Duchess of Sussex apologises for misleading court, stating she forgot she had authorised PR chief to brief Finding Freedom authors
The Duchess of Sussex has apologised in court for failing to remember authorising a senior aide to brief the authors of her and Harry’s unofficial biography.
Meghan submitted a statement to the court in which she said she could not remember emails between her and her then press secretary, Jason Knauf, about the unauthorised book.
Continue reading...As London’s ‘local’ paper hits troubled times, we examine the profitable past and challenging future for Britain’s provincial press
What job title did George Osborne, the former Conservative chancellor of the exchequer, and the late Labour leader Michael Foot both hold? It is a pub quiz teaser, but one that becomes easier if you add the names of journalists Max Hastings and Paul Dacre to the list.
The answer is that all four of them have at one time edited the Evening Standard, the London local newspaper that has long stood alongside Britain’s major national titles, mainly by virtue of covering a vast capital city and serving a captive audience of commuters.
Continue reading...Social media firm announces deal after long-running battle with national and regional newspapers
France has hailed a victory in its long-running quest for fairer action from tech companies after Facebook reached an agreement with a group of national and regional newspapers to pay for content shared by its users.
Facebook on Thursday announced a licensing agreement with the APIG alliance of French national and regional newspapers, which includes Le Parisien and Ouest-France as well as smaller titles. It said this meant “people on Facebook will be able to continue uploading and sharing news stories freely amongst their communities, whilst also ensuring that the copyright of our publishing partners is protected”.
Continue reading...Our security correspondent speaks to a predecessor about an era of spooks, leaks and open hostility from MI5
It is time for morning coffee and Richard Norton-Taylor and I are discussing secrecy, deception and brown envelopes, which comes naturally to the pair of us, as past and present defence and security correspondents of the Guardian.
Norton-Taylor joined the paper in January 1973 (when, incidentally, this writer was not yet two), starting in Brussels and switching to security a few years later. The first part of his career was dominated by a series of landmark official secrecy battles.
Continue reading...An ensemble cast of Guardian reporters and editors reflect on why investigative journalism is so important for a healthy democracy and what it feels like, on a more personal level, to be going up against powerful governments, tax-dodging billionaires, institutional racism, human rights abuses and more
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Maria Ressa, the journalist and founder of the Philippine news organisation Rappler, said she was 'speechless' after learning of her Nobel peace prize win while participating in a panel discussion on journalism in south-east Asia.
Ressa could be seen answering a call from the Norwegian Nobel committee informing her of her win on the event's live video feed. Reacting with visible shock, she briefly left the panel to continue the call.
'It's a recognition of how we're going to win the battle for truth,' she said, after returning to the discussion. 'We hold the line.'
Filipina and Russian given 2021 award as organisers warn of threat to independent media worldwide
Campaigning journalists from the Philippines and Russia have won the 2021 Nobel peace prize as the Norwegian committee recognised the vital importance of an independent media to democracy and warned it was increasingly under assault.
Maria Ressa, the chief executive and cofounder of Rappler, and Dmitry Muratov, the editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, were named as this year’s laureates by Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel committee.
Continue reading...Melanie Chisholm, Boyzone’s Shane Lynch and S Club 7’s Hannah Spearritt latest to allege voicemail interception
A group of 1990s pop stars are among the latest individuals to launch phone-hacking cases against Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, as the scandal that has dogged the company for more than 15 years continues to rumble on at the high court.
Melanie Chisholm from the Spice Girls, Shane Lynch from Boyzone, Hannah Spearritt from S Club 7, and Steps’s Ian Watkins and Lee Latchford-Evans have recently filed claims against the company.
Continue reading...Lawsuit alleges Mary Trump and NYT ‘were motivated by personal vendetta’ against him and a desire to push political agenda
Former US president Donald Trump has sued his estranged niece and The New York Times over a 2018 story about his family’s wealth and tax practices that was partly based on confidential documents she provided to the newspaper’s reporters.
Trump’s lawsuit, filed in state court in New York on Tuesday, accuses Mary Trump of breaching a settlement agreement by disclosing tax records she received in a dispute over family patriarch Fred Trump’s estate.
Continue reading...The career of the Observer’s former China correspondent who died last week, was marked by a willingness to review his convictions
Jonathan Mirsky, the Observer’s former China correspondent who has died aged 88, was acutely aware of the mounting danger from the bullets criss-crossing Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989 as units of the People’s Liberation Army were sent in to break up the protests. He was aware too that he desperately needed to get his copy to London.
Writing about the experience 30 years later, Mirsky admitted that few at first had any sense of the scale of the violence that was being unleashed either on the students in the square. All that, however, was to change quickly.
Continue reading...Since its creation in late 1988, the Guardian’s Saturday supplement has been lauded for front covers and features that have caught the eye and sparked joy or sometimes controversy. As its final edition is published, some of the team who worked on it explain how they brought the magazine to life
In 1988, Guardian editor Peter Preston was feeling jealous. The recently launched Independent had a new supplement on Saturday. Edited by the late Alexander Chancellor, it was shot artfully in black and white, and was receiving praise for its inventive use of photography. Meanwhile, the Guardian had barely any feature writers; interviews usually ended up buried in the middle of the paper.
“Saturday had traditionally been the weakest day of the week in terms of circulation,” says former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger who was, at the time, the parliamentary sketch writer. “The Guardian had experimented with some not very successful newsprint sections – one called Friday had flopped. The Independent had broken the mould with their magazine and it had given them a massive boost in circulation. Something had to be done.”
Continue reading...Head of International Federation of Journalists says ‘future is black’ for 1,300 journalists still in country
Journalism in Afghanistan is in danger of disappearing, according to the head of the International Federation of Journalists, who said that reporters trying to continue working under the Taliban have been subjected to beatings and imprisonment.
“The Taliban don’t want to make too many waves right now, but they will want to take control of everything, including the foreign press in Afghanistan,” Anthony Bellanger, the IFJ secretary general, told the Guardian. “And as often happens in such situations, foreign journalists will be considered agents of foreign governments.
Continue reading...The 91-year-old tabloid columnist, the star of a new Showtime documentary, on Murdoch, Trump – and why New York is the capital of the world
Cindy Adams, the long-serving gossip queen of the New York Post, was battling Hurricane Ida in her Manhattan apartment. Her terriers were disturbed, and she was not sleeping. “A glass-enclosed penthouse is not good,” she said. “The pounding of the rain. And not just rain, the thunder. I was up all night.”
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Continue reading...Will an oppressive new law stifle independent media outlets – or lead to a weakening of the president’s authoritarian regime?
Usually the bad news is dumped late on Friday when most Muscovites are heading out for the evening: a new list of names of journalists and outlets declared “foreign agents”, a label that for some Russians evokes such Soviet-era terms as “enemy of the people” and has sent a chill through newsrooms under threat.
“We are being told that we are the enemy,” said Tikhon Dzyadko, the editor of Dozhd, Russia’s main independent television station and a recent addition to the list. “And I am not an enemy and I am not an agent. It’s a spit in the face.”
Continue reading...US tech firm fined for not complying with order to come up with proposals on compensating publishers
Google is appealing against a €500m (£430m) fine imposed by France’s antitrust watchdog after a dispute with local media about paying for news content.
The financial penalty came amid increasing international pressure on online platforms such as Google and Facebook to share more of the revenue they make from using media outlets’ content.
Continue reading...More than a dozen independent media sign open letter calling for halt to ‘foreign agent’ designations
Russia’s leading independent media have appealed to Vladimir Putin and other top government officials to halt a crackdown on journalists under which some of the countries’ top outlets have been declared foreign agents or banned outright over the last year.
More than a dozen media, including Meduza, TV Rain and Novaya Gazeta have signed an open letter to the government calling on it to remove individual journalists and their outlets from its blacklists and repeal laws on “foreign agents” and “undesirable organisations” altogether.
Continue reading...Complaints unit backs makers of Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty, except over section on Tory ‘sleaze’ stories
Rupert Murdoch has largely lost a year-long dispute with the BBC after he objected to a documentary series that “implied he posed a threat to liberal democracy”.
Murdoch’s News UK business complained that a BBC Two documentary unfairly suggested the Australian-born media mogul “exercised malign political influence” through his ownership of news outlets. It said the BBC programme was biased and failed to give enough weight to more positive appraisals of Murdoch’s career.
Continue reading...Broadcaster says relations with China and Russia are fraught as its correspondent Sarah Rainsford is forced out of Moscow
BBC news executives vowed on Saturday night to continue to report from Russia and China despite growing fears that both countries are becoming increasingly difficult to cover.
After a surprise Russian move last week that will force correspondent Sarah Rainsford permanently out of Moscow at the end of the month, a senior figure in BBC news said that Russia’s decision not to renew her visa marks a new low in relations. “Efforts are being made to keep communications open but the feeling is that Sarah is sadly right when she says she doesn’t see Russia changing its mind,” he said.
Continue reading...Analysis: legislation is likely to target US-owned broadcaster as press freedom continues to deteriorate
In 2015, the year that the populist Law and Justice party (PiS) came to power in Poland, the country ranked 18th – its highest ever position – out of 164 countries on Reporters without Borders’ (RSF) annual World Press Freedom Index.
By this year it had fallen to its lowest ever position, 64th, continuing an annual slide that has left it just below Malawi and Armenia, in 62nd and 63rd, and just above Bhutan and Ivory Coast, with a classification from RSF of “problematic”.
Continue reading...U-turn over those who worked for British media follows outcry from newspapers and broadcasters
The foreign secretary has agreed to consider allowing Afghan journalists who worked for the British to flee to the UK if their lives are endangered by the resurgence of the Taliban, after an outcry from a coalition of British newspapers and broadcasters.
Dominic Raab signalled the policy U-turn on Friday, saying he recognised the bravery of the Afghan journalists. A scheme that was set up to offer a safe haven to Afghans who worked with the British will be expanded to include those who worked as journalists, it was reported.
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