That’s class.Paper cutsBert Hardy’s unplugged interview in the Press Gazette two weeks ago continues to haunt staff at the Evening Standard. Hitchens, however, had no intention of sitting next to his boss, and moved his card back to the table of his old friend, Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, where he had originally been seated. Carter then found the name card of his contributing editor Christopher Hitchens and moved that to Gore’s table too. Carter, who now bears a striking resemblance to the Joker in Batman, decided he did not like the company among whom he was meant to be seated His solution? To move his name card over to Gore’s table. Some American and Iraqi officials think it was ordered by a senior member of the Iraqi Interior Ministry fed up with our coverage of torture and murders carried out by government-sponsored paramilitaries.Kim SenguptaMEDIA DIARYGames top people playGraydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, was one of the luminaries invited to a dinner honouring the former US vice-president Al Gore at the Hay Festival last weekend. The second bomber, unable to get through, detonated his load, blowing down a series of Iraqi homes and killing the people within, but failing to kill any of us.No one knows who bombed the Hamra. There can be no such ambiguity about the Hamra, where I was staying at the time of the attack.

This hotel was used almost exclusively by journalists and the aim was to inflict maximum damage.The plan was to drive a truck full of explosives into a blast wall behind the building to shatter it, enabling a second suicide truck to come into the complex.Fortunately for us, the first vehicle had been packed with too much explosive, so it shattered the wall but also gouged out a deep crater in the ground. It is said to happen a lot in Iraq, but there is a paradox at work.Iraq remains a place where shutting the room door will not necessarily shut out the ferocious violence. Two hotels used by Western journalists have been targeted in the past two years, killing around 15 people – none of them from the media.After the attacks on the Palestine hotel, Sunni insurgents quite quickly issued a statement saying that contractors, not reporters, were the targets. It was only after Hurricane Katrina and criticism of the White House’s Iraq policy by the US military and its political allies in the second half of 2005 that this control of the news became less flagrant. Right-wing websites claiming that news of American achievements in Iraq was being suppressed by the media fell silent.Reporters under fireThe term “hotel journalism” is a pejorative one meant to describe reporters who “cover” a hazardous assignment from their hotel room by sending out fixers to gather information or by depending on agency copy.

The lack of information or misinformation coming out of Iraq in the early years of the war, particularly in the US, was often the result of editorial decisions reached in New York, not the inability of the correspondents on the spot to find out what was happening.I remember distraught American correspondents buckling on their body armour as, on orders from head office, they sallied out to report on “the good news from Iraq”. This enabled me to travel with some degree of safety across a large swath of northern Iraq.Not all the news is bad. This means going to the northern three Kurdish provinces and then going with Kurdish troops – sometimes part of the Iraqi army – to towns and cities where they are based. It is easier to see members of the government but their knowledge of what is happening is restricted.There are parts of Iraq where it is safer to operate, notably those controlled by the Kurds. When I interview people I go to queues of cars at gasoline stations where I can talk to bored drivers without getting out of mine so nobody, aside from the person I am talking to, knows that I am a foreigner.