Advocate and Rhodes Visiting Professor Wim Trengove is "constitutionally suspicious" of the proposed Media Appeals Tribunal.

"I ask myself why it is necessary to create a statutory tribunal rather than reform the law," he said, addressing a small audience of lawyers, students, academics and the public at the Rhodes Law Department on Tuesday.

"The only answer is that government believes that it would be better able to manipulate the Tribunal than the courts," Trengove said.

I approach writing that finds news media fallen from grace into the gutter with deep suspicion. There never was a golden age of journalism, and each generation feels its problems to be unique.

A new book by UK journalist and documentary-maker Nick Davies book about the defects of global news media has some of this, to be sure, but it differs not only in that it is an insider’s view and in the thoroughness of his argument.

Passionately presented, it also stands out as the work of a journalist with the courage to unsettle deeply held beliefs in areas other than the news media.

Nicky Cockcroft has blogged about the habit of student note-taking (Is the way we use PowerPoint serving our students?) and how it especially applies in journalism.

Some of the literature on higher education teaching tends to favour ditching lectures altogether, because it favours a "transmission" model that undermines the process of learning.

For those prepared to listen, it was a mini-lecture on monetary policy. And more entertaining than lectures on monetary policy tend to be.

The occasion was the Press Conference the Reserve Bank governor gives to explain the reasons for decision of the committee that decides on interest rate policy.

Tito Mboweni was explaining, on Thursday December 12, why the committee had decided on a half a percentage point interest rate cut in the Reserve Bank's influential interest rate, the repo rate, to 11.5%.

It's the ultimate commercial perversion. The makers of soap are creating product for the victims of beauty, women who starve themselves for appearance sake or who feel guilty about not doing so.

Do not shop when you feel hungry, you may have been told. This is even truer when marketers appeal to hunger to sell non-food items.