LAHORE, PAKISTAN – One of the joys of working in Pakistan is that people here love the media. There are dozens of Pakistani newspapers and TV channels and every other Pakistani, it seems, is – or thinks he is – a journalist. Of course the government – like most governments – wants to restrict or…
Jon Snow
A thought ahead of the opening of The Boat That Rocked, the movie about the pirate radio stations and Radio Caroline in particular. If it hadn’t been for the closing down of these stations and the change in the law that allowed legal commercial radio stations, I might very well never be where I am…
Jon Snow
I’m very struck by the response to the condom debate sparked by our interview following the Pope’s comments last week. More than 50 comments, and an interesting spread. I have I suppose what the Catholic church would call a “confession” to make. I did not handle it well. One must be honest about these things.
Jon Snow
I blogged earlier this week about the possibility that our disgraced bank bosses had signed “gagging orders” as part of their severance deals, stopping them from talking about what happened to the banks on their watch (earlier this week we asked RBS and Lloyds TSB to confirm or deny this, but they have yet to…
Jon Snow
“How do you pronounce ‘principum amicias’? Is it hard ‘c’, soft ‘c’, or a hard ‘ch’?” my friend asked. She was working on the story of the newly discovered Shakespeare portrait. I think I was right in suggesting a hard “c”. But before I knew it, we were debating the value of Latin – four…
Jon Snow
We’ve had an actor in here. He’s got a part in which he plays a whiz British news producer who is sent to a chaotic American newsroom to sort it out. I told him he should watch Broadcast News, still after all these years the best film ever made about our trade – even if…
More thoughts on female journalists on the frontline, this time from the activist and writer Gloria Steinem. This is from a recent interview in Russia Today: Q: Now, the conference that you’re going to be key speaker of here in Russia is called “Building bridges across conflicts: the role of women journalists”. How can women build bridges differently…
Last night I chaired a panel discussion hosted by Amnesty International called “Women on the Frontline“. The idea was to get together women journalists who cover conflict to talk about their experiences and thoughts. My three colleagues – Marie Colvin, Ramita Navai and Christine Toomey – all thought that being a woman could only be advantage.…
Jon Snow
Can it only be a year since Northern Rock disgraced the British financial system and collapsed under the weight of its own hubris and incompetence? Did we think then that it would prove the Northern tip of a very large iceberg indeed? Above and beyond anyone else I blame my own breed, we journalists, who…
Jon Snow
My visit to the literary festival in Cartegena found three of us in rare coalition meeting kids in the poorer barrios of the town.