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FiveBooks Interviews
Former staff writer for The Washington Post and Pulitzer Prizewinner Lorraine Adams says newspapers are contradictory in that they really don’t know how to deal with anything completely new and are mostly involved in promulgating what is already conventional wisdom. She says the JFK conspiracy theories are based on the television footage, aired a whole decade after the event.
Former journalist John Maxwell Hamilton is Dean and Hopkins P Breazeale Professor at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. In the course of his career Hamilton has had assignments in more than 50 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. He has overseen nuclear non-proliferation issues for the House Foreign Affairs Committee, advised the head of the US aid programme in Asia during the Carter administration, and managed a World Bank public affairs programme to educate Americans about economic development. His most recent book, Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Newsgathering Abroad, won the Goldsmith Prize. Foreign reporting, he says, is much less swashbuckling now and correspondents are on a shorter leash. ‘They used to be left alone to find and write the stories they wanted to write – they were the experts. But now they can be in touch with the editor ten times a day on a big story. There was less tampering with copy in those days. Now the correspondents are less independent and really less colourful generally.’
Tom Chatfield, Prospect arts and books editor and computer games fiend, says computer games aren’t just for teenage boys locked in their bedrooms – they are chewy fodder for the brain and vital tools for both social and intellectual development… and they’re fun. Here are his best five books on computer games and the best five games you could hope to play.
Aleks Krotoski is a broadcaster, journalist, and academic specialising in technology and interactivity. She talks to FiveBooks about the subtle ways in which web-based communication has altered human relations.
Richard Beeston is the former Daily Telegraph correspondent for Beirut, Nairobi, Moscow and Washington. He began his long career working for an Arabic radio station run by MI6 during the Suez War. He has covered the collapse of the Belgian Congo, East Africa’s post-independence struggles, revolutions in the Middle East, the Vietnam War, Watergate and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Since 1990 he’s worked as a freelance writer for The Times, the Daily Telegraph and Saga Magazine.
Deputy-Chair of the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Cambridge, and Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Dr Bennison has published widely on the medieval and early-modern Maghreb. She says that the scientific tradition in the Islamic world underpinned much of the European Renaissance, and that Muslim doctors were appalled by the brutal and primitive medical techniques of the early crusaders. Most Muslim towns had a hospital by the 10th century.
Peter Stothard is the editor of The Times Literary Supplement. He edited The Times for a decade, between 1992 and 2002, and was knighted for services to the newspaper industry in 2003.
Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology, as well as chair of the PhD program in communications at Columbia University. He is the author of 12 books, several of which concern media and culture, and a prominent commentator on the US media. He writes regularly for Dissent, The American Prospect, TPMcafe.com, and opendemocracy.net. He suggests that no successful model for newspapers to make money from the internet exists, and that there is no future for the industry without government support.
Investigative journalist Nick Davies says when he started out reporting PR copy was a real rarity. If you were writing about crime, you’d call the police station and speak to an officer. If you were writing about healthcare you’d probably speak to a doctor. ‘But these days it’s all fenced off, with press officers and press offices, and all your potential sources have been warned not to speak to the filthy hacks.’ He chooses five books on investigative journalism including, of course, All The President’s Men.
Book critic and technology columnist from Time magazine, says there’s a level on which the Internet is a mass tool for pacification. It allows people to play out their lives in a fantasy context, which is very politically unthreatening.