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Making the case for women in football…All the interest in the Women’s World Cup reminds me of story from 1990……

My first film for Granada TV’s World in Action series was on why women were being marginalised by the football authorities, clubs and many male fans. I spent some weeks hanging out with some heavy drinking Stockport fans who had very trenchant views of the place of women in football. There were a few signs of hope – we went to film the amazing AC Milan team. Nearly thirty years later  determined women have persisted and now women’s football is being recognised for the force it is. The programme went out in January 1990 and was called, rather clumsily, Send for the Sisters. The producer was Stephen Clarke (why no women on the reporting side? Don’t ask!). I did a couple of articles off the back of the programme and here’s the Guardian one.

Send for the sisters

 

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PL’s al-Jazeera film revealing manipulation of the Brexit vote

Who Paid for Brexit?  

I front this programme for the Al-Jazeera ‘People and Power’ team. With more calls for a UK Mueller style inquiries, it seeks to explain the jiggery-pokery of the dodgy donors, dark money, voter manipulation and appalling failure of the Electoral Commission, politicians and police to tackle these issues in the immediate aftermath of the referendum.

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The relationship between mental health and job insecurity- an early warning

I came across this piece I wrote for the New Statesman in 1995 that now seems quite prescient given the mental health crisis and the rise of the gig economy. There is a clear and obvious link the government – being Darwinian – refuse to make to this day.

IMG_4373 (2)

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Reporting 7/7 and the ‘war on terror’, a practitioner’s reflection – PL has new paper published.

7/7: A reflexive re-evaluation of journalistic practice

First Published September 3, 2018 Research Article

Can be found at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884918797210 (Subscription required)

Abstract

The suicide bombings of 7 July 2005 remain the most serious terror attacks in the United Kingdom to date in the so-called ‘war on terror’. Much has been published on the war on terror but few journalists have reflected on their practice post 9/11 and none on their domestic coverage of the 7/7 attacks. This article is written by a journalist who covered the London bombings for a UK national newspaper and more recently is a practitioner-academic. Using academic texts focusing on the domestic reporting of the war on terror as stimuli for scholarly reflection, this article reviews the author’s own coverage using reflexive practice and content analysis. This article places 7/7 in the continuum of reporting subsequent to 11 September 2001 (9/11) and issues discussed. Some 63 authored articles were considered from the period. Scholarly texts have proposed a range of concepts to analyse coverage from including political ritual, trauma, national wound and hegemony. This article concludes by noting that while many academic texts see coverage of terrorism as an elite discourse, dominated by political economy drivers and responding to events in a homogeneous reactivity, in practice, news organisations can have complex responses and journalists, agency in their coverage of major terrorism events.

Keywords Journalism, London bombings, national security reporting, terrorism