Archive for journalism
Secret Royal influence or journalists not reading Hansard?
I’m not an expert in this area, so there’s one thing that really puzzles me about the Guardian’s splash about the “secretive” process by which the Prince of Wales is asked to approve certain legislation: it doesn’t seem to me to be anything new. Obscure perhaps, but not new. Which is why I took a [...]
Media spin, 1966 vintage
Hello again to an old story which I cam across in the archives whilst looking for something else. Trust me, it’s more interesting than the Something Else which, even with the use of capital letters and ominous music, turned out to be a damper squib than the empty chocolate wrapper left in the work kitchen [...]
Is social media strengthening the position of journalists?
The digital world is destroying traditional media business models as people find news via their friends and then expect to read it for free. So goes the widespread lament about the future of British (and international) journalism. However, Nic Newman’s latest report for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found a much more [...]
Daily Mail sued by Carina Trimingham
The Press Gazette reports: MP Chris Huhne’s partner Carina Trimingham today brought a High Court damages action over a “cataclysmic interference” with her private life. The PR adviser, whose adulterous affair with the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change became public in June 2010 – with Huhne leaving his wife of 26 years [...]
Why Ivan Lewis isn’t completely wrong about journalists
The fiasco over Shadow Culture Secretary Ivan Lewis’s call for journalists to be registered has rather obscured what should be a good point of debate: the degree to which journalists or editors should be held personally responsible for what they do. As I wrote earlier in the year about media regulation: There needs to be [...]
Join me in Hackney tomorrow afternoon
I’m off to Hackney on Sunday afternoon to talk about the state of our media after the original speaker for the Hackney Liberal Democrats event has had to pull out. It turns out to be rather timely as I’ve just been reading Nick Davies’s seminal work on the state of our press, Flat Earth News. [...]
Did journalists really not misuse one of the UK’s largest databases of personal contact details?
Here’s a little conundrum for you. Imagine you are a journalist working on one of the many titles that the Information Commissioner found was involved in dubious practices to get hold of personal information about people. Don’t you think it’s quite likely you would now and again have wanted to get hold of someone’s home [...]
The flaws in Ed Miliband’s media policy are no cause for rejoicing
It isn’t often that the members of one party should be worried about a proposed policy from a rival party’s leader collapsing under examination. However, David Elstein’s demolition of Ed Miliband’s proposal to limit ownership of newspapers by circulation should not provide more than a passing smile to Liberal Democrats, for it highlights the difficult of [...]
Media ownership: what have Liberal Democrats said?
Flicking through old general election manifestos of the Liberal Democrats and our predecessor parties at the weekend, I was surprised to find how recent references to concerns over the pattern of media ownership in the UK are. It really is only with the 1997 general election manifesto that explicit policies about protecting or improving the [...]
Media reform in the UK
Anthony Barnett (Our Kingdom), Sunny Hundal (Liberal Conspiracy), Mark Pack (Lib Dem Voice) & Will Straw (IPPR) write… July 2011 will be remembered as one of those rare moments where the nation came together in shared outrage and disgust. The hacking of Milly Dowler shocked the country and led to a series of unprecedented events [...]
