Some things don’t change. I came across this yesterday while looking for something else:
Broadcasting in Scotland
In view of the fact that the charter of the BBC will come up for renewal next year, a majority of the General Assembly [of the Church of Scotland] yesterday supported an overture in favour of an independent Scottish Broadcasting [...]
The coverage of the foot and mouth disease outbreak by newspapers is criticised today by Peter Wilby in his Guardian column. Rightly so. He starts:
I’ve always been amazed by how the press gets so excited about foot and mouth disease. Farming accounts for 1% of the economy and barely 2% of the workforce. Genuine farmers [...]
How embarrassing! It took a 13-year-old Finish boy looking at a newspaper to realise that pictures used to illustrate the story of Russian mini-subs laying claim to part of the Arctic seabed were actually from the film Titanic.
The boy, Waltteri Seretin, contacted the tabloid Ilta-Sanomat to point this out what picture desks around the world [...]
Before my previous post on the coverage of Foot and Mouth disease I had decided I wanted to question the BBC’s judgment on the 10 o’clock TV news last night. The floods in Nepal, Bangladesh and India which have left a million people homeless and at least 120 dead in Bangladesh and 55 in India [...]
On the evidence so far, the Government has learned from the disaster of the 2001 outbreak of foot and mouth disease but the media have not. TV reports — the story missed the early editions of the papers that we get in this part of the country — are played out against wallpaper of of [...]
In its quiet and measured way the House of Lords Communications Committee report on the Chairmanship of the BBC is a devastating document. While it has a narrow focus on the chairmanship it makes a much broader comment in hoping that "in the long term the Government will address the democratic deficit that exists over [...]
Mostly stories write themselves but sometimes there is a real choice between two different angles. The question then for the reporter and editor is whether to run with the pack or do something different.
The tale of David Cameron and Ali Miraj, the man who had hoped to be a Tory PM provides a [...]
The differences between TV news operations in the UK and US are shown by the tragic deaths of four newsmen when their helicopters crashed while covering a police chase in Phoenix, Arizona.
There were five TV news helicopters in the air at the time when two of them collided while recording the pursuit of [...]
Alistair Burnett, editor of the BBC’s World Tonight, has a good post on the overuse of the word crisis by journalists. On The Editors Blog he writes:
One of the values BBC journalism puts great emphasis on trying to live up to is accuracy. On top of that, language is the most basic of tools for [...]
No wonder the BBC is being derailed: it is answerable to a Trust that believes there is merit in a wagon wheel with a shifting centre and spokes that go in all directions (BBC Trust report on impartiality).
That was a month ago. Today Peter Preston in his Observer media column, under the [...]
