This is some of what’s caught my atten­tion in the past hours:

• Pri­vacy Head­lines | cearta.ie — “The evid­ence sug­gests that the emphasis on pri­vacy issues in the pub­lic dis­course on journ­al­istic eth­ics is being led by pub­lic fig­ures and, par­tic­u­larly, by politi­cians. Two-thirds of inva­sion of pri­vacy com­plaints in all for­ums were from pub­lic fig­ures. One-third came from private cit­izens, and only a fifth (21%) actu­ally con­cerned private citizens.”
• Let­ter: Cost of regional TV | The Guard­ian — “It seems odd that a fort­night after the Scot­tish Broad­cast­ing Com­mis­sion pro­posed a ded­ic­ated tele­vi­sion ser­vice for Scot­land (pop­u­la­tion 5 mil­lion) at a cost of between £50-75m a year and within five days of the start of a Gaelic tele­vi­sion ser­vice cost­ing £21m a year (only 60,000 people speak Gaelic), Ofcom seems pre­pared to allow ITV in Eng­land (pop­u­la­tion 50 mil­lion) to cut its non-news regional pro­grammes to 15 minutes a week and amal­gam­ate news regions in such a way that they lose much of their local relevance…”
• Mark Thompson: The BBC can and must play a cent­ral role in the future of pub­lic ser­vice broad­cast­ing | The Guard­ian — The buy-off: “I want to offer a set of prac­tical part­ner­ships and ini­ti­at­ives which are deliv­er­able and big enough to be game-changing. Which do not require legis­la­tion or any new reg­u­lat­ory machinery — and which, there­fore, can make an eco­nomic dif­fer­ence to the other broad­casters in months rather than years.”
• Towards evidence-based reform of European uni­ver­sit­ies | vox — “EU coun­tries have almost no private fund­ing due to hav­ing no or very small tuition fees, few private insti­tu­tions, almost no phil­an­thropic fund­ing and con­tri­bu­tions by alumni, and little fund­ing provided by enter­prises. This is why US uni­ver­sit­ies are much bet­ter fun­ded than their EU counterparts.”
• Spin room cov­er­age out of con­trol | chicagotribune.com — “Green­field has been around long enough to remem­ber when he could, without much coax­ing, get a top Demo­cratic adviser to con­cede Ron­ald Reagan cleaned Jimmy Carter’s clock in a 1980 debate.Almost 30 years later, Green­field believes it’s prac­tic­ally to the point where a hor­rendous gaffe such as mis­tak­ing the pres­id­ent of Rus­sia for the second base­man of the Bal­timore Ori­oles some­how would be spun as a pos­it­ive. “These days, they’re likely to say, ‘No, actu­ally it human­ized him,’ ” Green­field said.”
• Six Years Inside Gitmo: A Journalist’s Tale | TIME — “Months after his release, Al-Haj still walks with a limp and the aid of a cane, because of injur­ies he says were incurred when he was pushed from a mil­it­ary heli­copter blind­folded after his arrest in 2001. U.S. mil­it­ary offi­cials say that claim has never been substantiated.”