Turkey's negotiations over possible membership of the European Union have triggered yet more scare stories in the British newspapers. In a speech at an EU seminar at Gaziantep in south-east Anatolia (28.3.2008), Nicholas Jones said the role played by the British press had important lessons for Turkish journalists at a time when much of their reporting was having to focus on divisive issues such as the debate over the wearing of head scarves and the lack of freedom of expression. Jones said he supported the demands by journalists in south-east Turkey for a greater awareness by the European Union of the news media's needs and more action to improve the flow of information about the potential implications of Turkey's possible accession. He gave his assessment of the hidden agendas of British media companies and the role of scare stories.

If ever there was an example of how important it can be for politicians to understand how to exploit the news media it has to be Enoch Powell's calculated timing of his "Rivers of Blood" speech. Although Powell's apologists insist to this day that it was never his intention to deliver such a highly-inflammatory speech, the build-up had been prepared with great precision on the advice a close friend, Clem Jones, who had in effect become the MP's personal spin doctor. Jones, editor of the Wolverhampton Express and Star, had been advising Powell on how to maximise his coverage in the press and he followed to the letter the advice he was given on supplying the text in advance to a carefully-selected group of political editors, leader writers and columnists and the speech was under a strict Saturday afternoon embargo, in order to secure maximum exposure in the Sunday newspapers. Former BBC correspondent Nicholas Jones reveals a family drama which throws new light on what many political observers consider is the most controversial speech of the post-war years.

In a speech to local authority leaders on the way reporters and councillors could co-operate with each other, Nicholas Jones recalled the day in the early 1960s when the father of the late film director Anthony Minghella agreed to help create a story line that captured the local headlines.  Eddie Minghella, then chairman of the Entertertainments Committee on Ryde Borough Council, was persuaded to suggest that his local authority should adopt as a summer advertising slogan Ticket to Ride, the latest hit by The Beatles.

Jones presented the awards at the annual lunch of the North East Charter on Elected Member Development at The Sage, Gateshead (25.3.2008).  He said councillors and staff had only themselves to blame if they failed to challenge press misreporting. He urged them to take advantage of new opportunities opened up by the internet which provided new ways to communicate through websites and the blogosphere. Jones said he had found a collective failure on the part of council members and staff to respond. 

David Cameron’s invitation to ITN to film his family having breakfast with their handicapped son Ivan was yet another illustration of his Blair-like charm offensive to win sympathetic media coverage.

In their new book, A Century of Spin, the authors suggest Cameron’s Conservatives are nothing more than "a mirror image" of New Labour. I would go further: when it comes to the creation of his media persona, Cameron’s tactics are a virtual carbon copy of the strategies used to promote Tony Blair.

David Miller and William Dinan are to be congratulated on their detailed expose of the close and interlocking links between Cameron, his advisers, the media and the public relations and advertising industries.

Cameron has already put these networks to good use: mutually constructive relations between the Conservative Party and the executives and editors of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers have not only been revived but are closer now than they have been for years, thanks in large part to the influence of the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson who was appointed Cameron’s director of communications in May 2007.

In a lecture to students at the University of East London (13.3.2008) Nicholas Jones had to consider some difficult questions. Is Britain governed more effectively because of the power and patronage exercised by the news media? And, more to the point, does the British press, despite the trivialisation and sensationalism of much of its coverage, serve the democratic process and help deliver better government?

Nicholas Jones was asked by the Local Government Association to speak at a conference in London (25.2.2008) on strengthening local democracy and address the question: How councillors can get a better press and is this diferent from individual councillors getting a good press?

My advice to local councillors when considering how to promote your work and that of your authority has to be pretty blunt: set your political differences aside, at least some of the time; do act collectively; and do go on the offensive. For some years I have been a regular lecturer with the Young Local Authority programme which runs courses to encourage young thinkers and speakers in the local authorities. Your youngest staff are some of the most enthusiastic and most committed public servants in the country and what they tell me is that they only wish their councillors would do more to raise the profile of council work and to stand up to the negative reporting which appears in so many of their local newspapers.

Nicholas Jones spoke at a meeting organised by the National Union of Journalists in Swansea (20.2.2008) in support of the union's campaign for recognition at the South Wales Evening Post. Jones said that journalists of his generation should do all they could to help the journalists of tomorrow adjust to the commercial and ethical pressures imposed by the dramatic pace of change in the news media. He believed more should be done to advise young journalists on how to respond to the challenging dilemmas they face.

In a devastating critique of the ills of British journalism, Nick Davies exposes the alarming degree to which reporters are being exploited by the public relations industry, spin doctors, assorted publicists and the like but rather disappointingly he skates over the full impact of the failings which he identifies so clearly in Flat Earth News.

Declining editorial standards have made it all the easier for successive governments to collude with proprietors in manipulating the news media, never more so than during the build-up to the war against Iraq and the blatant misreporting of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

While Davies deserves to be congratulated for his diligence and courage in identifying the many falsehoods and distortions of the intelligence services -- and also the gullibility of the media in accepting them -- he makes only one passing reference to Rupert Murdoch’s role as cheerleader for George Bush and Tony Blair, preferring instead to focus an entire chapter on unseemly and incestuous infighting between Guardian journalists like himself and those on their pro-war sister paper, the Observer.

After a cynical betrayal of the idealism which every journalist should strive for, Alastair Campbell finally tripped himself up in the mire of his own double-speak.

His utter contempt for the journalists of tomorrow and the challenges they face was underlined by his choice of title for the annual Hugh Cudlipp lecture, "The media: a case of growth in scale, alas, not in stature". (28.1.2008).

At the heart of Campbell’s reheated diatribe was his assertion that he and Tony Blair went the extra mile to improve the reporting of politics but it was rebuffed by the "relentless negativity" of political journalists who "culturally and collectively present an utterly one side view of political debate".

Debate at Literary and Historical Society, University College Dublin, January 30, 2008:

The news media should not be permitted to intrude upon the privacy of public figures. Nicholas Jones, a member of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, spoke in support of the motion:

I afraid there is no turning back: whether we like it not, media intrusion is all around us, in the old media as much as in the burgeoning new media. And it is not just journalists and a new generation of citizen journalists who are to blame. Inside of all of us there is what seems to have become an inner understanding of what interests and excites the media. Indeed I would go as far as to suggest that this is almost reflected in our genes, a component if you like of our 21st-century genome.