Media

Thursday

Hugo Rifkind

How Alex Brooker made political interviews interesting again

The other night on Channel 4, I watched the best political interview I’ve seen all year. It was with Nick Clegg, and conducted by a guy called Alex Brooker. And it gave me, if only for a few moments, a glimpse of a better world. You’ll know who Nick Clegg is. Brooker, though, might have passed under your radar: he was only just on mine. He’s one of three hosts on a comedy show called The Last Leg, which launched during the Paralympics of 2012. Disability features heavily in the premise of the show, so I probably ought to mention that he has a prosthetic leg and something up with

Wednesday

Toby Young

Je suis Page 3

Here is a preview of Toby Young’s Status Anxiety column from this week’s Spectator, out tomorrow… ‘I for one would be sorry to see them go,’ wrote George Orwell. ‘They are a sort of saturnalia, a harmless rebellion against virtue.’ He was writing about the seaside postcards of Donald McGill in 1941, but his defence of them and their ‘enthusiastic indecency’ could equally well apply to Page 3. Orwell’s argument was that McGill’s caricatures of women, ‘with breasts or buttocks grossly over-emphasised’, gave expression to ‘the Sancho Panza view of life’. There’s a fat little squire in all of us, he thought, although few of us are brave enough to admit it.

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

PM and Education Secretary at odds over Page 3

The ministers covering women and equalities do have a view on the disappearance of topless Page 3 models, but the Prime Minister apparently doesn’t. Today Nicky Morgan called the decision of The Sun to put something over at least a portion of the breasts of the women in its paper ‘a long overdue decision and marks a small but significant step towards improving media portrayal of women and girls. I very much hope it remains permanent’. Her Lib Dem colleague Jo Swinson said she was delighted that the old fashioned sexism of Page 3 could soon be a thing of the past’ and called on the newspaper’s editors ‘to consider whether

Monday

Douglas Murray

The Kremlin thinks Russell Brand is good news. Does that not worry him?

An interesting story in today’s papers: ‘Russia’s last politically independent TV station will be forced to close at the end of this month after the state-owned company that transmits its signal said it would be taken off the air.’ This comes at the same time, as our cover story last week showed, as Putin’s propaganda station in London – Russia Today – has increased its operations and profile within the UK. Unlike the Kremlin, I am generally in favour of as diverse a media as possible. The problem with Russia Today is that it seems to have fooled an astonishingly diverse number of silly people into thinking that what they

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Should politicians grumble about awkward stories?

A lot of political types are very cross with the ‘biased media’ today. Ukip is currently the most aerated because some journalists ‘fabricated’ (which is today synonymous with ‘transcribed’) some remarks Nigel Farage made about whether or not restaurants are right to tell women to put napkins over themselves when breastfeeding. Number 10 is very angry with the BBC’s Norman Smith because he talked about the Road to Wigan Pier which is not an OK way of describing the public spending cuts still to come (but the IFS describing them as ‘grotesque’ and ‘colossal’ apparently is). Labour has been annoyed for months that journalists keep pointing out mistakes that Ed Miliband makes. Unusually,

Thursday

Stig Abell

Stig Abell’s diary: My days in court with the Sun

Soon after I joined the Sun as managing editor (among other things, I used to review novels for The Spectator), I read an interview with Keir Starmer, the outgoing head of the Crown Prosecution Service. What an unhealthy thing it would be, he said, if journalists had to consult with lawyers every time they pursued a story or asked a question. He was right — yet this is precisely what it is now like for most people in the business of trying to break stories in Britain. More journalists are on trial or facing prosecution here than in many banana republics around the world — as my newspaper knows to

Matthew Bell

The perils of being a posh boy on the telly

The first time it happened was at the cinema. I was queuing for my ticket-for-one when the woman behind me exploded. ‘Omigod I saw you on television!’ ‘Oh, er, yes,’ I mumbled. The next time was in the cinema, as I squeezed down the row: ‘Sorry, but I have to say, I saw you on that show,’ grinned the young man. I suppose we were on the King’s Road, so it wasn’t surprising everyone had been watching Posh People: Inside Tatler. It was only when I was stopped by a blonde in Shoreditch the next day that I began to worry for my ego. I joined Tatler last year —

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Forget corporate social responsibility: just do a proper job

A theme of this autumn has been conversations about corporate reputation and how it is guarded or lost. To name but three, I have kicked this around at a ‘Trust Forum’ sponsored by the lawyers DLA Piper at Oxford’s Said Business School, at a lunch hosted by the wealth managers McInroy & Wood, and in an interview with Lord (Stuart) Rose, former Marks & Spencer chief, at last week’s York Business Conference. The essence is that most big companies feel their reputations are increasingly fragile, and that public trust is now routinely and unfairly denied to them. Non-banks blame banks for letting the side down. All companies blame the media

Thursday

Peter Jones

Aristophanes on Mazher Mahmood

Undercover journalist Mazher Mahmood, otherwise known as the Fake Sheikh, has been accused of dodgy dealing in luring the innocent to commit ‘crimes’ which he has then exposed to the press. The Athenians knew all about his sort. They called such people sukophantai (pl.), our ‘sycophants’, though the derivation of the word remains obscure, and it is not clear how it came to mean ‘toady’ in English. The sukophantês came into being as a result of legislation by the Athenian statesman Solon (c. 640–560 BC). Since there was no such thing as the police or a Crown Prosecution Service in the ancient world, it was important to find some way of

Cory Doctorow

The Anonymous ghost in the machine

Why would you send an anthropologist — as this book’s author, Gabriella Coleman, is — to study Anonymous, the indescribable hacktivist phenomenon whose operations (‘ops’) and giddy, menacing, profane video-manifestos have seized the media and the public consciousness from 2006 to the present day? Because Anonymous is, above all, an anthropological phenomenon. At first glance, you might think that the Anonymous story — the Guy Fawkes-mask-wearing, meme-spewing, terrifying, hilarious non-collective that hacked the church of scientology, the government of Tunisia, the Serious Organised Crime Agency, and the Pentagon (for starters) — is a story about computer security, or youthful alienation, or political activism. But political activism isn’t anything new, and

Wednesday

Tarek S Arab

Overpaid, underworked, ineffectual – the myth of the NHS doctor

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_15082013.m4a” title=”Andrew Haldenby and Sean Worth join Sebastian Payne to discuss NHS reforms.”] Listen [/audioplayer] GPs enjoy the salary of bankers, regularly pulling in £100,000 for a five-day week, with no on-call or weekend duties and a lovely taxpayer-funded holiday every year. I know this because it says so in the papers, so it must be true. Stories of GP largesse are far from accurate, and bear testament only to the media’s desire for sensationalism. GPs are the true medical heroes of the NHS, the soldiers in the trenches, too loyal to the metaphorical army to revolt, protest or express opinions, lest such opinions serve as an indirect abrogation

Sunday

Rod Liddle

Sinister types wanted to play Nigel Farage in Channel 4 docu-drama

Channel 4 has commissioned a docu-drama that will imagine what life will be like for poor and oppressed ordinary British people under the first few months of a Ukip government. As you can imagine with Channel 4, this will undoubtedly be an exercise in the very quintessence of impartiality and fair-mindedness. They plan to run it just before the 2015 general election. Bookies are already taking bets on who will play Nigel Farage – Michael Sheen is one of the favourites. However my guess is that Bruno Ganz, so mesmerising as Adolf Hitler in ‘Downfall’, will get the nod. Especially if he keeps the moustache. A spokesbore for the channel said: ‘This

Thursday

Roger Howard

The myth of the White Widow

Over the past year or so, a determined and fanatical Islamist has been waging a deadly and bloody war against the western world. This enemy is capable of moving unnoticed across continents and inflicting savage violence in each of them; inspires young Muslim men to become suicide bombers and die in their thousands. The enemy is particularly horrifying for being a traitor, born in Britain and a woman to boot. The ‘White Widow’, remember her? Samantha Lewthwaite from Aylesbury, usually described by our tabloid press as one of the most evil and powerful women alive. But is she really evil? Is she really even much of a threat? My contention

Thursday

Steerpike

Palace intrigue – is Her Majesty’s press corps on the verge of revolt?

Her Majesty’s Loyal Press Corps are on the verge of revolt. Minutes of a recent meeting of the Press Gallery Committee – seen by The Spectator – show that a Republican motion to ditch the Loyal Toast (in which Westminster hacks and assembled guests, from the PM down, raise a glass to the British sovereign) is being considered. Minutes from the July meeting of the Committee state: (ii) Loyal Toast: the committee considered the proposal to discontinue the loyal toast at Press Gallery lunches which had been deferred from a previous meeting. After discussion it was agreed that the chairman should take soundings amongst colleagues and report back to the

Steerpike Steerpike

Breitbart’s loss is Nigel Farage’s gain – or is it?

It’s no great surprise that Raheem Kassam, the troublesome managing editor of Breitbart London, has left his job. Kassam is a wildly self-important figure who flits about on the internet Right. Mr Kassam is famed for his inflated sense of self-importance, and Mr S particularly enjoyed the write up of the new job, mysteriously under an anonymous by-line on Breitbart: ‘Breitbart London understands from senior UKIP sources that Kassam was picked specifically for his political nous and campaigning prowess.’ What’s intriguing, though, is Kassam’s new job: he has been taken on as a ‘senior adviser’ by Nigel Farage. Kassam is a professional wind-up merchant, of sorts, too — and trained in

Friday

James Smith

The Rwandan genocide story that the BBC didn’t tell

On Saturday 200 UK-based Rwandans, including many genocide survivors, protested outside the BBC offices in response to the documentary ‘Rwanda’s Untold Story’, which aired earlier in October. The demonstration followed a letter of complaint sent to the BBC’s director general, written by the survivors’ organisation Ibuka. They point out that despite the BBC’s commitment to upholding truth and objectivity, the programme contained factual inaccuracies and seemed intent on reopening wounds in Rwanda. They expressed disbelief and disappointment that: ‘[A] few people who have their differences with the current government or the country were given a platform to politicise the Genocide and deny the planned and systematic killing of over one

Thursday

Hugo Rifkind

The ‘no’ campaign’s problem was that it sounded like me

Journalistically speaking, it’s been a good year to be Scottish and Jewish. Had I been a Welsh Zoroastrian, say, I doubt I’d have had nearly so much to say. In recent months, obviously, it’s been the Scottish thing that has really taken off. I used to be marginally Scottish, irrelevantly Scottish; never realising that a period of being helpfully Scottish was just around the corner. I suppose it’s a bit like the presumptions that some bilingual people have, that other people must, must be able to speak other languages really. I think I just assumed that the rest of London’s media knew plenty about Scotland, but tended not to talk

Tuesday

Steerpike

Parris vs Monty rumbles on

As Mr S predicted yesterday, the row between Times colleagues Matthew Parris and Tim Montgomerie has simmered on. And turning up the temperature in the Times’ Red Box email this morning, Parris seemed to be getting rather catty: ‘I was pleased to be singled out by my friend and colleague, Tim Montgomerie, in yesterday’s throwaway “I’m looking at you, Matthew Parris”. In the course of these remarks, Tim also wrote this: “Political leadership … becomes impossible if a leader is not willing to give large majorities of his or her party’s natural supporters what they want. From a less well-intentioned speaker than Tim I would regard that as a disgraceful

Thursday

Hugo Rifkind

Julian Assange is a narcissist and a nut — and if America comes for him we should take his side

Poor Julian Assange. Call me a contrarian but I’m genuinely starting to feel sorry for the guy. He’s just made such a mess of his life, hasn’t he? And with such promise. Only a few short years ago he was the world’s most prominent anti-everything activist, with hair like an indie guitarist, feted and worshipped wherever you might find hot Scandinavian revolutionaries, smug old men who work for ‘theguardian’ and Jemima Khan. Now he’s a hermit with hair like Noel Edmonds who lives in a cupboard. It’s a hell of a fall. Most crushingly, he’s become a figure of fun. Perhaps you noticed him holding a press conference last week,

Monday

Steerpike

Another Daily Mirror front page horror

What is it with the Daily Mirror and its spectacular ability to cock up its front page? We all remember the circumstances that led to Piers Morgan’s (first) spectacular fall. And the current editor is not having such a good run of things either. First there was the splash about British children living below the poverty line, but the photo used to illustrate the piece was taken in America in 2009. And today the paper has an incredible global scoop: Monday’s Mirror front page exclusive: Ebola terror as Sierra Leone passenger dies at Gatwick http://t.co/YijDuBzYtX pic.twitter.com/5eS9SHyV2i — Daily Mirror (@DailyMirror) August 3, 2014   Fortunately, it’s set to remain an exclusive because