Features Editor Filming - WINOL Assignment

Well we got behind the cameras recently and in pairs had to come up with a 2 minute(ish) video of an assigned job role on WINOL. For mine, I worked with Uldduz on my course and we put together the following video on Colin Boag, the features editor.



If the video isn't working for you, watch it here on YouTube.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

Naming Private Ryan - And the prize for best headline goes to...

Well sadly that was the Daily Mirror's and not mine but it was so good I could hardly let it go unnoticed. You can see the frontpage here but essentially, for those who are unaware, yesterday the super injunction saga kicked off in a big way. The supposedly unknown footballer who got himself a super injunction after an affair with Big Brother contestant, Imogen Thomas. Now most of you will know who the footballer is but fortunately for those that don't, Lib Dem MP John Hemming said in parliament on Monday, "Mr Speaker, with about 75,000 people having named Ryan Giggs it is obviously impracticable to imprison them all." So now you know. Defending his decision to use his parliamentary privelege to reveal the name, (which is why I can report it to you now, see privelege post here), "Basically when he... showed that he was going to go after relatively normal people and try and prosecute them, for gossiping about him on a matter of trivia, I think he has to be held to account for that."

I think personally that the law is wrong. I don't really care about the trivial affairs of celebrities but the fact that a person who is rich enough can block the press from reporting on their misdoings seems wrong. Of course, the injunction law comes from the privacy laws of the European Union and for more on the law behind it see my previous posts, especially look here. I also think that had the footballer in question not brought about the injunction in the first place, we the public would have long forgotten about the affair and would have been long past caring. The link to the BBC article from which the quotes are taken is here.

Apologies for the lack of blogging recently, exams are upon us and in fact, that's what I should be doing right now, last minute revision. Off I go then.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

Max Mosley is back!! - Privacy Laws

Remember Max Mosley? Of course you do! He was the motor sports boss who the News of the World reported had a sado masochistic orgy with five women. The bit people really get interested in is that the orgy had supposedly Nazi overtones; interesting if you know your history. Although he was paid damages (£60,000 to be exact) he argued that since the details of his private life were now public knowledge this was not enough to restore his reputation. This is quite interesting when you consider libel as to be a libelous statement one of the criteria is that it lowers the persons reputation in the minds of right thinking people (click here for a separate post on libel). The former president of the International Automobile Federation took his case to the Human Rights Court, challenging UK laws which allow publication without giving targets advanced warning. He claimed that since he was not warned about the papers intention to run the story, so he could not apply for an injunction to prevent the story from being published (Injunctions, here, here and here).

He told the BBC '"This is just about whether the newspapers should have the right to publicise very private aspects of people's lives which there's no public interest in at all - it's just purely for titillation and to sell newspapers."' However the court in Strasbourg begged to differ ruling that "the media was not required to give prior notice" because they are already self regulated and access to civil courts for damages and interim injunctions. Ruling otherwise would also have called into question the defence of public interest as having the press warn the people in question every time a story is about to be published would mean exceptions would have to be made for public interest.

The article is an interesting read and available here on the BBC news website. It will also be interesting to see whether Mosley appeals again and what implication this has on the current injunction news, i.e. supposedly revealing them on Twitter.

Emile Zola - J'Accuse!!!

We were thrown metaphorically back into lectures this week and our subject was Emile Zola and more specifically the Dreyfus affair which lead to Zola's famous piece, J'Accuse. The piece itself is one of the most important pieces of journalism that we have looked at so far, but to understand it, you have to look at the context of the time and the events surrounding it.

J'Accuse was written after a war between the once mighty French army (in Napoleonic times at least) and the Prussian Army combined with the Germanic states. The French lost. Embarrassing right? Well they certainly thought so. They thought it was so bad, that they needed to blame a random Jewish officer, and sentence him to a lifetime on Devil's Island with no human contact and barely enough food to survive. Let's hope the justice system in France has moved on a little since then. If it has it will be somewhat down to the actions of Emile Zola as he wrote and published the influential J'Accuse; investigative journalism at its best. The point behind J'Accuse was that many people knew that Dreyfus was innocent, and in fact knew that another man Esterhazy was the true culprit and traitor, but those in the highest seats of power chose to do nothing. In J'Accuse, Zola accuses outright those whom he believes through his investigative journalism have the hand of blame upon them for the imprisonment of Dreyfus, fully understanding that by doing so he is breaching the country's libel laws, defaming people left, right and centre. As is standard amongst controversial historical figures, Zola had to run away to London to escape persecution but the upshot of his most famous work is that Dreyfus was eventually pardoned. Yes, pardoned. Even with the force of the truth behind him, exposed by Zola, Dreyfus had to accept a pardon, almost like saying "I did it but you're letting me go because you're nice".

The political climate at the time of the Dreyfus affair was not the best, the war against the Prussian forces still fresh in the memory, France tried to create an Empire themselves to establish a sense of pride in the country. The country was still seen as militaristic so the Army was seen as a symbol of French identity. So whilst France wanted revenge against Germany/Prussia, they knew they couldn't defeat them so this is where Dreyfus comes in. The actual events leading up to Dreyfus being accused are easy enough to understand. Dreyfus was a captain in the French army around the time some secret documents were found in a bin inside the German Embassy. "How did they get there?" I don't hear you ask; well as I said before it turns out Esterhazy was the real culprit passing secrets, but there was a lot of anti-Semitism at the time in France, so Jewish Dreyfus was framed and court-martialed and so on (see above).

I think for the purposes of this blog it may also be interesting to look at the Paris Commune, an organisation set up by the workers whilst the rich landlords were hiding from the Prussian invaders, somewhere in France. The Commune was set up in March 18, 1871 and lasted a very short time until May 28th of that same year. It is often hailed as the first assumption of power by the working class during the industrial revolution; Karl Marx called it "the dictatorship of the proletariat." The movement was not just Marxist or Anarchic, it also had a feminist agenda, setting up nurseries, abolishing night working and establishing the right of workers to take over businesses; It also separated the Church and the State. Eventually though, the rich returned with armies and the Commune was ruthlessly destroyed, 20 to 30,000 are thought to have been executed, concentrating on the working class areas of Paris. It was a short lived movement, but had great impact on the politics of France and the wider world.

Back to J'Accuse. Whilst Zola's article never got Dreyfus acquitted, it did cause some people to think about the government and its corruption, in fact it took an entirely new government to even pardon Dreyfus, such was the level of corruption. Dreyfus was brought back from Devil's Island a broken man and though he went on to fight in World War 1, the final irony came when his granddaughter dies during World War 2 in Auschwitz death camp.

Well that was the last blog of lectures of my first year studying Journalism. Hope you've enjoyed reading my blog, I'm sure I'll keep it updated over the summer.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

Elections and stuff and a bit of AV

Yesterday, purely because I would have been lost in a place I didn't know without him, I went canvassing with my housemate Ross. Ross is a conservative and in fact, is an active member of the party (or youth party at any rate). This has always been fun for me and the rest of my housemates, not because I have strong opposing political views, but because politics makes Ross quite angry at times which can be pretty funny. So with a clipboard in hand I went around one of the local council estates, helping to canvas students in the area with pretty mixed results.

It didn't start well with the majority of people not actually being in when we came to annoy them with leaflets, (it was a lovely day after all), but even the people that Ross did try to canvass/convince seemed quite apathetic. The general consensus seemed to be, "I'm not here for long, local politics doesn't really have much effect on me." And that's fair enough really. People complain about voter apathy and in particular the apathy of student voters but when it comes to students at university, the time they spend at university only adds up to about a year and half there and a year and a half at home. Hardly likely to be too bothered about the local politics when it's really such a short time of your life, we don't even have to pay council tax for some reason so what impact do the council have on students? And then people wonder why we (in general) aren't voting. The best but possibly worst reactions we received were a door to the face by someone who turned out not to be a student and a long conversation with a Liberal Democrat supporter who Ross tells me they have to try and speak to because the support isn't so strong for them at the moment.

I really hope that a lot of students turn out on Thursday for the local elections but more importantly really is the election on the alternative vote (AV). Now I've got my own opinions on AV and since your voting preference should be kept private that's what I intend to do. I hope though to explain to you what AV is and also whether it is right for us at this time to change to a system which is only half heartedly backed by the Liberal Democrats who admit it is a miserable compromise and generally, aside from Ed Miliband and a few of his best friends in the Labour party, most other MPs appear to be against it (looks like I've failed already to keep my opinion out of it). Anyway, what is AV? Well it's a bit complicated really, but as I understand it, AV is much like the current first-past-the-post system, but with numbers as well. You can just put a 1 by your first preference and be done with it, but you can also put a 2nd preference or a 3rd or however many candidates there are in that election. To win under first-past-the-post you need to have received the most votes out of any party, there isn't actually a specific 'post' to pass. This is seen by some as unfair because you can gain a majority with only about 36% of the votes, as Labour did in the 2005 general election whilst 64% of the population didn't vote for Labour and presumably didn't want them in power. Under AV you need 50% of the votes to get into power which at first glance seems much fairer but the chances of someone getting 50% are low and so after the first vote is counted, the 2nd preferences of the people who voted for the losing party are added to the pile. So in an example where there are five parties in an election, the second preferences of the losing parties voters could be as important as peoples first preferences, if not more important. Under this system there will also be an increased chance, (not an absolutely certainty as some MPs have tried to paint it), of ending up with coalition governments. Coalition governments are often weaker because they have to compromise with each other and so they are less powerful.

I hope I've helped explain AV and why it will be one of the most important votes you may ever have. In the interest of fairness, here is a link to some of the No to AV campaign posters which I believe actually hinder a legitimate campaign issue in their ridiculousness. First poster, secondly an article from the New Statesman.

P.S. It's quite ironic that you will have to vote for AV on a first-past-the-post system.