-
News of the World: victim and villain in the poisonous communication of public service
Most aspects of the News of the World’s demise have been picked over. But this is not, for all the headlines, a scandal of journalism, or proprietors, or mergers and acquisitions. Journalists are journalists, proprietors are businessmen and deals are what they do. This is a scandal of public service and public information. The most…
-
Education by evensong
Nothing enshrines so completely the idea of decline as an English cathedral. Millennial in age, monumental in scale, meticulous in decoration, the cathedral is dedicated to a medieval deity. A god of buildings, worshipped through spires and flying buttresses and arches, feared through plaster paintings of devils and awed in roof bosses carved with angels and…
-
Democracy after journalism
I suppose the title reveals my concerns, which are more about the former than the latter. We’ll be talking about it in Perugia this week at the International Journalism Festival. Here’s a reading list: Journalism was long ago seen as a fourth estate, an extra-parliamentary representative cohort. In 19C political theory, the press is seen…
-
The price of blogging
In the mid-2000s City University’s Journalism school – well me, to be precise – had a number of conversations with the Bahraini authorities about journalism education, in the context of a more open and robust political culture. The conversations began with an approach by a junior member of the ruling family, a former academic of…