Articles By NICK COHEN
May 2013
British television editors still live in the 1980s, where the world of Netflix and iTunes is a distant dream
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April 2013
Mayday showed the originality so often lacking in management-led and prescriptive British television
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April 2013
So-called liberals prefer to turn a blind eye to the treatment of women by jihadists and support the enemies of America
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March 2013
Middlebrow TV drama like Death in Paradise is what tired viewers want and British writers do best
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January/February 2013
In broadcasting, as in literature, cynical writers devoid of self-belief are doomed to fail
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December 2012
Hounded out of her native Norway by radical Islamists, Deeyah tells stories the leftist media dare not
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November 2012
The BBC's managers thought they could kill the Savile sex abuse story. Now it is coming back to haunt them
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November 2012
Salman Rushdie's account of the life under a fatwa highlights the moral cowardice of establishment figures of the Left and the Right
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October 2012
Tom Holland's film on the origins of Islam deserves praise for not shying away from controversy
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September 2012
The Thick Of It wasn't daring. Its supposedly iconoclastic writer was just mooing with the herd
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July/August 2012
The BBC's suffocating conformism, petty prohibitions and woozy moralism are the enemy of creativity
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July/August 2012
The censorious among us can seize on vast amounts of online evidence and use it to ruin the lives of citizens at random
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June 2012
With extraordinary credulity the great and the good fell for far-left lies about Serbian atrocities
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May 2012
Strangely, it is easier to write a state-of-the-nation drama if you set it in the past
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April 2012
With the tabloids’ public interest defence in tatters, the BBC should beware falling into the same trap
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April 2012
Anti-Semitism has never been confined to the Right. Its latest manifestation is the left-wing campaign to undermine Israel
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March 2012
Politics is great drama, as Borgen, a fine Danish series, shows. So why do British scriptwriters ignore it?
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January/February 2012
The stars have been axed because they tried to push their show an inch upmarket
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January/February 2012
Western liberals are happy to speak truth to power—when they are sure they won't be thrown in prison or the subject of a fatwa
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December 2011
Julian Fellowes’s Downton Abbey epitomises the worst features of the culture he claims to challenge
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December 2011
Millions think next year’s London mayoral election is between an amiable Bertie Wooster and a Cockney cheeky chappie. Don’t you believe it
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November 2011
The boom years lasted so long that writers and artists lost their nose for trouble
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October 2011
Simplistic and divisive, the media response to the riots was utterly predictable
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September 2011
The odd script may show promise but TV executives are stifling British dramatists
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July/August 2011
BBC 4 failed to deal impartially with Amnesty International’s shameful loss of impartiality
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July/August 2011
For all the Arts community's grandstanding about its political value, none of its number was brave enough to protest the late, great M.F. Husain's plight
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June 2011
The sycophantic coverage of the royal wedding sidestepped the essential debate on the monarchy
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May 2011
British TV producers love the ethnic minorities but don't give them any work
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April 2011
Ignoring the silenced millions, Western journalists got the Middle East all wrong
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March 2011
British crime drama should emulate a Danish series as good as anything from America
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January/February 2011
American TV dramas are often realistic and authentic, unlike their British counterparts
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January/February 2011
India's greatest living artist has been forced out of his home country by Hindu sectarian extremists
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December 2010
The BBC correspondent may have launched ‘emotional journalism’ but he has returned to reportage
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November 2010
Only in Britain could a TV company get away with a drama that looks so lovingly at the past
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October 2010
French TV may be dull, but it is unashamedly highbrow. Not so British broadcasting
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September 2010
The BBC doesn’t know how to recognise a good series like Sherlock any more
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September 2010
They swoon at the feet of Tariq Ramadan and pour scorn on those who question his motives, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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July/August 2010
They were all members of an obscure outpost of the hard Left. Now they're on The Moral Maze
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June 2010
The scrum on College Green, showed that compared to Murdoch, the BBC isn't so bad
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June 2010
Don’t be fooled by the Lib Dems’ moderate image. Nick Clegg’s party harbours some highly illiberal people
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May 2010
The BBC wilfully ignored Corin Redgrave’s paranoid politics and his evil friends
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May 2010
This election will go down as a dishonest campaign: none of the parties came clean with the voters about the economy
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April 2010
BBC Radio 5 Live's commentators aren't afraid to tell the truth about how tedious sport can be
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March 2010
The BBC and the rest of the media elite will never forgive Blair for betraying them
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March 2010
European liberalism has gone badly wrong. Why does a culture that prides itself on opposition to bigotry become so feeble when confronted by reactionary clerics?
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January/February 2010
Watching the latest batch of spy thrillers, you'd never guess who the real enemy was
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January/February 2010
As anti-Thatcher literature blossomed in the 1980s, it was tempting to argue that the Right had won the economic war and the Left had won the cultural war. But the real victors of the past 30 years are blaring populists, ignorant and proud of it.
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December 2009
The BBC has created an admirable series about a pioneering barrister — Garrow's Law
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December 2009
We imagine that the web is a forum for uncensored thought. We couldn't be more wrong
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November 2009
Derek Pasquill, the Foreign Office whistleblower who leaked documents on its collusion with Islamists, now faces ruin
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November 2009
The BBC's adaptation of Emma might promote sexual chemistry but it lacks all tension
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October 2009
Ant and Dec rigged their game shows, but the fans have left them off the hook
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October 2009
Britain's arcane and illogical libel laws, litigious oligarchs and oil sheikhs have made it almost impossible to report the truth
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September 2009
Is the BBC trying to appeal to the same audience that watches internet porn?
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September 2009
Liberals and feminists do not consider the oppression of women a pressing concern when done in the name of culture or religion
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July/August 2009
Nick Cohen: Crisis and scandal have confirmed voters’ suspicions about their rulers. We are witnessing a taxpayers’ revolt
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July/August 2009
TV’s property queen was ridiculed, but she was only talking to her audience without humbug
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June 2009
When newspapers go under, the independence of the BBC will follow
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June 2009
They know who really killed JFK and Diana — many of us believe them. Who are these peddlers of paranoia? asks Nick Cohen
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May 2009
The Prime Minister has surrounded himself with attack dogs who undermine rival politicians and critical journalists
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May 2009
The people behind BBC's Horizon abandon scientific discovery for cheap - and inaccurate - thrills
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April 2009
TV journalists should start to worry. Their fate may be as grim as that of the press
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March 2009
Documentaries now focus on the emotions of the presenter. There's nothing good to be said for this
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February 2009
The Islam Channel employs a ‘‘rapid rebuttal service’’ run by top libel lawyers. Why?
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January 2009
The Devil's Whore fails to acknowledge the role of religious passions in the Civil War
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December 2008
Little Dorrit's uncanny similarities to today's financial crisis makes it more suitable for adaptation than much of modern literature
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November 2008
Far from revealing what has gone wrong with American politics, Simon Schama's new series shows what has gone wrong with British television
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October 2008
With audiences turning to the online world, television is caught in a deadly web
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August 2008
The London Bombers was a major drama-documentary about 7/7 of which the BBC should have been proud
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July 2008
Channel 4 News's anchorman has to disguise his political bias as neutrality, a pretence that is both insidious and unmanly
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June 2008
Thatcherism provoked great TV but the makers of Headcases are too liberal, too condescending and not nearly angry enough
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About NICK COHEN
Nick Cohen is a columnist for the Observer and author of You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (Fourth Estate).
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