Volume 11, Number 2, 2000 |
||
ContentsEditorial - Time for quality to show courageBill Hagerty - Cap'n Spin does lose his rag! David Leigh - Britain's security services and journalists: the secret story Dennis Topping - The business dailies Brian Winston - There's still hope for newspapers Mick Hume and Richard Tait - The LM-ITN clash Barbara Lewis - The politics of oil - and media madness Anthony Sampson - Whatever happened to the first draft? J O Baylen - The Telegraph's first Kremlinologist BOOK REVIEWSCal McCrystal on Max HastingsJonathan Fenby on The Express Robin Lustig on War reporting Ivor Gaber on Michael Brunson |
Editorial - Time for quality to show courageDo we hear a distant voice whispering, once again: “Beware the Ides of Dumbing Down”?. Can we detect a certain further slippage on that well-trodden route toward what is always, and euphemistically, called “popular taste” or even more dubiously, “the popular will” ? It begins to look like it... [Read full article]
Bill Hagerty - Cap'n Spin does lose his rag!When invited to become Tony Blair's press officer, Alastair Campbell says his agreement depended on whether he felt he “could make a difference”. That he has done so in the five years since then is one of the few aspects of the turbulent professional life of the Prime Minister's chief press secretary with which even his harshest critics would not quarrel... [Read full article]
David Leigh - Britain's security services and journalists: the secret storyBritish journalists – and British journals – are being manipulated by the secret intelligence agencies, and I think we ought to try and put a stop to it... [Read full article]
Cal McCrystal on Max HastingsWar correspondents are meant to give us unease. In the past many of them, under instructions from a patriotic editor or a patronising general, strove to do the opposite: to reassure the masses back home that victory was just around the corner, that defeat was out of the question, that the morale and zest of “our boys” in battle could not be higher, and that “your correspondent” was more or less omniscient and incapable of including anything other than the truth in his dispatches. Yet a few great war correspondents carried out their proper role... [Read full article]
Robin Lustig on War reportingThis great classic history of war correspondents and their never-ending struggle to separate truth from myth was first published 25 years ago, and the new edition is as welcome as it is timely. It contains valuable accounts of the reporting of the Gulf War (1990-1) and the NATO operation in Kosovo in 1999 – and it is the lessons from these two conflicts which lead Knightley to an unwelcome, and far from universally accepted, conclusion... [Read full article]
|
|