Today’s Guardian headline reads: ‘BNP conference backs ballot on non-white members’. Naturally, the accompanying picture shows Nick Griffin breaking wind with a very long pole up his backside. I found this very interesting. Not because it points to any grave injustice of media bias. All media is biased in one way or another and, frankly, [...]
Ah, Twitter. That bite-sized break from ennui, that stream of consciousness, that tool of social mobilisation… but mobilisation to what? Twitter has played an important part in the democratisation of politics – witness the Tweets of solidarity from Iran and the recent downfall of the Carter Ruck’s Trafigura injunction against The Guardian (which was also in [...]
Guest post by Christos Loutradis Following our coverage of this month’s Greek elections, The Third Estate continues its partnership with Press-Gr, one of the foremost news sites in Greece, by inviting Christos Loutradis to look at the country’s thawing relations with Turkey. Where a Prime Minister chooses to visit on his or her first trip [...]
Declining newspaper sales are not a crisis for journalism, but an opportunity to save it There’s a crisis in print journalism. Newspaper sales across the board are facing an inexorable decline. Worst affected, with the notable exception of the Daily Mail, are the tabloids. The Mirror, once the country’s best selling paper, has seen its [...]
Guest post by Oli The government’s chief legal adviser, Attourney General Patricia Scotland, was fined £5000 today and forced to make a public apology for employing an illegal immigrant as her housekeeper. Sad to say, I first discovered this story via the front page of the Daily Mail. That a positive case for immigration is [...]
Guest post by Carl Packman 102 Minutes That Changed America, the brave documentary that aired on Channel 4 yesterday, made for very tough viewing. The camera was very intrusive, and actually seemed to infuriate people, but it did what was best in documenting some very sombre and terrifying moments. People, covered in dust and debris, [...]
You are live on Channel 4, please do not swear. Wank! Unless you have tourettes. Shilpa poppadom, Shilpa chappawala! Fuck it, who cares, no one’s watching anyway. Reports of Big Brother’s demise are not greatly exaggerated, though for a long time, they’ve been greatly anticipated. This week, programme makers, in one last desperate bid for [...]
I never imagined that I would make a post here commending Rupert Murdoch. Yet while virtually the entire blogosphere has scorned his expressed intention to charge for online content, I feel inclined to say that it’s a bloody good idea. Free access to all manner of online content is brilliant. Yet it is also a [...]
You’d be forgiven for thinking Iraq is a peaceful place. It rarely occupies the British media these days. Only a couple of years ago, whilst Afghanistan was taking a back seat, barely a day went by without headlines of dozens killed by suicide bombs. These days, suicide is painless. On the same day that every [...]
There is nothing more totally and utterly soul destroying to the well-intentioned liberal-lefty than seeing a revolution betrayed. It’s a wound. A bloody deep wound. And the salt in that bloody deep wound is that it’s happened in almost every single case. I could probably count the number of genuinely socialist governments of which I [...]
