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BBC World News Today
I have a piece at the Guardian today reviewing the Beeb’s revamp of its international newscast, The World – now World News Today (World News Tonight already belonging to ABC). Basically, the UK scheduling puts this up against Britain’s equivalent of NewsHour, and that’s got people asking why the BBC is duplicating something already offered…
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Alan Johnston: Bret Stephens vs the BBC
Fran Unsworth, head of newsgathering at the BBC, takes issue with Bret Stephens. She calls his piece on Alan Johnston for the Wall Street Journal “scurrilous.” I disagree. I think snide is a better word. And it’s shorter. First, let me put the piece in context. Stephens is an anglophobe and his attack on the…
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Madeleine McCann: rite and wrong
As the Madeleine McCann story endured, I spoke to reporters who said: “If she was black, or poor, or…” and gave that slightly embarrassed look that journalists give one another on stories like this, hoping for an acknowledgement. There’s not much to inform, educate or entertain about child abduction. And this isn’t just a case…
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Journalism by numbers
Next time you do a word count, check out one of the stats offered up by your word processor – the Flesch reading ease index. It was devised in the 1940s by an Austrian, Rudolf Flesch, and is a simple number crunching exercise that uses the number of words per sentence, and the number of…