World Press Freedom Day in Africa meant loud drums and a gathering of almost a thousand people - including Ghana’s president, senior African judges, hundreds of West African journalists and a keen circus of press freedom advocates from all corners of the world. The...
Proposals which were described as 'important and timely' were submitted for the attention of Commonwealth leaders by an expert Working Group for a new 'code' on media-government relations, but they were ignored in the final Communique. Even so, foreign ministers from...
Gdansk is a bitter-sweet symbol of Poland’s fight against tyranny back in the time of Lech Walesa. The three tall metal crosses erected over the Gdansk shipyard recall the heady days in 1980 when Solidarity, the East bloc’s first free trade union, triumphed in a...
Nick Robinson told some awkward truths about Britain’s broadcasting media in the inaugural Steve Hewlett Lecture on Thursday: above all the need for them to up their game by defending impartiality and engaging ‘dissident’ voices. He captured the excitement and...
Journalists killed with impunity in Syria and Bangladesh, Kenya and Mexico. Insidious state controls through new technologies. More journalists in jail than ever before... Now is the most dangerous time ever to be a journalist: that is the dark and all too familiar...
This week the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, Patricia Scotland QC, said the 52-nation organisation must recognise the weaknesses in government accountability that lie behind the violent deaths of 61 journalists worldwide last year, according to Reporters...
Donald Trump’s pugnacious defence of his under-fire Attorney-General, Jess Sessions, is part of a wider pattern of disregard for truth in which he sees the news media as his main enemy. It is the latest twist in Mr Trump’s evasion of scrutiny about the core matter on...
The British media have been accused, along with the politicians, of doing a poor job of informing the nation about the great issues thrown up by Brexit, the biggest story for a generation. Is the criticism justified? A review of the course of the great debate over the...