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British actor Stephen Fry’s controversial opinion on university censorship, the prospective impeachment of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, and a German comedian being prosecuted for insulting a foreign official are the topics three for this week.
For all the slating that Christopher Hitchens attracted in his lifetime, it’s the quiet criticism of Jason Cowley, editor of the New Statesman, that best captures the man’s flaws as a writer.
In an otherwise generous obituary in 2011, Cowley wrote that Hitchens’ “polemical denunciations and pamphlets on powerful individuals […] feel already dated, stranded in place and time, good journalism but not literature”.
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The “biggest leak in history”, a pro-EU leaflet campaign from Whitehall and the prospect of Hong Kong independence are the three topics for this week’s podcast.
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Another controversy involving Zoe “Zoella” Sugg, the centenary of Ireland’s Easter Uprising and a series of bombings in Brussels and Lahore are the three topics of this week’s podcast, where Jazza and Jimmy are back in the same place at the same time.
Should a real press regulator ever be set up in this country, its first rule should be that any paper found to be puffing itself like a political or corporate dispatch will be abolished on sight.
Most would not last the day, windbaggery being a practice most editors and proprietors enjoy even as the grunts on the newsdesk wipe tears from their eyes as they extract the sliver of meaningful information from another slew of press releases.
It’s this practice that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth as one leafs through the last paper edition of the Independent, still the last full-blooded national ever launched in Britain (New Day and the i being cheap-sheets) after 30 years.