I read an interesting blog post earlier this week – “To read or not to read?” – written by an MA broadcast journalism student. In it he talks about the ethics surrounding reading other people’s text messages without their consent. He uses this example to illustrate a point regarding investigative journalism as a whole. While we agree on the main point in question, I’m not sure I agreed with everything he says. I’d recommend you go and have a look at his post, and my comments at the end, as I’m not going to repeat them here.
Then, this weekend, I spotted a copy of The Daily Telegraph on the train open on an article titled “The Mandy and Osborne Show had us in stitches”, so I had a look. The article I had initially seen was, in fact, not very interesting at all (some comments by an actress about The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year awards), but the item above it was. The section I was reading was the comment section, and the piece above related to the current economic climate. The article is clearly comment – it’s not hard fact, it’s one writer’s opinion on the way Gordon Brown has handled the slow down in the economy. As good comment should be it’s a very biased article. [read more]