It can be hard to understand Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s seemingly delusional rantings. But this is a leader who has sought to turn Libya into a “jamahiriya” – his vision of a state of the masses. During my time covering the North Africa for the BBC in the early 1990s, I visited Libya a couple of times. One of my TV reports from the time sought to explore how Gaddafi was trying

With Libya in the news, I thought I would share this piece I did for BBC News in 1995 about the Libyan economy. As the BBC correspondent in the region, I visited Libya twice and interviewed Gaddafi during one of these trips. It was, by far, the strangest interview I have ever done. We were on standby all day until the call came late in the evening that Gaddafi was

The UK TV network, Channel 4, has a comedy show starting on January 20 that takes a satirical look at the news. 10 O’Clock Live is described as “an intelligent, informative and – more importantly – funny take on the world of current affairs with a mix of debates, interviews, topical comedy, investigations and opinion pieces.” The line-up of hosts is impressive: Charlie Brooker, Jimmy Carr, Lauren Laverne and David Mitchell.

There is a wealth of material on the present and future of the news media in a report, Brave News Worlds: Navigating the New Media Landscape (PDF), published last week by the International Press Institute (IPI). The 152-page report brings together 42 essays were written by news executives, digital thinkers and educators from across the world. My attention was drawn to a provocatively entitled entry, The Future of TV News Belongs, in Part,

The state of the media in the US was the focus of one of the panels at the AEJMC annual conference. Bob Papper of Hofstra University reported on the state of TV news in the US from a survey of local TV stations. His message was that things aren’t as bad as they seem. TV news was still making money, though there has been a slight decline in revenue, coupled with

In a telephone call on Monday evening, a reporter for The Globe and Mail asked me if I was surprised that Sunday’s Canada-U.S. hockey game had become most-watched sports program in Canadian history. According to Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium, an average audience of 10.6 million viewers watched the Olympic showdown, beating the 2002 Salt Lake City Canada-U.S. gold-medal game’s 10.3 million viewers. The figures are not surprising, despite the

Charlie Brooker dissects the language of the TV news report. So true, it hurts

Like countless others, I watched at least some of the webcast on YouTube of the U2 concert at the Rose Bowl. It made me think of the only time I have seen U2 play live, more than 20 years ago at the Milton Keynes Bowl in Britain. Back then, to reach a global audience of millions would have required the collaboration of national TV networks.  Today, all you need is

The graph above says it all – more people in the US get their news from the internet than from print. The survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that TV remains the most cited sources for both national and international news. But for the first time, more people say they turn to the net than newspapers for news. The picture changes as the

The BBC’s User Experience & Design team is sharing its findings into how people are consuming media. But rather than publish a long report, it offers a visual representation in this infographic: The aim of the project was to understand how people are using media. Among the things that emerged was that a lot of people feel overwhelmed at the amount of choice there is and how  people mixed and