Gary Younge: Dog bites man *is* the story after all

Media Confidential

Journalists are often taught that “when a dog bites a man, that is not news; when a man bites a dog, that is news.” But, according to former Guardian journalist and professor of sociology at Manchester university Gary Younge, sometimes events are newsworthy because they happen often—journalists just need to get curious about the reasons why. For example, after the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a US justice department report revealed that every time a police dog bit someone in the city of Ferguson, the victim was black. Perhaps dog bites man is the story after all.

This week Alan and Lionel speak to Gary, who recently gave the inaugural Rosemary Hollis Memorial Lecture, about the lack of diversity in both race and class within the journalism industry. Broadsheets, he says, are the “internal memos of the upper class”. So, what can be done to open the field and make the industry more inclusive?

Journalist and writer Simon Nixon also joins Alan and Lionel to discuss the latest twists and turns in the story about who will buy the Telegraph, as Jeff Zucker and Andrew Neil get involved in a war of words about the control of the newspaper empire.

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