, witness: Vladimir Putin. But, even when it does not, other, more insidious, dangers lurk. I am fond of reminding Scots of the deeply troubling household survey finding that the proportion of their number who felt that they could influence decisions in their local area decreased significantly from an unimpressive 24% of adults in 2015 to a mere 18% in 2019. Or, to put it another way, on average each group of eleven Scottish adults would break nine-two, which is truly pathetic. Among other things, gaining meaningful civic influence absolutely requires knowing what the hell is going on locally and, crucially, it's the duty and the responsibility of regional press and media to discover and to publicise exactly that. Here in Lochaber our polity is weak because our fourth estate (Lochaber Times, Press & Journal) is not doing an important part of it's job properly. No doubt both of those publications are under serious financial stress and strain making it nigh-on impossible to fund good investigative reporting (which is goddamned time-consuming). OK, I accept that. But we're paying a terrible price: solid, dependably punchy, civic journalism improves people lives by holding officials and officialdom to account. That's why we need free, independent local news bureaux like the Niesewand Room. And that is why I'll be thinking of our heroic patron and exemplar, the late Peter Niesewand, when I cast my vote tomorrow. PS: Loyal readers expecting this week's Wed-Head to be the concluding half of <XXXIII> rather than the XXXIV that they're actually reading will have to wait another fortnight now, I'm afraid. Having (deservedly) trashed the Scottish Green candidate Kate Willis last week it felt excessively negative and thoroughly bad karma to lay into the almost equally self-indulgent candidacy of the Lib Dem's Angus MacDonald today. I am far more proud of the by-and-large much more positive work that Jen and I have done over the last month, and today's column is, similarly, a much more fitting note on which for us to end our parallel journactivistic election campaign. We'd also like to express our sincere gratitude to the two candidates who engaged with Nosey the most: the impressively experienced Mr Thomas MacLennan (Indep) and, most especially, the convincing and compelling Dr Fiona Fawcett (Cons).
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