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”
Responding to comments by Martin Daubney on the Sky News newspaper review about Jane Moore’s column in The Sun today, Gavin Drake argues that it is right to create a “toxic time” for abusers.
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 been reported widely, including in the Leicester Mercury, Daily Mail, […]
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 know the source of the original clip; I don’t know […]
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 proper cinema or a film club in a community hall, […]
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 that David Cameron is prepared to appear in just one […]
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 has hit a problem and has twice asked Ofcom to […]
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 the same market, scene or buzz around Christian music. There […]
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 I would have liked the terrorists responsible for the attack […]
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 be true for a perpetually infuriated radical feminist.” He then […]