For a whole generation of British journalists (my generation), Harold Evans was our mentor. He wrote the textbooks on reporting and editing that we all read at journalism college. In a sense, he invented the modern “professional” journalist; before him, journalism was largely seen as a trade. He is still widely revered. His life since [...]

In the video below, Jeremy Scahill fills out a little more detail on the new media venture he, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras are working on. Good to hear that they don’t intend to have a boss or be subject to the interference of editors. They are obviously hoping to create some sort of journalist [...]

Times are good for Nick Davies of the Guardian. Thanks to the trove of documents Julian Assange brought his way, he gets to be played by the ultimate cool character actor David Thewlis in the new Wikileaks movie Fifth Estate. And yet Nick Davies’ continuing role in this affair is chiefly to discredit Wikileaks and [...]

A good article – a long time coming – by philosopher Nancy Fraser about why second-wave feminism got coopted by second-wave capitalism. Where feminists once criticised a society that promoted careerism, they now advise women to “lean in”. A movement that once prioritised social solidarity now celebrates female entrepreneurs. A perspective that once valorised “care” [...]

Sayed Kashua has a column in Haaretz’s weekend magazine, where he ostensibly writes about domestic dramas, as his counterparts in the western weekend supplements do. But Kashua invariably also says profound things about the state of life for “Israel’s Arabs”, or rather its fifth-class Palestinian citizens. Here he is writing about the impending municipal elections, [...]

As “consumers” of news, we are presented with a world that looks anarchic, alien, terrifying. When we watch TV or read the newspapers, we see a world beyond our borders in which warlords kill senselessly, Islamic extremists want to exterminate us, barbarians lurk in the shadows. If we drop our defences for a second, another [...]

Yet another silly article by Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian’s star columnist. He’s taken a break from turning over every stone in his search for anti-Semitism to do a spot of policing Britain’s political discourse. According to Freedland, if you have doubts about an official and convenient story provided by government to explain away an embarrassing [...]

My last post, on the troubling existence of two versions of a filmed and seemingly real-time interview with a doctor on the front lines of Syria’s civil war, has touched a nerve with some readers. It seems that they think I and others should turn a blind eye to the BBC’s apparent breaking of the [...]

The following two BBC video reports on the victims of the same incident in the Syrian civil war raise very troubling questions about the corporation’s journalistic ethics. The two reports use seemingly identical footage of an interview with a British doctor but the words are different. Her mouth is covered by some kind of medical [...]

It’s easy to forget that journalists are more – or maybe less – than their public face: their writing, reporting and columns. Behind these figures of gravitas and moral authority hide flawed, vulnerable human beings, who worry about covering the monthly school bill or paying off their large mortgages. I say this as an introduction [...]

This must be the most cringe-inducing interview by a senior journalist I’ve ever seen. It’s conducted by Kirsty Wark, one of the BBC’s top presenters, and takes places on Newsnight, the BBC’s flagship nightly current affairs programme. It truly makes me more ashamed of the “profession” of journalism than I already was – and I [...]

I just stumbled across this Russell Brand interview, broadcast on Ch4 News earlier this year. It does not address anything making headlines then or now. Nonetheless, it feels like a wonderful antidote to what commonly passes for news. Here is someone with real insight, based on a life once lived in great pain, talking such [...]

I often read the “Good to meet you…” column in my old paper, the Guardian. In it, “ordinary people” explain why they are loyal readers. Obviously it is a very good marketing tool for the Guardian, letting other readers know why they made a wise decision to choose the paper for its independence and “different [...]

Seymour Hersh, one of a handful of real journalists working in the English language over the past 40 years, comes out guns blazing at a talk on journalism in London. He calls the US media “pathetic”, saying they are “more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama]”. how does [Obama] get [...]

There is a deep-seated malaise at the heart of what we call journalism but is really just the promotion of elite interests through the entertainment corporations that we call the media. The illusion that the media somehow represent us is deeply ingrained in us – and for a reason. The ones telling us throughout our [...]

My recent posting of doubts raised by Robert Fisk about the likelihood of the chemical weapons used at Ghouta being from the Syrian army aroused predictable anger from those supporting another US military strike on a developing country (collateral damage, anyone?) Fisk had pointed out that, according to Russian information, it had not supplied the [...]