When Richard Nixon resigned as president 50 years ago, the country witnessed the birth of a monster. I am not talking about some sinister influence he exerted after his fall. I am talking about the media.
Having gratifyingly removed a …
Inside the disinformation industry
“Our team re-reviewed the domain, the rating will not change as it continues to have anti-LGBTQI+ narratives… The site authors have been called out for being anti-trans. Kathleen Stock is acknowledged as a ‘prominent gender-critical’ feminist.”
This was part of …
The unreported anarchy of British courts
In truth, the old maxim that justice “must be seen to be done” has nothing to do with the rights of spectators or reporters in court. It comes from a judgement established in 1924 during a dangerous driving case, in …
The rage behind Transgender Map
Andrea James used to be a respectable, mainstream figure within the trans rights movement. A transgender woman herself, she was (and is) a film producer who carved out an important niche in the very early days of the internet: one …
Witnessing the Media’s Covid Coverage from the Inside
In the movie An Education, the main character gets sidetracked from her studies by a smooth-talking art dealer who turns out to be a criminal—and married. Our protagonist learns more from that experience than from all the medieval literature books …
Rupert Murdoch was my fiercest competitor
“I’m calling to celebrate the demise of Maxwell,” said Rupert Murdoch down the phone to me on the morning Robert Maxwell’s private effects were being auctioned in a bankruptcy sale. I acknowledged that Maxwell had been a frightful scoundrel, but …
Martin Amis knew the horror of words
Years after I first read The Rachel Papers, I bought the copy of Hamlet that Martin Amis had owned as an Oxford student from a book dealer in Charing Cross. It had his undergraduate jottings in the margins and his …
The Guardian’s links to the slave trade
This piece was originally published in February 2023.
The Guardian prides itself on being one of the most Left-leaning and anti-racist news outlets in the English-speaking world. So imagine its embarrassment when, last month, a number of black podcast producers …
The BBC’s phoney war on disinformation
Ever felt your ears burning? I get as much flak online as the next believer in the existence of human biology, but recently I’ve noticed it ramping up somewhat. For the purposes of researching this column, I gingerly dipped my …
No, the Dinosaur Journos Have NOT “Dropped Objectivity”
Objectivity in journalism is not only a pipe dream but a psyop, designed to mislead you about what media really is and how it really functions. Intrigued? Let’s dig in. . . .
The post No, the Dinosaur Journos Have …
What’s wrong with our prime ministers?
At Balliol, Boris Johnson’s old Oxford college, there was a society, now dormant, called the Hysteron Proteron Club. Members were required to live an entire day backwards at least once a term, and discharged the duty conscientiously. The 12-hour ordeal …
Elon Musk must destroy Twitter
If there is anything more dull than listening to acquaintances relating their dreams, it can only be reading journalists complaining about Twitter. Yet since Elon Musk spent $44 billion on becoming its main character, the topic has become inescapable. As …
The seductive horror of extremist violence
There is something horribly seductive about the spectacle of extreme violence: it’s disgusting, gut-wrenching, appalling. It’s also impossibly compelling in its extremity and strangeness: just look at it.
Anyone who builds a career out of watching such material, whether it’s …
The American media’s racism fantasy
It was the kind of correction you love to see. The story that originally broke in the final days of August, about a young black athlete being racially heckled in front of a crowd of thousands at Utah’s Brigham Young …
Chinese Zero Covid was always a lie
For the past two years, the Western media has taken that pernicious little term, “Zero Covid”, at face value. While the rest of the world saw rocketing caseloads and death rates, during a key 18-month period China reported two (yes, …