Tag Archives: Michael Howard

Will Lewis’ defence of Telegraph expenses coverage

A special programme from BBC Radio 4 aired yesterday: ‘Moats, Mortgages and Mayhem’ which looked at media coverage of the whole scandal.

The editor of the Daily Telegraph, Will Lewis defended coverage of MPs’ expenses, rubbishing suggestions that his paper had irreparably damaged Parliament.

“Will Lewis told the BBC his paper’s reports about MPs’ claims would make Parliament more ‘open’ and allow a ‘new generation’ of people to be elected,” reported the BBC.

(….) “former Tory leader Michael Howard said some of the paper’s coverage had been “inaccurate and unfair.”

You can listen to Lewis’s comments here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8123362.stm

Or the programme, presented by Nick Robinson and produced by Martin Rosenbaum, in full here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lh47j

Nick Robinson’s own comments are also very insightful: his frustrations about the lack of time to ‘ponder’ on the revelations, and the questions raised about presenting accusations fairly.

Hat tip: Journalism student and blogger, Nigel Barlow. On his blog he says: that he has a couple of problems with the Telegraph’s reportage: “Firstly that there was no differentiation between claims that were accepted or rejected. Secondly that the paper has been selective in the MPs that it has targeted.”

The BBC is in ‘a vortex of its own making’ Paxman tells awards audience

BBC Newsnight star presenter Jeremy Paxman is never known to mince his words and he certainly didn’t when receiving the Annual Media Society Award last Thursday evening in London. The ‘Great Inquisitor’ attacked the BBC, saying that it was ‘in a vortex of its own making’.

He criticised cuts on his own programme – “people at the top are no longer interested in what we do or how we do it” – to the audience that included Helen Boaden, BBC director of news, Stephen Mitchell, her deputy, and no less that six former or present editors of Newsnight.

Paxman was stinging in his criticism of the cuts in the media outside the BBC as well, saying it was ‘now cheaper to print opinion that the truth’; and that some major American papers no longer had a full-time correspondent or even a stringer in London. He described the current situation as ‘depressing’.

Paxman, who has now presented Newsnight for 20 years, was the subject of paeans of public praise from his bosses past – including Robin Walsh, who gave him his first reporter’s job in BBC Northern Ireland 35 years ago – and who had the audience reeling, with his tales of ‘Paxo’ interviewing the Appointments Board – and Peter Barron, the last Newsnight editor who had forced Paxman into the digital 21st century and to do a (short-lived) weather forecast on the programme.

The tributes were all warm, especially from his most high profile victim former Home Secretary, Michael Howard, of whom Paxman famously asked the same question 12 times in 1997. Time had healed the rift.

It was not all downbeat. Paxman said that if he had his time again he would still join ‘our trade,’ and become a journalist, as he had at 23. “I’ve spent my life talking to amusing people. It is an incredible privilege to work with thoughtful, clever, funny people,” he said, saluting the teams who had made it all possible. “There are no solos in television – everything is collaborative. Even the gargantuan egos!”

For this British giant, the basic premises of journalism remain, for what is still the same job. To be good, one needs to be ‘curious’ and have ‘instinct’ and in ‘Paxo’s’ case, plenty of Chutzpah.

thisismoney.co.uk: Michael Howard demands FSA investigation of Peston reports

Michael Howard has written to the Financial Services Authority (FSA) asking for an investigation into reports by BBC business editor Robert Peston that included details of confidential talks between Alistair Darling and Bank of England governor Mervyn King.