Comments by Huw Merriman come day after No 10 forced to deny government pursuing agenda against BBC
A minister has lashed out at a satirical Radio 4 show as being “completely biased” in the latest allegation from the Conservatives about BBC impartiality.
Huw Merriman, a transport minister, also referenced the BBC’s coverage of universal credit when challenged to give examples of supposed bias a day after a row was sparked by remarks by the culture secretary.
Continue reading...James wrote A Life Inside column while serving sentence for murder and later edited Inside Time newspaper
Erwin James, the writer of an influential Guardian column about life in prison who would go on to be a leading voice on criminal justice, has died.
James, real name Erwin James Monahan, was convicted of murder in 1984 and served 20 years in prison.
Continue reading...Entertainment giant has dabbled with live events in bid to shore up its dominant position as world’s largest streaming platform
Netflix has unveiled a $5bn push into live television after striking a decade-long deal with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) to broadcast the hit wrestling show Raw.
The entertainment giant, which led the on-demand streaming revolution, has dabbled with live events in recent years in a bid to shore up its dominant position as the world’s largest streaming platform.
Continue reading...Move comes as pressure mounts on broadcaster’s management with union members passing vote of no confidence in managing director David Anderson
The ABC has claimed it did not sack the journalist Antoinette Lattouf from her casual radio role, paving the way to attempt to have her termination case thrown out.
It comes as pressure mounts on the broadcaster’s management, with union members passing a vote of no confidence in the managing director, David Anderson.
Continue reading...Belgium already takes a cut from Netflix and Disney and new income will support local TV production
Cute cat videos, fried chicken clips and viral dances could soon help to finance Belgian TV, with the Flanders government on the verge of passing laws to force TikTok and YouTube to share revenues with local television producers.
“Politically speaking, it is important in audiovisual and media services that there are obligations on companies to invest in local TV content,” the media minister for the Flemish government, Benjamin Dalle, told the Guardian.
Continue reading...Theft occurred on day the Ouray County Plaindealer published story about alleged sexual assault at party at police chief’s house
Nearly all the copies of a small-town Colorado newspaper were stolen from newspaper racks on the same day the Ouray County Plaindealer published a story about charges being filed over rapes alleged to have occurred at an underage drinking party at the police chief’s house while the chief was asleep, the owner and publisher said Friday.
Mike Wiggins vowed to get to the bottom of it, posting Thursday on X, formerly Twitter: “If you hoped to silence or intimidate us, you failed miserably. We’ll find out who did this. And another press run is imminent.”
Continue reading...Israel is in sixth place after the Committee to Protect Journalists recorded 18 Palestinian journalists in its jails
Israel has joined a notorious band of authoritarian states with a history of imprisoning journalists by detaining Palestinian reporters without trial since the beginning of the latest war in Gaza.
A report by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) released on Thursday said that for the first time Israel figures in its list of “worst jailers of journalists”, putting it on a par with Iran.
Continue reading...Former chief operating officer was lead architect of Facebook’s digital advertising-driven business model
Sheryl Sandberg is to step down from the board of Facebook’s parent company, Meta, nearly two years after quitting her executive role at the business.
Sandberg was the lead architect of Facebook’s digital advertising-driven business model as Meta’s chief operating officer.
Continue reading...Comes as national broadcaster files its response to wrongful dismissal claim brought by presenter
ABC journalists in the broadcaster’s Sydney offices have threatened a walkout unless management addresses concerns over the handling of the termination of radio host Antoinette Lattouf.
On Tuesday morning, the Sydney Morning Herald reported it had seen a chain of leaked WhatsApp messages showing a letter-writing campaign from pro-Israel lobbyists targeting the ABC managing director, David Anderson, and the chair, Ita Buttrose, in the week starting 18 December over Lattouf’s December fill-in job on ABC radio in Sydney.
Continue reading...Reporter Casey Newton takes more than 170,000 subscribers elsewhere over company’s failure to police extremist content
Platformer, a prominent tech newsletter founded by the veteran reporter Casey Newton, is leaving Substack over the company’s failure to police extremist content.
In a post explaining the decision, Newton said his team had identified seven Substack publications “that conveyed explicit support for 1930s German Nazis and called for violence against Jews, among other groups”. He said after weeks of back-and-forth discussions with company leaders about their “laissez-faire approach to content moderation”, he decided to part ways with the platform.
Continue reading...Annapoorani: the Goddess of Food criticised for depiction of deity and member of vegetarian caste cooking and eating meat
Netflix is embroiled in a backlash in India from rightwing Hindu groups over a film accused of offending religious sentiments for its depiction of a deity and a member of a traditionally vegetarian caste cooking and eating meat.
Annapoorani: the Goddess of Food, a film made in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, tells the story of a young woman of the privileged Brahmin caste, whose father cooks food in a Hindu temple, and her aspirations to become one of India’s best chefs.
Continue reading...Students’ union calls for sanctions over posts on social network that have also contained homophobic abuse
The French Union of Jewish Students has called for sanctions against people who have written antisemitic and homophobic comments about France’s new prime minister, Gabriel Attal, on the social network X.
Attal, 34, who was appointed by the president, Emmanuel Macron, this week, is France’s youngest prime minister and also the first out gay politician in the job.
Continue reading...Business Insider ran reports on Nexi Oxman, wife of billionaire investor who helped oust Harvard head over alleged plagiarism
The billionaire investor Bill Ackman, who helped oust Claudine Gay as Harvard president in a scandal over alleged plagiarism and campus antisemitism, is “completely losing it” over stories in which Business Insider said his wife, the academic Neri Oxman, “plagiarised some passages” in her own dissertation.
So said Adib Sisani, communications director for Axel Springer, the German company that owns Insider, in comments to the news website Puck.
Continue reading...Defence counsel for Najib Razak, jailed over fraud scandal, says Man on the Run is ‘sub judice and contemptuous’
A lawyer acting for the disgraced former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak has called for the takedown of a Netflix documentary about a multibillion-dollar fraud scandal that occurred under his administration.
Muhammad Shafee Abdullah, the lead defence counsel for Najib, who is serving a 12-year sentence on corruption charges, said Man on the Run was “sub judice and contemptuous”, according to local media reports.
Continue reading...Chair says government-approved appointments lag behind broadcaster’s diversity targets
A row has broken out over the lack of ethnic diversity among Channel 4’s new board members, as the broadcaster’s chair criticised the government’s decision to appoint four white directors.
The culture secretary, Lucy Frazer, approved the appointments on Monday of five new non-executive directors to join the Channel 4 board and they were announced by the UK’s media regulator Ofcom.
Continue reading...Billionaire vows to tackle ‘problems with how our media operates’ after Neri Oxman accused of plagiarism in PhD thesis
After the resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay, amid accusations of plagiarism, some might have expected Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager, to step back from what became a rightwing push against academia.
Instead, Ackman, who became embroiled in university politics after students protested against Israel’s actions in Palestine, appears to have expanded his scattergun attack against other perceived liberal institutions, with news organizations and the media now in his sights.
Continue reading...A 5,000-word opinion piece has been branded as ‘inappropriate’ and ‘invasive’ for suggesting the singer was sending coded queer messages in her music
The New York Times is under fire for publishing a piece speculating on Taylor Swift’s sexuality.
In a 5,000-word opinion piece titled Look What We Made Taylor Swift Do, editor Anna Marks listed references to the LGBTQ+ community overt or perceived in Swift’s music and theorized that the singer was sending coded messages that she was secretly a member of the community.
Continue reading...Exclusive: As many as 200 roles could go as firm seeks to accelerate digital streaming strategy and limit cuts to content budget
Channel 4 is drawing up plans to cut potentially as many as 200 jobs in its biggest round of layoffs in more than 15 years, as it seeks to make savings to weather the worst TV advertising downturn since 2008.
The broadcaster, which has undergone a rapid expansion in recent years with staff numbers swelling to a record level of more than 1,200, aims to dramatically reduce a wage bill that now stands at more than £108m a year.
Continue reading...Hong Kong media mogul’s team raises concerns over testimony of former democracy activist who was imprisoned in China
The international legal team for the imprisoned media mogul Jimmy Lai, who is on trial for national security offences in Hong Kong, has filed an urgent appeal with the United Nations special rapporteur on torture regarding one of the key prosecution witnesses in Lai’s trial.
Lai’s lawyers say there is “credible evidence” that Andy Li, a 33-year-old former pro-democracy activist, was tortured while in prison in mainland China before he confessed to allegedly conspiring with Lai to collude with foreign forces. That is one of the two national security law offences that Lai has been charged with, along with a colonial-era sedition offence. Lai has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Continue reading...Samir Sassi joins growing number of journalists imprisoned and prosecuted in country
Tunisian authorities have arrested an Al Jazeera reporter, the network’s bureau chief said on Thursday, as campaigners voiced concern over a growing number of journalists behind bars in the north African country.
“Samir Sassi, a journalist at the Al Jazeera office in Tunisia, was arrested after security forces raided his house,” said Lotfi Hajji, director of the Qatar-based television network’s bureau in Tunis.
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