Media studies gets a hard time in higher education and the top universities in the UK are not making things any easier by continuing to take a contradictory stance as they advise students on what to study…
When Madeleine McCann tragically disappeared whilst on holiday in Portugal in May 2007, it became the news story of the year. The nature and scale of the reporting was unprecedented – as was the public…
On Monday evening, the BBC’s Newsnight programme revealed that a sub-committee of the privy council had rejected the Royal Charter on press self-regulation put forward by the Press Standards Board of Finance…
The Daily Mail’s now infamous essay described Ed Miliband’s father, Ralph, the socialist academic who died in 1994, as “the man who hated Britain”. That, normally, would have been that. It’s hardly news…
There are at least two points of convergence in this week’s parliamentary deliberations on media freedom in Australia and the UK. Both are driven by reports – Finkelstein and Leveson respectively – responding…
Britain’s newspaper editors met in a London hotel last week in a bid to fend off statutory regulation of their activities. Warned by prime minister David Cameron on Tuesday that unless they accepted all…
New laws to govern publishing on the internet will likely be needed in future, the chair of the UK’s biggest inquiry into media practices and phone hacking has said. Lord Justice Brian Leveson made the…
The good Lord Leveson has certainly set the cat among both the press and political pigeons. His elegantly crafted proposal for establishing a self-regulatory regime for the press, backed by statutory under-pinning…
Few public inquiries have been so closely followed by the British press, or its findings awaited by them with such nervous anticipation as Lord Leveson’s into their culture, practices and ethics. The waiting…
Lord Justice Leveson has released the recommendations of the Inquiry into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press, which was prompted by the Murdoch press phone hacking scandal that erupted last…
The Leveson Inquiry, set up by the UK coalition government in response to accusations of phone hacking at the now defunct Murdoch newspaper the News of the World, has reported – calling for press regulation…
Big day tomorrow. The Leveson Inquiry report in the United Kingdom is being released overnight, and no doubt media inquiry watchers like me will be up all night downloading and clicking through it. But…
The ramifications of the UK phone hacking scandal, in which murder victims, journalists and politicians had their phones tapped, are still playing out. Last year the scandal sank the UK tabloid, The News…
Andy Coulson, Former News of the World editor and British Prime Minister David Cameron’s previous Director of Communications, was arrested and charged with perjury last night in relation to evidence he…
Will the damning, and somewhat surprising, verdict brought in on Rupert Murdoch by a committee of British parliamentarians, spell the end of the reign of the Wizard of Oz? The answer depends on what is…
Actor Hugh Grant said it as well as anyone in an interview with ABC News a while back. All that was needed to end the UK’s decades-long culture of tolerance for News International’s phone-hacking, its…
When the report of the Independent Inquiry into the media and media regulation, aka Finkelstein inquiry, was released some time ago, it was denounced as sinister and – like the Leveson Inquiry in the UK…