(You can also read this post in the Huffington Post, here) The excitable and ubiquitous coverage of ‘labour boy’ Rory Weal following his appearance at the Labour Party Conference on Monday said a lot about the power of narrative. From Melanie Philips’s enraged dismissal of his ‘mantra of hate’ in the mail to the Guardian’s…
Back in February, I wrote an entry about the ‘lost art of the long lunch’, which lamented an unfortunate consequence of the modern, social media-dominated environment and its ten minute news cycle. With most conversations now conducted via mouthpiece or screen, and quickly at that, it strikes me that the generations of hacks cutting their…
According to Private Eye, Times media correspondent Patrick Foster was sacked after being earwigged by the BBC’s head of Press during a call in which he made a rather inappropriate comment to Caroline Thomson, the BBC’s chief operating officer. Paul Mylrea, head of press at the Beeb, swiftly raced off a letter of complaint to…
I was asked by the Times what could save Tiger Woods’ reputation in the wake of the revelations that he has, as he put it in his guarded press release the other day, “transgressed”. I told them that the next step for Woods could be a public display of contrition, perhaps in a television interview….
I’ve just been reading an intriguing post by that doyenne of the celebrity underbelly, Madame Arcati, querying the disappearance of an article by the Times’s Dan Sabbagh on Sir Philip Green’s involvement in trying to break the X Factor in America. Arcati, whose blog is the current darling of the blogoshphere and one of its…
There’s not that much of a gap between Phineas Taylor Barnum, grandmaster of the freak show, and Simon Cowell. Both Barnum and Cowell are exemplars of transmuting showbiz into mega-biz gold. The difference is that we look back now, 150 years later, and judge the freakshows that made Barnum’s name as exploitative and degrading. I…
The hoo-ha over Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s pre-recorded assault on the answerphone of Andrew Sachs has spilled over into a debate in today’s Times about whether presenters will earn as much money in the predicted straitened times post credit crunch and the global impact of such anarchic behaviour in a more tight-fisted entertainment world….
The Times has a story on the Christian Bale incidents and the influence of publicists, quoting me and The Fame Formula, as well as a number of other publicists. Here’s the excerpt featuring me – click on the link at the bottom of the page to read the full article. From The Times, July 30th…
I received my old friend Julia Hobsbawn’s Editorial Intelligence report called The Power of The Commentariat. It features research which involved a self selecting small group of individuals from business, media, politics, public life, academia and a group set up by Editorial Intelligence on Facebook called Keep Up With The Commentariat to say who they…