If politics is theatre, one of the defining features of the form is the presence of the on-stage critics – the media, or more specifically, the big name opinion leaders. They would like to imagine themselves as a Greek chorus commenting on the drama, but if they are, they’re a Greek chorus composed of unreliable…
Read More The failure of the on-stage criticVideo from remote control helicopter shows the extent of flooding in Frankwell, #Shrewsbury. http://t.co/R8UUl6HtSx pic.twitter.com/FcqHL3qfYV — Shropshire Star (@ShropshireStar) February 10, 2014 OK, so the weird weather and infrastructure crisis exacerbated by the Galbraithian combination of private affluence and public squalor is being monitored by the local newspaper using a web platform for 140-character snarkfarts…
Read More ProliferationSo, did ya ever want to know social network analysis metrics on the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport’s special advisers during the spring of 2011, as Rupert Murdoch’s interests in the UK feverishly lobbied Jeremy Hunt and his staff and we raced towards the epochal eruption of Hackgate? ‘Course you did. In June, 2011,…
Read More Hunt, through a non-sexist prismUpdate: in this post, I wanted to know which questions were asked in an ICM poll. ICM has now released the full tables. The question was: You may have seen or heard that Britain slipped into a new economic downturn during the last quarter of 2012. Which do you think was the single most important…
Read More Update: ICM economy questionYou thought Con Coughlin was bad, but did you know he was this bad? The race for Britain’s Most Disgusting Journalist is a tough one, but rather like Roger Federer, the great champions are always in with a chance against the young’uns.
Read More a hard, hard game to pickAdam Bienkov has an excellent piece out on Guto Harri, Boris Johnson, and the Murdochs. Harri was one of the alternative candidates to Andy Coulson for the No.10 press job, of course, then he worked for Johnson, and now he’s off to work for Murdoch. Bienkov points out that there is an increasing tendency for…
Read More The Project 3.0 – where are we going from here?My mental model of the whole Murdoch/political complex, as I’ve said before, is that there have been two projects, The Project 1.0 and The Project 2.0. The first was the original use of “The Project” as Peter Mandelson introduced the phrase – the Blairite settlement, under which there was a transactional, bargaining relationship between the…
Read More The Project 2.0: confirmedHere’s a role for a blogger that I don’t think anyone covers. The Whitehall blog. It’s a truism about British journalism, going back to Anthony Sampson if memory serves, that the newspapers cover Westminster politics obsessively but they hardly cover Whitehall at all. When they do, their service is even more conventionalised and less penetrating…
Read More Request for blogDoes anyone else see a parallel between the Murdoch e-mail timeline and some of the recent new information? For example, the meetings with Cameron regarding the Sun coming out for him seem to have happened not long before the new policy of “eliminating in a consistent manner across NI…emails that could be unhelpful”. More tellingly,…
Read More Your inbox is over its size limitFrom the archive, George Pascoe-Watson in 2006, on just what a hands-off manager Rupert Murdoch was.
Read More filed for reference and indeed referred to