Media
Freedom of the Press Now Concerns Us All
The censorious among us can seize on vast amounts of online evidence and use it to ruin the lives of citizens at random
Lynching the Last Great Newspaperman
Rupert Murdoch’s critics will never concede that the tycoon has any merits — but our media would be worse off without him
A New Yorker Writes
Anthony Daniels has said he likes living in foreign countries. He has lived in several of them. For one thing, a foreign country’s problems are not your own problems — your own country’s. You can view them with a certain detachment. It may be too bad that Italy has gone childless, let’s say. But what really churns your gut is the barbarisation of Birmingham.
Do you know the definition of minor surgery? Surgery someone else is having.
I don’t live in Britain, but I have become addicted to the British press. I turn to it for information and amusement, yes. But also for something like comfort. As an American political journalist, I am enmeshed in my own country’s problems, and long have been. Sometimes these problems are bitter in one’s mouth. My cousins, the British, provide relief.
Hackgate Debate
Daisy Waugh listens in on the great debate on phone hacking.
Leveson Levity
‘There is only one thing the Leveson inquiry needs to discover: how did the law come to be broken repeatedly and publicly, with impunity?’
Clive’s Indian Summer
Book review of A Point of View by Clive James
Good Copy
The Independent‘s new masthead is a little too close to home for Standpoint
A Free Press Means to Publish and be Damned
Our most cherished liberty is up for grabs at the Leveson inquiry, but it cannot be entrusted to a new tribunal to muzzle newspapers
Max Hastings, the Repentant Europhile
The military historian and former editor has belatedly renounced his European faith. Can we expect further recantations?
Media Myopia
Simplistic and divisive, the media response to the riots was utterly predictable
Majority rule; minority rights
It is folly to treat UK race relations as totally divorced from the rest of human experience. We need to look at the larger global picture
American revolutions: Rewriting the language of the unheard
‘Dissenting viewpoints — for example, the belief that America is not an intrinsically racist country—are shunned as further proof of racist pathologies’
The favourites
From Piers Gaveston onwards, controversial courtiers have a long history in British politics.How unusual is Dominic Cummings?