What indicates to me that Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald and Russell Brand, whatever their personal or political differences, are part of an important social and ethical trend is the huge irritation they cause to the media class who have spent decades making very good livings being paid by the media corporations to limit our intellectual [...]

Great to see Russell Brand getting fired up like this on Newsnight, finally showing his anger at Jeremy Paxman’s tedious incomprehension that Brand’s refusal to vote for any of the candidates in a corrupt political system might actually be both a more rational and a more ethical act than Paxman’s choice over decades to conspire [...]

Nazareth has been arguing for decades that it should host the first Arab university in Israel. Successive governments have turned a deaf ear, fearful that an Arab university teaching in Arabic might make the local “minorities” uppity. A few years back, a group of academics set up their own college in the city, calling it [...]

I always read with disbelief the annual international corruption perception index, which puts Israel at the lower end of the developed world but still ahead of many European countries. In the last index, Israel ranked 39th place against Italy’s 72nd. Whose perception? Israelis certainly regard their country as corrupt: 73 per cent believe “government agencies [...]

One never wants to sound churlish but it is truly astounding that it has taken this long for Amnesty and Human Rights Watch to issue a definitive, non-definitive judgment on whether US drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere are war crimes. In a brave and bold move (sarcasm!), they have concluded that such strikes [...]

Here is a very useful series of infographics in the Christian Science Monitor showing that Israel’s settlements have expanded at their fastest rate during renewed activity in the so-called peace process. However, the Monitor doesn’t answer its own question: “Why do Israeli settlements expand more during peace talks?” So let me do it: They expand [...]

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 [...]