If you run a broadcasting organisation, you hire a journalist who discovers that the government is misleading the public in order to justify a foreign war (but who makes his report in a slightly exaggerated fashion, even though that has no impact on the substance of the accusations), and you back him up in the early [...]

“The fact that an Iraqi has just tried to blow us up proves that Islamist terrorism has absolutely nothing to do with the war in Iraq. Also, we hate Ken Livingstone.” - here.

Last night Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre used the Hugh Cudlipp lecture to the beat the BBC for its stifling political correctness and left-wing bias. (The editors of the Guardian have printed a transcript, presumably to demonstrate their more open and embracing form of liberalism.)
His basic line of argument - that a national, tax-funded media [...]

If you’re in the UK, you’ve doubtless been forwarded an email coupon to receive 40% off wine and champagne at the country’s largest off-license chain, Threshers.
If you’re like most of this site’s contributors, you’ve doubtless headed straight down to the nearest offy, loaded up on all the plonk you can carry, and are currently trying [...]

Simon Heffer is not a columnist for whom I usually have much time - although his biography of Enoch Powell was relatively interesting, that was more down to the subject than the author. If anything, the writing style put me off reading the thing more so than did old Enoch’s politics.
Still, Heffer has a piece [...]

Courtesy of today’s Metro freebie (published by the same lot as are responsible for the fervently anti-EU Daily Mail):
“Traditional loaves of bread could soon be replaced by packs containing just four slices under a new EU ruling”

It’s a disgrace! How dare these Brussels bureaucrats take away our sliced whites! How dare they presume to allow [...]

Late Friday trivial post. Good stuff on Chris Muir from the redoubtable Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings. You may not think much of cartoon pages of US newspapers, but however desperate they are for material, not one so far runs Day by Day (tagline: as funny as the title is original, a take-off of Doonesbury with far fewer characters, no intelligence to speak of, poor repetitive draughtsmanship, and homeless puppy’s eagerness to please aimed unashamedly at wingnut bloggers).

Everyone is talking about this. Mike Power: “Paxman should have wiped the floor with her” [my emphasis], Andrew Ian Dodge “man did she stuff Jeremy Paxman”, Guido (curiously silent), Blairwatch.
Like Mike, I think Paxman “should have wiped the floor with” Coulter. But he didn’t. I admire Paxman; he adds to the gaiety of the [...]

Veteran satirist Tom Lehrer said that the world of comedy changed in 1973 when the greatest living war criminal, Henry Kissinger, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. ‘At that moment, satire died. There was nothing more to say after that’.
If, during Bono’s cosying up to the G8 last summer, I’d done a sketch about him [...]

The July 7th reports were greeted with a chorus of disapproval about their refusal to assign blame – but the demand for easy answers misses the point.
Last week’s reports on the July 7th bombings were cautious, ambiguous, and very careful to hedge their bets. The same can’t be said of the reaction to them.
The Times [...]

Google Trends is rather an impressive new piece of software. In the style of late-90s favourites like Search Voyeur, it allows you to see what other people are hunting for. But instead of merely providing a list and allowing you to marvel at others’ illiteracy and perversion (these days, a function that Sitemeter is admirably [...]

“Real Madrid can eff all, you arse-face arsing arse-heads”
I’m not trying to raise the Sharpener’s rude word count, nor shock you with poor grammar. I’m simply quoting the finest panel of Medium Large’s recent Brit Week. (That’s just the latest cartoon: there are usually weekly archives, and the last one should be here, but [...]

Forget the flap about Google.cn for a bit. In China, the main media controversy right now is the closure of Freezing Point, a popular weekly supplement of the China Youth Daily, on the orders of individuals in the Central Propaganda Department. The magazine didn’t have a particular agenda as such, but embodied a general commitment [...]

It happens without you noticing it - you go away for a week or so, don’t get to see any television and then when you come back, everything’s gone back to the 1970s.