Category: Media Blunders or Brilliance

Publish and be dammed. Evidence that Correspondent.World was correct in its world scoop in Ukraine two days ago: The Kakhovka Dam wall WAS blasted by the Russians.

9 June 2023 By Paul Martin

Transcript of a conversation that Ukraine claims proves Russia blew up the Kakhovka dam: Ukraine’s domestic security service (SBU) said on Friday it had intercepted a telephone call proving a Russian “sabotage group” blew up the Kakhovka hydroelectric station and the dam in southern Ukraine. A one-and-a-half minute audio clip on its Telegram channel of […]

“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, […]

‘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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Do you need to be ruthless or a ‘nutter’ to become British prime minister? No, says Britain’s leader of the Opposition.

22 February 2021 By Paul Martin

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has hit back at critics who say he lacks the hard-man qualities needed to become Britain’s prime minister.   He also attacked politicians and journalists, who he says have already been proved wrong about him. Speaking by zoom to a group situated inside his parliamentary constituency, Sir Keir said voters don’t want […]

An interview with British Prime Minister John Major after a very Soviet attempted-coup. How my own coup went awry.

12 February 2021 By Paul Martin

For a journalist and foreign correspondent, being in the right place at the right time is sometimes lucky, sometimes an instinct.  I had just failed in both.  Only days before I had been in Russia, making a film about Boris Yeltsin, the recently elected leader of the Russian Federation, which was the major part of […]

Correspondent.World’s Media Excellence Award, for January 2021: Egypt’s overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak ten years ago… by the Telegraph’s Colin Freeman.

11 February 2021 By Paul Martin

Ten years on from Egypt’s Arab Spring – what has become of the Tahrir Square revolutionaries?  Protests in Cairo in 2011 sparked the downfall of dictator Hosni Mubarak. But did it really change anything? By Colin Freeman 24 January 2021 A woman waves an Egyptian national flag from a balcony overlooking Tahrir Square, Cairo on […]

Did a jailed terrorist beg to come home? Newspapers rush to the wrong — though headline-grabbing — conclusion.

18 January 2021 By Paul Martin

‘It’s the Sun wot won it.’ That was a famous headline when the Conservatives unexpectedly won a British general election. Now, more than a quarter of a century later, that popular tabloid newspaper could very well rewrite its deliberately ungrammatical headline and declare: ‘It’s the Sun wot faked it.’ Let’s start by quoting the offending […]

Recent references to Correspondent.World appear in three articles in a major British newspaper.

23 December 2020 By Paul Martin

Paul Martin 20 Dec 2020, 6:00amRevealed: How the FBI tracked down second Lockerbie suspect nicknamed ‘The Ghost’ 05 Dec 2020, 5:00pmLockerbie bombing key witness had history of ‘making up stories’, says CIA handler 20 Jun 2020, 5:00pmMysterious Covid-linked disease ‘no longer expected to be fatal’ in children after treatment breakthrou

The row over the media’s responsibilities continues. UK editors reject pleas to outlaw discrimination against ethnic and religious groups, says Press Gazette.

9 December 2020 By Paul Martin

Can the British media regulate itself, or should it be put under greater control? Here’s the Press Gazette’s take. Top editors have rejected calls to adopt a provision in the Editors’ Code of Practice banning discrimination against groups such as Muslims, Jews and migrant communities in the press. The Editors’ Code Committee (made up of […]