I spent a little time this evening watching the BBC News channel’s coverage of the death of Michael Jackson.  As part of it they went over to Lizo Mzimba, their showbiz correspondent, who is currently at the Glastonbury Festival (I feel a little sorry for him, he’ll be up all night covering this and then have to do Glastonbury in the morning!).  He spoke to a few people about it. The first was the keyboard player of one of the bands playing this year, and another two who he introduced as “music fans at the Glastonbury Festival” who were hoping to see Michael in London in the next few months.  He asked these two how they heared about the news.  First of all they said they heared through their mobiles, Facebook, and general word of mouth. And then one of them said “we caught on to it first over at the press tent”. Read more…

I read an interesting blog post earlier this week – “To read or not to read?” – written by an MA broadcast journalism student.  In it he talks about the ethics surrounding reading other people’s text messages without their consent.  He uses this example to illustrate a point regarding investigative journalism as a whole.  While we agree on the main point in question, I’m not sure I agreed with everything he says.  I’d recommend you go and have a look at his post, and my comments at the end, as I’m not going to repeat them here.

Then, this weekend, I spotted a copy of The Daily Telegraph on the train open on an article titled “The Mandy and Osborne Show had us in stitches”, so I had a look.  The article I had initially seen was, in fact, not very interesting at all (some comments by an actress about The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year awards), but the item above it was.  The section I was reading was the comment section, and the piece above related to the current economic climate.  The article is clearly comment – it’s not hard fact, it’s one writer’s opinion on the way Gordon Brown has handled the slow down in the economy.  As good comment should be it’s a very biased article. Read more…