Earlier this week, the New York Times introduced social media guidelines for its journalists. The rules were designed to ensure the paper’s ‘reputation for neutrality’ isn’t damaged by anything its writers might say on Twitter. Is it time for the Economist to do the same? Mr S. only asks because one of the magazine’s Brexit-bashing writers appears to have taken it upon himself to launch his own pro-EU political party overnight. Jeremy Cliffe, the Economist’s Berlin Bureau chief, tweeted late last night to say he was considering balancing his day job with a new foray into politics:
The result was ‘The Radicals’, a party with the electorally questionable commitments to ditch the immigration cap, share Trident with Germany, stay in the single market – and make Manchester Britain’s capital city.
Alas, it wasn’t to be. Just 12 hours after it was launched, the party has already lost its leader, with Cliffe having apparently come to the realisation that leading a political movement might not be compatible with his day job as a journalist:
Coincidentally, two of this week’s big new dramas began with a fourth wall-busting declaration of their narrative methods. At the start of Towards Zero, BBC1’s latest Agatha Christie adaptation, a man we later discovered to be a lawyer addressed the camera. ‘I like a good detective story,’ he told us. ‘But they begin in the
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