So TV debates will be a ratings disaster. Broadcasters will have to live with that

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/01/peter-preston-tv-debates-broadcasters-ratings

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Everyone except the Northern Irish, it seems, will be welcome at two out of three TV election debates. David Cameron, having insisted on Green inclusion, will be part of the crowd. The broadcasters, toiling away, have reconfigured – and, in doing so, demolished the whole 2010 three-handed structure. It’s gone. Turns at the lectern now depend on the possibility of a party leader holding part-power after an election. They are there to tell viewers what they believe in, what a coalition including them might do. No reason not to have the DUP and Sinn Fein, then, if Plaid Cymru and the Greens are already on board. More insights, more information.

But it’ll be chaotic, a ratings disaster, wail the broadcasters. Possibly so; indeed, inevitably so if an eight- or nine-ring circus is shovelled into 90 minutes. Why 90? Because that’s 2010 all over again. Try three hours instead, and stow away the lecterns. Break an evening down into mini-debates on specific topics. Put participants on the spot. It may appear pretty wearisome television and a ratings disaster. But it’s public service in a democracy.

The Tudors had no monopoly on cruelty and greed

After Wolf Hall, what? Or rather, whom? In his essay in the new book 10 years of FOI: freedom fighting or lazy journalism?, a survey of freedom of information in Britain and the world published by Abramis, Barry Turner from Lincoln University has a scintillating suggestion. Call Sir Francis Walsingham “super-efficient spymaster to the court of Elizabeth I”, who memorably wallowed in “subversion, cruelty, greed, disloyalty and deception”, and laid the foundations of a secret state that seem to endure to this day. The new book (with a foreword by me) launches at the City University on 4 September, but the theme, and the paranoia hidden behind it, is as old as a Tudor tale bathed in blood.

Louis Heren, man of his Times

It was, in a way, like wandering around a graveyard reading the stones. For there – In Memoriam – on the births,marriages and deaths page of the Times were a simple few words of type remembering Louis Heren, foreign correspondent and then deputy editor of the paper, dead just 20 years. He joined as a copy messenger when he was 14. He covered Indian independence. He reported from Beirut, Jerusalem, Seoul, Cairo, Germany and, most triumphantly of all, Washington DC. He moved between crises, not between employees. And the memoriam box ended with words that, for good or ill, define a bygone era of journalism. “I loved my paper as a soldier loves his regiment.”