Two remarkably similar comments about Tesco, the UK’s biggest retailer, have been made 6,000 miles apart. The first is from today’s Guardian and the second from the Southeast Asian Press Alliance on March 19.

Instead of frankly explaining their position and/or engaging in a public dialogue Tesco has taken the extraordinary step of suing for libel in a clear attempt to close down the debate and discourage others from looking too closely.

It’s hard to think of another large public company which would resort to such bullying tactics.

The Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA) strongly condemns the heavy-handed attempts of Tesco Lotus to intimidate its critics, and thereby sending a chilling message to civil society and members of the press. Civil defamation suits of this nature and of such absurd proportions are not really meant to win in court, but rather to intimidate independent media, harass legitimate criticism, and stifle discussions and debate over legitimate public concerns.

Tesco has started legal proceedings against the Guardian and editor Alan Rusbridger over allegations made by the paper about its tax affairs. The paper alleged that complex tax arrangements were to avoid paying £1bn in UK corporation tax. Tesco denies this but says it will save up to £63m in stamp duty.

Across the word in Thailand where Tesco is expanding rapidly, its legal department is gunning for an ex-MP who runs the Thai chamber of commerce and a newspaper columnist.

It is not the criticism of the effects of the rapid expansion of Tesco which both men suggested could lead to serious conflict with small retailers, that has brought the action.

It is their suggestion that as much as 37 per cent of Tesco’s global revenue came from Thailand that is being challenged by the company which is seeking damages totalling 1.1bn baht (£17.4m). The two men accept the figure was wrong.

Tesco opened its first store in Thailand in 1998 and its 2007 annual report showed the number had risen to 370. The figure now is said to be approaching 500.

We always knew Tesco was an aggressive retailer but taken together these cases look like the makings of a spectacular own goal.

With James Murdoch confirmed as the heir apparent of his father’s News Corporation business there is much speculation about the future of the media empire he is destined to run.

Possibly the most significant indicator this year of the way in which News Corp will move has been the $5bn purchase of Dow Jones which includes the Wall Street Journal.

The spending of more than three times as much, over $17bn, on Reuters by the Thomson Corporation has attracted much less attention. Thomson was once a power in newspapers in the UK and north America, but has largely got out of that business. It sold The Times to Murdoch back in 1981. This year both have been getting into financial information.

The Thomson newspaper business was founded by Canadian Roy Thomson who became the first Lord Thomson of Fleet. Since his son Ken became the boss it has become a huge information business concentrating on legal, financial, scientific and healthcare information.

After 25 years as chairman, Ken Thomson said:

By wholeheartedly embracing change, I’m sure an exciting future lies ahead for everyone associated with Thomson. If my father were alive he would understand completely the need to continuously move on. The world changes, situations change, corporations change, we change personally. Everything changes, you know, that’s the one constant in the world.

How News Corp will change is unknown but it will undoubtedly change. But James Murdoch can at least look at Thomson Corporation and see that family businesses can and do prosper although Thomson is the smaller business.

Thomson has more than prospered with the grandson David Thomson now at the helm with a fortune of $22bn putting him in tenth place in the Forbes rich list. Rupert Murdoch is way down the list at 73 with $9bn to his name.

There must have been a joker at the British Comedy Awards on Thursday night. The evidence is in the Guardian’s corrections column today. In the absence of any explanation of how their reporter came to write that the Turner Prize Winner, Mark Wallinger, was at the awards in a bear suit and introduced as “Muhammad”, we can only assume someone misled her.

I feel for the reporter. Once I was sent under duress to cover a rugby match and not knowing anything about the teams (there was no programme) asked for help and was given a string of invented names. No doubt the story was told with glee in the club house, but it did not seem funny to me.

And I wonder if Mark Wallinger finds it funny that Guardian Unlimited has not added a correction note to the original story.

I have long avoided making predictions about the future because the one thing I have learned is that they ae invariably wrong.

Reading David Leigh, an assistant editor of th Guardian, yesterday on the question of whether reporters are doomed, I hoped my theory stands up this time.

The media and journalism is certainly changing and a commercial model that will work online is elusive. As a result, say the doomsters, reporting as we know it is dead, because the people who do the job will not be able to afford a crust for their babies.

All I can really say in response is that something will turn up, things happen. We will find a new business model.

The future for reporting, according to some, is in networks of amateur citizen journalists working with paid journalists. Actually, I see that as a development of what has happened for a long time. Yes, it may be important but unlikely to be more than a part of the answer.

Leigh writes about the impact of stories coming from the influence of the places they are published. He continues:

That is perhaps one of the biggest dangers of the media revolution. When th media fragment — as they will — and splinter into a thousand websites, a thousand digital channels, all weak financially, then we will see a severe reduction in the power of each individual media outlet. The reporter will struggle to be heards over the cacophony of a thousand other voices.

Is that really what is going to happen? More likely there will be consolidation resulting in a smaller number of media organisations. That is a concern, but a different one.

The web is already bringing us global news brands. The BBC’s website has been called Brtain’s biggest newspaper, and it is being increasing read around the world. The Guardian of which David Leigh is an assistant editor, is also read around the world and draws advertising revenue from these distant places.

Rupert Murdoch having recognised the reality of the internet is embarking on the development of the Wall Street Journal global brand.

The trade press, some of whose titles have a fine record in investigative reporting, remains strong as it adapts to the web which is enabling publications to overcome some of the restraints of weekly, or less frequent, publication.

Overall, my belief is that good reporting will survive. Whether it will of not is a very different question to one of whether newspapers will survive which Leigh’s colleague Roy Greenslade has also discussed recently.

The forthcoming departure of Roger Alton from the Observer is starting the produce a fascinating debate. At its heart is whether the web sites are taking over as the central element of traditional newspaper businesses.

First Patience Wheatcroft said her farewells at the Sunday Telegraph. Last week the Observer’s Alton was “defenestrated” as Stephen Glover puts it in the Independent.

Perhaps stung by comments on the lack of full coverage in the Observer and Guardian, Peter Wilby’s On the Press column in Media Guardian today is devoted to the subject. Wilby sums up the issue neatly:

But as newspapers develop 24-hour web operations, journalists who write once a week for a distinctive brand are increasingly anomalous. As I pointed out here last month, no newspaper group gives its Sunday paper a significant profile on the web. Even the market-leading Sunday Times is absorbed into timesonline. The Observer may be for the Iraq war and against inheritance tax, while the Guardian takes the opposite view on both, but the latter’s approach prevails on the group’s website. The Observer’s personality is overshadowed by the Guardian’s more conventional left liberalism.

This cannot continue. Sunday papers as we know them are, I believe, doomed. The Independent on Sunday has long been a Potemkin village, with a separate editor and distinct design, but drawing almost entirely on the daily paper for news and features staff. I expect most other Sunday papers to go the same way. But the Altons and the Wheatcrofts - strong-minded, independent journalists - cannot be expected to go gently into that good night.

Stephen Glover takes the more conventional position that merging daily and Sunday papers from the same stable does not work, writing:

For months there have been talks about integrating parts of The Guardian and The Observer. The justification is that The Observer is losing money, as, to a lesser extent, is The Guardian, and economies can be made by merging departments and turning The Guardian into a seven-day paper, though the integration of daily and Sunday titles hasn’t worked for other publishers in the past. According to one source, news, business and sport will be brought closer together.

Clearly the demands of the 24-hour newsroom have changed things, as has the way in which the dailies have followed the Sundays into the multi-section fill as many niches as possible approach.

Yet Sunday papers have continued to have clear identities (in print, if not online) because of the tension involved in finding distinctive stories — inventing their own news agendas, as Wilby puts it.

Economics as well as the traditional rivalry of stablemates comes into this. Newspaper businesses are having to finance the online operations while print circulations generally (not the Observer’s) fall.

I have a fear that if the separate identities and different approaches to news are lost there will be less reason the shell out a couple of quid for weekend editions on both Saturday and Sunday.

There is a place for Sunday-style journalism. Maybe, it just does not fit any longer into the economics of the Guardian-Observer, Telegraph-Sunday Telegraphy, Times-Sunday Times operations. But that could open up space for a kind of weekly newspaper or magazine which has not previously been viable in the UK.

Peter Preston points out that while Sir Menzies Campbell (66), departed from the Lib Dem leadership because he would be too old to fight an election at 68, media people go on.

In his Observer column today he says Michael Grade (64) is bringing back Trevor McDonald (68) to present News at Ten. It might, Preston suggests make a topic for discussion on Question Time presented by David Dimbleby, 69 today.

Peter Preston, is older than any of them at 69 and five months. Long may he continue to write.

The furore over the comment by James Watson, the Nobel prize for medicine winner who was one of the discoverers of the double helix structure of DNA, that Africans are less intelligent than Westerners, is turning into a debate over free speech.

And the part journalists played in turning an injudicious remark into an international story that has disgraced a leading scientists is coming under scrutiny too.

The controversial passage in an book-promoting interview in the Sunday Times magazine last week, came 3,500 words into a 4,000 word interview. It read:

He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”.

According to a two-page spread in the Observer today, the ST magazine staff thought it was a news story and passed it on to the news desk. They declined it on the grounds that Watson had said such things in the past. And there the story might have rested if the Independent had not picked it up and turned it into Wednesday’s front page lead.

In effect, Simon Kelner’s Independent is accused of sensationalism (my word, not the Observer’s) that promoted the comment of a maverick scientists known for his off-the-cuff remarks into much more than it deserved to be. Meetings he was to address in the UK were called off and he returned to the US to try to save his job.

Also in the Observer, Henry Porter takes up the issue, writing:

Watson’s views about the intelligence of Africans, let slip absentmindedly in an interview, caused deep offence, yet there was also something self-serving about the people screaming ‘racist!’ at this elderly loon. Compare Livingstone’s reaction with his support of extremist clerics from the Middle East and you begin to yearn for some consistency in his outrage.

The other part of my reservation was expressed by Colin Blakemore, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Oxford, who said: ‘Jim Watson is well-known for being provocative and politically incorrect. But it would be a sad world if such a distinguished scientist was silenced because of his more unpalatable views.’

As Porter says: “Free speech is about the communication of the human experience. Without it, we are diminished: we put our minds in neutral and let others think for us.”

As journalists we should be reflecting on the issues of science, ethics, free speech and the way two editorial decisions — at the Sunday Times and the Independent — have shaped the controversy.

A story in the Guardian headlined “Condi’s party surprise cost Britain $10,000″ ends with a quote from a British official: “There were 111 people there - some of them the most influential Americans in the administration. Do the math - it’s good value for money.”

Apart from the evidence that the British official has gone native in Washington, it is a fair point.

The headline use of $10,000 gives us what looks like a big number, translated in the text to £4,900. Simple arithmetic shows that the cost was around £45 a head for a dinner in the British embassy.

You can spend that sort of money for dinner in some pubs so it looks like a pretty good deal for a celebration for the woman who, at the time, was soon to become the US secretary of state.

I feel that the paper should have done the sum for its readers. But I guess a headline saying UK spent £45 a head on dinner for the Condoleezza Rice, President Bush and 109 others might have changed the complexion of the story.

Peter Preston raves about the Standard’s new Eros reward card in his column in the Observer today. It is a prepayment card that works like Transport for London’s Oyster and will provide invaluable information on readers who get a discount of at least 20% in return.

It went on trial at Waterloo last week. But I have a feeling it is a good idea too late. We already have to carry too many cards, loyalty, credit, debit, security, library, driving licence…

I suspect the East of England Co-op has been meeting resistance, constantly putting off the day when it insisted on swiping a membership card instead of giving a number. Today, they started demanding the card which I will have to remember every time we run out of milk. It takes longer when people have to search their purses for a card, the woman on the check-out told me this morning.

The trend may well be turning against multiple cards. Travel through Canary Wharf at the moment and you cannot miss the fact that Barclaycard OnePulse is offering a card which includes Oyster, allows purchases of under £10 by simply waving the card at a terminal but insists on a pin number when more is spent.

According to Preston, the Times and the Standard’s sister, the Mail, have also been experimenting. But my guess is that the future is in combined cards rather than in an inch-thick wodge of loyalty cards.

The sound of feet shuffling is almost audible in the stories today about the addition of the late-arriving James Purnell, the culture secretary, to a photograph of MPs organised by Tameside and Glossop NHS Trust. It seems to hinge on whether Mr Purnell understood the meaning of the word “merge” or whether he thought it would be OK because they were only going to lie to health service staff. The explanations are a bit different in the Telegraph and Guardian reports.

I am happy to put it all down to misunderstanding, but the idea that anyone could have thought it acceptable in any circumstances suggests media illiteracy. What really worries me is that Purnell has been spouting about trust in the media and the need to learn lessons from the fixing of phone polls.

It does not look likely that anyone’s head will roll over the picture, That is right, but it is worrying that the episode of the naming of the Blue Peter cat has reportedly led to the sacking of the editor. I do hope Mr Purnell will put in a good word for Richard Marson, of Blue Peter, next time he bumps into Mark Thompson, the BBC’s director general.