The chief executive of the Guardian Media Group (GMG) has quit just 15 months into the job and less than two months after its owner announced plans for a structural overhaul to shift the way the organisation is run.
Annette Thomas will leave the company this month and will be replaced by financial and operating officer Keith Underwood on an interim basis.
GMG is owned by the Scott Trust, the £1 billion endowment fund set up to bankroll the news organisation.
Annette Thomas will leave the Guardian Media Group this month (GMG/PA)
A recent report in the Daily Telegraph suggested tensions between Ms Thomas and Guardian editor Kath Viner have risen over the direction of the publication and the power structure within the business.
Politicians and the press: Ten years after Leveson we investigate whether they are still too close
Ten years since the Leveson Inquiry uncovered some rather cosy texts between David Cameron and the chief executive of arguably the country’s most powerful news publisher, the question of whether the press and politicians are “too close” remains a thorny one.
The former prime minister’s leaked messages to Rebekah Brooks, who continues to head up Rupert Murdoch’s UK news business, revealed an apparently close friendship, but when it comes to the relationship between senior politicians and journalists, has much changed?
When Leveson published his report in 2012, he said that for 30 years or more politicians “have had or developed too close a relationship with the press in a way which has not been in the public interest”, although he added that “close relationships, including personal friendships” were “not in themselves any cause for surprise or concern”.
Last modified on Thu 6 May 2021 03.37 EDT
Fifty years ago, as the Guardian marked its 150th birthday, the then editor, Alastair Hetherington, reflected on the changes he had seen since he joined the paper 21 years earlier. Intriguingly, he singled out social forces striving to upset “racial harmony”, and promised resistance.
But in the same 1971 edition, a gallery of images of the senior staff showed how far the paper had to go. All men. All white. In its first 150 years, the number of journalists of colour employed by the paper could be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Unsurprisingly for a 200-year-old institution, the Guardian has not always got it right in terms of race coverage. An early article from 1823 regretted the “cruelty and injustice of negro slavery”, but also noted that “amongst all the obvious disadvantages of slave labour, there is none more striking than its tendency to deteriorate the soil”. That set the tone for decades of coverage that often fail
April 29,2021
Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Media Lens Long before ‘the propaganda model’ flew off Edward Herman’s keyboard and into ‘Manufacturing Consent’, the book he co-authored with Noam Chomsky, Leo Tolstoy had captured the essence of non-conspiratorial conformity:
‘One man does not assert the truth which he knows, because he feels himself bound to the people with whom he is engaged; another, because the truth might deprive him of the profitable position by which he maintains his family; a third, because he desires to attain reputation and authority, and then use them in the service of mankind; a fourth, because he does not wish to destroy old sacred traditions; a fifth, because he has no desire to offend people; a sixth, because the expression of the truth would arouse persecution, and disturb the excellent social activity to which he has devoted himself.’ (Tolstoy, ‘What Then Must We Do?’, Green Classics, 199
Spiked cartoon that sparked censorship row between Guardian editor and cartoonist Steve Bell was ill-judged , says readers editor
A cartoon by the Guardian’s Steve Bell which was spiked because it “conjured up an image of the Holocaust” has been described as a “clanger” and “insensitively and counter productively ill-judged”.
The verdict from Guardian readers’ editor Paul Chadwick comes two weeks after the cartoon was leaked online amid a public row between Bell and the newspaper in which he claimed he had been “censored”.
Bell also said Guardian editor Kath Viner had set an “unfortunate precedent” by not publishing the image.