A journalist of fifty years standing offers a personal and independent assessment of the often troubled relationship between public figures and the British news media.
My aim is to try to monitor events and issues affecting the ethics of journalism and the latest developments in the rapidly-changing world of press, television, radio and the Internet.
Expect too an insight into the black arts of media manipulation. So spin-doctors, Beware!
Highly acclaimed cartoons published during the 1984-85 miners’ strike are to be included a book celebrating the work of the socialist cartoonist Alan Hardman which is due to be released during the 40th anniversary year of the dispute.
His illustration based on the wartime recruiting poster Lord Kitchener Wants You – one of the most iconic and enduring images of World War I – was widely publicised to rally support for the mining communities.
“Your Class Needs YOU: Save the Pits” was the stark appeal from a miner wearing a helmet and pit lamp.
Attempting to correct some of the deeply held opinions of his most loyal supporters is becoming a priority for Arthur Scargill in speeches marking the 40th anniversary of the miners’ strike.
He blames the news media and historians for the perpetuation of myths about the dispute but is aggrieved to find that “unfortunately some of our members” are continuing to spread “lies” over the tactics deployed in 1984-85, especially during the Battle of Orgreave.
A succession of tv and radio documentaries have given the strikers and their families an unprecedented opportunity to relive their experiences but some of their recollections have riled the former President of the National Union of Mineworkers.
Television and radio documentaries commemorating the 40th anniversary of the 1984-85 miners’ strike have been welcomed for providing a much-needed correction to the news media’s original portrayal of the dispute.
“At last people are seeing the strike from a different perspective” says former South Wales miners Ron Stoate.
His praise for a series of newly commissioned documentaries drew wide support at a conference in Cardiff held by the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data.
Previously unseen footage in a Channel 4 documentary about the Battle of Orgreave was confirmation if any was needed that heavy handed policing of a mass picket outside the Orgreave coke works in June 1984 descended into unprecedented brutality.
Battered and bloodied pickets were captured on camera by two officials from the National Union of Mineworkers who carried on filming amid the mayhem – footage that had been left for years locked in a cupboard and which was broadcast for the first time.
Devoting an entire programme to the tumultuous events in the divided mining village of Shirebrook was an inspired choice to open a season of radio and tv documentaries commemorating the 40th anniversary of the 1984-85 miners’ strike.
Flashing back and forth between past and present – seeing and hearing archive tv footage of young miners in their twenties and thirties and then listening to them again in their sixties and seventies as they relived their experiences – provided gripping reportage.
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