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Off topic: Tim the Pig man
If you ever wanted a small example of the interaction of national, local and hyperlocal news, ponder the recent discovery of a strain of foot and mouth disease in a beef fattening herd, just down the road from us in Surrey. It could be ten, a hundred, or a thousand miles away. It means little…
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The wisdom of Neil Postman
Mike Rosenblum has been riffing over on his blog about Neil Postman and the U.S. presidential debates. Back in the day, Postman wrote 1980s media classic Amusing Ourselves to Death, which blames telegraphy for all our modern woes. IMO, before the telegraph, information overload came in the the form of religious works (try reading the…
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Ofcom and the future of TV news
Writing in American journalism’s gilded age, Charles Dudley Warner offered this assessment of the worth of a newspaper: Not all newspapers which make money are good, for some succeed by catering to the lowest tastes of respectable people, and to the prejudice, ignorance, and passion of the lowest class; but, as a rule, the successful…
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Let’s give up on British English online
The first four years of my working life were spent with a US TV network. My language began unraveling (US), or unravelling (UK). My estuary drawl was peppered with the argot so memorably deployed by Alicia Silverstone in Clueless.* British friends laughed – at me, rather than with me. Then a spell at ITN made…