For a long time we have heard about the dearth of journalistic jobs. Newspapers have struggled to “adapt their business models” to the epoch of everything written being free. Meanwhile other kinds of businesses are arising to pick up the slack, and take on underemployed writers. And some of them offer a truly frightening picture [...]
Ok, false alarm, it’s not quite breaking news. People have known this for years. But I think, following today’s little outburst in The Independent, it’s worth reiterating. Julie Burchill is an idiot. Quite why a paper which is, by and large, aimed at intelligent, liberal minded progressives, chooses to print the journalistic equivalent of an [...]
Purdah is the Persian word for curtain. In the far-flung places of the world, it refers to the practice of concealing women from men through segregation or dress. Here in Britain, it is the somewhat curious term applied to the pre-election period in which the government is, more or less, prevented from making major policy [...]
Guest post by Richard Symons
We came to “The Fear Factory” via an unusual but (as we discovered) incredibly astute request.
The Nationwide Foundation’s steering committee brief was simple enough, “give us a tool to change minds” – a regrettably necessary first step in making the treatment of young offenders something you could convince the public they [...]
When I received my review copy of Spirit Level Film’s latest documentary, The Fear Factory, through my letterbox a few days ago, I had little idea what to expect. A few seconds in, as the ominous music begins to play and the image of a foetus looms into view accompanied by the voiceover telling us [...]
In Agatha Christie’s classic crime novel the ABC Murders, the detective Hercule Poirot comes up with the following formulation: “When do you notice a pin least? When it is in a pin cushion. When do you notice a murder least? When it is one of a series of related murders.” I would like to extend [...]
Last week I suggested that when middle class journalists get contemptuous about “the English”, they are rarely engaged in true self-deprecation. They are not, I argued, referring to themselves, but are using superficially anti-patriotic sentiment as cover to express often quite vile opinions about the masses. And so it was that one of my [...]
Peter Tatchell’s is – perhaps understandably – pissed off. The Press Complaints Commission has failed to uphold a complaint against Jan Moir’s despicable attack on late boyzone star Stephen Gately. Yet he is wrong to demand – along with many others - that the PPC, a “discredited, feeble institution” be “replaced by an independent statutory [...]
This is a guest post by Francesca Rose Lewis.
Much has been written recently on the malaise (if not quite death) of feminism. In 2006 Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs bemoaned the desire of women to become sex objects in a perverse re-reading of female power. Germaine Greer went on Celebrity Big Brother, and, in the [...]
Last week the historian Martin Gilbert brought attention to an article published a couple of months back by the Independent on Sunday. He expressed a certain amount of reasonable outrage over piece in which former ambassador Oliver Miles had questioned the impartiality of the enquiry panel. It is an article that starts off reasonably. Miles [...]
