Chair: Des Freedman

Speakers:  Michelle Stanistreet, Natalie Fenton, Brian Cathcart, Chris Jefferies, Tom Watson MP

 Time:  Tuesday 2 October  6pm-7.15pm

 Venue: Manchester Central Charter 3

 

Michelle Stanistreet is the general secretary of the National Union of Journalists.   She worked as a journalist for ten years at the Sunday Express newspaper as feature writer and books editor. She was NUJ mother of the chapel at Express Newspapers. In 2006 she was elected vice president of the NUJ and in 2007-8 served as the union's President. In April 2011 she became the first woman in the NUJ's history to be elected as general secretary and was the union's first woman deputy general secretary elected in 2008. 

 

Tom Watson is the Labour MP for West Bromwich and Labour Party Deputy Chair and Campaign Coordinator. He gained prominence from his forensic questioning of Rupert Murdoch during the Commons culture committee's hearings on phone hacking. He was elected to Parliament in 2001 and has served as a government whip and defence minister. His book Dial M for Murdoch gives an account of the hacking scandal and the influence of Rupert Murdoch's media empire.

 

Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University London and was a founder of the Hacked Off campaign. He served as specialist adviser to the commons media select committee in 2008-10. He was a journalist at Reuters, the Independent papers and the New Statesman.  His latest book Everybody's Hacked Off is published by Penguin and he has written books about the murders of Stephen Lawrence and Jill Dando.

 

Chris Jefferies is a retired English teacher who was the landlord and neighbour of Joanna Yeates, the Bristol landscape architect whose body was discovered on Christmas Day 2010. He was questioned by the police and arrested on suspicion of murder. In a witness statement at his appearance at the Leveson Inquiry in November, Mr Jefferies told of a "frenzied campaign to blacken his character" by the tabloid press which had "decided he was guilty of the murder". He accepted libel pay outs from eight national newspapers over false claims they made against him. Vincent Tabak was later convicted of Joanna's murder.

 

Natalie Fenton is Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, London University, Her research is concerned with  the role the media play in the formation of identities and democracies and why and how people seek to change the world for socially progressive ends. She is co-director of the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre.

 

Des Freedman, is a reader in Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is an editor of the Sage journal 'Global Media Communication' and was a participant in the 'Spaces of the News' project in the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre. He is a member of the national council of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom and a founder member of the Coordinating Committee for Media Reform.

 

 

 

 

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