Long before the Draft Online Safety Bill was published in May the press had been lobbying strenuously to ensure that the online versions of newspapers would not fall within its scope in any way whatsoever. Continue reading
The International Forum for Responsible Media Blog
Tag: Julian Petley (Page 3 of 6)
Imagine a bank appointing a confirmed Marxist as its CEO, or an oil company doing likewise with a passionate campaigner against fossil fuels. Sounds crazy? Continue reading
The Prime Minister’s chief advisor, Dominic Cummings, has long been a sworn enemy of the BBC. In 2004, when he was director of the New Frontiers Foundation, he called for “the end of the BBC in its current form” and argued that the “privileged closed world of the BBC needs to be turned upside down and its very existence should be the subject of a very intense and well-funded campaign’”. Continue reading
On 27 January, Suella Braverman, a former chair of the European Research Group, a junior minister at the former Department for Exiting the EU and an MP with a consistent record on voting against laws to promote human rights, wrote an article for the Conservative Home website in which she argued that: Continue reading
The BBC had a poor election and a poor Brexit, being accused of political bias by both Left and Right, both Leave and Remain. It tends to respond in such circumstances that this shows that it has got the political balance of its coverage about right. Continue reading
Glancing at the headlines of the Brexit press on 25 September 2019, one could have been forgiven for expecting a veritable flood of anti-juridicalism in their inside pages. Thus the Express demanded ‘Unlawful? What’s lawful about denying 17.4m Brexit?’; the Mail focussed on Johnson’s reaction with ‘Boris blasts: Who runs Britain’? Continue reading
During the course of a three-week trial in March 2015, it was revealed how MGN papers, and especially the Sunday Mirror, had hacked the phones of eight well-known people, wreaking havoc in their personal lives by causing them to believe that stories about them appearing in the papers had been fed to them by their nearest and dearest. The victims included Shane Ritchie, Paul Gascoigne, Alan Yentob and Sadie Frost. Continue reading
The Cairncross Review Call for Evidence [pdf] states that the ‘review’s objective is to establish how far and by what means we can secure a sustainable future for high quality journalism, particularly for news’, asks respondents whether ‘the future of high-quality journalism in the UK is at risk – at national, regional and/or local levels’, and argues that ‘high quality journalism plays a critical role in our democratic system, in particular through holding power to account, and its independence must be safeguarded’. Continue reading
No-one would deny that both the local and national press are facing problems. In the past decade more than 300 local newspapers have been closed, and two thirds of local authority areas and more than half of parliamentary constituencies no longer have a local daily newspaper covering their affairs. Continue reading
The Government has recently announced a review into the sustainability of the press. According to its summary of the review’s scope, ‘the UK has always benefited from a strong, well established and diverse press sector’, and the resultant Continue reading
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