Media & Communication: Research Guide

Pulitzer prize winner Ann Telnaes had drawn a cartoon of the paper’s owner kneeling before Donald TrumpThe Washington Post’s Pulitzer prize-winning editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes has resigned from her position at the newspaper after its refusal to publish a satirical cartoon depicting the outlet’s owner, Jeff Bezos – along with other media and technology barons – kneeling before Donald Trump as he gears up for his second US presidency.“I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations – and some differences – about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at,” Te..

A wave of local publications are considering requests to wipe or edit old articles to give their subjects a fresh startCivil rights advocates across the US have long fought to free people from their criminal records, with campaigns to expunge old cases and keep people’s past arrests private when they apply for jobs and housing.The efforts are critical, as more than 70 million Americans have prior convictions or arrests – roughly one in three adults. But the policies haven’t addressed one of the most damaging ways past run-ins with police can derail people’s lives: old media coverage. Continue reading...

Company’s own inquiry found money laundering and children performing sexualized acts for digital currencyTikTok has long been aware that its video livestream feature has been misused to harm children, according to newly revealed details in a lawsuit brought against the social media company by the state of Utah. Those harms include child sexual exploitation and what Utah calls “an open-door policy allowing predators and criminals to exploit users”.The state’s attorney general says TikTok conducted an internal investigation in which it discovered adults paid teens to “strip, pose, and dance provocatively” using its livestream feature, known as TikTok Live. Another internal investig..

She’s the charismatic TV host known for her bombshell struts into the Love Island villa, but Maya Jama didn’t have an easy start. She talks about her tough teenage years, being a ‘late bloomer’, and why the tabloids are fascinated with her love life“What day is it, Thursday or Friday?” Maya Jama asks.Friday, I say. Continue reading...

The It Ends With US wrangling is becoming increasingly nasty – we live in a world where the powerful can ‘bury’ their enemiesFirst, a mea culpa. Last year I wrote a critical piece about the promotional campaign for the adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s controversial novel It Ends With Us. The fact that Blake Lively appeared to be using a movie about domestic violence to promote her husband’s gin brand as well as her own haircare line, I noted, was pretty grim. Continue reading...

Musk has now used X as a platform to make aggressive interventions in US politics – and in those of other countriesAs a business proposition, Elon Musk’s ownership of X, formerly known as Twitter, has so far been a disaster: since he acquired it in late 2022, the social media company, according to one estimate, has lost nearly 80% of its value.As a political proposition, however, Musk’s purchase may turn out to be one of the shrewdest investments of all time. Every week, the platform seems to supercharge a news issue that comes to dominate conservative discourse – and often mainstream discourse, as well – with real political repercussions. Continue reading...

A delightful but decidedly unfunny encounter with the author led to a train of thought about his comic booksWhen I was a teenager, David Lodge, who died last week at the age of 89, meant more to me than any other writer. It wasn’t only that his novels were so wildly entertaining and funny. My parents had been born into the optimistic but class-ridden postwar world he caught with such precision, and for this reason I saw his tales of campus life as helpful guides to the more baffling aspects of adult behaviour.There was no getting away from the fact that my father, a university lecturer, had an amazing amount in common with both conformist Philip Swallow and randy Morris Zapp, the two profe..

Instagram profile of ‘proud Black queer momma’, created by Meta, said her development team included no Black peopleMeta is deleting Facebook and Instagram profiles of AI characters the company created over a year ago after users rediscovered some of the profiles and engaged them in conversations, screenshots of which went viral.The company had first introduced these AI-powered profiles in September 2023 but killed off most of them by summer 2024. However, a few characters remained and garnered new interest after the Meta executive Connor Hayes told the Financial Times late last week that the company had plans to roll out more AI character profiles. Continue reading...

Former UK deputy prime minister, who still has about $21m worth, is leaving role as president of global affairsNick Clegg made almost $19m from the sale of shares in Meta during his six-year term at the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, filings show.The former British deputy prime minister had sold $18.4m (£14.8m) worth of shares in the group before announcing on Thursday that he was leaving his role as its president of global affairs and communications. Continue reading...

Choice of Thilo Mischke, author of Around the World In 80 Women, for ARD’s flagship arts show criticisedMore than 100 prominent German writers and artists have signed an open letter refusing to appear on one of Germany’s top culture programmes on public television after the broadcaster announced a new host who has been accused of sexism and racism in his writing.ARD said in late December it had picked the author Thilo Mischke, 43, to co-present its flagship culture show, ttt – Titel, Thesen, Temperamente (Titles, Theses, Temperaments), after the programme’s veteran host Max Moor stepped aside. Continue reading...

Lawyer for actor and director says he is prepared to release trove of text messages amid It Ends With Us disputeThe actor and director Justin Baldoni plans to sue his co-star Blake Lively after she accused him of sexual harassment and launching a smear campaign against her, Bryan Freedman, Baldoni’s attorney, told NBC.While Freedman did not share any details about what the lawsuit will include, he said he was prepared to release a trove of text messages that he said would add the context needed to prove his client’s innocence. Continue reading...

Booker prize-nominated author and critic who was known for his Catholic novels and satires on academic lifeDavid Lodge, who has died aged 89, was, like his close friend Malcolm Bradbury, a professor of English literature who became even better known as a novelist. The two men occupied adjacent offices for some years at Birmingham University in the early 1960s and greatly influenced each other. Both were grammar school boys from non-academic backgrounds who became leading figures in English letters without ever darkening the gateways of Oxford or Cambridge universities. Both wrote novels in part out of an instinct to reach a wide constituency of readers with literary tastes.Lodge worked ..

Emilia Pérez, The Brutalist, Wicked and Conclave aim for awards this weekend but without an Oppenheimer-sized juggernaut, it all remains up in the airFull list of Golden Globe nominationsAnother Hollywood awards season kicks off this weekend with the Golden Globes, the industry’s glitziest yet most consistently troubled ceremony.Nominations for the 82nd edition are led by films such as Netflix musical Emilia Pérez, period saga The Brutalist, Broadway blockbuster Wicked and Vatican thriller Conclave, and promises to help steer an unusually confused race that’s yet to firm up clear frontrunners. Continue reading...

The £2.4bn sector is thriving, says a new report, as online demand grows for authentic cultural content created outside the global north – but there are still challengesVlogs by the Nigerian content creator Tayo Aina, on anything from Nigeria’s japa (emigration) wave and voodoo festivals in Benin, to time with the Afrobeats star Davido or the last hunter-gatherer tribes in Tanzania, can garner millions of views on YouTube.Aina, 31, who started his channel in 2017 while working as an Uber driver, says it helped him to see parts of Nigeria he had never had the chance to visit before. Using his iPhone, he began to make mini-adventures of his work trips, taking breaks to document the places..

‘Around the Bay of Biscay and back for tea’. The weather bulletin has inspired poets and popstars and become our national lullabyIt is no surprise that the Shipping Forecast, which turned 100 on New Year’s Day, is one of the cultural touchstones of our times. The weather is our national obsession, after all. Alan Bennett and John Prescott have read it, while poets Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath and Carol Ann Duffy have been inspired by it, along with musicians Tears for Fears, Radiohead and Blur. To mark its centenary, BBC Radio 4 devoted a day to celebrate this twice-daily bulletin and its place in the British psyche.In her diary, in January 1925, Virginia Woolf reported that it was “a..

Clegg was the tech giant’s chief public policy architect when it was facing scrutiny over Cambridge Analytica scandalNick Clegg, Britain’s former deputy prime minister and Meta’s current president of global affairs, is leaving the company after six years.“It truly has been an adventure of a lifetime!” Clegg said in a post on Facebook. “I am proud of the work I have been able to do leading and supporting teams across the company to ensure innovation can go hand in hand with increased transparency and accountability, and with new forms of governance.” Continue reading...

Project driven by Wayne Rooney and his advisersProduction company made Coleen Rooney documentaryPlymouth have scrapped plans to make a documentary about their battle against relegation from the Championship after Wayne Rooney’s departure this week.Filming was paused last month as a result of the downturn in results that eventually led to Rooney’s exit and there are no plans to resume. Continue reading...

Foreign ministry summons ambassador as Cecilia Sala reportedly tells family she sleeps on floor of prison cellItaly’s foreign ministry summoned the Iranian ambassador on Wednesday and urged the immediate release of an Italian journalist held in solitary confinement in Tehran.Cecilia Sala, a 29-year-old freelance journalist for Il Foglio newspaper and a podcaster, reportedly spoke of the harsh conditions of her detainment in the notorious Evin prison, including having to sleep on the floor of her cell without a mattress. Continue reading...

Released from prison in 2020 after being jailed for ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’, he became increasingly desperate to leave – before seizing his opportunityAs he trekked up the lush mountain range on China’s border with Laos, Lu Yuyu felt exhausted. He had been travelling for days, dodging his official minders to slip out of China. His travelling companions were smugglers who he’d paid 15,000 yuan (£1,622) to help him escape, and forced him to keep going until he could be delivered to two men and a scooter for the final few hours of his journey to freedom.But leaving China was only the first step. Lu had thousands more miles before he would truly feel safe. Continue re..

With firms such as Makani and Boycat, founders answer a growing demand: help their users support PalestiniansAmany Killawi made a breakup playlist every time she was dumped, three in all. The playlists, which feature songs such as Gotye’s Somebody That I Used to Know and Apologize by OneRepublic, would make good soundtracks to romantic splits, but that’s not what they were. The playlists came together after Killawi was told by three different banks and payment processors they would no longer work with LaunchGood, the crowdfunding platform for the Muslim community she co-founded.Stripe said its banking partner instructed the company to cut ties with LaunchGood after five years of working ..

It wouldn’t be a press tour without the Gladiator II director saying something contentious, and now he’s managed to upset big cheeses on the Mediterranean islandFor a while, it looked as if Ridley Scott was going to get through the Gladiator II press cycle without saying anything remotely contentious. That was a worry since, as we know, saying contentious things is the entire point of a Ridley Scott press cycle. The gold standard, of course, was Napoleon; a film about a historical French figure that he promoted by slagging off French people (they “don’t even like themselves”) and historians (“Excuse me, mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the fuck up then”). However, the most ..

The 79-year-old musician says the music festival is ‘not the way I remember it being’ after BBC ‘wanted us to do a lot of things in a way we were not interested in’Neil Young has announced that he will not perform at Glastonbury this year, saying he believes the BBC’s involvement in the festival means it is “now under corporate control”.The 79-year-old Canadian musican wrote a letter on Tuesday on his website, Neil Young Archives, detailing why he and his band the Chrome Hearts were backing out of the music festival, held each year at Worthy Farm in Somerset. Continue reading...

His BBC career began with a year-long suspension and he was later fired for on-air comments. Yet the broadcaster’s warmth meant listeners followed him for more than five decades• Johnnie Walker dies aged 79 – news• Johnnie Walker – obituaryThe Radio 1 listings for 26 April 1969, when Johnnie Walker made his BBC broadcasting debut, in some ways have a dated air, also boasting shows featuring “Kenny Everett and his granny phone” and “Emperor Rosko’s Midday spin”. However the entry at 2pm for Walker – “The Saturday afternoon listening revolution with music and happiness for all to share” – pretty much applied for the next 55 years of his working life.Days of the week..

While a film editor at BBC Scotland I worked with James Cox. When he left to be the correspondent in New York, I recall contributing to the autograph book circulated for comments: “Cox’s Pippin the Big Apple”. Continue reading...

Federal action comes hours after film’s director sued New York Times for libel over story about Lively’s accusationsThe actor Blake Lively has sued the director of It Ends With Us, Justin Baldoni, and several others associated with the film, alleging harassment and a coordinated campaign to attack her reputation for coming forward about her treatment on the set.The federal lawsuit was filed in New York on Tuesday, hours after Baldoni and many of the other defendants in Lively’s suit sued the New York Times for libel for its story on her allegations, saying the newspaper and the star were the ones conducting a coordinated smear campaign. Continue reading...

The ludicrously camp Claudia Winkleman hit returns with a gutting twist in the opening moments – and some wild new rules. Prepare for emotional disembowelment all the way! Series three of The Traitors begins with an utterly gutting twist. Well, technically it begins with Claudia Winkleman opening a drawer of identical pairs of red fingerless leather gloves while conversing with an owl (yes, the show’s ludicrously camp Highland gothic vibe is still in full swing), but after that it’s emotional disembowelment all the way.As per tradition, a new cohort of players meet on a steam train, where they merrily bond. Unlike previous series, however, this journey is a test: there are 25 passenger..

From feelings of grim acceptance to those who felt they’d totally lost their compass, writers open up on what it’s like to have your television series cancelledWhen he learned that series two of Utopia would be airing in July of 2014, Dennis Kelly knew the end was nigh. “I remember us going ‘summer’s terrible isn’t it?’”, the writer says. “And they were going: ‘No! Summer’s the new winter!’ … Never believe anyone when they say this shit to you.” By October, the cult Channel 4 thriller had been axed. For Kelly, who had a third series mapped out, it was “heartbreaking” to bid farewell before he had planned to. “But I’m quite stoic. I learned a long time ago ..

CBS correspondent Jan Crawford castigates US journalists for not digging deeper into Biden’s alleged loss of acuityJoe Biden’s decline has, on one of America’s longest-running current affairs shows, been labelled the most underreported story of 2024.The designation was made on CBS’s Face The Nation by Jan Crawford, the network’s chief legal correspondent, after the show’s moderator, Major Garrett, asked reporters in a panel discussion to identify the most undercovered issues in a review of the year’s events. Continue reading...

Company that has agreed to buy the Observer reports a pre-tax loss of £3.8m for 2023 after shedding some rolesTortoise Media, which has agreed to buy the Observer newspaper, has reported a smaller annual loss after reducing spending and cutting some staff.The podcast, newsletters and live events company reported a loss before tax of £3.8m for 2023, down from the previous year’s loss of £4.6m. Turnover fell slightly to £6m, down from £6.2m, amid “consumer and corporate hesitancy”, according to accounts filed with Companies House. Continue reading...

The US is in urgent need of well-funded, truly independent journalism in 2025. Please make a gift to the Guardian now to help reach our year-end fundraising goal.As a media critic and longtime journalist, I have serious worries about today’s news environment and its effect on democracy.I’m concerned about corporate or chain ownership of news outlets that can skew the decision-making and priorities of media leaders. The bottom line seems to loom larger, at times, than tried-and-true journalistic standards do.If you are able, please support the Guardian before our year-end fundraising deadline. Thank you for helping protect the free press. Continue reading...