The New Yorker has an interesting piece about the invention of political consultancy. It sprang immediately to mind when I read this quote from Mitt Romney, in a transcript of a secretly recorded video at a fund-raiser: I have a very good team of extraordinarily experienced, highly successful consultants, a couple of people in particular who have done races around the […]
Journalism
From the Leveson inquiry this week: (Tony) Blair complains about the crossover of comment and news in newspapers. He says that this “stops being journalism. It’s then an instrument of propaganda or political power” What exemptions should there be for propaganda?
When Jeremy Paxman engages, he is an excellent presenter. When he is bored…not so much. The clip below shows what happens when Newsnight attempts to recreate the kind of boorish conversation that would not have passed for debate in ye olde English pub of thirty years ago. By using controversialists like Oborne, and an ex-journalist Lambert, […]
When we follow through the history of particular industries and see new skills arise as old ones decline, it is possible to forget that the old skill and the new almost always were the perquisite of different people… Even where an old skill was replaced by a new process requiring equal or greater skill, we rarely […]