Category: Media Blunders or Brilliance

Analysis Eyewitness How It Was Done Latest News Media Blunders or Brilliance

“Ukraine: Life Under Attack” documents painful but life-affirming survival under Russian bombardment in Kharkiv.

27 June 2022 By Paul Martin

It’s been dubbed City of Heroes, the official accolade awarded by President Volodymyr Zelensky to Kharkiv — Ukraine’s battered second city. Two intrepid cameramen-producers have chronicled its trials and tribulations under Russian fire in a riveting film called “Ukraine: Life Under Attack”.  Their documentary has added poignancy as the Russian bombardment, apparently receding a month ago, […]

How It Was Done Media Blunders or Brilliance

‘I was expecting someone more important.’ Journalistic encounters with world leaders don’t always go to plan.

21 June 2022 By Paul Martin

As I walked in to a hotel to interview Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s prime minister from 1959 to 1990), I should perhaps have read the signals.  The Singaporean leader looked at me, then at his wrist-watch, in quick succession.  He pointed to a chair I was to sit on. “I was expecting someone, er, more important,” he […]

Latest News Media Blunders or Brilliance

How two Russian state-run broadcasters report on their own impending demise in Europe.

28 February 2022 By Paul Martin

Even as they faced a broadcasting blackout imposed by the European Union, both of Russia’s state-run English-language broadcasters continued to report or invent fanciful and distorted stories about the war their masters had launched inside Ukraine. RT, an acronym for Russian Television, seemed to enjoy mocking the mayor of Ukraine’s embattled capital city Kyiv, former […]

Media Blunders or Brilliance

BBC places Nigeria in ‘Southern Africa’. It’s not the first geographical blunder that this supposedly authoritative broadcaster has made recently.

7 December 2021 By Paul Martin

The BBC has made a new geographical blunder. The flagship BBC Radio 4 morning programme, Today, informed its listeners in its 6 a.m. news that Nigeria is in Southern Africa. Any glance at the map, let alone general knowledge, would have told the reporter that Nigeria, the continent’s most populous country, is way north of […]

Media Blunders or Brilliance Sport

Two essentials of Wimbedon tennis: Strawberries, and the BBC. One of these stalwarts was not functioning too well.

29 June 2021 By Paul Martin

Wimbledon has started without the bulk of its usual spectator fans this year. Attribute that to the Covid pandemic. The way most people watch Wimbledon has also been infected — by bugs in the BBC’s computer system. Or in its technology, at least. On the second day of The Championships, as they are somewhat arrogantly […]

Analysis Eyewitness How It Was Done Insight Media Blunders or Brilliance Still Relevant

Forty years after Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s nuclear facility, there is still no Arab state with an atomic bomb. Does this prove the raid was justified?

7 June 2021 By Paul Martin

A sign on the desert road south of Baghdad, curiously in English not Arabic, pointed to what it described as an “Engineering Factory”. It was the only hint that there was something unusual to be found just off the beaten track. Until days before, this “Engineering factory” had been nothing less than Saddam Hussein’s project […]

Media Blunders or Brilliance

A former British national newspaper editor admits he secretly backed violence by the Irish Republican Army. Did this influence his objectivity?

3 March 2021 By Paul Martin

The revelation from former Daily Mirror editor Roy Greenslade that he “supported the right of the Irish people to engage in armed struggle” via the IRA throughout the 1970s and 1980s has prompted a furious response from many in the industry, reports the Press Gazette. From 1992 until 2020, Greenslade had also been the media […]

Insight Media Blunders or Brilliance Strange as It Seems

Pictures from Mars to Earth are clear. Pictures from Britain to Britain far less so.

25 February 2021 By Paul Martin

The world has just seen astonishingly-detailed clear pictures from the surface of Mars, courtesy of an American rover called Perseverance [affectionately abbreviated to Percy]. However when BBC Newsnight proudly showed them [on February 24 2021], as a marvel of human achievement, it also linked up with a scientist in Britain. Except the picture of him […]