Margaret Heffernan

Last July I argued that Rupert Murdoch was guilty of willful blindness in his failure to see how pervasive phone hacking had become in his organisation, in his refusal to investigate it and his refusal to acknowledge what other people found. Now, it appears, the Culture Committee agrees with me.

Every time I go to a conference about creativity and innovation, I'm struck by just how uncreative and dull they are: hideous bland venues that are too big and lack emotion house stale formats and dreary presentation. So setting a digital media conference inside Bath's Assembly Rooms was clearly something...

When I moved to the US in the 1990s, one of my first and best discoveries was Eileen Fisher. I'd never encountered the brand before so I was delighted by beautifully simple clothes, elegant, made from gorgeous fabrics, that all mixed and matched with each other and, apparently, with just...

Many, many years ago, I produced David Starkey's first film for the BBC. A short film about my favourite Tudor, Henry VII, it wasn't Starkey's TV debut - he'd already appeared, clad in leathers riding a motorbike on Channel 4 - but he was still a media neophyte and still,...

In the select committee today, Adrian Sanders asked the Murdochs if they were familiar with the term 'wilful blindness'. The silence was stunning and said everything.

After every institutional debacle, the arguments are the same: it was just a few bad apples. Nobody at the top is to blame. A...

Why isn't the banking crisis as profound an outrage as the phone hacking scandal?

I appreciate that everyone has phones and therefore can understand how obnoxious phone hacking is. Like everyone else I share the revulsion that followed the revelation that Milly Dowler's phone had been hacked. And yes I'm...

Why did it take Rebekah Brooks so long to resign? Did she want to stay or did Murdoch want to keep her? We may never know. But the whole saga looks to me like a bad case of gatecrasher syndrome.

Gatecrasher syndrome afflicts members of minorities who enjoy rapid...

David Cameron has acknowledged the press needs better oversight - but this isn't news. When the public was being abused by hacking journalists, what was the PCC doing? Nothing - because it has never actively looked after the interests of the public. That's not what it was set...

After every institutional debacle, the arguments are the same: it was just a few bad apples. Nobody at the top is to blame. Rogue employees just went off piste.

That argument was wrong in Abu Ghraib, in Enron, WorldCom, Countrywide, HBOS and it's wrong today at News International. The phone...