Political Editor Research Articles

How can we maximise operating theatres and reduce waiting lists?

Our Political Editor looks at the ways in which we can tackle the increasing demand on surgery and reduce the increasing waiting lists.

Is the COVID-19 enquiry worth it?

Our Political Editor explores the use of the COVID-19 enquiries and what they will tell us about the pandemic’s effect on waiting times and healthcare delays.

Health inequalities: the unintended consequences of private healthcare policy?

Our Political Editor looks at the disparity in quality of care between private and public-funded healthcare and how this affects patients.

“Solidarity with the Most Oppressed Peoples of the Earth”: The Boston Chronicle and Black Internationalist Print Culture, 1945–60

Abstract This article explores transformations in the Black press during some of the most repressive years of United States and global anticommunism in the 1940s and 1950s. Centering on an examination of the editorial politics of the Boston Chronicle, a daily newspaper founded by Caribbean immigrants in the early twentieth century, it argues that Black leftist internationalism continued to be visible in print despite a repressive political climate shaping the experiences of Black journalists and activists. The Chronicle, a relatively understudied Black newspaper, offers a somewhat different perspective on the evolution of a vibrant, transnational print culture that linked Black freedom struggles in the United States with anticolonial movements in the British Caribbean, Africa, and Latin America. An examination of the Chronicle’s coverage and journalists in a period of deepening anticommunist repression reveals ongoing links between Black activists, anticolonial movements, and the organized left before the 1960s.

Clinicians and politicians: the unusual bedfellows?

Our Political Editor looks at how the relationship between surgical professionals and government officials has evolved throughout the past 75 years, and how the development of the NHS has led to more collaborative working between the two.

Local elections and local health systems

Our Political Editor discusses why it is important to consider voting in your local elections in order to make larger changes and bring in the right initiatives.

Adapting to Twitter: The Entanglement of Journalistic Values and Online Personas

ABSTRACT As more journalists rely on social media platforms like Twitter to gather information and report the news, scholars have identified an increasing tension between traditional journalistic values and reporters’ construction of online personas. Moreover, networked journalists build these mediated personas—following platforms’ affordances—to better engage with fellow journalists and algorithmic audiences. Drawing on data from 15 in-depth interviews with Kosovar Albanian political journalists and editors, this article offers a unique perspective by examining the negotiation process between professional standards and journalists’ online personas on Twitter. Via their online personas, influenced by the audience and the platforms’ affordances and logic, journalists and editors have given rise to new role conceptions and standards in local political journalism. The results show that political journalists and editors in Kosovo view Twitter as a platform where they can display both professional and personal layers of their identity. Furthermore, they feel unrestricted by journalistic standards, taking on roles outside the traditional scope of journalism: as good citizens, they express opinions on political issues; as activists, they advocate for personally meaningful causes; but they also see themselves as mordant critics of political figures.

A political solution to the future workforce?

Our Political Editor discusses how the extended surgical team can help address the issues faced by the NHS and offers a political solution,

Діяльність українських студентських товариств Східної Галичини міжвоєнного періоду (1918–1939 рр.) та їх учасників в еміграції крізь призму аналізу часопису "Український студент"

Background. The studied period for the territory of Eastern Galicia was a time of struggle for self-determination and search for ways to develop Ukrainian education and science. Ukrainian student associations should be active participants in all political, socio-economic and cultural processes of the Eastern Galician lands, especially during the period when these territories were part of the Republic of Poland. Especially today, it is necessary to study the peculiarities of the cooperation of emigrant students with members of Ukrainian societies that remained on Ukrainian territory and to study the experience of students' national and cultural activities. Methods. Reviewing the periodical and taking into account the challenges of the researched period, it was important to adhere to the principle of objectivity, especially when analyzing posts with political content or editors' opinions, to use a number of methods, including general scientific, interdisciplinary and actually historical. Results. The article analyzes the activity of Ukrainian student associations of Eastern Galicia in the interwar period (1918-1939) using the magazine «Ukrainian Student», which was published in Prague by students from Naddniprianshchyna. The journal described a series of events, the research of which helps to assess the contribution of Ukrainian students of Eastern Galicia to national and economic development, the formation of the Ukrainian University, and the cultural, educational and sports life of Ukrainian lands. Based on the analysis of the articles in the magazine, the cooperation of Ukrainian student societies in international affairs and the promotion of the idea for the European community that it is necessary to support the Ukrainian people in their desire to declare independence were investigated. Problems were found that hindered Ukrainian students of Eastern Galicia and their representatives in emigration. These were: lack of funds, lack of housing, persecution by the authorities and many ideological directions. We also see how the intelligentsia cooperated with, helped and supported the Ukrainian students of Eastern Galicia. The article shows the importance of student congresses in the struggle for the creation of the Ukrainian state, as well as for the search for material aid and allies. Conclusion. The important place of Ukrainian student societies of Eastern Galicia in the interwar period (1918-1939) in the national and cultural life of Ukrainians is shown.

Književna kritika Milenka Matickog

The main purpose of this paper is to enlighten literary critical thought and work of Milenko Maticki (1936-2001), a well-known writer for young people, as well as for adults. In the constant touch with literature, and in the capacity of editor of Politics for Children, Maticki based his literary-critical contributions on strict selection and valid aesthetic-artistic criteria, showing his poetic affinities and good knowledge of literary theoretical and methodological parameters, which confirmed his creative agility and presence on the ex-Yugoslav literary scene. The paper shows that the literary criticism of Milenko Maticki, despite its professional quality and undoubted value, stayed in the shadow of his prose for young readers.

Assessing the impact of surgical hubs

Our Political Editor discusses the benefits that surgical hubs have had on patients and the surgical backlog.

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The struggle for authority and legitimacy: Lifestyle and political journalists’ discursive boundary work

Scholarship has pointed to an artificial hierarchy between political and lifestyle journalism that is rooted in norms and values stemming from Western-liberal thought. Within this distinction, lifestyle journalism has been subordinated as occupying a marginal or peripheral position in the field. Yet, how journalists perceive this distinction has rarely been studied empirically. This study draws on concepts of ‘boundary work’ and ‘othering’ to examine how political and lifestyle journalists discursively reinforce and contest boundaries and hierarchies. Through semi-structured interviews with 22 lifestyle and 26 political journalists and editors in South Africa, we show that political and lifestyle journalists engaged in both intra-field (self-)expansion, and (self-)expulsion and (self-)othering, by evoking several boundary markers. Boundaries were reinforced through gendered discourses, autonomy ideals, claims to specialization and accessibility in news beats and presentation, beliefs about political journalism’s preservation of humanity, and greater risks to safety of political journalists. Boundaries were challenged by politicizing lifestyle journalism and popularizing political journalism, providing a counter-narrative to political journalism’s negativity, and treating lifestyle journalism as economically beneficial.

Do good things come to those who wait?

Our political editor looks at the UK government's position on their elective recovery plan.

The Color of Avant-Garde: Kenneth Goldsmith’s “The Body of Michael Brown”

In the following paper, I put forth a claim that literary works created according to the rules of conceptualism, seemingly devoid of expression, often reveal that values are inseparable from any textual operations. This is visible in Kenneth Goldsmith’s recent project, “The Body of Michael Brown,” which follows the format of Goldsmith’s previous book-Seven American Deaths and Disasters-a transcription of news reports of American national disasters, such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy or the attacks of 9/11. The text rewrites the autopsy report issued by the St. Louis County Coroner’s Office on the shooting of Michael Brown, an African-American teenager shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The problem with the new conceptual art practice is that it disregards the ethical dimension of creation. For Goldsmith, ethical issues in art are limited to the question of “faithful” copying/rewriting, regardless of the fact that an appropriated text always reflects editorial manipulation and politics behind it. Goldsmith thinks of himself as a daring disciple of Duchamp, but he fails to understand that his text propagates racist violence, performing anew the autopsy’s latent, institutional racism. In terms of methodology, I rely in my analyses on Marjorie Perloff’s understanding of the concept of avant-garde and refer to the theories about literature and ethics emerging from recent writings by Cathy Park Hong and Jacques Ranciére.

A Linguistic Study of Topicalisation in Selected USA Newspapers: North Korea Nuclear Weapon as a Case Study

This research focuses on surveying Topcalisation phenomenon in political texts, and investigating the utilizations of its types. It aims to inspect Topicalisation in construing various types of constructions in the texts of political discourse and display how this phenomenon can construe non-canonical and complex sentences' structures. To achieve these goals, Verma’s division (1976) of Topicalization types is adopted as a model of analysis. Additionally, Quirk et.al (1985) is adopted as a complementary modal. The data of the present study are 17 selected political editorials that are chosen in a random way from three of the most famous American newspapers: The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. According to Verma’s division, Topicalisaion types are divided into four basic types: passivization, pseudo-cleft, Cleft, and Extraposition. The study hypothesized that: Topicalisation transforms the syntactic construction of simple sentences into complex one, still it is utilized in political editorials in order to grant prominence to specific sentences' items to grab the attention of readers and convince him or her in a specific point of view. Cleft, which offers a highly levels of flexibility by drawing two or more sentences from a simple ones, is utilized heavily in political editorials. From a syntactic perspective, topicalisation supplies diverse syntactic structures, which have rhetorical effective. From a semantic perspective, It clarifies and unambiguously expresses the desired meaning. Data analysis has displayed that Topicalisation provides editorialists with various syntactic constructions for various purposes, involving pique the reader's interest and try to persuade him in a particular view. It has shown that passivization has been the most dominant type used in political discourse. In addition, the analysis has shown that syntactic and semantic aspects of Topicalisation phenomenon produce sentences with effective constructions and unambiguous meaning. The study comes up with the conclusion that Topicalisation has various structures which can serve various purposes. For example, when New piece of information appears at the beginning of the sentence, passivization process can be utilized to reorganize the sentence in order to agree with Given-New principle via postponing it.

Assisted dying policy review

Our political editor discusses the College's review of our assisted dying policy, and the reasoning behind it.

Budget boom or bust: NHS funding

Our political editor looks at the government’s plans for the NHS over the next year.

Things that go bump in the night: the cabinet reshuffle

Our political editor looks at the cabinet reshuffle and what this means for surgery.