Fuss about PR

Britain's polity has to reckon with a stronger third party and the British media is working up a debate about the constraints imposed by the...

Britain8217;s polity has to reckon with a stronger third party and the British media is working up a debate about the constraints imposed by the electoral system. In the wake of Labour8217;s slim victory and the emergence of the Liberal Democrats as a significant third pole in what has functioned as a two-party system, many commentators are loudly wondering whether the first-past-the-post system can be properly representative. Should it be replaced by the Proportional Representation system PR?

Last week, senior Labour politician Jack Straw took it upon himself to shoot down the idea of a proportional representation system, before it gathers more force. PR gives undue power to minority parties to decide who rules, he wrote in an article in the Guardian; it produces coalition, as opposed to 8216;8216;strong8217;8217;, government. Wrote Straw: 8216;8216;British people prefer strong majority government rather than some mush in the middle8217;8217;.

In India, we8217;ve seen a far more drastic reconfiguration of the polity in the 1990s after the splintering of the one party-dominance system into a multi-party system. But for good reasons and bad, the occasional balloon about replacing the first-past-the-post system with the PR system crumples up before it can fly.

Film sans politics?

At Cannes, the jury has been sternly advised to keep the politics separate from the cinema. The admonition came from festival director, Gilles Jacob, still traumatised by the memory of last year8217;s top award going to Michael Moore8217;s Fahrenheit 9/11. Moore, he has said, won for 8216;8216;political rather than cinematographic reasons, no matter what the jury said8217;8217;.

But is it possible to tidily amputate the politics from the cinema?

In the New York Times, a piece on the much-feted work of Sarajevo-born film-maker Emir Kusturica, who presides over the Cannes jury this year, described how relentlessly Kusturica is stalked by one question: 8216;8216;During the wars that destroyed Yugoslavia in the 19908217;s, why didn8217;t he come out openly against Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader who was ravaging his homeland?8217;8217;

Then there8217;s the film from Iraq that8217;s making news this year at Cannes. Kilometer Zero, set in 1988, is a road movie that takes place in Kurdish Iraq and tells the story of a soldier recruited by force into Saddam Hussein8217;s army to fight Iran. The director, Hiner Saleem, is an angry exile who longs to meet Saddam8217;s cousin Chemical Ali, known for the poison gas attacks against the Kurds. 8216;8216;I would like to look this war criminal in the eye8217;8217; he told the International Herald Tribune.

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Is Saleem8217;s film aesthetically satisfying or simply well meaning 8212; the jury8217;s still chewing on that this year in Cannes.

Inside the news

It was a newspaper scandal that made a worldwide splash. In 2003, when it was revealed that a young journalist, Jayson Blair, was fabricating stories, and that these made-up stories were smoothly making their way past the checks and balances of one of the world8217;s great newspapers, the New York Times responded by creating space in its organisation for an ombudsman. It appointed a 8216;Public Editor8217; to open out a conversation with its readers, to keep a vigilant eye on the newsgathering processes, to keep the reader from getting alienated from her newspaper.

Also, to mop up the uncomfortable fallout from an embarrassment larger than the fracas about Jayson Blair: Like most American newspapers, the NYT8217;s pre-war reporting on Saddam Hussein8217;s weapons of mass destruction gave the misleading impression that they existed as an immediate threat.

Last week, the man the NYT hired as its first public editor, Daniel Okrent, reflected on his tenure before handing over charge to his successor. Published in the Guardian, Okrent8217;s interview was remarkable for his insistence on the need for constant accountability to the reader.

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Okrent spoke of his mission against anonymous quotes. 8216;8216;You should at the very least indicate as much as you can about the source and what the motivation is8217;8217;. He said newspapers must make it clear to readers what various formats mean, tell them what a particular column is meant or not meant to be about. A paper must not be afraid to nag even its opinion writers and columnists on questions of factual errors.

On the controversial WMD stories: 8216;8216;It certainly was a very serious case of bad journalism8217;8217;. Is it likely to happen again? Not really, 8216;8216;8230; because everybody is aware of how we in the press blew it8217;8217;. But what the press needs to do is: 8216;8216;Keep public editors around, give readers more access to the editors of the paper, constantly challenge itself, and be aware of its own history.8217;8217;

She said it

Traditional Labour supporters are giving him grief, and so what if he delivered the party a never-before third term. But surely the last word on Tony Blair8217;s limp victory belongs to Margaret Thatcher. 8216;8216;He has a long way to come before being a Thatcherite8217;8217;, she said.