Category: Mediawatch
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Private dancer?
A news item on a Belgian radio last week spoke of how students were turning to new forms of income to subsidise their studies. One form of income was a new service being provided whereby students agreed to perform cleaning services (the French term is “technicien des surfaces”) while wearing sexy underwear. Persons buying the…
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Intellectual cowardice and the constitution
MaltaToday carries a report about a man who was arraigned in court for having made what turned out to be false claims about ex-PN leadership contender Francis Zammit Dimech. The man had made these claims on Facebook and Zammit Dimech considered them to be sufficiently injurious and false as to take legal action in this…
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The cost of a paper
So the Times must have gotten their feathers ruffled by the news that their spanking new premium scheme is rather “hackable”. That’s only if you call refreshing a page before the irritable subscription request pops up “a hack”. The thing is that beyond what are surely teething problems for the Times (and more particularly for…
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This wall is on fire
Kurt Sansone’s Sunday morning article introducing the Times’ (of Malta) new premium scheme kicks off with a tenuous comparison to the introduction of the Rediffusion a good 77 years ago. Biblical scholars tell us that the number 77 signified a very large number as in Jesus’ affirmation “I tell you, not just seven times, but…
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Guernica revisited
The other day I was browsing the news on my phone when I came across an item about a series of bombings around Irak and Afghanistan. I remember thinking how this kind of news has become so frequent as to become almost unnoticeable. My first idea of news is in the early eighties when the…
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The United Kingdom’s Fourth Estate
The UK Parliament is under huge pressure (including a looming deadline) to enact new measures that would regulate the behaviour of newspapers. The highly controversial measures have seen an increase in cross-party negotiations as the Lib-Dems (Tory partner in government) seem to prefer an alignment with Miliband’s Labour on this one. Labour, on its own…