Davos Newbies

How’s this for an extraordinary public gift? The BBC is broadcasting the complete works of Beethoven on Radio 3 and the television stations BBC2 and BBC4, starting on June 5. All nine symphonies, performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Gianandrea Noseda, will be available for free download.

Here’s Norman Lebrecht’s prescient comment:

Noseda is no Karajan, that’s for sure, but he served a tough apprenticeship with Valery Gergiev in St Petersburg and has come on nicely in three Manchester seasons, manifesting a deft, unsentimental touch in German Romanticism, alongside his Russian and operatic specialisms. At 41 he is younger, less experienced and less established on the international circuit than any of his recorded predecessors.

Yet it may turn out that Noseda’s Beethoven becomes the household version to computer-literate millions in China, India or Korea who have never heard of Karajan or Klemperer and could, in any event, never afford the price of a DG or EMI set.

To them, Noseda and the BBC Phil are the bringers of light and arbiters of art.

When, two or three decades hence, China is the world’s largest industrial power, it will be Noseda’s Beethoven that couples recall as their formative revelation, as our grandparents once savoured Toscanini’s.

Such is the potential magnitude of the BBC’s magnanimity. The Beethoven week is a robust reminder that there is life yet in the Reithian principle: that broadcasting must educate and inform, and that there is no better way in the 21st century for nation to speak peace unto nation.

What a great institution.

Update It looks like this is a free download, not a podcast. The BBC is doing some interesting stuff in podcasting, but I suspect this isn’t it.

Good riddance to the bureaucratic snoozefest of a “constitution”. Much of the machinery it suggested is necessary, but what the EU really needs is a true constitution that can inspire and foster a pan-European democracy. Sadly, I don’t think the leadership is present to do it right the next time. More muddling through ahead.

I wrote last week about what I saw as the shameful parting shot of Daniel Okrent, The New York Times public editor, or ombudsman. He accused Paul Krugman of distorting statistics in his columns, with no supporting evidence.

Today the Times has a quarter-page of soppy huzzahs from readers for Okrent. (Parenthetically, why do all American publications persist in publishing letters of the ilk: “What a wonderful cover story on x”? I thought that kind of thing vanished with the collapse of the Cultural Revolution. The Times piece is even headlined: “Goodbye, Public Editor No. 1, and Thanks”. Yuk.) The last letter, however, is something different.

In Daniel Okrent’s parting shot as public editor of The New York Times, he levied a harsh charge against me: he said that I have “a disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults.”

He offered no examples of my “disturbing habit,” and maybe I should stop there: surely it’s inappropriate for the public editor to attack the ethics of one of the paper’s writers without providing any supporting evidence. He responded to my request for examples with criticisms of specific columns. Those criticisms were simply wrong: in each of those columns I played entirely fair with my readers, using the standard data in the standard way.

That should be the end of the story.

I want to go back to doing what I have been doing all along: using economic data to inform my readers.

PAUL KRUGMAN
Princeton, N.J., May 24, 2005

Stay tuned to the public editor page for further instalments.