Editorial Intelligence: ‘a disgusting idea’?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 3 April 2006 at 09:42
Tags: BBC, Daily Mail, Ethics, Journalism, Spectator, Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Times

The Sunday Times yesterday reported on a row — sorry, “catfight”, among leading media figures over whether journalists and PRs should hobnob in a forum sponsored by big organisations.Some journalists, it seems, are not impressed by Editorial Intelligence, PR guru Julia Hobsbawm’s “information and networking club” which seeks to bring together spinmeisters and leading columnists.

The Sunday Times story appears to have been provoked by a Guardian column in which Christina Odone  described EI as “PR meets journalism in Caribbean freebies, shameless backscratching and undeclared interests”. Institutionalising the “already rather dubious relationship” between hacks, flacks and the organsiations the latter represent, Odone wrote, “is just bad news.”

Odode is not alone, it seems. The Sunday Times reports that BBC has forced Barney Jones and Kirsty Lang to quit the Editorial Intelligence advisory board, after learning that they would be paid £1,000 to hold the position and £200 to attend its seminars.
Melanie Phillips has refused to get involved and saying “I don’t think that journalists and PRs should be in a jolly boat together.” Rod Liddle described the project as “a disgusting idea which suggests journalists might be up for hire.”  John Lloyd also resigned, following his appointment to head the Reuters journalism institute at Oxford — but Matthew d’Ancona is less concerned about his membership.

Editorial Intelligence sells its corporate subscribers access to an online directory of profiles of  and columnists, along with its quarterly magazine and access to networking events to bring PRs and journalists together.

Are Odone, Liddle and Phillips right — is this something journalists should not get involved with?

Ashley Cole roundup

Posted by Martin Stabe on 3 March 2006 at 11:25
Tags: Ethics, Journalism, Libel, News of the World, Online, Privacy, Sport, Star, Sun

Our exclusive report yesterday that Arsenal and England footballer Ashley Cole is suing the News of the World and the Sun (for harassment, libel and “false privacy” over stories about gay footballers in which he was not even named) has been widely picked up by other papers.

The Star tastefully splashes with the story (but strangely not on its web site). It’s also in the Daily Mail, Evening Standard, and Daily Telegraph.
The Times and Independent analyse the potential consequences for media law and what the Guardian calls the “implications for the tabloid press and their Faustian pact with the celebrity world”:

Legal experts view the case as an important step in taking the temperature of libel and privacy law in cases where the aggrieved parties are not named but the public is able to build up a “jigsaw” identification via tabloid hints that spark gossip via email, blogs and chatrooms.

They said the privacy part of the claim was “unique” because it relied on an untested concept known as “false privacy” - even though Cole says he is not gay, he will argue his privacy has been invaded.

Best of all is the Sun’s own front page report. In the intro, we learn that:

SOCCER star Ashley Cole has instructed lawyers to sue two newspapers — claiming he has been wrongly linked to gay sex allegations.

Fast forward to paragraph six:

He instructed lawyers to sue the News of the World — who originally reported that two Premiership stars had been caught romping on camera with a music industry pal.

Oh! That newspaper. Onward to paragraph 10, the last of the story:

Cole’s lawyers have filed writs against the News of the World and The Sun. He is suing for libel, harassment and breach of privacy.

Nice of them to mention that little detail.

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Gay licence fee payers don’t get value for money from BBC

Posted by Caitlin Pike on 28 February 2006 at 15:31
Tags: BBC, Ethics, Issues, Journalism, Television

Coverage of gay people on the BBC’s flagship channels is almost non existant, according to new research commissioned by gay and lesbain charity Stonewall, in spite of contributing £190 million a year to the BBC in TV licence fees.  

A monitoring exercise carried out for Stonewall of 168 hours of prime-time BBC One and BBC Two found lesbian and gay lives realistically portrayed for just six minutes, or 0.06 per cent of airtime. A further 32 minutes of programming featured derogatory or offensive references to gay people. These came from a range of programmes including the Weakest Link, hosted by Anne Robinson, and The Lenny Henry Show. 

The stark conclusion of this major exercise is that gay licence-payers receive astonishingly poor value from the BBC, said Stonewall chief executive Ben Summerskill.

At a time when the BBC is seeking renewal of its Charter, it’s difficult to argue that 1.5 million households should be expected to continue making such a substantial contribution to channels on which their real lives are hardly reflected, and which are often punctuated with derisive and demeaning depictions of them.

A BBC spokesperson said:

Stonewall’s report is a contribution towards our goal of serving all licence payers. But we feel that Stonewall has chosen to analyse a very narrow timeslot, which excludes nearly all of the BBC’s news and current affairs output. We believe the researchers would have found a great deal of richness and diversity in our output across television, radio and online throughout the eight weeks they examined. We are committed to finding ways of reflecting the audience’s daily lives in our programmes, but we feel the notion that gay men and lesbians only receive value for money from the licence fee through seeing direct representation of gay life is misconceived.

Focus groups of both gay and heterosexual people told Stonewall researchers they wanted to see better representation of gay people on screen. The BBC was singled out as the least successful broadcaster at capturing the realities of gay lives. “If you put the BBC against Channel 4, it’s just like the caveman,” said one interviewee from London. 

Stonewall found that Gay innuendo was broadcast across a wide range of programmes in spite of BBC editorial guidelines which explicitly require staff to avoid “offensive or stereotypical assumptions”. 

The BBC has made strenuous efforts in the last five years to serve minority ethnic viewers more effectively, added Summerskill.

Gay people are forced to pay the BBC £126.50 a year on pain of imprisonment if they fail. We hope that the BBC will now develop for the first time a similar sense of obligation to lesbian and gay licence-payers.

The report suggests eight key recommendations to the BBC. These include provision of urgently-needed “balanced and unsensational” coverage in its news and current affairs programmes, developing authentic gay characters throughout drama and soap outputs and including six per cent of gay contestants in game shows, reflecting the wider British population.

RSF says Chinese verdict implicates Yahoo!

Posted by Martin Stabe on 27 February 2006 at 19:00
Tags: Ethics, Freedom of Expression, International, Journalism, Online

Reporters Without Borders says it has obtained Chinese court documents confirming that internet portal Yahoo! collaborated with Chinese authorities seeking the conviction of dissident Li Zhi.

“The Li Zhi verdict shows that all Internet sector companies are pulled in to help when the police investigate a political dissident,” the press freedom organisation said in a news release.

RSF says the verdict showed that Li was given a eight-year prison sentence in December 2003 based on electronic records provided by Yahoo! Hong Kong Ltd and its Chinese competitor Sina.

RSF has previously criticised Yahoo! for similar involvement in the jailing of journalist Shi Tao, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison after being convicted of forwarding a letter sent to his newspaper, Dangdai Shang Bao, by the Chinese propaganda officials to a US-based Chinese dissident web site. Shi had used his personal Yahoo! e-mail address to forward the message, and records supplied to Chinese authorities by Yahoo! linked him to the address, RSF says.

Wot, no diamonds?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 21 February 2006 at 16:21
Tags: Ethics, Mirror

The American tax man may be eyeing the pricey “goodie bags” handed out at film awards ceremonies, but here in Britain we seem to have no such worries. Just the opposite, in fact. The Mirror’s 3am Girls — Kiki King, Eva Simpson and Caroline Hedley — took the opportunity in their column yesterday to whinge about at their slim takings from this weekend’s Baftas:

They might be the British Oscars but the Baftas could learn a thing or two from Hollywood about goody bags.

Whereas your US A-listers might head home with £10,000 of diamond-encrusted watches and tooth-whitening sessions, last night’s attendees got, wait for it… a CD, a DVD of Bafta-winning film and a set of hair products from Nicky Clarke.

Oh, and the official awards brochure. We could hardly contain our excitement…

As Brand Republic editor Gordon MacMillan writes on his blog: “Journalists moaning about rubbish freebies — whatever next?”