The Rushdie Fatwa and After

This resounding defence of the principles of free expression revisits the Satanic Verses uproar of 1989, as well as subsequent incidents such as the Danish cartoons controversy, to argue that the human right of free speech is by no means so secure that it can be taken for granted.

Brian Winston is the Lincoln Chair at the University of Lincoln, UK. He has an Emmy for documentary script-writing, has taught documentary in both the US and the UK, and has been involved with many international documentary film festivals and the Visible Evidence conference series. He was the founding director of the Glasgow (University) Media Group, whose pioneering studies of television news, Bad News (1976) and More Bad News (1980), have been re-issued as a classic of media sociology. He was also a founding chair of British Association of Film, Television and Media Studies and has been a governor of the BFI. In 2012, a feature-length documentary on Robert Flaherty A Boatload of Wild Irishmen which he wrote and co-produced won a Special Jury prize from the British University Council for Film and Video. His primary areas of interest are freedom of speech, journalism history, media technology and documentary film, all of which he teaches.