Melanie Phillips
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Melanie Phillips (born 1951) is a British journalist and author. She is best known for her controversial column about political and social issues which currently appears in the Daily Mail. She is married to Joshua Rozenberg, formerly legal affairs correspondent for the BBC, now Legal Editor of the Daily Telegraph and is a regular panelist for BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze.
Education and career as a journalist
Phillips read English at St Anne's, Oxford, before training as a journalist on the Evening Echo, a local paper of Hemel Hempstead. After a short period on New Society magazine, she joined The Guardian in 1977 and soon became its social services correspondent and social policy leader writer. After a stint as the paper's news editor, she started writing her column in 1987, taking it to The Observer and then The Sunday Times before starting to write for the Daily Mail in 2001. She also occasionally writes for the Jewish Chronicle and has, since 2003 and unusually for a mainstream newspaper journalist, maintained a lively weblog.
Accusations of Islamophobia
In 2003, she won an award as "Most Islamophobic Journalist of the Year" from the Islamic Human Rights Commission for their readings of her criticisms of Islam. She did not attend the awards ceremony and denies that her views are in any way Islamophobic.
External links
- Melanie Phillips' personal website (http://www.melaniephillips.com/)
- Melanie Phillips's Diary--a regular weblog (http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/)
- Details of Phillips' award as "Most Islamophobic Journalist of the Year" (http://www.inminds.co.uk/islamophobia-awards-2003.html)