Harry’s Place

Stephen Fry:
I was asked by the BBC to make this speech, if speech is the word. They hoped I suspect, but in no way insisted, that I would fight their corner against cuts, against the slicing of the licence fee: at the very least they expected I might make a case for the public service […]

Dear Reader,
I will get to the “but” presently. Indulge me for a few paragraphs…
The growing popularity of blogging and so-called “citizen journalism” was once seen as a challenge to the traditional media. As news sources, blogs could sometimes dramatically scoop print and broadcast media, but I don’t think any serious media commentator honestly ever thought […]

With George Galloway off in Tehran celebrating the first anniversary of one of his many sources of income, I hope it’s not impolite to remind him that he (as an employee of the Iranian government-funded Press TV) is part of the same communications network that produced the following.
The first is the latest in a series […]

Guest post by davem
There’s a fascinating clip at MEMRI which is a translation of an Al Jazeera report regarding a report by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedoms.
The USCIRF report uncovers educational material promoting religious intolerance and even violence, which is part of the curriculum of the Islamic Saudi Academy in Virginia.
Notice in […]

Thank Davros that Russell T Davies is leaving Dr Who. He should be congratulated for reviving a national treasure, but when I see his name at the start of a programme as writer, I inwardly groan.
He inserts his politics into the show with all the subtlety of a one kilometer asteroid hitting a major […]

If you have a DVD player, get “Persepolis.”

I liked this paragraph from The Washington Post’s obituary of writer Eliot Asinof, who wrote the book “Eight Men Out” about the fixing by gamblers of the 1919 baseball World Series, and who co-wrote the excellent 1988 movie of the same name with director John Sayles:
[Asinof] ran into trouble while working on a Western movie. […]

Martin Bright’s Dispatches documentary, The Court of Ken, was the subject of a number of complaints to OFCOM, none of them brought by Ken Livingstone himself.
They have all been dismissed by the regulator, which took the view that:
“Investigative journalism plays an essential role in public service broadcasting and is clearly in the public interest.
“Ofcom considers […]

Not having given the issue any thought beyond being prepared to recite a victim narrative, Aftab Hussein, a mental health worker at a Birmingham Mosque, went on BBC News 24 earlier today to explain why young Muslims were experiencing an above-normal sense of paranoia and other mental health stresses (as revealed in a report today by Birmingham University, which, […]

Who is “the convicted Iraqi-British fraudster Nadhmi Auchi”?
To be frank, I don’t know. However, this what he is up to, according to Martin Bright:
More worrying was the news that the Guardian/Observer has been forced to pull down six articles about Nadhmi Auchi, the Iraqi businessman convicted of fraud in France in 2003. [Mr Auchi’s lawyers, […]