When Saddam Hussein hanged Farzad Bazoft on trumped-up spying charges, I was virtually accused of his murder by a rival paper, which said I was "culpably foolish" to send an Iranian to Iraq. In fact, he had been invited there by the Iraqi government, as he had been six times before ? and I didn't even know he had gone. Even so, a sense of guilt remains after 19 years, and I can imagine the tormented self-analysis among Farrell's editors in New York after his Afghan interpreter ( Read more... )
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The rival bids were comparable financially. The difference was that in one, The Observer would remain a separate title, but in the other it would have been merged (submerged, in the view of The Observer's journalists) into the Independent on Sunday, which had been launched three years before.

I could understand the journalists's argument, especially since a merger was bound to result in job losses, but I could also see that to join the two compatible papers would remove ( Read more... )
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Last year, when I set out my blueprint to shift the creative industries from the margins to the mainstream of economic and political thinking, the global economy was in very different shape. "Creative Britain" celebrated our international success in businesses like film, video games, advertising and fashion, and mapped out a vision where all our major cities would be driven by creativity, with job opportunities on offer in every region.

Of course, a lot has ( Read more... )
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Take the Barack Obama fundraiser to be held on 22 April at the Notting Hill home of Elisabeth and her husband Matthew Freud, an event that The New York Times believes "offers possible clues to Hillary's Murdoch status".

Yes, but what can it all really mean? Does it imply that Rupert, who hosted Hillary fundraisers himself last year, has turned completely against her? Could it simply be, as Matthew posited last week, that Lis admires the Senator from Illinois? Does she closely identify with ( Read more... )
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An Irish billionaire named Denis O'Brien is attempting to wrest control of Independent News and Media, which owns this newspaper and The Independent on Sunday. He says he intends to flog them off because they are loss-making. He has said some very rude things about Sir Anthony O'Reilly, and his management of Independent News and Media.

Let me declare an interest as one of the three people who helped start The Independent in 1986. One of the ironies of the present situation is that the paper ( Read more... )
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I'll bet the larger part of the audience for all three won't have been alive when the original '60s action took place. (Viewers who were, of course, are forever looking for anachronisms, checking the release date of the songs on the music tracks, or the car models.) So why are we quite so keen to re-work and re-examine the world that made us? Partly because it's dying – all the structures and people from the post-war popular culture revolution. Watch old comedy from 'Yes Minister' to 'Dad's ( Read more... )
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Somehow this eagerness to call a spade a large blunt instrument used for digging earth turns even more problematic in the territory occupied by that innocuous adjective "alleged". Several newspapers last week, for example, tied themselves into extraordinary knots in their coverage of the pre-teenage brothers who appeared at Doncaster Youth Court charged with assaulting two boys aged nine and 11. Naturally enough, the defendants were described as "alleged attackers", as their guilt had not yet ( Read more... )
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Historically, Brits have been militantly against hope and happiness, quick to deride New Age thinking and anything to do with living forever. Remember that post-hippy couple who sold billions of books in America proving that with the right diet and exercise you could last till 200? It didn't translate.

But there have been moments of doubt recently. With liposuction and tooth veneering available on every provincial street corner, the move to life-extension clinics could be only a whisper ( Read more... )
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ITV's executive chairman Michael Grade was suitably contrite – as befits a man who was not at the commercial broadcaster at the time and who had got a "zero tolerance" policy into the public domain before the solids really started flying.

But was the decision to release the Olswang report on Ant and Dec and the British Comedy Awards an hour after the Ofcom announcement evidence of a little too much stage management? It looked like an attempt to get all the bad news out on the same ( Read more... )
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It's interesting watching kids figure this out. They've mostly lost a set of rhetorical certainties, whether it's Jesus's injunctions or Marx's, because their parents have given them up. Instead they've got a rag-tag of hippie-crossed-with-Thatcher, some vaguely New Age sentiments they hear from their teachers and a new set of priorities.

Can the charitable impulse arise naturally in the truly good-hearted or does it have to be stimulated? They've tried everything recently. Charities are ( Read more... )
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In advertising, the glass is not only half full, but almost always raised in a cheeky “Salut”. It is as if working in the “good news business” has rendered us incapable of accepting bad news. In fact this obdurate optimism is, I think, one of our most endearing traits.

However, there’s no escaping the fact that many staffers, especially in the larger networks, have been “walked Spanish down the hall” as they say in Joshua Ferris’s funny and moving |book Then We Came to the End. Whether this is due to individual agency misfortune or UK recession is a moot point. Suffice it to say that too many good people are looking forward to longer summer hols than they originally anticipated.

One consequence of recession is the market model known as the “hourglass”, whereby the value and luxury sectors continue to flourish, squeezing the living margins out of the mid-market brands. Early indications are that we’ll be buying more food from Aldi and Lidl and less from Marks & Spencer. “But whither your Guccis?” I hear you cry. (Sounds like a Borgia curse.)

In my forthcoming book |Luxury Branding: Is it Beau Luxe or What? I examine the phenomenon known as the inverse stupid/rich ratio. This stunning riposte to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs posits that the cleverer and more successful you become, the more crass and moronic the luxury brand advertising targeted at you. Your Oxbridge degree and Harvard MBA appear to have equipped you to decode straplines like “The art of time” or “The essence of now”. (Or indeed, “The now of essence”.) If you’ve used your wits and hard work to claw your way up the |corporate ladder, you may be |confronted with propositions as subtle and complex as:

Do you want to be mistaken for George Clooney? Then buy our vermouth/coffee/watch.

Do you wish to commit acts of unimaginable depravity with a supermodel? Then buy our cologne/clothes/cognac.

I’m not saying that intellect, taste and disposable income are directly, inextricably linked. Anyone who saw the Hello! spread on Gary Neville’s lovely home can testify to exceptions. Similarly, I recall a journalist closing her intimate interview in the Ike and Tina Turner Memphis mansion with the line, “I never realised you could spend a million bucks in K-Mart”.

But, for the love of God, surely there’s something wrong when you contrast the effort and |invention that goes into selling a couple of quid worth of Pot |Noodle with the paucity of |imagination behind advertising for a two-grand handbag.

“True craftsmanship needs no salesman”, coo the luxury brands. “The less you say the more desirable you become”, trill the experts. That may be true if you want to be a dumb blonde all your life, but people who can read without moving their lips have come to expect more. I don’t mean jokes or expensive TV ads, but I, for one, would like to buy into an idea when I fork out for my hand-tooled leather love-|object. Paying Nicole Kidman, fragrant though she may be, to wear your perfume is not an idea.

According to the Millward Brown consultancy, Hollywood stars pitched up as pitchmen and women in 14 per cent of all advertising last year. The ratio in the luxury sector is higher. A quarter of all ads in India are celebrity-led. The figures reach nearly half in Taiwan. Without any disparagement of the advertising talent in those respective countries this is very basic, class-one-in-the-infants stuff. The advertising scenario so precisely and painfully portrayed by Bill Murray in Lost in Translation is now becoming a worldwide reality. Where is irony? Where is wit? Where are my good friends argument and persuasion? Did Bill Bernbach die in vain?

It is no wonder the luxury brands are losing billions to knock-off copies when they offer nothing to the consumer beyond the visual. If it looks like a Prada bag, it’s as good as a Prada bag. So much of traditional “luxe” advertising doesn’t give the consumer any other set of criteria with which to make a differentiated choice. The world’s magazines are full of page after page of the same pouting, po-faced models posing and smug celebs co-branding. Oh, and lifeless product shots with gnomic straplines hinting at a state of fulfilment somewhere “beyond the ultimate”.

Some caveats: there are brands, such as Louis Vuitton, that do this stuff so well it defies criticism. There are brands, such as Jaguar, who cleverly adopt the language of luxe to challenge the German hegemony in their market. There are brands, such as Patek Philippe, who actually have an idea. Also I concede that sometimes international brands have to move at the speed of their most nascent markets. I grant that women “read” ads differently from men, that the semiotics are often more important than the logic. I confess to being a “leeeteral Eeenglishman”, always looking for the hook when sometimes it is just enough to have a look. I remember losing a luxury pitch to a continental agency whose big idea was? “Blue”.

But despite the recession-|induced hourglass market, the luxury-brand sector is due a |correction. Consumers, even the well-off and wedged-up ones, will be making more discerning choices. They will look for more information and richer, fuller engagement to support those choices. The brands that thrive will be the ones that walk the talk not just the catwalk.

Gerry Moira is the chairman and director of creativity at Euro RSCG London

Take coroners’ courts, for |example. The Ministry of Defence has been embarrassed time and again by comments, notably from the Oxford coroner, about failures of military equipment causing, or at least contributing to, the death of troops in Iraq. The MoD would like coroners silenced. The Government tried to introduce a gagging clause into the Coroners Bill. When that was removed after strenuous lobbying by press groups, it reappeared in a different form in the Counter-Terrorism Bill.

This includes powers for the Ministry of Justice to remove juries from inquests and provide a “specially appointed coroner” in the so-called interests of national security. The effect would be felt mainly at military inquests at RAF Brize Norton, in Oxfordshire. The Bill will be debated in the Lords after the recess.

Bob Satchwell, executive director of the Society of Editors, says: “An inquest is an important public occasion. The power to ban reporters from inquests could be used in all sorts of cases to halt the reporting of embarrassing stories for the Government or the armed forces.”

Michael Smith, defence correspondent of The Sunday Times, points out that “there are already procedures in place to hold hearings in camera. Appointing someone who will be seen as a government stooge is no way of ensuring that the justice system is free and fair” – or, indeed, open.

If this clause goes through unchecked, it will make nonsense of Gordon Brown’s promise last year that his government would extend liberty in Britain by “respecting freedoms for our press, the removal of barriers to investigative journalism, respecting the public right to know”, and providing “new rights to access public information”.

In order to honour that commitment, the Prime Minister might also take a look at our libel laws, which have just been attacked by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. These laws, says the UNCHR |report, have “served to discourage critical media reporting on matters of serious public interest”. It refers to “libel tourism” – a phenomenon highlighted in this paper’s news pages last week – in which celebrities, from Britney Spears to Boris Berezovsky, can successfully use British courts to sue American publications. Britain is now seen as a soft touch in the way that France used to be.

This process is exacerbated by conditional fee agreements (CFAs, or “no win, no fee”). These were designed to help poor people bring libel actions, but the effect has been the opposite: to encourage the rich to sue without financial risk. The whole process threatens the existence of weaker papers and regionals, who can’t afford to defend cases in court and are thus disinclined to expose any wrongdoing in their pages.

The UNCHR report also condemns the use of the Official Secrets Act “to frustrate former employees of the Crown from bringing into the public domain issues of genuine public interest”, and notes that “disclosures of information are penalised even where they are not harmful to national security”.

On top of all this is the “Eady effect”, following Justice Eady’s judgment in the Max Mosley case against the News of the World, which seemed to imply that reporting anyone’s sex life would be a breach of privacy. The case was such a bizarre one-off that it was hard to tell what precedents it would set. But along with other current privacy cases – the details of which can’t even be mentioned – we do seem to be entering an uncertain legal twilight area where every step is hazardous and nobody can locate the switch.

Donald Trelford was editor of The Observer, 1975-93, and is Emeritus Professor of Journalism Studies at Sheffield University

Hacks win gold medals in jealousy

The Olympic Games are now a glittering television spectacular – and boy, how some newspapers hate that. Rather than responding in the way they know best, through in-depth analysis, they have taken every opportunity to mock the TV presenters and complain about the number of BBC staff in Beijing. From what I saw, 437 members of staff was the least the corporation needed to put on such informative, entertaining, technically brilliant and swiftly reactive shows.

There was another aspect of the Beijing Games that some papers didn’t know how to deal with: it was a huge success story for Britain. They don’t do national success. One had only to look at the way the sports pages reacted to England’s tame draw at football with the Czech Republic to see that putting the boot in is the default mode of our tabloid press.

Gabby Logan and Sue Barker have rightly been singled out for praise, but not by everyone. The Sunday Times said that, to people under 35, Ms Barker “looks and sounds like their aunt living in Spain”. Carole Cadwalladr in The Observer said Logan wasn’t fit to present because she’d once “appeared in a photospread in GQ wearing a pair of red knickers and a teeny tiny vest”. Come now, hacks, your jealousy is showing.

Every little helps ‘The Guardian’

I hear that Mr Justice Eady, sometimes portrayed as a bogeyman by the press because of his privacy verdicts, has made some robust rulings in favour of The Guardian in its dispute with Tesco. The newspaper admitted it was wrong to accuse Tesco of using complex overseas tax avoidance schemes, apologised and made an “offer of amends”, a new defence designed to speed up libel actions. Tesco neither accepted nor rejected this offer and sued instead for malicious falsehood against the paper and its editor, Alan Rusbridger.

Now, Eady has given Tesco until mid-September to accept or reject The Guardian’s offer. The board meets on 8 September to decide, though the chief executive, Terry Leahy, apparently thinks it’s a matter for him. With possible costs of £4m involved, his board may not agree. Every little helps.

Meanwhile, Eady has halted the malicious falsehood actions on the grounds that the libel case would be enough to restore the company’s reputation and that the courts should not be used for revenge or PR purposes. If Tesco accepts The Guardian’s offer, that’s the end of the case, leaving damages to be assessed. If they decline and go for malicious falsehood, the burden of proof falls on Tesco. It is hard to see how it could prove that an editor deliberately published false information, knowing it was false: why would he? And would the company want a case that revealed its commercial secrets, especially when Private Eye has made fresh allegations about its overseas tax arrangements that Tesco has not challenged?

I was rather harsh on Rusbridger when I last wrote on this subject. I still stand by the principle that editors should carry the can and not blame staff for errors. In the case of a charge of malicious falsehood, however, I can see that an editor can only defend himself by explaining how much, or how little, he knew about the offending story.