Journalism

Friday

Martin Bright

Maziar Bahari and Press TV

The latest outrage committed by the Iranian state broadcaster Press TV is its coverage of the arrest of film maker and journalist Maziar Bahari. Maziar, a Canadian-Iranian, was arrested on June 21 and paraded on TV nine days later “confessing” to his role in a western plot to destabilise the Iranian regime. He had provided footage of the crackdown on protestors to Channel 4. I am loathe to encourage readers to look at the Press TV site, so check out the story at The Spittoon, an excellent website opposed to clerical fascism. The author of the piece, “shikwa”, concludes: “How can anyone continue doubting the bias of Press TV which spews this rubbish at the behest

Wednesday

Cressida Connolly

It’s not all good manners

Lynn Barber’s interviews are one of the main reasons to subscribe to the Observer: on any Sunday when a piece of hers appears, it’s always the first thing to turn to, even — or make that especially — when she’s profiling someone unsympathetic. Not for nothing has she earned the nickname the Demon Barber. On John Prescott, for example: ‘You wouldn’t want to invite Prezza to dinner, not because he might eat peas off his knife, but because he’d bore the other guests to death.’ What makes Barber such an unfailingly enjoyable read is that she makes her own judgments about people, which means she often likes monsters or disdains

Monday

Martin Bright

Something Between a Blogger and a Commentator

This evening I have the pleasure of speaking about the ongoing battle between the Commentariat and the Bloggertariat at an Editorial Intelligence event. My fellow panellists are David Aaronovitch of The Times, blogger Iain Dale, Mick Fealty (Slugger O’Toole and Brassneck) and Anne Spackman of The Times). Where do I fit in? I guess somewhere inbetween the two. What are my concerns? That the emrgence of the bloggertariat is merely an outgrowth of the commentariat, but even more self-regarding than its precursor. The event takes place on the same day as the launch of Stephen Grey’s Investigations Fund, a brilliant project to renew the investigative tradition and encourage the next generation

Thursday

Alex Massie

The Pleasures of Moral Panic

Like Julian Sanchez, I consider Reason’s compilation of 40 years of Time magazine’s addiction to hysteria a real treat. This 1972 effort – warning, as you can see, of the inexorable rise of Satanism in the United States – is just the beginning of it. From there it’s but a hop, skip and jump to scaremongering about cocaine use, rap music, population growth, “crack kids” and, best of all, Pokemon. Yes, Pokemon. I suspect that Reason could have gone much further: surely Time must have warned us that we’re all going to die of swine flu? Or was that bird flu? Pretty much each and every one of these issues

Tuesday

Martin Bright

A Vision of the Future

A lot of us have been wondering what Westminster might be like under the Tories. What, for instance, would the parliamentary press lobby look like under a Cameron government? A return to deference, perhaps. Would the gentlemen and the ladies of the press take their information dutifully from the PM’s spokesman or woman (who would presumably be called a spokesman) and put it straight in the paper? We now have an indication from the behaviour at Eric Pickles’s bash (quite literally) last night that we may see a different kind of throwback to the days of boozing and brawling that seemed a distant memory.

Friday

Martin Bright

What Do We Know?

I had the pleasure of guesting on Jon Pienaar’s political podcast yesterday. Inevitably we ended up talking about the death of Ivan Cameron and found ourselves lost for words. But Jon made a very interesting point. He noted that the story showed how little we really know about the lives of our prominent politicians, however much we might think they are public property. We talked about whether this tragedy will change the way we do politics in this country and decided that it probably won’t. Jon raised the example of the death of Labour leader John Smith, when everyone thought everything would change and nothing did. But I think something

Sunday

Martin Bright

Bloody Students: The Next Generation

I’ve been teaching the politics specialism at City University’s journalism course and I’ve been pleasantly surprised how much fun it has been. I was warned before I started that my student would be barely literate, apathetic lumps with just a passing knowledge of British politics. I was surprised how few of them regularly read a newspaper, but I have found them, for the most part, well informed and engaged. My job is to provide them with insights into the job of a political reporter, which mainly involved me droning on about my scoops and great victories over the forces of darkness. But from time to time I wheel out a special guest.