Volume 18, Number 1, 2007 |
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ContentsEditorial - Back-door raiders 3Brian Cathcart - Deepcut: the media messed up 7 Julia Langdon - Interview: Sir John Major 13 Dominic Waghorn - Out of China, into the light 23 Trades unionsPaul Routledge - Meeting spin with spin 29Greg Neale - Growing strong from the Acorn 34 Laurel Maury - It’s a fact — Brits don’t check 39 Fiona Millar - For the sake of the children 45 Eleni Andreadis and Joe Smith - Beyond the oozone layer 50 Matt Thornhill - Let’s hear it for the Boomers 57 Lindsay Nicholson - Can journalists keep the faith? 63 Sarah Niblock - Hacks in the movies: hello Hollywood 69 BOOK REVIEWSBill Hagerty on Peter Stephens 76Richard Stott on Tony Harcup 78 Julia Langdon on Harry Reid 80 Robert Macdonald on Robert Hughes 82 Peregrine Worsthorne on Tom Bower 84 Michael Leapman on Francis Williams 86 Quotes of the Quarter 6 & 22 Ten Years Ago - The way we were 28 
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Brian Cathcart - Deepcut: the media messed upIn spring 2002, researchers from the BBC television programme Frontline Scotland stumbled across what would become a very big story. They were looking into the mysterious death by shooting of James Collinson, a young army recruit from Perth, and they had already established that a strikingly similar death had occurred at the same Surrey barracks where Collinson died, just six months earlier. Then they made their big discovery: there had been not just two such deaths at the barracks, but four. Two young soldiers had died there in 1995, also by gunshot, and also in unexplained circumstances. So began the scandal of Deepcut... [Read full article]
Julia Langdon - Major voice, minor keyJohn Major’s view of the world these days is, literally, quite stunning. Ten years after he lost office, the former Prime Minister looks at it from the top of an apartment complex which commands a panorama every bit as good as that from the top of the London Eye. He introduces the sweep of what must be a 90-degree London cityscape outside his window with a practised joke about being able to keep an eye on the Houses of Parliament, MI6, the Archbishop of Canterbury – look, in tiny little Lambeth Palace way down there – and he can do it all without even having to leave his desk on one side of the cushioned comforts of his imposing drawing room... [Read full article]
Dominic Waghorn - Out of China, into the lightIt had been a strange weekend. Even our driver had turned out not quite what he seemed. On the long journey through the stunning green countryside of Sichuan, he revealed a dark secret. He had been an executioner in the People’s Liberation Army. He unburdened himself of grisly memories of China’s death row and told us how sometimes prisoners had been executed to order for their organs. One in particular was killed even before being convicted because he had a rare blood type, matching that of a senior party official in need of a transplant. But that would be another story. We were meant to be investigating China’s baby-snatchers and he was driving us to meet one... [Read full article]
Laurel Maury - It’s a fact – Brits don’t checkLate in 2002, as America geared up for what looked, to most journalists, to be an absolutely useless war in Iraq, word in the U.S. was that the British press was getting it right, especially The Guardian. Its articles resembled the late- Vietnam-era reporting that we’d grown up reading at university far more than the milk-toast we were seeing daily in The New York Times... [Read full article]
Fiona Millar - For the sake of the childrenLate last year the Family and Parenting Institute, a charity which I chair, commissioned a poll to examine what impact the current focus in the print and broadcast media on parenting was having on parents. It was a subject staff and trustees of the charity had been discussing for some time – the inevitable consequence of an explosion of reality TV programmes such as Supernanny, The House of Tiny Tearaways, Brat Camp and Honey We’re Killing the Kids, and the print coverage that followed in their wake... [Read full article]
Eleni Andreadis and Joe Smith - Beyond the oozone layerIt feels like the end of an era. Despite occasional pockets of scepticism, such as Peter Glover’s article in BJR late last year, the days when journalists would report on climate change by balancing “pro” and “sceptic” voices, or by knocking the human-induced climate-change argument with prominent coverage of an alternative theory, already seem a distant memory in the UK. This marked change in the treatment of climate change in the British media has helped lay the ground for a dramatic shift in the quality of public debate around the issue. Numerous specialists credit UK journalism of the past 18 months with being leagues ahead of their U.S. colleagues in the depth and regularity of coverage... [Read full article]
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