Category: “Media”

Longer than usual blog today, most of it not written by me. You’ll have to wait a bit for the point, but with thanks to the Labour Party’s media monitoring department, I want to begin with an account of what appeared on the main news programmes this morning. Today Programme 1. The US enquiry into [...]

Hype can be a very dangerous business, and The Archers is the latest commodity to find itself damaged by it. I am not an Archers’ fan, but Fiona is and yesterday, the biggest anticipation of the day was not celebration of her birthday, but tuning in to make sure she learned what all the fuss [...]

Papers wise I have only seen The Guardian and the Financial Times today and my eye was particularly drawn to three photos. One of Nick Clegg (FT). One of Julian Assange (Guardian). One of Barack Obama (FT). And they made me think of conventional wisdom. I can find none of the pictures online so you [...]

Once a newsworthy event becomes a full-blown media frenzy, there comes a point where separating fact from fantasy, comment from conspiracy, and hard information from spin becomes virtually impossible. That is the point we reached with the WikiLeaks circus yesterday. The central character, Julian Assange, some of yesterday’s walk-on parts, like John Pilger and Ken [...]

First, re the World Cup location announcements, part of you wants to say these are visionary decisions which will help two important countries build a more modern and relevant global identity, and provide two great festivals of football. A bigger part can’t help fearing that from a fan’s perspective it is hard to think of [...]

Well, we’re having a right old book day are we not. Bad Sex Awards pitch this morning (I liked the line from journalist John Rentoul that it was ‘triple bluff’) and now I offer you the article I penned for the latest issue of The Bookseller, on the subject of political books. Though it is [...]

With Royal weddings top of the news agenda, it won’t be too long (in historical terms) before Royal babies come along … which brings me neatly to the subject of midwives, which brings me swiftly to the subject of cuts. Oh it will take more than a Royal wedding to knock me off message … [...]

The best bits of Private Eye often come from the spoof press reports, which mock both the people they are about, and often the media and the manner of its reporting. There is one such funny piece this week under the headline ‘Woolas fury at re-run in Oldham.’ The story, from ‘Rotters’ agency, goes as follows: [...]

I hope you don’t mind me reprinting in full here the comment posted by Jacquie Reed on the blog I did earlier about the coalition cutting off their noses to spite their faces by cutting government spending which is shown to have generated investment. And I hope she doesn’t mind me saying it is for [...]

The great thing about writing a blog, as opposed to a newspaper column, or an editorial, is that when you can’t be arsed, you don’t have to. One of the many bad things about our papers is that there are too many columnists with not enough to say, and it is so obvious when they can’t [...]