Latest from Coffee House

It is always amusing to hear the left selectively invoking Margaret Thatcher. This week, they are doing so to prevent the privatisation of Channel 4, citing the fact that she brought the channel into being. She did, in 1982; but in her memoirs, she explains that by 1988, when she was striving for the phasing out of the BBC television licence fee, she decided that Channel 4 would be better off privatised. On both subjects, she was defeated by what she calls ‘the monopolistic grip of the broadcasting establishment’. That grip is scarcely looser today.

In a private letter written in 1918, the recently deposed German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg admitted that in the run-up to the Great War, ‘there were special circumstances that militated in favour of war, including those in which Germany in 1870-71 entered the circle of great powers’ and became ‘the object of vengeful envy on the part of the other Great Powers, largely though not entirely by her own fault’. Yet Bethmann saw another crucial factor at work: that of public opinion.’How else,’ he asked,'[to] explain the senseless and impassioned zeal which allowed countries like Italy, Rumania, and even America, not originally involved in the war, no rest until they too

As the British authorities debate whether to ban the propaganda channel of a savage imperialist power, Russia Today is making a decent first of banning itself. Workers have been walking out for a week. The invasion was too much even for staffers who had spent years demeaning themselves by licking the boots of a dictatorship. Even if Sky and YouTube had not effectively closed the channel by pulling it from their platforms, RT would have faced extreme difficulty in continuing to broadcast from London, one ex-staffer told me. About half his former colleagues had quit, including large numbers of production staff the Russians needed to keep the channel on air. One had

Nadine Dorries, the Culture Secretary, has written to Ofcom urging it to keep the situation with Russia Today ‘very carefully under review’ given events in Ukraine. At PMQs, Keir Starmer called for the government to ask Ofcom to review RT’s license.  But if RT lost its broadcast license in the UK, then Putin would use this as an excuse to kick out the BBC and other British broadcasters. Just look at how Russia closed the Moscow office of Deutsche Welle, the German public service broadcaster, and ended the accreditation of its journalists after a German-language version of RT was taken off air in Germany. The least-worst option would be for

Is Laura Kuenssberg’s time as BBC political editor coming to an end? That’s the suggestion tonight after the Guardian reported she is in talks to step down from the role and move to a plum gig hosting the Today programme.  Rumours of Kuenssberg’s impending departure have been circulating around Westminster for some time now to little avail. But this time it is being talked up as part of a wider shake up of the Beeb’s lead presenters, with Jon Sopel recently announcing he is ending his US beat and returning to the UK. Rumours of Kuenssberg’s impending departure have been circulating around Westminster for some time now Kuenssberg’s time in

Is it any wonder that children and young adults are going down with ‘eco-anxiety’ , as claimed in an opinion piece in the BMJ this week? One of the pieces of evidence it cites is a survey published in 2020, which claimed that 57 per cent of child psychiatrists had dealt with patients who were feeling anxious about climate change. It would be easy to dismiss this as another case of the ‘snowflake generation’ lacking the toughness of their forebears. But even if it is true that earlier generations of children, such as those brought up during the second world war, seemed to cope much better with the genuine threat

The tale of Tala Halawa has an ever-mounting horror to it: each sentence is more disturbing than the last. First we learn that this BBC journalist proclaimed during the 2014 Israel-Gaza war that ‘Israel is more Nazi than Hitler’ and that ‘Hitler was right’. Then we encounter her assertion that ‘ur media is controlled by ur zionist government’ and her sharing on Facebook the same image that saw MP Naz Shah suspended from the Labour Party in 2016, an image that advocates the ‘transportation’ of Israel to the United States to end ‘foreign interference’ in the Middle East. Next up is a graphic Halawa tweeted showing a child being burned

Jeremy Corbyn is hitting the comeback trail. The former Labour leader made the keynote speech at this week’s Media Democracy Festival organised by the Media Reform Coalition. He began by citing his own journalistic credentials. ‘I produced 500 columns for the Morning Star.’ Then he turned to India where 250 million strikers are protesting against the removal of state support for farmers. The strike involves ‘one in thirty of the entire population of the world,’ enthused Corbyn, which makes it the largest industrial dispute in history. But coverage in the UK has been minimal, ‘which says a lot about the priorities and the news values of much of our media outlets

It should be said that Jeremy Corbyn’s ideas for shaking up the media aren’t all bad. The Labour leader is right for instance to focus on the need to help out local media; the death of regional newspapers in recent years means that local government is almost entirely unaccountable nowadays. It’s only when things go badly wrong that people actually sit up and pay attention. Corbyn is also right on the need to reform freedom of information laws, which have now been rendered virtually redundant by those in authority who know exactly how to prevaricate and obstruct requests at every turn. But too many of the Labour leader’s other ideas

Once upon a time, ITV was the darling of the Corbynistas. In fact, it was Mr S who disclosed that Seumas Milne — Corbyn’s director of communications — had been overheard discussing the pros of the broadcaster over the Beeb, back in January. Alas, things have since taken a turn for the worse. The problem? An ITV reporter dared to ask the Labour leader whether he would be happy if Theresa May called an early election. After Libby Wiener asked the question at a conference organised by Class, Corbyn claimed he was being ‘harassed’. Jeremy Corbyn ducks question on general election; accuses @LibbyWienerITV of 'harrassment'https://t.co/6IPEIahDbj pic.twitter.com/ZUsiTrBbRX — ITV News (@itvnews) November 5, 2016 Now Richard Burgon

Downing Street is more confident than it has ever been that the EU referendum will be won. It is not just Barack Obama’s full-throated warning against Brexit that is responsible for this, but—as I say in my Sun column this morning—the sense that they have got the argument back onto their home turf of the economy. Indeed, it was striking how much Obama talked yesterday about the economic benefits to Britain of EU membership and the single market. The fact that this was his main message, rather than Western unity against Putin and Islamic State, shows which argument Number 10 thinks is working. The truth is that however spurious George

As David Cameron finds himself in hot water over his admission that he once owned shares in an offshore fund, today ought to be a walk in the park for Labour. In fact, all Jeremy Corbyn need do is give the press a few soundbites on the Tories’ troubles and then sit back and relax. Alas this is Corbyn we’re talking about so things were never going to be that simple. Instead the Labour leader has managed to become the story after he was filmed scolding an LBC journalist outside his home after she attempted to ask for his thoughts on Cameron’s admission. Rather than answer, Corbyn told her that he

As Seumas Milne attempts to settle in to his new job as Jeremy Corbyn’s director of communications, the former Guardian columnist has got off to a rather shaky start. As well as making headlines himself over his controversial appointment, the negative press surrounding Corbyn has shown no sign of disappearing with a fresh storm recently emerging regarding Milne’s colleague Andrew Fisher. Perhaps aware of his own shortcomings, Milne was even overheard outside a pub on Thursday asking the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg for advice on how to do his job. Now, Corbyn’s other original Guardian cheerleader Owen Jones has stepped in to offer Milne some advice of his own. Following the negative press Corbyn received this week over

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party conference speech started pretty well, with him poking fun at the newspapers’ more apocalyptic predictions of what would happen should he become Prime Minister. He teased the Daily Mail for a story saying that he once welcomed the prospect of an asteroid hitting the earth.* And then, a wee joke. ‘It’s not the kind of policy I’d want this party to adopt without a full debate in conference.’ Everyone, even the press, had a laugh at the press. They were probably even laughing in Iran, where the state broadcaster was showing his speech. But then Corbyn had to go and spoil it all by denouncing the ‘commentariat’. Again. ‘No one, not me as leader,