Raymond Snoddy: Perhaps the gung-ho magistrates currently jailing looters for stealing chewing gum should be told to moderate their anger. Quite a number of cells will have to be reserved to accommodate the miscreants of News International…

Raymond Snoddy: NotW rivals have been accused of missing an open goal but in reality salvaging around two million copies in the middle of the summer and in the current competitive climate facing all newspapers is a respectable performance. But it is now clear that Rupert Murdoch made a spectacular misjudgement when he decided to close down the NotW…

Raymond Snoddy: The seven-year Grand Prix deal may be messy and less than ideal but it is the clearest indication so far of what a 20% cut in revenues will mean in reality for the BBC…

Just at the very moment when the official launch of the silly season seemed inevitable, along came the most dreadful atrocity from the most unexpected of all places – Norway. Then Amy Winehouse died. Couldn’t she have waited a couple of days and then she could have been given the full, unambiguous dead tragic star/hero treatment without any Norwegian neo-Nazis getting in the way.

Raymond Snoddy: It was most unfortunate that James Murdoch could not deal adequately with such a tricky question at yesterday’s select committee (a compelling drama that told us almost nothing new in any factual sense but almost everything about the key players involved) because in the mildest of ways it went to the heart of the matter…

Raymond Snoddy: “Rupert Murdoch could say “to hell with it” – though those would not be the actual words used. He could close down Sky News and save the company an immediate £20 million a year. Worse still the entire future of News International could be called into question…”

Raymond Snoddy: It has been a remarkable few days, in which three important instutitions in British society – the press, the police and the Prime Minister – have all been judged and found wanting…

Raymond Snoddy: Things are moving so fast with one journalistic atrocity following another on a daily basis, each worse in some telling aspect than the one that has gone before, that something urgent now has to be done…

As Jeremy Hunt reaches out for the disastrous “bottom-up” solution for local TV, would-be operators at yesterday’s Future of Broadcasting conference had one simple piece of advice – have the courage to stick to the original plan. It is the only one that will work…

Raymond Snoddy: If Lord Patten can handle the sometimes sulphurous politics of a major university, never mind the Tory party, then the manoeuvrings of the BBC are tame by comparison…