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Jeremy Paxman: regional news fan
[J]ust look at almost any regional news programme, with its tawdry catalogue of misfortune, recited in deadbeat vocabulary. You’d think that every child in the city was being sexually abused, every journey every day disrupted, resulting in ‘pure misery’, every teenager a drug-crazed psychopath. Does it alarm? Sure. Does it help us understand? You must…
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Great writing
Never really had a chance to see the writing of Malcolm Muggeridge – I remember him as a faintly embarrassing figure of fun. But here’s a lovely excerpt of Muggeridge describing America in the 1950s: What they all want … is what the Americans have got – six lanes of large motor cars streaming powerfully…
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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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Playing business politics with TV news
I own a few Sky shares so I wasn’t exactly thrilled when James Murdoch decided to buy a chunk of ITV. Still, the following announcement had me choking on my chips: Ofcom’s advice is that there are public interest issues, in relation to sufficient plurality of news provision for both cross media and television news…