People’s budgets The Chancellor George Osborne was talking of his plans to cut a further £10 billion from the UK’s annual welfare budget as I drove through rush-hour traffic to Kingston-upon-Thames. News of his crowd-pleasing speech to the Conservative party conference spouted from the radio as I wondered how such questions might be decided with […]
The basic message of Fraudcast News is pretty simple, you sort of can’t miss it in the subtitle – How Bad Journalism Supports Our Bogus Democracies. Working from back to front – the bogusness of our democracies is that ordinary citizens get nothing like the influence implied by the word “democracy” – […]
Very little, I say, as I explained in a video recorded for a GlobalNet21 debate held in London on Tuesday, July 31. Not least of the problems is the gathering, multiple crises in government legitimacy, at every level from the local to global. There was an interesting array of opinions expressed on the night, judging […]
I wrote this comment in response to a commentary piece by ex-colleague and current friend Paul Holmes about recent editorial changes being for the better at Thomson Reuters, despite the recent “cock-ups and casualties”. I disagreed. Patrick Chalmers • I have a great deal of respect for Paul Holmes as an ex-colleague and as a […]
I wrote this comment in response to the following article by the World Association of Newspapers and Newspaper Publishers. Thomson Reuters can hire all the new journalists it wants but won’t change anything fundamental about its daily news file. Sorry about that. The agency deserves its reputation as providing a service that helps rich people […]
It’s days to go before the first round in the 2012 French presidential elections. In Montbrun Bocage, a rural backwater south of Toulouse in the Pyrenean foothills, the atmosphere is hardly crackling with excitement. People here certainly know their politics but generally fail to find much passion for politicians. Given the bluntness of occasional votes […]
I watched the extraordinarily moving documentary Brother Number One last night, one I’d meant to catch when covering the recent Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London. It tells the story of a New Zealander who was captured, tortured and executed by the Khmer Rouge. The film’s great success is to use one person’s tale, […]
I’ve spent some of the past few days working with Glenn McMahon on covering the Human Rights Watch Festival 2012 in London for visionOntv. We ended our interview series by asking HRW’s Andrea Holley on her organisation’s thinking about the hows and whys of these video fests. Are they preaching to the choir, reaching out […]
