On Wednesday, 20-year-old David Kernell pleaded not guilty to hacking the e-mail account of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
Yesterday saw the BBC’s economic editor Robert Peston taken to task for his influence on the UK’s economy and his cosy relationship with the government:
The Guardian’s Matthew Weaver is worried that his blog might have too much influence, and the Daily Mash joked that Peston had reached a state of transcendence.
Meanwhile the House of Lords Communications Committee asked a panel of leading political journalists if they thought Peston was setting the reporting agenda.
Another BBC editor whose influence has been much discussed is the corporation’s political editor, Nick Robinson, who last night admitted he had toed the government line too strongly during his reportage of the Iraq War, and admitted that he didn’t ‘do enough’ to seek out dissenting views.
Participating in a debate entitled ‘Political campaigners and reporters: partners in democracy or rats in a sack?’ at City University, Robinson said: “The biggest self criticism I have was I got too close to government in the reporting of the Iraq war.
“I didn’t do enough to go away and say ‘well hold on, what about the other side?’
“It is the one moment in my recent career where I have thought I didn’t push hard enough, I didn’t question enough and I should have been more careful,” he said.
“I don’t think the government did set out to lie about weapons of mass destruction. I do think they systematically and cumulatively misled people. What’s the distinction?
“It was clear to me that Alastair Campbell knew how what he was saying was being reported, knew that that was a long way from the truth and was content for it so to be,” Robinson said.
“They knew it was wrong, they wanted it to be wrong – they haven’t actually lied.”
Politicians ‘actively want to avoid a debate the public wants to have’, he said.
For example, he said, Labour was reluctant to debate the implications of a single European currency.
“[The government] wanted to limit the debate to being the five tests. It wanted to avoid divisions, it simply did not want to enter a political debate,” he said.
The Conservative Party are now doing the ‘exact same thing’, Robinson said.
“They don’t want a debate on whether they will tear up the Lisbon EU treaty, they don’t really want a debate about if they will put taxes up or down, or in what way.
“These are active decisions by politicians to keep you ill-informed, and it is our job as journalists to try to fight against that.”
It isn’t the job of a journalist to ‘pick a constant fight with people in power’, he said.
“I don’t see it as a badge of pride to have endless arguments with politicians, although with Peter Mandelson they usually are.”
French President Nicolas Sarkozy is launching crisis talks today with the aim of saving France’s ailing newspaper industry.
A report from Africa’s Independent Review Commission (IREC), which was set up to investigate last year’s disputed presidential elections in Kenya, has cleared the country’s media of professional malpractice in its coverage of the election results, and blamed the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) and politicians of delaying results at grassroots level.
The commission, which has trashed claims of rigging and alteration of presidential results at the National Tally Centre – the main complaint of the opposition, also dismissed concerns over the media’s role in the post-election violence raised by international observers, including the European Union, as overly reliant on hearsay.
IREC – headed by retired South African Judge Johann Kriegler – recommended that the media should be fed results electronically to increase speed and that a secure line of transmitting results from village polling stations to the headquarters be developed with an access password for all media houses.
“The media was under pressure to relay results, politicians and the electoral commission of Kenya delayed the numbers, the media had no choice but to report what they had, you cannot blame the beast if you have not fed it,” reads the report.
However, the report did find fault with vernacular media stations for fuelling tension after the announcement of the election results and called for a review of employment policies in media houses. “Only professionals should be employed,” it said.
“How can you blame the media when politicians forced their way into the press centre and took over the role of the ECK at a time when there was[sic] information gaps?” asked the 117-page report.
Within the next 15 days another report on the media’s handling of the elections is expected to be presented to President Mwai Kibaki and former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, who was chief mediator in the post-election crisis.
The report is expected to name, shame and recommend crucial steps that politicians, the media and the ECK should take to avoid a repeat of such violence in future.
The Washington Post has launched a new web section that links readers to the best of political coverage, including that of their rivals.
Sunny Hundal looks at Labour blogging. The party hierarchy resists it, he says, but Labour will only revive by giving control to the grassroots, and that means blogging.
Anderson will use a host of social media tools – including Twitter, Flickr and Dopplr – to report on the US presidential election during a 4,000 mile country-wide trip.
Hundreds of online commentators, entrepreneurs, and Palin imitators are trying to fill in the gaps in the online information available on Sarah Palin.
The BBC has responded to claims made in a Guardian article that its coverage of al-Qaeda had been influenced by a Home Office counter-terrorism unit.
“The programme was called ‘al-Qaeda’s Enemy Within’ and explored how the war of ideas within the Jihadi movement is becoming as important as the military frontline,” explains Nicola Meyrick, executive editor of radio current affairs.
“Was it the result of a ‘push’ from RICU? Absolutely not. The truth couldn’t be more different.”
Digg is working with CNN’s citizen journalism site iReport to allow users of the social bookmarking site to pose questions to members of the Democrat and Republican conventions taking place in the US over the next two weeks.
The Digg Dialogg feature, which will be used for the first time at the conventions, lets users submit text or video questions to be put to a particular interviewee. These are then ranked by other Digg users with the top 10 posed to the subject during a live interview.
The first candidate will be Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the US Democrats’ House of Representatives, said Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, in a blog post.
According to a release from CNN, the news organisation broke the one billion barrier for page views on its politics site, which was launched last September; while its blog, the CNN Political Ticker, recorded its highest ever traffic on August 22 with more than 2.7 milion page views – driven by the announcement of presidential candidate Barack Obama’s running mate.