Journalism

Saturday

Martin Bright

Mea Culpa: I'm in the Electronic Stocks

I have just received what I hope is the last of a series of letters from the parliamentary commissioner, John Lyon. He has informed me that a complaint against me has finally been resolved, which is something of a relief. When I first heard from him I must say I was irritated. Someone called Mark Pack had pointed out over the summer that I had not updated my entry in the journalists’ register of interests. This is the mechanism whereby members of the lobby, who gain access to parliament thanks to their connection with an individual media organisation, register other paid employment. When I was at the Observer and the New

Friday

Alex Massie

All the News that's Fit to Eat

Not content with one hazardous business enterprise right now, apparently Rolling Stone is going into the restaurant business. God knows why. Anyway, this allows Slate to imagine what might happen if other magazines decided to open their own restaurant. Thus… New Yorker Cafe: Although this beloved eatery professes familiarity with international cuisine, it’s best to stick with the dry, witty takes on American classics, which tend to provoke thin smiles of recognition, if rarely outright delight. If they’re out of the Anthony Lane crab cakes, the David Denbyburger is an adequate second choice—while bland, it is easily enlivened with artisanal ketchup. After the meal, patrons may join Adam Gopnik for

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

In answer to your questions

So, what is The Spectator coming to? Dishing out trophies to Harman and all these Labour types? Has the editor’s chair made me crawl up to people like Harman and Darling? Am I angling for a political seat? The comments to my earlier blog post raise some excellent points – about politics, polemic and The Spectator itself. I thought they deserved a response in a post rather than a comment. The Spectator’s tradition of honouring talent on all sides of the political divide in its annual awards is a long one:  La Harman was our 24th Parliamentarian of the Year. While Harman was speaking, Boris and I were holding her

Wednesday

Alan Watkins

Man and urchin

Frank Johnson, the finest and funniest parliamentary sketch-writer of his generation died, too young, in late 2006. His widow, Virginia Fraser, has now compiled and edited a selection of his writings. It is mostly about domestic politics as seen from his seat in the press gallery of the House of Commons, interspersed with expeditions to by-elections and general elections. There are also pieces on his early life in Shoreditch, his lifelong enthusiasms — opera, ballet, warfare, diplomacy — and at the end of his life, his newly acquired house near Montpellier. In a work of this kind it is a temptation to review the man and not the book. I

Wednesday

Alexander Chancellor

A lost civilisation

It’s odd that a writer as excellent and long-established as Ian Jack hasn’t ever written an actual book but has stuck doggedly to the humble trade of journalism, of which this volume is a collection. It’s odd that a writer as excellent and long-established as Ian Jack hasn’t ever written an actual book but has stuck doggedly to the humble trade of journalism, of which this volume is a collection. The reason may be that since what he called ‘perhaps the best Sunday morning of my life’, the day in 1970 when Harold Evans offered him a job as a sub-editor on the Sunday Times, journalism has remained his first

Wednesday

Magnus Linklater

Making the running

Journalists’ memoirs tend to be as transitory as the great stories they so lovingly recall. Journalists’ memoirs tend to be as transitory as the great stories they so lovingly recall. Even the best of them — Arthur Christiansen’s Headlines All My Life, Otto Friedrich’s Decline and Fall, about the death of the Saturday Evening Post, Murray Sayle’s A Crooked Sixpence, recalling Soho gangs and press corruption — seem dated now, the scoops forgotten, the scandals long past. Few of them impart much of value, except perhaps for a fleeting sense of nostalgia. Harold Evans must surely be counted an exception, because, for more than a decade, he ran the best

Friday

Alex Massie

Mencken's Thought for the Day

Writing the diary column* for this week’s edition of the magazine, I can’t believe I failed to quote from HL Mencken. The insufferable nonsense provoked by what passes for a healthcare “debate” (on both sides of the Atlantic) would have entertained the Sage of Baltimore no end. As Peter Suderman reminds one, Mencken viewed these absurdities with an appropriately jaundiced eye: “I enjoy democracy immensely,” he wrote. “It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down.” Quite so. Quite so. *Probably the only

Friday

Martin Bright

Maziar Bahari and Press TV

The latest outrage committed by the Iranian state broadcaster Press TV is its coverage of the arrest of film maker and journalist Maziar Bahari. Maziar, a Canadian-Iranian, was arrested on June 21 and paraded on TV nine days later “confessing” to his role in a western plot to destabilise the Iranian regime. He had provided footage of the crackdown on protestors to Channel 4. I am loathe to encourage readers to look at the Press TV site, so check out the story at The Spittoon, an excellent website opposed to clerical fascism. The author of the piece, “shikwa”, concludes: “How can anyone continue doubting the bias of Press TV which spews this rubbish at the behest

Wednesday

Cressida Connolly

It’s not all good manners

Lynn Barber’s interviews are one of the main reasons to subscribe to the Observer: on any Sunday when a piece of hers appears, it’s always the first thing to turn to, even — or make that especially — when she’s profiling someone unsympathetic. Not for nothing has she earned the nickname the Demon Barber. On John Prescott, for example: ‘You wouldn’t want to invite Prezza to dinner, not because he might eat peas off his knife, but because he’d bore the other guests to death.’ What makes Barber such an unfailingly enjoyable read is that she makes her own judgments about people, which means she often likes monsters or disdains

Monday

Martin Bright

Something Between a Blogger and a Commentator

This evening I have the pleasure of speaking about the ongoing battle between the Commentariat and the Bloggertariat at an Editorial Intelligence event. My fellow panellists are David Aaronovitch of The Times, blogger Iain Dale, Mick Fealty (Slugger O’Toole and Brassneck) and Anne Spackman of The Times). Where do I fit in? I guess somewhere inbetween the two. What are my concerns? That the emrgence of the bloggertariat is merely an outgrowth of the commentariat, but even more self-regarding than its precursor. The event takes place on the same day as the launch of Stephen Grey’s Investigations Fund, a brilliant project to renew the investigative tradition and encourage the next generation

Thursday

Alex Massie

The Pleasures of Moral Panic

Like Julian Sanchez, I consider Reason’s compilation of 40 years of Time magazine’s addiction to hysteria a real treat. This 1972 effort – warning, as you can see, of the inexorable rise of Satanism in the United States – is just the beginning of it. From there it’s but a hop, skip and jump to scaremongering about cocaine use, rap music, population growth, “crack kids” and, best of all, Pokemon. Yes, Pokemon. I suspect that Reason could have gone much further: surely Time must have warned us that we’re all going to die of swine flu? Or was that bird flu? Pretty much each and every one of these issues

Tuesday

Martin Bright

A Vision of the Future

A lot of us have been wondering what Westminster might be like under the Tories. What, for instance, would the parliamentary press lobby look like under a Cameron government? A return to deference, perhaps. Would the gentlemen and the ladies of the press take their information dutifully from the PM’s spokesman or woman (who would presumably be called a spokesman) and put it straight in the paper? We now have an indication from the behaviour at Eric Pickles’s bash (quite literally) last night that we may see a different kind of throwback to the days of boozing and brawling that seemed a distant memory.

Friday

Martin Bright

What Do We Know?

I had the pleasure of guesting on Jon Pienaar’s political podcast yesterday. Inevitably we ended up talking about the death of Ivan Cameron and found ourselves lost for words. But Jon made a very interesting point. He noted that the story showed how little we really know about the lives of our prominent politicians, however much we might think they are public property. We talked about whether this tragedy will change the way we do politics in this country and decided that it probably won’t. Jon raised the example of the death of Labour leader John Smith, when everyone thought everything would change and nothing did. But I think something

Sunday

Martin Bright

Bloody Students: The Next Generation

I’ve been teaching the politics specialism at City University’s journalism course and I’ve been pleasantly surprised how much fun it has been. I was warned before I started that my student would be barely literate, apathetic lumps with just a passing knowledge of British politics. I was surprised how few of them regularly read a newspaper, but I have found them, for the most part, well informed and engaged. My job is to provide them with insights into the job of a political reporter, which mainly involved me droning on about my scoops and great victories over the forces of darkness. But from time to time I wheel out a special guest.