Blade feels that Peter Preston doth protest too much. Click here to find him raging against the way in which the media has allegedly sensationalised the effect of the country-wide snow and ice. If newspapers are still being delivered, says Preston, how can there be a crisis? If not one BBC radio station went off air, how can there be a crisis? If TV broadcasts continued as they normally do, sans interruption, how can there be a crisis? Crisis? What crisis?! It’s all a media invention!
If, like Blade, you have been housebound for the past four days because the roads next to your house have become an ice rink, you might feel inclined to disagree with the former editor of the Guardian. If you then recall that not a single letter has made it to your house for the past four days, nor been collected from nearby post-boxes, you may find yourself feeling even more contrary. And then, when you reflect that said circumstances apply not merely to you but to many who live outside the media metropolis of London, you might be tempted to conclude that far from criticising media sensationalism, as he intended, Preston merely illustrates the degree to which some people think that the media is the only meaningful barometer of whether life is being lived ordinarily.
For a certain poet, an unspoiled stretch of seaside was like “the holy hush there is in the land on Christmas morning. The roads fairly empty, the sky almost free of aeroplanes and you begin to hear and see and smell once more”.
But who uttered these lines?
(It’s a Monday, and this is your starter for 10 – and yes, we’re fresh to the metropolis, from a coastal sojourn.)
The following words appeared in a Times article in 2003, about the paper’s recently departed Head of Legal, Alastair Brett. They’ve been doing the rounds in the wake of Brett’s sudden exit last week, though without attribution. Who, we wonder, wrote them? Two suspects present themselves – our own occasional scribe, Alex Wade, and Dominic Carman, son of the late, great George (an old mucker of Brett’s). Or was someone else the author? Whatever: the fact remains that Brett was a fearless, tenacious and excellent newspaper lawyer, a man whose commitment to press freedom coursed through every vein in his body. We don’t know the precise reasons for his departure, but he will be missed.
“[He] is known for his impassioned commitment to press freedom – so impassioned that he has been described as “certifiably insane”. Capable of an intimidatory snarl or two, and prepared to be stubborn, Brett is far from mad. He is erudite, charming (so the ladies say), and not known for sitting on the fence. If his sanity has, tongue firmly in cheek, been questioned, one thing not open to doubt is that Brett epitomises the old school Fleet Street lawyer”.
Pictured: Fleet Street - not the same as it used to be.
A curious observation leaps at us from Roy Greenslade’s piece about whether Conrad Black, shortly to roam the high-class hotels of the world again as a free man, will return to the UK and carry out his threat to sue his biographer, Tom Bower, for libel:
I somehow doubt that he would have the appetite, or the funds, to pursue a libel action, but Black marches to the sound of his own drummer, so he might just do that. Even if he did, my money would still be on Bower winning.
Hang on, Roy – what about suing via a no win, no fee deal? Funds or no funds, a CFA would see Conrad through – though maybe he’ll remember what happened to the last press baron who sued Bower. Anyone for Richard Desmond’s curious dalliance with libel?
Pictured: the kind of place in which Conrad Black may be spotted (if not at the Royal Courts of Justice).
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A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.
Πλάτων, Greek philosopher.