The Plashing Vole

Well, perhaps not all newspapers. The liberal ones will send their Toynbeebots up to the dreadful slums once every five years to wring th...

I'm watching the British media coverage of the Hong Kong democracy protests with some fascination. I'm supportive of the protesters:...

Wow. Four days since I last blogged. Back then I was young, naive and optimistic. The world was an exciting place and possibilities were end...

It seems like every time I use this blog to think aloud, to consider the wider contexts of events in the news, or to discuss the highs and l...

I wonder what people would have said ten years ago when asked to describe a Romanian or Bulgarian. Perhaps some highly-informed people would...

Morning all. And what a grey, dreary morning it is here. Perhaps it seems even greyer because I looked through my sister's wedding photo...

Afternoon all, how are you on this beautiful sunny day? I woke this morning (at 5.15, thanks to the adrenalin gland) ready for a day 'on...

You've probably never heard of Anderson Cooper. He's an American journalist and news anchor. Chiselled. Silver hair. Doesn't ran...

I spend a lot of time abusing politicians, I'll admit. In particular, one Mr. Paul Uppal, the Mediocre Millionaire. To add a bit of cl...

I'm still reeling from Richard Desmond's appearance yesterday at the Leveson Inquiry. Together with the editors of his newspapers, t...

Media effects is the topic of this afternoon's class with the first-years. Thankfully, I have a fine exposition of the case for violent ...

On the left (this is the Daily Star , but it could have been any of them), a picture of an underage girl complete with references to her bre...

Morning all. The media news of the week is that I'm doing a Guardian Higher Education live chat on Surviving Your First Academic Job. I...

As you can see from this site , only fruity teenage girls pass A-levels. Or is it just that the entire news media only print pictures of fru...

One of the reasons the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police had to resign was that he'd accepted a free stay at a health spa. A day b...

Listening to the news about the Japanese/Pacific tsumani reminded me of a question we posed to our Media Ethics class this year. We asked th...

This is a lovely satirical piece on how science is reported in newspapers - I'm impressed the Guardian , which is only slightly better ...

I've gone on long enough about pseudo-science and the media's obsession with 'balance' and distorting stories for sensationa...

That's it for me, this week. I'm off to Newcastle on Tyne for a UK School Games team managers' orientation meeting, which promi...

One of the things I did in my introductory lecture on representation yesterday was to discuss a range of images of homosexuals across four d...