Why the Cliff Richard privacy judgment is not a threat to the freedom of the press
The head of news at the BBC, Fran Unsworth, has said that the judgment “creates a significant shift against press freedom.” No. It doesn’t.
Category: Media
No, not all men are perverts; but this isn’t a “toxic time for masculinity”
Did you hear about the vicar who banned “Onward Christian Soldiers”?
Did you hear about the vicar who banned “Onward Christian Soldiers”? The chances are that you have: the story that the Revd Steve Bailey, team rector-designate of St Peter’s Church in Oadby, Leicestershire, has banned the Victorian hymn from this year’s Remembrance Sunday service has…
Now we’re fact-checking opinions
The Gurdian journalist Owen Jones shared a message he received from a member of the public in an election news report. And his image has been shared multiple times on social media. This incident is yet another being used to decry ‘fake news’. I don’t…
Cinema Advertising? I’m offended!
I’m not a major cinema-goer these days. But I still go around three or four times a year. It wasn’t always that way. I used to go weekly to a cinema in Bloxwich, north Walsall, for the Saturday Morning Kids Club. Whether this was a…
The General Election televised Leaders Debates fiasco
Late last night, the Prime Minister’s director of communications, Craig Oliver, delivered what appears to be a devastating blow to the broadcasters’ plans for a series of leaders debates I’m the run up to the General Election. In his letter, the PM’s spin doctor says…
Big Centre TV – Television as it should be
Last night, local commercial television returned to the Midlands. Big Centre TV is the new local channel for Birmingham, the Black Country and Solihull; and is available on Freeview channel 8 (you may need to retune your sets). London Live, the local TV service for London…
The Grammys: Gospel and contemporary Christian music winners
Way way back, many centuries ago (okay, the early 1990s, actually), I cut my journalistic teeth on the UK’s contemporary Christian music magazine Cross Rhythms. In recent years I’ve been privately lamenting the loss of Britain’s Christian music scene. There just doesn’t seem to be…
Je ne suis pas Charlie; Je suis Gavin
Like just about everybody, I was shocked last week as news emerged of the terrorist attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo and the cold bloodied murder of the magazine’s journalists and cartoonists, visitors the office, police officers and, later, customers of a kosher supermarket. And, while…
A journalist with a police caution for domestic violence describes Ched Evans opponents as “morons”
Writing in the week’s Spectator (cover date 10 January 2015, but online now), the columnist Rod Liddle describes opponents of Ched Evans as “morons”. He starts his column with an attack on pseudonymous campaigner Jean Hatchet, saying that her name is “almost certainly too good to…