Wednesday 20 July 2011

The (non-)effect of Hackgate

According to Spectator:

No Labour bounce, no drop in approval for Cameron or his government. That's the impact that two weeks of front pages dominated by the phone hacking scandal on the opinion polls:

This seems to prove my feeling that (for better or worse) the public is not so obsessed with the hacking scandal as members of parliament or certain areas of the media.






"

Good journalism

I guess that the public are already becoming bored with the whole hacking business. I have some sympathy for this trend: other matters such as the East African crisis, the fate of the euro , other parliamentary concerns, etc., are certainly being ignored. Moreover, a sense of proportion is in danger of being lost.

However, I wish to make a point which has been comprehensively ignored: Such newspapers as the  News of the World were really appalling in content apart from the news-gathering methods which were so illegal. The paper (and it was not unique) was in terms of journalism and quality of writing utterly reprehensible.

Rebekah Brooks was editor of such a newspaper. She is undoubtedly intelligent; but the fruits of her labour was sub-journalism. She, of course, continued her illustrious career at the Sun: another infantile publication.

We shall discover whether she was really ignorant of what appears to have been a culture of law-breaking for the sake of a story. But there is no doubt that to call the content of the News of the World good journalism is a betrayal of what journalism is meant to be.

Sunday 17 July 2011

Economic crisis

We thought not so long ago that the crisis had come to an end: the banks had been rescued and mortgage lending curbed.

This is becoming more and more unlikely: the US sovereign debt is incredibly large - and still growing; the Eurozone  is confronted with problems which threaten its very existence.

Economists gave mutually contradictory advice.

Ordinary people can only await developments with trepidation!