“Don’t worry about your A-levels, I don’t have any. Do what I did instead and spend £676,000 in a nationwide referendum.”
So said the Twitter account of Darren Grimes on the day the English exam results were released. The tweet alludes to his origin story: the fashion student plucked from obscurity to face charges of electoral fraud after £675,000 of Brexit campaign money avoided a funding cap by being channelled through Grimes’ BeLeave organisation.
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Journalists love to talk of politicians “flip-flopping” or being “forced into a U-turn”. No politician would recover from conducting the comedy U-turn, wearing flip-flops, carried out by The Independent this month.
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Boris Johnson loves a catchphrase – Build Build Build, Get Brexit Done, Make Britain Great Again – but his go-to phrase in coronavirus lockdown was never quite delivered with the same relish.
Does Johnson, educated at Eton and Oxford, gifted his first job in journalism at The Times, truly believe that “we’re all in this together”?
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“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it,” said Winston Churchill.
The history of Churchill has been written by many – including an ex-journalist called Boris Johnson – but a new chapter has been opened by the Black Lives Matter protests.
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In step with perception and criticism of the rest of the media, discussion around Question Time guest selection usually revolves around whether it has a “right wing” or “left wing” bias. These accusations are relatively comfortable for the BBC as they can resort to an increasingly common defence: “well, we’re getting flak from both sides so must be somewhere in the middle!”
Left and right is also allowed for in the official statement of the BBC on QT guest selection: “Question Time aims to select a panel with a broad range of views, knowledge and experience” according to the programme’s official website.
What this statement doesn’t allow for, in terms of a “range of views, knowledge and experience”, is that the overwhelming majority of QT guests represent the elite, which hugely limits the range of views, knowledge and experience presented.
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Intellectuals are a “herd of independent minds”[i] wrote the art critic Harold Rosenberg.
Few things chime with the phrase like the reaction of mainstream journalists to Keir Starmer’s first Prime Minister’s Questions as leader of the Labour Party:
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“The language around Covid-19 has sometimes felt trite and misleading. You do not survive the illness through fortitude or strength of character, whatever the Prime Minister’s colleagues will tell us.”
So said Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis in an opening monologue[1] that went viral and saw the presenter praised for her “frank takedown of the language used to talk about coronavirus”[2], her “powerful”[3] and “extraordinary”[4] intervention.
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“The media is the most powerful entity on earth” wrote Malcolm X. “They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent.”
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As anticipation builds for the launch of the Disney Plus streaming service next month, fuelled by paid advertisements, product tie-ins and media articles facilitated by Disney PR, a story which isn’t gaining much traction in the media is the potential threat posed by the service.
Read Full ArticleIf you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.
Malcom x
The Free Press? 