http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog Mon, 01 Sep 2008 23:21:24 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Standards of press behaviour have plunged and the PCC sees much of this as ‘inevitable’. Now’s the time for those at the sharp end to revolt When Arnold Wesker, the playwright, persuaded Sunday Times editor Harold Evans to allow him to spend a month on the paper in the early 1970s, to watch the ... http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog/2008/09/01/what-happened-to-playing-fair/ If the soup was too salty, the steak tough and the fruit overripe, that’s one restaurant you won’t be revisiting. You might be too timid or too busy to complain, but the nasty taste will linger, and you will find somewhere else to eat, somewhere you can trust. That’s more or less the ... http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog/2008/05/26/food-for-thought/ As might have been expected, reactions to the condemnations of media practices contained in Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News, which provides a plank for an article on investigative journalism by David Leigh in this issue, have tended to be focused on the moral and methodological failings of national newspapers and broadcasters. Another aspect might, ... http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog/2008/03/01/trivia-pursuit/ On a spring day, two distinguished drama critics and broadcasters, James Agate of The Sunday Times and his protégé Alan “Jock” Dent of the Manchester Guardian, were out in the West End. Agate wrote in his diary: “Of a six-footfour figure whom we saw striding along Regent Street this afternoon, Jock ... http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog/2007/12/03/lord-help-us/ Andy Bull I have an analogy I like to use when working with a group of raw recruits to a journalism course. It's that they should think of learning how to write a news story rather as they would approach following a recipe in a cookbook. Just as with a recipe by Jamie or ... http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog/2007/08/31/training-a-matter-of-degrees/ So ends a classic era of spin, during which an undisputed master of the misleading baffled his opponents with endlessly devious skills, reviving an old art so that the public, even those who hoped for a different outcome or found his personality unsympathetic, could only watch, wonder at, and applaud in admiration. But enough ... http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog/2007/06/04/will-gordon-brown-clean-up-the-governments-media-act-what-do-you-think/ The freedom of the media in Britain has been suffering erosion over the past few months, some of it from politicians, some from the courts, and some of it self-inflicted. On Friday January 19, at the end of a tiring Parliamentary week, a private member’s bill, the Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill, slipped through ... http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog/2007/03/16/privacy-and-freedom-of-information-what-do-you-think/ The high-profile owners of Press Gazette, faced with considerable losses, decided after only one year in possession to abandon the magazine and the awards that are made under its name and which provide the Fleet Street Diaspora, as well as the provincial press, one of few excuses in the modern ... http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog/2006/12/07/mean-street/ Peter C Glover We see the headlines almost daily. “Global warming: passing the tipping point” (The Independent, February 11, 2006), “Climate change a bigger security threat than terrorism” (The Guardian, June 12, 2006) and “Sea rise could be catastrophic” (BBC News, March 23, 2006). Anyone familiar with the flow of media reports might easily conclude ... http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog/2006/08/21/what-climate-consensus/ Brian Winston The recent call by Conservative leader David Cameron for the repeal of the Human Rights Act is meaningless, as he does not propose stopping people appealing to the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, the procedure before the Act became law. But at least he does make opportunistic ... http://www.bjr.org.uk/blog/2006/07/06/have-these-journalists-actually-read-the-human-rights-act/