Volume 14, Number 1, 2003 |
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ContentsEditorial - How do we balance privacy with freedom? 3Mary Riddell - Inside the Press Complaints Commission 7 Matthew Engel - The country where newspaper journalism is dying 17 Close-up on Iraq Jon Swain - War doesn't belong to the generals 23 Philip Jacobson - Hacks dodging the flak 30 David Hellier - Life with Desmond the meddler 35 Brian McNair - The changing face of news: what a difference a decade makes 42 Jon Silverman - The shaming in naming 49 Media training Peter Cole - Escaping from the time-warp 54 Don Berry - Teaching in the Third World 61 Russell Miller - Sauce of the apprentice 65 Ali Phillips - A question of degree 71 BOOK REVIEWSMark Brayne on the meaning and trauma of war 77Julian Petley on impartial digital broadcasting and on news, old and new 81 Bill Hagerty on precious memories of war 86 
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Editorial - How do we balance privacy with freedom?Having eyed each other with their traditional distrust in the growing conflict between freedom of speech and personal privacy, the media and the law are on the verge of a struggle which could end in the collapse of self-regulation. Since 2000, the Human Rights Act (HRA) has given British people what most of the European Union's citizens already had: a legal right to free speech. It also handed them a legal right to privacy. Rather than attempt to reconcile the two competing Articles at source, the framers of the legislation are allowing them to fight it out and have appointed the courts to referee... [Read full article]
Mary Riddell - Guy Black: in the eye of the hurricaneGuy Black is on a diet. No alcohol, and, in place of convivial lunches, an unvaried procession of the prawn cocktail salads he buys from Boots. This austere regime tied in neatly with Black's other mission for the early months of 2003. Late last December, the director of the Press Complaints Commission discovered that the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee had launched an inquiry into privacy and media intrusion. Black's response to this “rather awkward Christmas present” was to compile a 230-page submission. Amassing the case for the defence was, he says, “a very healthy thing to do; a bit like going on a New Year detox”... [Read full article]
Matthew Engel - Where newspaper journalism is dyingSome talk of H L Mencken and some of Ben Bradlee. My own two heroes of American journalism are called Ramsey and Sam. They emerge, from suburbs less sought-after than my own, before the dawn in anonymous vans through the extremes and eccentricities of the Washington DC weather, chuck a newspaper or two on the lawn, and are gone. Neither has yet been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Unfortunately, what they deliver are American papers, the dullest and most depressing on earth... [Read full article]
Jon Swain - War doesn't belong to the generalsWhenever I address the problem of how as a newspaperman I might best report the war in Iraq, I inevitably try to imagine how the talented array of post-war British foreign correspondents would have covered it had they been around in this digital age. Undoubtedly, it would have been with dedication, derring-do, moral integrity and good humour. They would have got out into the field, not sat around at a briefing centre at headquarters relying on official sources for news, and they would not have been part of a pool... [Read full article]
Brian McNair - What a difference a decade makesWhen the first edition of my book News and Journalism in the UK was published in 1993, there was no online journalism and only one UK-based rolling news channel. Flagship television programmes such as News At Ten on ITV and BBC1's Nine O'Clock News were seemingly immovable journalistic objects, fixed forever in their slots as symbols of British public service broadcasting's commitment to the provision of quality news for a mass audience. The presence of Panorama at peak-time on BBC1 and World in Action in the equivalent ITV slot reflected long-standing obligations by both public-funded and commercial broadcasters to produce quality current affairs programming at times in the schedule when people might actually watch it... [Read full article]
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