Newspapers

Amidst the usual stiff competition this week’s palm for Most Abject Commentary goes to Sir Simon Jenkins for this truly miserable column on the aftermath and implications of the shootings in Tucson. It’s not entirely clear what Jenkins is trying to say but since he writes that “Freedom can only flourish in a climate of discipline” and concludes with “If American politics is now going the way of wounding, not healing, it needs the tonic of order. It is the great paradox of democracy. Free speech cannot exist without chains” it seems reasonable to conclude he thinks some kind of Jenkins-friendly authoritarianism would be preferable to the vulgar, boorish, messy

One of the good features in the government’s Localism Bill is the proposal for referenda on more directly-elected mayors. At present it seems only a dozen English* towns and cities are taking advantage of these plans but one hopes more will do so in the future. Contemplating this, Bagehot chews on centralisation and London’s hegemony in British (and especially English) life. As he observes, generally speaking London has been the dominant city in England for centuries, dwarfing its rivals. But there was a spell when this wasn’t the case and one need only look at Town Halls and Corn Exchanges and museums and galleries and Assembly Rooms across Britain to

You don’t need to share Julian Assange’s politics or his objectives to think that he’s the victim of at least one double standard. If he’s guilty of betraying secrets and endangering lives and making diplomacy more difficult and everything else then so are the publishers of the New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde and every other media outlet worldwide that publishes, or republishes, anythnig to do with the leaked American diplomatic cables. A few weeks ago I suggested that Assange really is a newsman. Even if you dispute that, however, it’s hard to see how anyone can deny that he’s a news publisher. So the State Department’s PJ Crowley

Is, as someone suggested recently, to be either a dumb person’s idea of a clever person or a clever person’s idea of a dumb person. Or both. Perhaps the worst paragraph written this year comes, not surprisingly, from America’s chief metaphor-mangler Thomas Friedman: More than ever, America today reminds me of a working couple where the husband has just lost his job, they have two kids in junior high school, a mortgage and they’re maxed out on their credit cards. On top of it all, they recently agreed to take in their troubled cousin, Kabul, who just can’t get his act together and keeps bouncing from relative to relative. Meanwhile,

This is much too good to be left to John Rentoul. Page 29 of today’s Daily Mail is what they call, I believe, an “instant classic”: Read the full – very well done – story here.

I’m not sure I understand the Wikileaks controversy. If one of the many definitions of news is (and always has been) that it is something that someone, somewhere does not want you to know then, yes, Julian Assange is a journalist. Perhaps newsman would be a better, more strictly accurate way of putting it. As such, it’s strange to see Americans accusing him of treason (he’s an Australian!) or William Hague complaining that the Wikileaks document-dumps put “British lives” at risk. So what? Then there’s Jonah Goldberg complaining that a column headlined “All Quiet On the Black-Ops Front” and subtitled “Why is Julian Assange Still Alive?” has – this may

As a general rule, newspapers are owned by ogres. As with the Presidency of the United States, desiring the office or, in this instance, the title, should be considered enough to disqualify anyone from consideration. Nevertheless, it matters what kind of ogre it is. There’s a chasm between a Richard Desmond (Express) or a Sam Zell (Tribune Company) and a Rupert Murdoch (half the English-speaking world). Conrad Black, bless him, is in the latter camp. A newspaper proprietor of the proper, old-fashioned brutish school. That is, one who likes newspapers while having a suitably low opinion of both journalism and journalists. He rightly says, in this review of three books

I’m reading Keith Jeffrey’s history of the Secret Intelligence Service at the moment. There’s plenty of good stuff in it. Including Our Man in Moscow’s account of the death of Rasputin which, Samuel Hoare explained, was “a question…so sensational that one cannot describe it as one would if it were an ordinary episode of the war.” Accordingly he wrote his report “in the style of the Daily Mail“: 1st January, 1917. In the early morning of Saturday, December 30th, there was enacted in Petrograd one of those crimes which by their magnitude blur the well-defined rules of ethics and by their results change the history of a generation. GREGORY EPHEMIC

Top spot by Amol Rajan: Daily Mail, p5:  “Being slim ‘makes a woman happier than any man could’”. Daily Mail, p11: “Having a big bottom and thighs could shape up to a longer life, claim researchers”. As Amol says, living long and being happy ain’t necessarily the same. But what this means, I think, is that the Daily Mail  has a high opinion of its readers (at least its female readers anyway) since it expects them to satisfy Scott Fitzgerald’s definition of a first-rate intelligence, namely “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” To wit: I

There’s lots of good stuff in Peter Oborne’s* Dispatches programme on the News of the World phone-hacking story even if, in the end and like many TV documentaries it over-reaches and tries too hard to build too large a conspiracy when simply laying out the established facts would seem enough. Nevertheless, it certainly deserves your time. Peter probably makes too much of the Murdoch-Downing Street relationship (and he should certainly have pointed out that Lord Puttnam is a Labour peer). Much worse from the perspective of Joe Public who kind of feels as though celebrities and politicians are some kind of fair game, was the story of “Sam” – the

Yup. This is a news website article about a scientific paper  In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding? In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of “scare quotes” to ensure that it’s clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever. In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research “challenges”. If the research is about a potential cure, or a