Unable to post today because I'm taking part in a discussion at the Oxford Literary Festival with two other journalists, Nick Davies, author of Flat Earth News and John Lloyd, author of What the media are doing to our politics, TV columnist for the Financial Times and director of journalism at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
The session is entitled "Newspapers - a corrupt, unaccountable force or the bedrock of democracy?" We will deal with questions about the ethics of news reporting, the nature of scoop journalism, the reliance - or otherwise - on public relations, and whether the balance between profit and truth is too weighted towards the former.
Given Lloyd's recent criticism of Davies's book in this month's Prospect, it could prove to be a lively battle between the two. I'm expecting them to clash over PR too because Davies argues that modern journalism is infected by PR while Lloyd, writing in a book that defended PR, Where the truth lies (edited by Julia Hobsbawm), took a very different view.
His chapter, "Consider not the beam, focus on the mote", began: "I wrote a column recently, in the FT magazine, about public relations. Its main point was that journalists' views of PRs - that of the dog to the lamppost - was largely absurd, because the standards of journalism in the UK were not always and everywhere higher than the standards of press relations..."
