War Correspondents

At its outbreak, newspapers in the Allied and neutral democracies hoped to present vivid descriptions of the First World War. They were soon frustrated. Censorship obstructed the adventurous style of war reporting to which readers had grown accustomed. Belligerent governments wanted journalists to encourage enlistment and maintain home front morale. Many newspapers in Britain, France and America were content to behave as patriotic propagandists. All were constrained by rules and circumstances. War correspondents downplayed misery and extolled victory. Soldiers found their behavior hard to forgive. War reporting promoted the belief that newspapers could not be trusted to tell the truth

George Orwell Versus Vera Brittain: Obliteration Bombing and the Tolerance in Wartime of Dissent in Weekly Political Publications

In the summer of 1944, George Orwell used his column in Tribune to launch a ferocious assault on arguments advanced by the peace campaigner Vera Brittain in her pamphlet Seed of Chaos, published that year by the Bombing Restriction Committee. By doing so, Orwell raised publicly a topic the wartime coalition sought anxiously to conceal from the public – the deliberate killing of German civilians in RAF bombardment of German cities – and he took advantage of the government's preparedness to tolerate controversy in weekly political publications which it worked carefully to exclude from mass market newspapers and BBC broadcasts. The controversy serves as an excellent example of the way in which weekly political publications were used to burnish Britain's democratic credentials in wartime. It also annoyed Vera Brittain so greatly that she would lie about it after Orwell died

When Yorkshire ruled the world

How a great provincial editor defied his own proprietor to challenge the British prime minister at a time of European crisi

Spinning out of Control

Fascinating papers in the National Archives reveal how a prime minister's press secretary tried to change the course of histor

Representation in Westminster in the 1990s : The ghost of Edmund Burke

Why are 'trustee' notions of representation still invoked in the UK House of Commons in the 1990s? In answering this question this article analyses the premises of Burkean theory and the arguments that these premises are of little relevance in the late twentieth century. Despite these dismissals of trusteeship, Burkean ideas are still articulated in the Commons some 200 years after they were first voiced. The idea of trusteeship can prove extremely useful to justify the actions of representatives when those actions conflict with constituency 'opinion', party policy or the wishes of interest groups. Examples of the occasions when Burkean notions have been invoked in the 1990s are provided

This is Today – A Biography of the Today Programme

It is what millions of people in Britain wake up to every morning: the radio programme that starts their day, and sends them off to the office or to take the children to school infuriated, amused, exasperated, enlightened - but above ail informed. Though you might frown at the blood sport of John Humphreys interrogating a hapless cabinet minister, or wince at the homespun philosophising of 'Thought for the Day', Today could no more be dispensed with than the first cup of coffee. It is listened to in Downing Street, in far-flung British embassies, and by foreign ambassadors to the UK seeking to gauge the national mood. So how have these three hours of radio, from six till nine, come to assume such a central part of British political, cultural - and indeed everyday - life? Now, Tim Luckhurst, himself once a producer of the programme, has written the most authoritative anatomy of the phenomenon that is Today. He reveals how what we nowadays value for its hard news exposes and political interrogations began life as an undistinguished miscellany of light news under the avuncular Jack De Manio. He traces Today's move to the political centre-stage back to the Thatcherite eighties, when radical and ruthless social upheaval found its match in the unabashed truculence of Brian Redhead. He evaluates less-universally-venerated Today traditions like 'Thought for the Day' (accused of cosiness and even homophobia) and 'Person of the Year' (frequently fixed). And he unearths obscure Today landmarks like Sue MacGregor's leather trousers and the self-operated studio behind the Scottish newsagents where Alan Beith can be interviewed at 5.30 in the morning. But above all he considers the power that the Today programme has come to wield in the national agenda, and the consequent huge pressures on the BBC from a political establishment seeking to limit or control its influence. This is Today...therefore shows the alarming extent of New Labour's obsession with the programme, and Alastair Campbell's attempts to spin its output favourably; it discovers, fascinatingly, how Mrs Thatcher came to be so abreast of Today's daily coverage that one morning she rang in to insist on being interviewed; and it paints the unedifying battleground created when the Today programme has to cover a modern General Election. Controversial and trenchant, in the genre of books like Servants of the People

Bias, Bunkum and Capital-itis

The BBC is determined to migrate to the north, yet there is no evidence that the much-discussed London-centircity really exist

King and County: The Kent Messenger and the Abdication of Edward VIII

Tim Luckhurst reports on how a forgotten parcel has revealed the ways in which self-censorship by journalists over the 1936 abdication crisis worked at an influential local newspaper

Television News with Brains

Jeremy Paxman's departure gives us a moment to acknowledge the intelligence of our two best news channels, says an admiring viewe