Showing posts with label Leveson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Leveson. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Daily Mail caught out lying again & turning into your Dad

When I was growing up my father banned newspapers from our house. He said that they were all biased and we should get our news from the BBC TV at 9pm. He knew that the BBC (bless it) was not perfect but he was satisfied that they meant well and usually got their reporting right most of the time.

I disagreed and use to love reading newspapers. As a teenager I worked in a Newsagents and in the school holidays would try and read every paper in stock. I found it fascinating how different papers would report the same story. Over the years I have become more and more disenchanted with newspapers and have now pretty much stopped buying them.

The latest example of lies and smears published in the Daily Mail last week about Gordon Brown MP just beggars belief (see rare retraction above). You would have thought with the current phone hacking criminal trial and unease about the proposed press regulation charter they would have been just a little big careful about what they publish?

The broadsheets are better but not that much better.  Leaving aside the Sunday Times which I don't believe anything it says anymore. They all seem to be aimed at wealthy middle class elites who obsess over super expensive cars, Waitrose cooking ingredients and exotic holidays in the Seychelles. I exaggerate slightly to make my point and I do on occasions read something interesting and well written but I usually get bored reading them and end up throwing most of it away unread.

Provocative and opinionated stuff you can nowadays get very easily on the Internet. 

I will still read the local press and specialist weeklies but I find myself in yet another way, turning into a slightly updated version of my old Dad. I have decided not to buy daily or Sunday papers and rely on the BBC for my main news.  Now of course largely via their website and PC, tablet, laptop and smartphone.

Friday, March 08, 2013

Hacked off at West Ham? (Labour Party GC & Leveson)

Twitter picture from last week's West Ham Labour Party GC when we had Julianne Marriot from Hacked Off as our guest speaker.

Hacked Off is about "campaigning with victims of press abuse to ensure that the Leveson Inquiry leads to a free & fair press, promoting world-class public interest journalism".

Julianne explained they are not just about phone hacking but about press abuse.  She gave a number of examples of the sorry state that is the modern day UK press. For example some of them will still ring the actor Hugh Grant's  90 year old Dad in middle of night, to try and startle him into saying something and they will pretend to be his son (his Dad also has heart condition).

Major newspapers such as the Sunday Express are not even members of the current voluntary Press Complaints Commission. You need to have an independent regulator underpinned by law. The Government want a "Royal Charter" while the victims of dreadful abuse want statutory regulation of press.

One good thing so far about the debate and controversy about the press is that it has so far stopped further media consolidation.  Final criticism of the Tory Government "Royal Charter" is that it would result in a "modest fee" for arbitration when Leveson made it clear that arbitration should be free.

Julianne gave a thought provoking and persuasive presentation.

She is actually a member of West Ham Labour Party and West Ham ward and we had a "discussion" yesterday evening about "Hacked off" and the Libel Reform Bill where I expressed my "concerns" over recent developments. Nuff said.