Techdirt. Stories filed under "mayor"

Mayor Of London Says Internet To Blame For British Press Sins

Glyn Moody — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 09:34:00 PST

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is something of an institution in the UK, famous for his blond mop of hair and outrageous opinions. He's also been a journalist on and off for two decades, and is close to Rupert Murdoch, so it should perhaps come as no surprise that he's penned a characteristically witty defense of British newspapers. They're currently under threat of having governmental regulation imposed upon them in the wake of the UK's Leveson Inquiry, written in response to years of journalists breaking the law in search of hot stories, as Johnson acknowledges:

They have shoved their slavering snouts into the parlours of weeping widows, and by their outrageous lies they have driven the relatives of their victims to suicide. When you read Leveson in full, you are left to ponder the mystery of how people can behave like this. Are these journalists that much nastier and more cynical than the rest of the human race? Why do they seem to have got out of control? The answer is simple. The press are no nastier than anyone else; quite the reverse. On the whole, journalists are highly intelligent, amusing and frequently idealistic.

But if that is the case, how is it possible they have been shoving their slavering snouts all over the place? Johnson has a simple explanation: for some papers the costs are becoming prohibitive. Every year, every month, they are losing ground to blogs and Twitter and Google News; every year the internet eats more destructively into the business case for old-fashioned journalism. That is at least one of the reasons why some journalists have been driven to behave so disgracefully, squawking ever louder, no matter how erroneously, in the hope of being noticed.
Yes, it's all the Internet's fault. Those poor journalists lost their otherwise robust moral compass because Big Bad Google and friends have been progressively stealing their daily bread. Of course, we've heard this narrative about Google destroying newspapers many times before. It's what publishers around the world are saying, while asking for a cut of Google's revenues. It's what Rupert Murdoch has been saying, although he still wants to be included in Google's search results.

But this whole idea is "an inverted pyramid of piffle", to use a famous phrase of Johnson's. It wasn't Google and the Internet that destroyed traditional journalism, it was the newspapers themselves by refusing to evolve as new technologies have come along that changed the relationship with the reader in significant ways. Johnson's attempt to deflect blame away from the guilty parties onto the agents of technological change is simply shabby.

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When Citizens Elect Comedians Who Run For Office As A Joke...

Mike Masnick — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 09:28:00 PDT

The idea of comedians who run for office as a joke has a pretty long history. Comedian Pat Paulsen starting running for US President in the 1960s and ended up taking part in six presidential campaigns. More recently, Stephen Colbert attempted to sort of enter the 2008 election, but was eventually denied. There was also an awful movie based on this premise, wherein a TV comedian played by Robin Williams enters the race as a joke... and wins.

However, what I didn't know was that on a much smaller scale this sort of scenario actually played out... in Reykjavik, Iceland, where "absurdist" comedian Jon Gnarr entered the 2010 mayoral race as a joke... and then won, after an absurdist campaign.

Whenever anyone else made a political promise, Gnarr made a bigger one. Gnarr proposed attracting tourists by leveraging the fame of Iceland's most famous citizen: The pop singer Bjork.

His vision:

We should have this huge statue of Bjork at the harbor like the statue of liberty and instead of a torch she would be having a microphone and she would shout out some information about Reykjavik in three different languages and she would be revolving, you know? And also there would be lights. Her eyes would shoot lights on interesting tourist spots in Reykjavik.

When a candidate proposed building an entire amusement park, Gnarr went small.

"I promised to have a life size Mickey Mouse," he says. "We would be the only Disney World that had a life size Mickey Mouse."

When political events turned boring, Gnarr would walk out.

He's now been mayor for a year, and while he still does absurdist things (wearing a gorilla mask at the office, giving a speech while wearing lipstick) he's actually balanced the budget... and seen his ratings drop significantly. He also says that he has a lot more respect for politicians:

"I have realized that the politicians, or most of them, are not evil, stupid people like I thought they were."

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Mayor Gets City Council To Pass Law Demanding Critical Website Get Shut Down

Mike Masnick — Wed, 26 May 2010 13:35:59 PDT

What is it with politicians and their problems with free speech? Apparently, the mayor of Bordentown, New Jersey, one James E. Lynch Jr., is pretty damn upset about the website BordentownMayorReallySucks.com. I guess you can understand why. Now, of course, when you have critics like that, there are all sorts of things you can do in response. You can respond to the criticism. You can ignore the criticism. You can take legal action against specific statements if you believe they are defamatory. What you don't get to do is pass a law that requires the company that hosts the site to shut it down.

But, it appears, that's exactly what Bordentown Mayor James Lynch is doing.

Apparently, Lynch convinced the town council to agree to a "resolution" demanding the ISP that hosts the site take it down, saying that it "violates New Jersey's consumer affairs law and possibly other state and federal laws." I love the vagueness of "possibly" violating other laws. Now, as the article notes, the site was, at one time (briefly) just called BordentownMayor.com, but quickly renamed itself. So it's unlikely that there's any confusion going on these days. Sucks sites have been found to be legal time and time and time again.

If there's specific defamatory content, as the mayor claims, I could see a reasonable case for dealing with that (though, in all honesty, doing so would just call more attention to the content). But demanding that the entire site be shut down? That's going way beyond what the law allows, and no town resolution gets to ignore things like the First Amendment. But, the best part may be the quote from Mayor Lynch:

"This website has to be removed," the mayor said. "I'm not going to go down the freedom of speech road. But some of the stuff that's on there is fraudulent. You want to put information out? Fine. Say you don't like me? Fine. But attacks on my wife, my daughter? I won't stand for that."

Except, you are going down that freedom of speech road by trying to take down the whole site, in pretty clear violation of the First Amendment. If there is specific content that is defamatory, then sue over that content. Do not use your position is mayor to pass a special resolution demanding a website be shut down completely.

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