You might think that Paul Dacre would be susceptible to delusions of grandeur. After all, his brilliantly crafted Daily Mail is feared by public figures of every kind, his front pages can wreck government policies, and his carefully chosen, hard-fought campaigns almost invariably get what they demand.

But no, he sees himself as a victim. In his own eyes he is leading a desperate rearguard defence of the values [...]

You may have missed it: at the High Court in London on 15 October, Express Newspapers agreed to pay £375,000 in libel damages to the so-called "Tapas Seven", the friends of Kate and Gerry McCann who were with the couple in Portugal when Madeleine McCann disappeared.

This development did not receive much coverage. There were three sentences in the Sun on page 21, for example, and just a little more [...]

If ever you wanted proof that the news you read arrives through a white filter - that it is selected, reported, edited and interpreted by groups of people that are overwhelmingly white - then the coverage of the departure of Sir Ian Blair from the Metropolitan Police Service provided it.

Let us set aside the Daily Mail (though in a sense it set itself aside by an eccentric insistence that [...]

Before the shock of the financial crisis wears off, parliament should take a small share of the public cash being showered on the banks to fund a monument to September 2008. It should be prominent - overlooking the M1, perhaps - and it should declare, in giant letters, "The Market Must Never Be Master".

This ought to be unnecessary given the current horrors. But we are forgetful creatures and prone [...]

I am teaching some journalism history this term (an enterprise made much more practical and enjoyable by the arrival of the first digitised, online newspaper archives), and inevitably I have been viewing the present state of the trade in a different light.

Probably most humbling are the constant, gloomy reminders that the people who write the words have always lived in the shadow of technology. When the Times introduced steam [...]

You might have read about the Newseum, the $450m (£251m) museum dedicated to news and journalism that opened in Washington, DC this spring. Well, a chap from the New York Times paid a visit and asked at the front desk where he would find exhibits on copy editing - or sub-editing, as it is known on this side of the Atlantic. After a little discussion he was referred to the [...]

Poor Michael Fish: the amiable chap in tweed who was already the author of the country's most notorious weather forecasting cock-up has been at it again.

As August ended, the Daily Mail commissioned him to write a piece putting our dreary summer in perspective, and he did it in bracing style. Stop your moaning, he wrote, because the weather had been no worse than we should expect. Perhaps it had [...]

In normal circumstances, there are few sins that the right-wing papers are not happy to pin on Sir Ian Blair. The commissioner of the Metropolitan Police usually appears in their pages as politically correct, accident-prone, a Labour crony, incompetent, obsessed with minorities, outspoken on the wrong subjects and fundamentally not a "copper's copper" of the kind they claim to prefer.

Yet when it came to the choice between Blair and [...]

As I flicked back through my notebook, my eye fell on the words "TORIES IN TURMOIL". The Daily Mirror, Guardian and Daily Telegraph were all saying it. Reading on, I saw it was mid-June, just after David Davis resigned his seat. Remember that? Well, the Tories survived their supposed turmoil without so much as breaking sweat, and the headlines, viewed from a distance of a mere three months, now look [...]

Among the many consequences of Barry George's acquittal, there is one that has been neglected: this remarkable event poses a direct challenge to the government's policy of refusing to enforce the law of contempt of court. More, there are strong grounds to believe that, unless there is a change in that policy, more people will end up in jail as a result of unsafe verdicts. Ministers will try to duck [...]