By Jock Gallagher In more recent years, I’ve had the persona of a respectable company director (MD of my own communications company, no less). I’ve given media advice to major institutions and key political figures. I served for quarter of a century in the middle...
By Donald Trelford The phrase, “throwing out the baby with the bath water,” has been used several times lately about the proposed reform of press regulation. There seems to be a general belief, certainly among MPs, that the phone-hacking scandal resulted from the...
By Philip Davies In the last few years we have seen corruption in Parliament, in the police and in the Press, often involving the collusion of members of all three. Business is rife with corrupt practices, from misrepresentation to tax-dodging. The eagerness with...
By Martin Conboy Shock horror, the popular tabloids have offended public taste and contravened what passes as journalistic integrity. So far, so unremarkable. Events at the News of the World may be the grossest in recent times, prying as irreverently as irrelevantly...
By Rachael Craufurd Smith The extraordinary events surrounding the closure of the News of the World and the withdrawal by News Corporation of its bid to take full control of BSkyB have cast a light on how journalistic standards, if not democratic government itself,...
Today's Parliamentary debate about Rupert Murdoch – “hanging the Great Satan out to dry” was the way one writer put it – was the day of come-uppance that MPs have been eagerly awaiting ever since the newspapers shamed them over their expenses. It was pay-back time...
By Jackie Harrison When James Murdoch made his MacTaggart speech entitled ‘The Absence of Trust’ in August 2009 he criticized regulatory constraints in the broadcasting sector for creating unaccountable institutions such as the BBC Trust, Channel 4 and Ofcom. In his...
By Ralph Negrine The events surrounding the demise of the News of the World has focused our minds, once more, on what should be considered legitimate and permissible practice in journalism and, indeed, in the pursuit of ‘the story’. That the NotW may have used...