Abstract
From the British Journalism Review of 10 years ago (vol. 21, issue no 4, 2010)
‘Nobody dare assert that matters of public interest were not involved in the War of Jenkins’s Ear, the Abdication, and the duck house, but the same cannot be said of the exploits of the mobile-phone hackers. So far nothing has emerged to provide them with a public-interest defence for their activities. They are simply a disgrace.’
– BJR editorial on the phone-hacking scandal
‘So here’s the bottom line. Within a few years, it is distinctly possible that there will remain just one viable commercial provider of television and radio news in the UK – owned ultimately by a single individual who frequently demonstrated his appetite for editorial intervention and who also happens to own more than a third of Britain’s national press. By any standards, that has to be an unacceptable level of media concentration…’
– Steven Barnett, professor of communications at the University of Westminster, on the dangers facing plurality in TV and radio
‘The story had all the richest ingredients for ever-excitable Fleet Street. There was something so bawdily English about it; the sort of thing that foreigners don’t understand but which adds gaiety to the British nation. The oddest aspect of the story was that the American press, represented by hundreds of correspondents in London, published not a word, even though the principals were from the US…Even the raggiest rags, which are much raggier than ours and favour stories concerning caravan park chainsaw massacres, three-headed babies and sex-experiment abductions by aliens in flying saucers, regarded the Manacled Mormon business as beyond the pale.’
– Peter Tory on his role as a Daily Express man chasing a prize newspaper scoop of the 1970s