Media dirty tricks
April 30, 2008
On Thursday, the elections take place for London’s mayor, its assembly and many English local authorities.
The London election has dominated the news. Here, the role of the print media needs to be seriously challenged. Monday’s Evening Standard carried a pro-Boris Johnson headline and front page, while many of the inside pages were filled with so-called “investigations” by Andrew Gilligan which amounted to the usual litany and abuse of Ken Livingstone. The paper even managed to run an architectural attack on Livingstone and concluded with an editorial urging people not to trust the current mayor. Read more
Victims of riches
April 22, 2008
Last week, there was a serious plane crash in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The Hewa Bora Airlines plane burst a tyre on take-off in the eastern city of Goma, failed to clear the end of the runway and then ploughed into some very poorly built houses. Some reports put the death toll among locals as high as 80. Had there not been a large Indian Army United Nations contingent nearby, the number of deaths would have been far higher. The hospitals had difficulty coping and the sight of dirty old stretchers being used to bring in the injured demonstrated just what it is to live without the kind of infrastructures that we take for granted in the West. Read more
