Volume 15, Number 1, 2004 |
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ContentsEditorial - Cleaning up the act 3The greatest columnists Bill Hagerty - And the winners are... 6 Keith Waterhouse - Those I have loved — and loathed 7 After Hutton Michael Brunson - Putting ourselves beyond reproach 13 Brian Winston - Say goodnight, nurse 19 Julian Petley - Balancing the books 23 Roger Harrabin - Risky business 28 Harold Evans - Propaganda versus professionalism 35 Sean Magee - Whipping-boys 43 Peter Preston - Tabloids: only the beginning 50 Victor Davis - Murder, we wrote 56 Chris Frost - For the sake of the children 63 Alec Charles - Racist, or just animal crackers? 68 BOOK REVIEWSMichael Leapman on Christine Fanthome 73Joe Haines on Colin Seymour-Ure 76 Ned Sherrin on Donald Zec 79 Bruce Page on Michael Wolff 81 Brenda Maddox on Arthur Gelb 84 Richard Littlejohn on Bernard Shrimsley 87 
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Editorial - Cleaning up the actIn the interval between Lord Hutton’s report and Lord Butler’s, the BBC is going to be put under heavy pressure from inside and out over its coverage of news and its editorial procedures. With a charter renewal looming, it is vital that the corporation treads carefully... [Read full article]
Bill Hagerty - And the winners are...In his pungent essay on newspaper columnists (BJR, 14/3), Bernard Shrimsley observed: “Great columnists make the difference good sauces make.” Alongside Shrimsley’s piece, Geoffrey Goodman asked: “Who is the greatest British national newspaper columnist of all time; and who is the greatest of those writing today?” It would be difficult to choose, reflected Goodman, and the varied response to the BJR’s Greatest Columnists Poll proved him right... [Read full article]
Michael Brunson - Putting ourselves beyond reproachThe day after the Hutton report was published, at seven minutes past six in the morning I was listening to BBC Radio 4. I was therefore tuned to the channel on which Andrew Gilligan had made his infamous broadcast at the precise time at which he had delivered it. In a live two-way with John Humphrys on the Today programme – once again exactly the same format as the Gilligan report – I heard the BBC’s Washington correspondent, Justin Webb, talking about the resignation of the weapons inspector, Richard Kay, after his team’s failure to discover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq... [Read full article]
Brian Winston - Say goodnight, nurseWhen the world was young, so young that Lord Gus Macdonald was just a callow firebrand producer on World in Action, we had, I thought, a pretty coherent view of the statutory notion of balance. It was claptrap. “Due impartiality”, which was how the 1954 Television Act which introduced commercial broadcasting put it, was nothing but a threadbare attempt on the part of our political masters to curtail free expression by limiting the range of acceptable opinions on air... [Read full article]
Julian Petley - Balancing the booksAccording to A Young Citizen’s Guide to the Media in Politics: “Despite the legal requirements for them to be impartial and balanced in their political coverage, radio and television broadcasters have frequently been criticised for not being so. They have been accused of bias – about Northern Ireland, or civil unrest in British cities such as Bradford in 2001, for example – or for down-playing or even ignoring altogether certain kinds of story… [such as] sizeable domestic protests over Britain’s role in the Falklands, Iraq, Balkans and Afghanistan wars.” So why do I, as the author of these words, want to defend the current impartiality regulations?... [Read full article]
Peter Preston - Tabloids: only the beginningThe enthusiasm, I should admit right at the start, is long-standing and personal. Twenty-eight years ago, when I was a young editor of The Guardian, some equally young Spaniards came to see me. They were returning to Madrid from exile in America; they were going to revive one of the great, lost titles of Spanish journalism, El Pais. What hints, please, could I give them? The answer, as it turned out, was very few... [Read full article]
Sean Magee - Whipping-boys“I have a dream – a race for journalists in which they are the jockeys and the jockeys are the journalists.” It was not difficult to have some sympathy with French jump jockey Jacques Ricou after he had won a big race on Jair du Cochet at Cheltenham in January. For the best part of two years he had been the latest whipping-boy in the favourite pursuit of the British racing press – slagging off French jockeys – and the esprit with which he retaliated in his moment of vindication brought into focus the curious relationship between press and performer in horseracing... [Read full article]
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