Scab editor coming to town

bristol | media and culture | news report Monday October 18, 2010 18:42 by Scargill is innocent

"Who can you trust in this age of blogs, tweets and high speed broadband?" Not Roy Greenslade that's for sure

The Bristol Festival of Ideas and the NUJ have invited Roy Greenslade - now known in establishment circles as Professor Greenslade, an expert in journalism- as the keynote speaker on the subject of "Is blogging journalism? And who can you believe in this age of blogs, tweets and pay walls?"

The short answer is that you can't believe Greenslade.

Greenslade - now reinvented as a media expert at the Guardian - was a key Robert Maxwell lieutenant in the early nineties who edited the Daily Mirror and deliberately published a series of security services-inspired smears about Arthur Scargill.

He later apologised for this and admitted he had published lies but not before the damage was done.

The full story is available in Seaumas Milne's 'The Enemy Within - The Secret War Against the Miners'.

Greenslade is coming to Bristol to discuss journalistic ethics. Tickets are priced at £7.

http://www.ideasfestival.co.uk/?p=522
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Enemy-within-Thatchers-Secret-A...75084

"Seumas Milne revealed for the first time the astonishing lengths to which the government and its intelligence machine were prepared to go to destry the power of Britain's miners' union. Using phoney bank deposits, staged cash drops, forged documents, agents provocateurs and unrelenting surveillance, MI5 and police Special Branch set out to discredit Scargill and other miners' leaders. Planted tales of corruption were seized on by the media and both Tory and Labour politicians in what became an unprecedentedly savage smear campaign. In this new edition, published for the twentieth anniversary of Britain's most important postwar social confrontation, new material brings the story up to date - and, in the wake of the Iraq war intelligence scandals, highlights the continuing threat posed by the security services to democracy today."