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{ Category Archives } Journalism

John Humphrys’ interviewing style

John Humphrys’ has been on the Today programme so long it is getting hard to remember his predecessors. According to his biography on the BBC website, he is 66 and started on the Today programme 24 years ago. He has become a “national treasure”. I was reading yet another complaint recently about how wrinkly men [...]

The big Sun scoop

I could not resist this when I was buying the i2 yesterday. “New Osama”, “Terror blitz”, “MI6″, “Exclusive”. The Sun had it all. The mullah is Anwar Al-Awlaki. He is in the Osama Bin Laden mold: highly intelligent, speaks sensibly and persuasively. Whether his Arabic is as beautiful as Bin Laden’s I am unfortunately not [...]

Plagiarism

I am still experimenting with Twitter and only follow 62 people, a rather eclectic bunch. One is Edward Champion (@drmabuse), a writer and literary critic, best known for the Bat Segundo Show. At 16:46 yesterday I noticed him complaining: Peter Laing and @deadlinenews: If you take quotes from my Bat Segundo interview, can you at [...]

Propaganda

I am not sure what annoys me more. The cynicism that leads PriceWaterhouseCoopers to write a report (above) which misrepresents important facts so blatantly: or the incompetence (or maybe attachment to ad revenues) which leads journalists to reproduce it. If you look at page 8 of the report you find this table: which shows that [...]

Phone hacking

[John Yates, an Assistant Commissioner at the Met] I first wrote about this nearly two years ago. Since then the story has bumbled on interminably, seemingly more a tribute to the self-importance of some MPs than to its real importance. For a while it was kept going because Andy Coulson had moved from being editor [...]