The first edition of "Media Law" was published in 1984. This edition will take account of the developments in law relating to government secrecy; the updated official secrets act; forensic secrecy; restrictions on broadcasting; libel law, right of reply; privacy, and so forth.
One topic in this book is a Chapter on Highways. Two of my 5th Great Grandfathers were appointed to serve as 'Surveyors of the Highways' by the Justices of the Peace. I have documents showing Names that were proposed to the Justices of the Peace and other evidence on a List of Names of those who served entitled BROMLEY SURVEYORS OF THE HIGHWAYS 1737-1805. This role of Surveyor is written about in the Chapter on Highways eg. See Page 73 in The Handy Book of Parish Law - the 1859 edition. I would have liked to have found out what this role of Surveyors entailed. It was usual for the Vestry to submit 4 Names to the Justices of the Peace, who chose those who could serve.
This guide explains the mechanism for seeking access to information, the exemptions that, in certain circumstances, permit public authorities to refuse access to information, and the powers of enforcement available under the Act.
"This study examines the use and abuse of rhetoric in English public life from 1790 to the end of the Regency. It begins from the premise that the period's rhetoric can employ reasoned arguments while also exhibiting regressive tendencies not so much supplanting rational discourse as using it in unexpected ways. its underlying premise is that, however distinct were the positions taken by various political constituencies at this time, these positions could be advocated by means of rhetorical techniques common to all. The materialist emphasis of current cultural studies provides a useful corrective to the grand schemas of intellectual history but overcompensates by employing only the most nominal generalizations. While revisionist treatments of the "public sphere" have succeeded in breaking the concept down into divers political constituencies, this study examines assumptions about public discourse shared by these constituencies." "The discipline of rhetoric developing alongside logic since the Reformation was a creature of both instrumental agency and subliminal suggestion, at once tool and medium. The ambivalent associations still surrounding the term "rhetoric" today are the result of this checkered history, a history portraying logic and rhetoric alternately at odds with, and absorbing aspects of, one another until finally settling into occasionally converging paths with rhetoric often on the low road. In the last half of the eighteenth century, two schools of rhetoric, the Elocutionary movement and the New Rhetoricians, began to explore ways of adapting to the theory and practice of rhetoric certain epistemological advances made in empirical philosophy since Locke. An inference of these rhetorical assimilations of empirical psychology is the reduction of truth to an impression. Such latitude as sensationalist thought introduced into rhetorical practice made a very flexible instrument of rhetoric indeed. It rendered hopes expressed by moralists/critics like Samuel Taylor Coleridge - who in his reflections on modern rhetoric speaks of "securing a purity in the principle without mischief from the practice" - all the more quixotic." "A result of this tendency was the systematizing of rhetorical imposture. The techniques of rhetorical imposture in the public life of Romantic England are not reducible to party allegiance or even generic ideological disposition. They may be employed by pragmatists and idealists of either a sentimental or rational nature; any party or ideology may appropriate seemingly characteristic techniques of the other. In its purest (and most insidious) form, this ethos, which is comparable to Machiavellian virtu in its exploitation of contingency, enables the rational manipulation of irrational energies to effect whatever end it happens to be pursuing. Opening chapters examine rhetorical imposture in practical guides to rhetoric, parliamentary speaking, and the queen's trial in 1820. A chapter on William Cobbett - who, developing his polemical techniques in both the ministerial and reform presses, is the exemplary case - traces in his writings the career of reasoned argument along a rhetorically conditioned bias leading at once away from and toward imposture. A final chapter examines how the narratives of several well-known Romantic texts - including Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, William Wordsworth's play The Borderers, William Godwin's Caleb Williams, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and William Blake's prophetic poetry - run along this same bias."--BOOK JACKET.
"As the presidential campaign of 1992 began, the television networks approached it with dread. The media honchos assumed the public had turned off to politics, George Bush was a shoo-in, and they would earn only blame for whatever they did. They became more intent on cutting their costs than in covering the campaign." "Thus, as preparations for the New Hampshire primary began, ABC, the leading news network, decided to assign only one off-air producer to each candidate; the other two broadcast networks were going to do even less. The result of this early decision was that the networks found themselves playing catch-up for much of the unpredictable campaign of 1992. And the candidates found themselves establishing new arenas in which to present themselves to an attentive public. Televised town-hall meetings, appearances on Donahue, Larry King, Arsenio Hall, Good Morning America, and almost every other nontraditional media format became the vehicle for supplying voters with the information the candidates wanted them to have." "No one could have foreseen the shaping of this campaign, but early in 1991, Tom Rosenstiel, award-winning media and politics reporter for the Los Angeles Times, had decided to write Strange Bedfellows, a book that would follow a network for an entire campaign. ABC granted Rosenstiel complete access to their news division, and with this unprecedented access, he shows us how the media shaped and misshaped the improbable campaign of 1992, how the mysterious world of network television news operates, and how the networks are seeing their influence over the news shrivel in the rapidly changing era of New Media." "From behind the camera and inside the editing bays of the nation's most influential network, we follow Peter Jennings, anchor of World News Tonight, and its executive producer, Paul Friedman, as they create and re-create their strategy for coverage of the 1992 presidential campaign. And we witness how after months of miscalculations, pursuit of false issues, and phony muckraking, the network attempted its most serious and substantive coverage ever - with mixed results." "In Strange Bedfellows, Tom Rosenstiel defines the high-tech sophistication that is democratizing the landscape - while also lowering the standards of American journalism. From Bush's facsimile Oval Office secret TV studio to Clinton's Little Rock War Room, we learn how the campaigns worked to control what went out on the airwaves and what that meant to the networks - and to the public. We see in close-up Candidate Perot's reactions to journalistic scrutiny and analyze his real contributions to the campaign of '92." "Rosenstiel challenges the media to take responsibility for their influence in shaping politics - while revealing the decision-making process of the media. Strange Bedfellows breaks important new ground in the literature of American politics."--Jacket.
Media law by Geoffrey Robertson and Andrew Nicol | Literally Just Books
