Expect fireworks next Tuesday during a panel discussion at City, University of London when four people debate whether campus campaigns against the sale of the Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Express are justified.
On the panel will be Neil Wallis, the former deputy editor of the News of the World who spent five years as editor of the Sunday People; Tom Slater, deputy editor of Spiked Online; Liz Gerard, the former Times night editor who runs the excellent SubScribe blog; and Miqdaad Versi, assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain. It will be chaired by a City, University of London student, Ghazzala Zubair.
In November last year, members of City’s student union voted to ban the three papers from the campus. They argued that the papers had run Islamophobic stories and also “actively scapegoat the working classes they so proudly claim to represent”.
They further claimed that “freedom of speech should not be used as an excuse to attack the weakest and poorest members of society” and that the titles publish stories that are “inherently sexist”.
Fewer than 200 of the university’s 19,500 student population attended the meeting, which has since been opposed by a large group of students studying journalism at the university.
So the debate could get quite heated. It’s part of the university’s journalism futures series of events, and will take place in the Oliver Thompson lecture theatre on 24 January, starting at 6.30pm.
It’s free to get in and there will be networking drinks afterwards. To book a place, go here.