Editorial – Pure news 3
Not finally…
Tom Mangold bans vox pops 5
Steven Barnett falls out of love 7
John Mair watches television news 9
Aidan White recalls Andrew Jennings 11
Christopher Howse knows his grammar 13
Kim Fletcher investigates a big deal 15
Peter Oborne Our lying prime minister 18
Julian Petley The truth about privacy 26
Paul Foster Understanding polls 35
Patrick Barwise Philistines and the BBC 39
Fiona Chesterton Remember young viewers 43
Kim Fletcher Who needs print? 49
James Hanning Spies and journalists 55
Tom Leonard A dilemma for US media 60
Martin Bright Happy birthday, Index! 65
BOOK REVIEWS
Ian Jack examines Nigel Farage 71
Gary Gibbon admires Michael Cockerell 74
Maggie O’Kane celebrates Virginia Cowles 76
David Pegg explores trust 79
Twitterwatch 17/54
Quotes of the quarter 48/70
The way we were 34
What the papers said on Boris Johnson 24
Cover illustration: Martin Rowson
Was ever a medium more suited to journalists and journalism than Twitter? Solipsistic, self-promoting, credulous and with a short attention span – no wonder we keep going back. It gets stick for encouraging the mean-spirited, but today it deserves only praise. Twitter...
Tom Mangold Now that the talented and BBC luggage-free Deborah Turness is taking over BBC TV news, will she at last be able to end, once and for all, the curse of the TV vox pop? Invented as a space filler for news items half a century ago, the vox pop (vox populis –...
Steven Barnett As a kid growing up in a close-knit north London Jewish family, I was part of a Friday night ritual that was replicated in thousands of Jewish homes across the country. We would go to my grandmother’s for supper (featuring the best chicken soup this...
Christopher Howse Amol Rajan, the BBC’s busy media editor and Today programme presenter, has an engaging way of admitting some of his failings. On air, he openly discussed having panic attacks before his first Today shift. Of an antimonarchist piece he wrote for...
Paul Foster Despite the rise in data journalists, the industry is terrible with numbers, particularly on poll results Every year I like to carry out a snap survey of my journalism students. I ask them one simple question: who’s good at maths? As you might expect, just...