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Going to pot and other comedy headlines…
Before I earned the right to moralise about your behaviour and upbraid you for failing to conform to my current high personal standards…I once sinned. Sadly I’m not going to share my teenage history of amphetamine abuse (narcolepsy you understand), but British Labour politicians – like Home Secretary Jacqui Smith – are popping up in…
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Journalism training for executives
Time was when being a journalist was pretty much de rigeur for network bosses. CBS President Howard Stringer was a news division product. NBC’s Andy Lack (for whom I once did a very great and unacknowledged favour) was a news exec. They knew politics. They had judgement. In Britain, Mark Thompson was propelled into his…
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Islamism in universities
Given the headline above you can perhaps see how would-be terrorists would be keen to up their academic credentials. On which topic, I heard Ed Husain on Today this morning repeating the familiar mantra that universities are centres of Islamist recruitment. It was an odd piece, since it seemed to lack any factual peg –…
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Faction and fakes, trust and distrust
The director Peter Kosminsky was once a documentary maker. In 1988 he made a film called Afghantsi, about the Red Army’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. The film won all sorts of awards, but what I loved about it were the sequences cut to a haunting piece of brilliantly chosen Afghan music. I resolved to track it…