They fuck you up, your sons and daughters. This was the lesson learned by PR legend Lynne Franks when she opened her Mail on Sunday to discover her grown up son lambasting her as “too selfish to raise children”. To be fair to Josh Howie, his description of the archetypal eighties career woman, “on the…
Ask a reasonably clever ten year old what a journalist is and she will say someone who reports what is happening. While this impression may become more nuanced as we develop a greater understanding of how news is broken and spun this basic understanding still underpins our view of what the media is. How is…
This month marks the last time a brand new VCR will roll off the conveyor belt of Funai Electric in Japan. It is 12 years since most major shops in the UK and Europe stopped selling VCRs, relegating their bulky tapes to ever-decreasing shelf space at the back of charity shops. Someone, somewhere was still…
The comedy is that David Cameron believed his own lie. The tragedy is, so did the rest of us. The Conservative victory at last year’s election sent shockwaves through the media and political establishments. When the dust had settled and the pollsters had been pilloried, it was all so obvious why the Tories had won-…
‘Post-factual’ is a phrase we’ve been hearing a lot of lately. Once upon a time you would have been discredited for calling the Bank of England corrupt. Now –as Rafael Behr quotes in his Guardian long read autopsy of the remains of Remain– you can plaster it over a bus and the BBC will give…
“What is this festival anyway?” asked a bemused Dave Grohl to an audience of star struck advertising folk. Few of the execs in the room –who had spent the last few days pickling their vital organs in Rosé- were in a fit state to respond. There are several ways of answering Dave’s question. Excess knows…
In PR we talk about reaching out and cutting through. We craft messaging that will engage that poised and docile mob we call ‘the public’. Well, if this morning’s result has shown us anything it’s that this pursuit is utter rubbish. Any illusion of commons threads that bind together our diverse country has given way…
“Lost for words”. This was how so many of us reacted to the senseless, brutal murder to MP Jo Cox. After a frenzied week of last ditch campaigning for the upcoming referendum the tragic event in Birstall has catapulted everything into miserable perspective. Only on Wednesday the Dumbish Armada was descending down the Thames. Even…
Muhammad Ali was a limitless divinity, touched by a tincture of madness. He was the showman beyond all showmen, conquering the decades with an all powerful chaos. When I was still in short trousers I witnessed his all consuming hype machine sweeping up all in his path. Nobody was immune to it: an intoxicating deity,…
The spin and backtracking that have characterised Chris Evans’s steering of Top Gear have been more Downing Street press office than racing track. Last year it was “100% not true” that he was in line to fill Clarkson’s shoes; months later the BBC announced that they had signed him up for a three year stint….