Fair warning to my followers. Over the next 4 days I’m going to be live-tweeting from @BylineFest, with coverage of sessions, the bad press awards and more. It’ll be about journalism, politics and how to navigate our collective way out of the current mess… #bylinefest
@BylineFest … if that’s your thing, great - do follow along :)
If not, you might want to temporarily mute me, or mute the hashtag #bylinefest that I’ll tag all my tweets with
But hopefully you’ll want to follow along and get a flavour of the UK’s biggest festival of journalism
@BylineFest …Look at sessions on the festival website bylinefestival.com/friday/ and let me know any you’d really like me to cover - perhaps I can take you there virtually.
I’ll kick off from about 2pm tomorrow. Wish me luck with the toilets, the phone signal, and battery life!
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Anyone who works at the Home Office, in any role: at some point, just saying you were only doing your job and following orders is going to no longer be an acceptable defence. Stop enabling these wrongs, and stand up for what is right, before it is too late
History shows us there will be a public enquiry into the hostile environment policy, and these kinds of actions. It may be in 10 years or so, but it will happen. Do you really want to be waiting to be summoned to account for what you did or didn’t do? What you saw and heard?
Picture yourself walking into the court past the press (who are by now of course ‘shocked’ by what is emerging about the HO), your evidence televised live and recorded for the history books.
“I honestly didn’t know it meant they’d stop a 6 year old from being with his mother”
Next up at the @BylineFest is @GaryLineker, someone who has chosen to use his position and celebrity to engage positively in public discourse and faced the wrath of the Press. He’s being interviewed by @thelisamaxwell #BylineFest
First up, how does he respond to people who criticise him using his social media platform to share his views and discuss politics. People who tell him to shut up and stick to football.
He says, I’d say they’re probably right, for all the grief it gives me... #BylineFest
... but in reality, why should I have less opportunity to talk about what I think than the people who raise that criticism. I have these views on political and humanitarian issues and it’s part of who I am, and I don’t just want to be boring like sportspeople who plug their book
He says politicians are talking about an outcome of this being taxing tech companies and using the money to fund journalism...
But this raises the question of what journalism is, in terms of who should get the money.
The government tends to define it as ‘The Press’. So they’re talking about taking money from Google and giving it to the Daily Mail. That’s not going to improve journalism.
The discussion is started by @BrianCathcart a journalist turned academic. He says that the media has always liked to create monsters. It helps to sell papers to stoke a fear of ‘other’.
Next @richpeppiatt a former tabloid journalist says that essentially your job as a journo at a tabloid is to deliver the story you are told. He tells of one colleague who said she didn’t want to do Muslim-bashing stories, so the editor gave her more every day for weeks.
Carole talks about the resistance of the big SV companies to any real transparency or accountability. One of her Guardian colleagues ran a story about Facebook data a long while ago, but Facebook wouldn’t respond, when Carole started with story got the same brick wall...
She says it was only when @chrisinsilico came out as a whistleblower with hard evidence for the public to see that Facebook finally addressed the problem. They have no interest in public scrutiny until there’s a threat of bad PR.
Damian is chair of House of Commons Select Committee for culture Media and also sport, which conducted investigation into ‘fake news’ which followed evidential trail that broadened the remit... #BylineFest
That investigation ended up looking into Brexit and the Cambridge Analytica law breaking, and produced a comprehensive and extensive report.
Damian starts by speaking a little about his work with the enquiry...
He says that what he started looking at was content hosted by tech companies that was intended to mislead. It wasn’t just fun or silly stuff like jokes about Trump, it was completely false stuff like the bodies of white women being found with ‘black lives matter’ carved in flesh