Having eyed each other with their traditional distrust in the growing conflict between freedom of speech and personal privacy, the media and the law are on the verge of a struggle which could end in the collapse of selfregulation. Since 2000, the Human Rights Act (HRA) has given British people what most of the European Union’s citizens already had: a legal right to free speech. It also handed them a legal right to privacy. Rather than attempt to reconcile the two competing Articles at source, the framers of the legislation are allowing them to fight it out and have appointed the courts to referee. Article 8, the Right to Respect for Private and Family Life, states: “Everyone has the right […]

Anthony Delano The introduction to this lively stroll through the tabloidesque landscape of yesteryear opens with a verse I’d never heard before: Up and down the blessed town I run for information; Trying to discover if there’s any new sensation. Politics and accidents and scandalising too, Sir, Either’s all the same to me, as long as it is new, Sir. It’s from a London music hall hit of 1861, The Great Sensation Song, by Frank Hall and Frederic Archer. Wish I knew the tune. Sensation, as the author has clearly seen, provided rich and varied entertainment for our Victorian ancestors. Shock, scandal and spectacle had been staples of journalism since the earliest “newsbooks” of the 17th century. But the development […]

Cal McCrystal Cal McCrystal fund fraud. So I read the chapter twice before deciding that I do not believe Donoughue culpable of any crime. Indeed, as he has always maintained, it was his opposition to Maxwell’s use of pension funds that led to him to quit months before the old villain died. In answer to those who suggest he should have blown the whistle on Maxwell, he claims that Maxwell had not, in his view, broken the law. He also implies that he did not, as has been alleged, take hush money. Again, I accept what he says. Where I would take issue is over his reticence about how much money he earned from his time with Maxwell and the […]

Roy Greenslade I approached this book with trepidation because of a personal prejudice against the author which, like so many prejudices, was born of ignorance and then nurtured by intransigence. I first took against Bernard Donoughue in 1974 when I was a sub-editor on the Labour party’s organ, Labour Weekly, and he was identified by a Transport House colleague as “a dangerous rightwinger”. Almost a decade later, friends at The Timestold me that Donoughue was the kind of newspaper executive who had gained his position without the trouble of learning the trade. Us hacks who toiled on locals and regionals have an inbuilt bias against chaps who haven’t risen from the ranks. To cap it all, in the aftermath of […]

Geoffrey Goodman such the anti-globalising Medialens website, already exist to detect and correct what they (in their very biased way) see as bias. This is all to the good, and there are several conservative bloggers who attempt to discern the tiniest example of pinkness on the part of the BBC. But the debate needs to be bigger. Journalists have real power, often more power than politicians. Internet criticism, naturally, is in its infancy. But there is, for example, no programme currently on TV that scrutinises either the press or television itself. That is an appalling and remarkable gap. One which this journal, admirable though it is, cannot fill on its own. David Aaronovitch is a columnist for The Guardianand The […]

David Aaronovitch One of the things I always loved about working for Ian Hargreaves – whether it was at the BBC, The Independentor the New Statesman– was the calmness of his intelligence. Just as everyone else was about to plunge furiously into the latest moral panic, Ian would be the one to wonder, gently, whether such agitation was really justified. Wasn’t there a case to be made for moral uncertainty? Were young people really any less idealistic than their parents’ generation? Were we all actually doomed? Usually (the rest of us eventually agreed), we probably weren’t. It is as Hargreavesian as “something will turn up” is Micawberist for the peroration at the end of his introduction to this book about […]

Victor Davis Readers of The Observer Magazine were vastly entertained recently by an encounter between their feature writer Harriet Lane and the Hollywood superstar Richard Gere. It is fair to judge they loathed each other. But, oh, how refreshing to read a star interview where true emotions were laid bare as compared with the usual idolatrous fare that typifies this busy branch of popular journalism. In order of use, these are the trigger words and phrases Ms Lane pinned on the screen god: tiresome, hostility, wuss, bad, no sense of humour, looking daggers, a man badly in need of a hit film, uptight, inhibited, a nightmare, talking v-e-r-y slowly, as if addressing a remedial class, earnest, neurotic, no real ability […]

Gerald Kaufman The two things I always wanted to be were a journalist and a member of parliament. I have to admit that the kind of journalist I wanted to be was not a political correspondent but a film critic. When I was a schoolboy I used to write out in careful printed lettering – no computers then – my own newspaper, with film reviews a prominent feature. Later in life I did become a film critic, over a number of years and for several publications, but always as a freelance. My enthusiasm for politics meant, however, that, as a freelance, I also wrote political stories and features. Under the editorship of Bob Edwards at Tribune, I used frequently to […]

Bryan Rostron Like sightings of Elvis, the late Hansie Cronje popped up everywhere during the recent Cricket World Cup. Judging by the column inches devoted to him, you could be forgiven for thinking that Hansie (as journalists and fans here still refer to him) was even now captain of the South Africa national cricket team rather than a fallen idol, banned for life from professional cricket for accepting bribes – and who died in a plane crash last June. Hansie was definitely the spectre at the feast; a feast of cricket that many South Africans – backed by patriotic comment and editorials in the local press – hoped would be a successful showcase for the “new” South Africa. But even […]