Charles Thomson

Newsquest Crime & Investigations (Essex) — 4x Weekly Reporter of the Year — 2x Crime & Investigative Reporter of the Year

[Charles Thomson @CEThomson]

'Amazing'
'Disturbing'
'Astonishing'
'Shocking'
'Like a real life Line of Duty'

The reviews are in. All episodes are out.

A true crime podcast tells how a local newspaper unearthed a shocking paedophile ring cover-up.

Unfinished: Shoebury's Lost Boys - https://t.co/JK1gYXAV2x

[Charlie Moloney @CharlieMoloney]

This is a classic case of seeing prominent media personalities as “the media”.

This post suggests grooming gangs were “airbrushed”.

Yet it was the mainstream media which actually exposed the scandal in the Times.

Blue ticks just dine on the spadework done by real journalists

[Dylan Byers @DylanByers]

New statement from Scott Pelley:

There has never been anything in America like 60 Minutes.

The Sunday tradition is the most successful program of any kind in history. For more than a decade, its innovative growth on every major online platform has extended its reach to countless millions around the world. This spring, at the end of our 58thseason, 60 Minutes grew rapidly with an unheard-of 9% jump in viewers on CBS.

“60” has been the number-one program in America for decades because our beloved audience finds integrity, quality, and humanity in our stories. When stewardship of the program passed to my colleagues and me, our responsibility was to expand energetically into a new age of media technology while preserving the values our audience expects. Now, the new owner of our network is casting this legend aside, apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.

The waste is heartbreaking.

Last month, 60 Minutes lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause. Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos.

For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them. Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over 60 Minutes interviews is not how this is done. Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.

At 60 Minutes, we have fought harder than anyone knows to save the program that became an American icon. We owed that to our millions of viewers. I am deeply moved by the thousands of wishes we have received to “keep up the good fight.” Most of the men and women of CBS News are still in that fight. But now the collapse of values at the top has become untenable. The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well.

I depart after 37 years at CBS with one emotion—a heart brimming with gratitude for the men and women of CBS News who encouraged and enriched my work, very often at the risk of their own lives. I pray for a day when those people and their ideals are honored again—a day when sanity, competence, and courage return.

Scott Pelley

[Michael Crick @MichaelLCrick]

Michael Grade was once a great TV executive, but he's no longer fit to hold public office. Under his watch Ofcom have become one of the weakest institutions in the British state. A complete joke.

[Alex Prompter @alex_prompter]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

[Joanna Hardy-Susskind @Joanna__Hardy]

On the saga of jury trials, @AndyBurnhamGM says out loud what everyone is thinking.

He calls for a pause on the deeply unpopular plan to restrict juries, and for reflection on a way forward for our broken system that attracts wider consensus.

Grown up. Sensible. Unarguable.

[Richard Sanders @PulaRJS]

Reform is proposing the deportation of 2 million people - including people legally here.

"Politically it feels quite clever doesn't it," says Trevor Phillips, and leads a discussion that revolves entirely around whether it is affordable and practical.

These are people who sweep our streets, look after disabled people, keep the care sector functioning. People who work incredibly hard and are invariably very badly paid. People who have families, lives, hopes, dreams. Without whom the economy simply wouldn't function.

This country has arrived at an appalling place.

[Charlie Moloney @CharlieMoloney]

Something this Southampton CC case demonstrates crystal clear is how important having journalists in court is re scrutinising the CJS.

The CPS press release (naturally) does not include any of the judge's sentencing remarks.

Press release-based court coverage is not sufficient.

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

This is an official government account in a democracy.

This is what Orbanism looks like. The president bragging, via AI video, that he forced a comedian who mocked him off the air and ‘into the trash’.

[Joanna Hardy-Susskind @Joanna__Hardy]

I really hate to be the one to break this news to you but your proposed jury trial reforms (making Recorders & Circuit Judges decide some verdicts, exposing them to online and media vitriol) will likely reduce the pool and depth of talent applying to be a Recorder or Judge.

[ALASTAIR CAMPBELL @campbellclaret]

Imagine if a candidate of any other party was found to have deleted an account with so many disgustingly offensive posts. I suspect we will hear very little of this as the Double Standards Squad continue to ply their trade to the benefit of the 5 million pound man

[Ed Newton-Rex @ednewtonrex]

Scraping websites and having AI summarize them, so that no one visits the websites, is theft.

Training AI on videos, so that it can make new videos that compete with them, is theft.

We are witnessing the largest theft of creative work in history.

[John Squires 🎃 @FreddyInSpace]

Well.

Another huge nail in the coffin for websites.

What I want to know is, once all the websites can't afford to keep the lights on, where is the information going to come from?

Google's AI summaries require the constant theft of fresh information written by human beings.

[Joanna Hardy-Susskind @Joanna__Hardy]

I cannot believe - in a crowded field - that the dying vapours of a Starmer leadership are going to be chanced on asking restless backbench MPs to RESTRICT JURY TRIAL for their constituents.

Will those backbench MPs be able to resist giving Lammy and Starmer their true verdict?

[Robin @neocruyffista]

As James Gray’s Paper Tiger is currently in premiere at Cannes, here’s a throwback to this legendary clip. It permanently changed my perspective on the movie industry.

[alan rusbridger @arusbridger]

Ofcom only employs around 1,500 people, so it is to be congratulated for moving so swiftly—a mere six months!—to see that there might have been a problem with allowing a known fantasist to spout nonsensical falsehoods about a number of subjects without correction or interruption. https://t.co/8CXNAdAv7p

[narancia gaming @naranciagaming]

ironically, Orson Welles gave one of the best criticisms against easy to generate ai slop

[Barry Malone @malonebarry]

It’s just gutter racism. That’s what we saw in London today. And, to make a glaringly obvious point, if pro-Palestine protesters had pulled a stunt like this about Judaism the police would storm the stage and Starmer would call a Cobra meeting.

[Parody Nigel Farage @Parody_PM]

Actually, this photo is PROOF that gullible dimwits will believe a Shakira concert in Rio is London and it will be wildly shared and liked because Musk's X is designed to encourage and reward such lies and misinformation.

[JT @Jtaylor0_3]

I’m sorry but if you’re under any impression that AI will uplift your ability to tell stories more than it negates your validity as a filmmaker I’m inclined to never pay attention to you ever again

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

I'm trying to imagine Muslim kids chanting something similar about the Jewish or Christian faiths at a rally in London. The Prevent folks, counter-terrorism police, the entire British media would be all over the story, asking why Muslims are so extreme & brainwashing their kids.