Review Breaking news: The remaking of journalism and why it matters now (a review)
Is it Trump and ‘fake news’? Is it the huge changes in journalism and how we receive and process news from around the world? Is it the way that journalism uses language that needs to be studied and understood as part of specialist language programmes? Maybe all of these, but a rash of books on journalism and journalistic language has appeared over the last year or so, some of which have been reviewed in these pages. All have been by eminent journalists, but Alan Rusbridger is especially so. As editor in chief of the British national newspaper, the Guardian, for twenty years from 1995-2015 he was in some respects the guardian of the nation’s morals, campaigning for rights and ‘speaking truth to power’. If one of the jobs of the press is to publish what power wants to keep hidden the Guardian was one of the trailblazers.