Blogs
Phone hacking – ethics and tabloid journalism
View in iTunes Watch the event here. By Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi Rupert Murdoch’s positive contributions to the British press as well as the negative effects of his influence were discussed by a Frontline Club panel on phone hacking last night. Although some of the panelists concluded that the positives might even outweigh them, the negatives are “awfully […]
Fictional ‘Gay Girl in Damascus’ blog disappears
The ‘Gay Girl in Damascus’ blog, which was believed to have provided an authentic voice documenting the Syrian chapter of the Arab Spring, has "vanished". The author of the blog, Tom MacMaster, apparently decided to delete the contents of the blog after it reached more than a million "separate views". The blog had claimed to […]
From internships to the WikiLeaks truck: catch up on the Forum blog
Here’s a round-up of this week’s blog posts, which began with an anonymous piece about the life of an intern and ended with a piece by Ryan Gallagher In praise of… the WikiLeaks truck. This week we posted Frontline: Vaughan Smith Shot in Kosovo (1998), the second of two excerpts from the newly revised and […]
Realignment in the Arab world: what are Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran worried about?
Watch event here. The impact of the Arab Spring on three regional neighbours: Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran and how they might respond to the changing political landscape was the focus of last night’s discussion at the Frontline Club. Chaired by Sam Farah, lead presenter of BBC Arabic’s flagship interactive programme Nuqtat Hewar (Talking Point), the […]
My favourite time – Asparagus is out
Three years ago we planted two acres of asparagus in our farm. Last year we didn’t get much crop but this year its amazing. I have never seen so much asparagus in my life. We started the deliveries to London this week and there is asparagus all over the menu. Come and try the new […]
BBC World Debate: “Is Homosexuality UnAfrican?”
Download this episode View in iTunes You can watch the Frontline event here. By Gianluca Mezzofiore After the killing of gay rights activist David Kato in Uganda in January, debate about homophobia in Africa has been reignited. Kato was the face of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) an advocacy group actively campaigning against the controversial Anti-Homosexuality […]
Blood and Dust film
Vaughan’s new film, Blood and Dust, is below for those who didn’t catch it on Al Jazeera’s People and Power strand. If you want to see it on a large screen we will showing it at the Frontline Clubon 6 March. Followed by a discussion about how war is represented by the broadcast media. Vaughan writes: I have […]
Martin Rowson: Caricatures and Commentary
Martin Rowson walked onto the stage at the Frontline Club last night with a pint and Laurie Taylor. As you would expect from a satirist, the tone of Rowson’s presentation was humorous with generous lashings of acerbic wit thrown into the mix.
In the Picture: Orphaned and Ostracised- HIV in Africa with Carol Allen Storey
Download this episode View in iTunes Watch the event here. By Antje Bormann Broadcaster Sue Steward introduced Carol Allen Storey as one of the most fascinating photojournalists around. Carol Allen Storey’s photographic career started 10 years ago following a thorough rethink of a successful career in the fashion and beauty industry. Photographs by Edmond Terakopian. […]
The world’s most wanted house guest by Vaughan Smith
Having watched Julian Assange give himself up last week to the British justice system, I took the decision that I would do whatever else it took to ensure that he is not denied his basic rights as a result of the anger of the powerful forces he has enraged. This decision – which will result […]
The Secular Fatwa on Julian Assange by Charles Glass
In February 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa inciting the faithful to murder author Salman Rushdie for blasphemy. Within a few days, professional writers convened in London, New York, and elsewhere to discuss countering this threat. In London, we met at the National Union of Journalists’ offices in Gray’s Inn Road. We had fierce arguments […]
Report don’t dispatch
Rule number one for journalists starting a blog in a foreign land, pick the blog’s name carefully. Meskel Square = clever, good, local. South by South West = geographic, but not specific, nice. Noodlepie = genius. I’ve just picked a new name for a new website I’m planning. The name’s bloody brilliant. How did I […]
Hearty Food for Valiant Olive Pickers on Sunday 5th December
POTENTINO POP-UP Our cousins who make the wonderful Potentino wine we serve in the Restaurant and Club are running their pop-up restaurant at Frontline every first Sunday of the month. This is their latest email with news from the vineyard and announcing the menu for Sunday 5th December: Hearty Food for Valiant Olive Pickers. Please […]
Blogging backlash against proposal to escalate confrontation with Iran
Earlier this month bloggers rounded on a column written in the Washington Post which suggested that Barack Obama could revive the United States’ flagging economy by ramping up tensions with Iran. In an article in the Washington Post on 31 October, David Broder wrote that the President could "spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating […]
The Secret War – Iraq War Logs
With the ‘biggest leak of military documents ever’, Wikileaks has reestablished its position as the pentagon’s no1 hate object. In a special four-page report, FRONTLINE discusses the shocking results of the whistle-blower’s collaboration with the Iraq Body Count group and talks to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange about the latest release. i l l u s […]
Welcome to the Global Shadow State – Julian Assange talks turkey about Wikileaks
Julian Assange reaches to take a book from a shelf behind him – any book. The commodity in which hedeals is information, and he wants to make a point about how information travels, and why. Or does nottravel, and why not. About what he calls “the media information flow economy”. He asks one to bear […]
Enough is Enough by John Morris
By John Morris, from the Autumn 2010 issue of the Frontline broadsheet (subscribe here) … Open publication
Afghanistan: the brittle compact between military and media
Vaughan Smith argues that news management by the military is a risky business. Smith founded the Frontline Club in London in 2003 and during the 1990s he ran Frontline Television News. He filmed the only uncontrolled footage of the Gulf War in 1991 after bluffing his way into an active-duty unit while disguised as a […]
Social networking and journalism: Power to the people?
By Julie Tomlin and Sirena Bergman How have Facebook, Twitter and blogs changed changed grassroots politics? This was the question tackled at the club on Tuesday, at an event moderated by Deborah Bonello, founder of Mexicoreporter.com and video journalist for the Financial Times. If you couldn’t be with us for this event, you can watch […]
Incredible India by David Rieff
The shining face of success that the country presents to the world disguises deep tensions between great wealth and extreme poverty. With the commonwealth games approaching, David Rieff looks at the politics that sustains such divisions and wonders whether the dream of the Asian century still has meaning for this divided culture. The term “Asian […]
Hunting Men
Here is my director’s cut. 22 minutes from Operation Moshtarak, exciting stuff. Shows the war as it really is. First shown on Channel 4 News in February 2010. Vaughan
War & Peace by Jon Swain and Gavin Greenwood
As Vietnam celebrates the 35th anniversary of its defeat of the US, Jon Swain remembers the adrenalin rush of being a young reporter in the biggest war story of his life. Gavin Greenwood reports on how the old guard struggles to hold the socialist line. A few weeks ago, a group of Vietnam Old Hacks […]
Africa for sale by John Vidal
China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, India – half the world seems to be buying vast tracts of territory to grow food for their home markets. But, as John Vidal reports from Ethiopia, the great land-grab is at the expense of local farmers and is seen by some as a new colonialism. We turned off the main […]
Continental Drift by Jurgen Kronig
Britain may find its new coalition govern ment strange and hard to comprehend. But, says Jurgen Kronig, look to Germany, long accustomed to such arrangements, which is adopting attitudes to politics more like our own. It is an ironic twist of fate: suddenly, Germany is discovering the attraction of a more sceptical attitude towards […]
Tracing the first official U.S. military blogs
So yesterday on Twitter I asked a question: when was the first official U.S. military blog started? Of course, long gone are the days when blogs were an unknown quantity, and these days blogs by U.S. soldiers will usually be signed off by a superior meaning they are to some degree ‘official’ but I wasn’t […]
What’s rocking the cradle of democracy? by Costas Douzinas
Few events in recent European political history have baffled the commentariat more than the widespread Greek insurrection, or “riots’“(according to rightwing analysts), of December 2008, and those last month, when a quarter of a million people took to the streets and the Greek parliament was stormed by trade unionists and other demonstrators. The catalyst for […]
British Armed Forces launch front line blogs from Afghanistan
Need to run out in a moment or two so excuse the brevity of the post, but I’ve just been helpfully pointed in the direction of a press release on military blogging: ‘British forces in Afghanistan have launched their first-ever mass blogging initiative, with dozens of personnel writing from the frontline on the Army, Navy […]
Trouble in Store by Douglas Morrison
With Brighton the sparehead of english eco-politics, having elected the first Westminster green MP, it is fitting that a brilliant site-specific, multi-media show carries on the fight, linking shopping and messing up the planet. So this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a chopper. If art has something to say […]
The blog as a weapon in an era of information war
I’ve been doing some research into the coverage of the Gaza conflict (back end of 2008, front end of 2009) on blogs. One of the English-language blogs that covered the war was the Muqata blog. The Muqata blog was started in 2005 by ‘Jameel’, a Jewish settler who had lived in Chomesh in Gaza before […]
What would Orwell say? How the web is championing top quality journalism
For all the scaremongering, hand-wringing and hair-pulling that has taken place over the last few years, the state of journalism is in fact alive and well and even aided by the internet revolution. But anyone at Wednesday’s Frontline event with three writers shortlisted for the Orwell Prize could see that great stories still can and […]