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 [...]

There’s been something unseemly indeed about the rush by the supporters of the Syrian rebels (some people seem to think we are supposed simply to choose sides in this civil war, as though it were a football match) to cheerlead a military attack on Syria just because the usual suspects were claiming, yet again, that [...]

This image of a French diplomat Marion Castaing forced into the dirt, surrounded by Israeli soldiers with their guns pointed at her tells you all you need to know about the power relations between Israel and the EU. A decade ago Israel realised international solidarity activists were using the then newer technologies – like mobile [...]

If you haven’t seen it, it’s well worth watching the delicious moment at the GQ awards when British comedian-guru Russell Brand fires off against the magazine’s corporate sponsors, Hugo Boss, reminding us of their ties to the Nazis. Now we have Brand’s account of why he made such mischief. The whole article is worth a [...]

Here’s another one of those minor stories that taken together provide a shocking portrait of the apartheid state that Israel is – not just for Palestinians in the occupied territories (there something worse is going on) but for Israel’s own Palestinian citizens, who comprise a fifth of the population. An Arab tourism student at Haifa [...]