Volume 20, Number 1, 2009 |
||
ContentsEditorial - The sharp end 3Not finally... Subjective views on matters journalistic Michael Leapman - Martyrs to a cause 5 Brian McNair - Journalism's screen test 7 Michael Henderson - Journalistic stage frights 10 Daya Thussu - Turning terrorism into a soap opera 13 Danny Schechter - Credit crisis: how did we miss it? 19 Nick Pollard - Staying alive in the killing fields 27 Bill Hagerty - Chicago: down but not out 33 Ivor Gaber - Them and us: is there a difference? 41 Nick Wilkinson - Spookmania and the media 47 Sky News - The way they were 53 Martin Moore - Only change can save self-policing 55 Keith Somerville - BBC wounds that won't heal 61 Nicholas Jones - A piranha fish bites back 69 BOOK REVIEWSConrad Black on Michael Wolff 77Tony Thomas on Richard Dowden 80 Donald Trelford on Anthony Sampson 82 Liz Vercoe on François Maspero 84 Roy Greenslade on Mick Temple 87 Brian Winston on Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor 89 Mike Molloy on Murray Sayle 91 BJR conference – 68 Quotes of the Quarter – 76 Ten years ago The way we were 93 Letters 94 Cudlipp Award 96 Cover: Unemployed in New York, 1932: AP/PA PHOTOS 
|
Editorial - The sharp endA snapshot assessment of today’s British media would show an understandable obsession with the world’s finances – relieved in the recent past by the everlasting subject of the weather – and, at the other end of the spectrum, a less comprehensible fascination with private and public activities of real and overhyped celebrities and what they say during unscripted broadcasts or in the green room after them. These two extremes are at present providing employment to large groups of journalists, not least commentators and columnists who articulate the half-formed thoughts of viewers and readers...
Michael Leapman - Martyrs to a causeHow “the youngest national paper editor ever to get fired” found TV stardom and irritated his critics by becoming internationally famous.
Danny Schechter - Credit crisis: how did we miss it?The public, and most journalists, were taken by surprise by the global recession because, in the years leading up to the credit crisis, a complicit media was guilty of lazy and superficial coverage. That’s the contention of American investigative journalist Danny Schechter who argues that there is an unfortunate dialectic between financial failures and media failures. He asks whether there was a relationship between advertising revenues and the quality of the journalism and whether dwindling journalistic resources account for the inadequate reporting. But he does believe a more diverse European media did a better job than their US counterparts.
Daya Thussu - Turning terrorism into soap operaLast November’s television coverage of the attacks in Mumbai was sensationalist and marked by fevered speculation that led to the transmission of many falsehoods. It also sparked a controversial debate about whether it might be necessary to regulate reporting during an unfolding emergency. Daya Thussu, Professor of International Communication at the University of Westminster, explores the issues and raises questions about the commercial imperative that drives TV to present atrocity as spectacle.
Nick Pollard - Staying alive in the killing fieldsReporting on wars has always been a risky business for journalists. But news organisations have transformed their approach to safety in recent years by ensuring that all their staff sent to the front line have as much training as possible to minimise their chances of becoming victims of the conflict they are covering. Despite that, and the virtual industry that has grown up around risk assessment, individual journalists on the ground will go on taking decisions that place them in danger, writes Nick Pollard, the former head of Sky News.
Bill Hagerty - Chicago: down but not outThe U.S. newspaper industry is in deep crisis and the state of the two titles in America’s greatest newspaper city, Chicago, is a case in point. In the city that spawned The Front Page, the iconic play and movie about 20th century journalism, both the Tribune and the Sun-Times are coping with the twin problems of falling advertising revenue and falling sales. Bill Hagerty, BJR’s editor, visits the city and meets the papers’ two editors to discuss their problems. In spite of the gloom, he discovers that they remain optimistic about the future.
Ivor Gaber - Them and us: is there a difference?It is no longer an easy matter to define exactly who is a journalist. As the blogosphere expands in range and influence, there are more and more people – the people formerly known as the audience – who are taking an active part in disseminating news. The change this has wrought in reporting has both renewed the old debate over “objectivity” and stimulated a new concern about ethical standards. Ivor Gaber, Professor of Political Campaigning and Reporting at City University, considers the dangers of dealing with an anarchic tsunami of information.
Nick Wilkinson - Spookmania and the mediaThe media, and their audiences, have long been obsessed with spies and spying. In 1912, to avoid overt censorship, the British government and the then press proprietors reached a gentlemanly agreement to establish a D-Notice Committee in order to restrict reporting of intelligence and security matters that might harm the national interest. It is a system that continues to work effectively, writes Nick Wilkinson, who served as the D-Notice Secretary for five years and whose official history of the system will be published in May this year.
Martin Moore - Only change can save self-policingPress self-regulation and its official body, the Press Complaints Commission, is opaque, largely unaccountable, under resourced and insufficiently effective. Meanwhile, not only has public trust in Britain’s national newspapers declined, cynicism has set in. Many people who suffer at the hands of the press prefer to go law rather than the PCC. Yet there is a lack of political will to bring about any reform, which is a great shame since the losers are both journalists and the public, argues Martin Moore, director of the Media Standards Trust.
Keith Somerville - BBC wounds that won’t healThe BBC’s training programme for staff after the 2007 revelations about faked winners of phone-ins and competitions was something of a fake itself, argues one of the men tasked with running the course, Keith Somerville. Now a journalism lecturer at Brunel University he was a BBC journalist for 28 years, latterly at the corporation’s College of Journalism. He contends that though the programme, Safeguarding Trust, was well constructed it was watered down and failed to question ruling editorial cultures. Now, with journalists required to be multi-media reporters, there is concern about a further decline in standards.
Nicholas Jones - A piranha fish bites backDuring the miners’ strike in 1984, the union’s leader, Arthur Scargill, prided himself on his ability to thwart the news media by refusing interviews and denying reporters information. But he once recruited Nicholas Jones, then the BBC’s industrial correspondent, to act as his driver on a long journey. To mark the strike’s 25th anniversary, he finally reveals the details of his conversation with the man who regarded all journalists as piranha fish swimming in the Fleet Street fish tank.
Conrad Black - Not baring all about RupertFormer Telegraph group proprietor Conrad Black, writing from his prison cell in Florida, reviews Michael Wolff’s biography of Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns The News. He begins by calling it “mediocre and annoying” and then he really lets rip.
|
|