About me
'O'Neill is one of this country's sharpest social commentators.'
Damian Thompson, Daily Telegraph.
'He is devilishly clever.'
Yasmin Alibhai Brown, The Independent.
'A loony lefty hack.'
British National Party.
Brendan O'Neill is the editor of spiked, the 'sassy, irreverent, UK-based online magazine of news and opinion', in the words of the San Francisco Chronicle. (Read the Press Gazette's coverage of his becoming editor here.) He started his career in journalism at spiked's predecessor, Living Marxism, until it was forced to close in 2000 following a notorious libel action brought by ITN.
When he's not writing for and editing spiked, and commissioning journalists who have something to say and the guts to say it, O'Neill writes widely for publications on both sides of the Atlantic. His journalism has been published in the New Statesman, the Spectator, the Guardian, The Sunday Times, the British Journalism Review, the Press Gazette and the Catholic Herald in Britain, and in Salon, Slate, the Chicago Sun-Times, the American Prospect, the American Conservative and Reason magazine in the United States. He is also a feature-writer for the Christian Science Monitor in America and for the BBC in Britain. He writes a weekly blog for the Guardian website, Comment Is Free.
O'Neill is a British correspondent for the Polish political weekly PrzeKroj, and has written for newspapers and magazines in Australia, South Africa, Canada, India, Germany, France, Italy and Denmark. His work covers everything from war and terrorism to free speech and junk food. He was a consultant for the book Human, published by Dorling Kindersley and winner of the British Medical Association Medical Book Award 2005. He is currently writing a book about terrorism titled From Bosnia to Baghdad: How the West Spread Al-Qaeda, which is due to be published in 2007.
O'Neill has been a guest on numerous TV and radio shows in Britain, Ireland and America, including on BBC radio and TV, Sky News, Channel 4 News and The Last Word on More4; The Big Bite on RTE television in Ireland and Talk Radio in Dublin; and on the Heartland show on Fox News and International Correspondents on CNN, and radio stations in New York, San Francisco, Colorado, Wisconsin and Washington, DC. He has given talks at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Oxford Literary Festival, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and the Battle of Ideas at the Royal College of Art. He was depicted in the play An Explosion, which explored the meaning of terrorism, at the Battersea Arts Centre in London in 2006 (O'Neill was played by actor Jim Pyke). O'Neill also founded and taught the Online Journalism course at the University College for the Creative Arts in Surrey, England.
In his writing, O'Neill coined the terms 'dodgy dossier' (to describe Blair's first dossier on Iraq, the one published in September 2002 which most journalists accepted as good coin), 'Blairpop' to describe today's conformist rock'n'roll, and 'celebrity colonialism', in reference to celebrities' exploitation of African states for their own gratification (which now features in the Official Dictionary of Unofficial English).
In February 2004 he revealed in the Spectator and the Guardian that Saddam Hussein probably did not have a human-shredding machine, a horror story told by both the British and Australian governments to justify invading Iraq. In May 2004 he revealed in the UK Press Gazette that numerous American journalists sat on the story about torture at Abu Ghraib for months, until it was finally forced on to the front pages by persistent military families. In June 2004, in an article for spiked, he exposed that the House of Commons Health Select Committee lied when it claimed that a three-year-old girl had died from eating too much - an expose that was widely debated in the media and which led David Hinchliffe, MP and chairman of the Health Select Committee, to accuse O'Neill, without foundation, of being part of a 'behind-the-scenes manipulation by the food industry in a battle for public opinion'.
In September 2005, in an article in the New Statesman, O'Neill brought to British attention the website Now That's Fucked Up, where American soldiers were posting grisly photos of dead Iraqis and Afghans in return for access to porn. In February 2006 he showed in a news feature for the BBC that the popular story about a paediatrician having been hounded by an anti-paedophile mob has been massively distorted and exaggerated in the retelling, effectively making it a 'folk tale'; Sir Christopher Meyer of the Press Complaints Commission commended this BBC piece for showing that newspapers sometimes cannot be trusted.
O'Neill provokes controversy: he has been described as a 'smug shite' by gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, as 'exceptionally ignorant' by Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips, and 'entertaining in a Julie Burchill kind of way' by Richard Sanderson of the Little Atoms radio show. He is a passionate defender of free speech, and was one of few British journalists to attack the Austrian authorities for imprisoning David Irving on charges of Holocaust denial; he has also argued against the censorship of homophobic Jamaican dancehall singers by the British police and their 'gay best friends'. Nadine Strossen, President of the American Civil Liberties Union, recently described O'Neill's site, spiked, as 'one of those rare publications that defends free speech even when it is difficult and unfashionable to do so'. O'Neill is a co-founder of the Manifesto Club, which aims to reclaim the creative spirit of the Enlightenment for the twenty-first century, and coordinator of the Freedom Rules blog. He lives in London Bridge.
For more information on media and public appearances visit the News page here.
Damian Thompson, Daily Telegraph.
'He is devilishly clever.'
Yasmin Alibhai Brown, The Independent.
'A loony lefty hack.'
British National Party.
When he's not writing for and editing spiked, and commissioning journalists who have something to say and the guts to say it, O'Neill writes widely for publications on both sides of the Atlantic. His journalism has been published in the New Statesman, the Spectator, the Guardian, The Sunday Times, the British Journalism Review, the Press Gazette and the Catholic Herald in Britain, and in Salon, Slate, the Chicago Sun-Times, the American Prospect, the American Conservative and Reason magazine in the United States. He is also a feature-writer for the Christian Science Monitor in America and for the BBC in Britain. He writes a weekly blog for the Guardian website, Comment Is Free.
O'Neill is a British correspondent for the Polish political weekly PrzeKroj, and has written for newspapers and magazines in Australia, South Africa, Canada, India, Germany, France, Italy and Denmark. His work covers everything from war and terrorism to free speech and junk food. He was a consultant for the book Human, published by Dorling Kindersley and winner of the British Medical Association Medical Book Award 2005. He is currently writing a book about terrorism titled From Bosnia to Baghdad: How the West Spread Al-Qaeda, which is due to be published in 2007.
O'Neill has been a guest on numerous TV and radio shows in Britain, Ireland and America, including on BBC radio and TV, Sky News, Channel 4 News and The Last Word on More4; The Big Bite on RTE television in Ireland and Talk Radio in Dublin; and on the Heartland show on Fox News and International Correspondents on CNN, and radio stations in New York, San Francisco, Colorado, Wisconsin and Washington, DC. He has given talks at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Oxford Literary Festival, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and the Battle of Ideas at the Royal College of Art. He was depicted in the play An Explosion, which explored the meaning of terrorism, at the Battersea Arts Centre in London in 2006 (O'Neill was played by actor Jim Pyke). O'Neill also founded and taught the Online Journalism course at the University College for the Creative Arts in Surrey, England.
In his writing, O'Neill coined the terms 'dodgy dossier' (to describe Blair's first dossier on Iraq, the one published in September 2002 which most journalists accepted as good coin), 'Blairpop' to describe today's conformist rock'n'roll, and 'celebrity colonialism', in reference to celebrities' exploitation of African states for their own gratification (which now features in the Official Dictionary of Unofficial English).
In February 2004 he revealed in the Spectator and the Guardian that Saddam Hussein probably did not have a human-shredding machine, a horror story told by both the British and Australian governments to justify invading Iraq. In May 2004 he revealed in the UK Press Gazette that numerous American journalists sat on the story about torture at Abu Ghraib for months, until it was finally forced on to the front pages by persistent military families. In June 2004, in an article for spiked, he exposed that the House of Commons Health Select Committee lied when it claimed that a three-year-old girl had died from eating too much - an expose that was widely debated in the media and which led David Hinchliffe, MP and chairman of the Health Select Committee, to accuse O'Neill, without foundation, of being part of a 'behind-the-scenes manipulation by the food industry in a battle for public opinion'.
In September 2005, in an article in the New Statesman, O'Neill brought to British attention the website Now That's Fucked Up, where American soldiers were posting grisly photos of dead Iraqis and Afghans in return for access to porn. In February 2006 he showed in a news feature for the BBC that the popular story about a paediatrician having been hounded by an anti-paedophile mob has been massively distorted and exaggerated in the retelling, effectively making it a 'folk tale'; Sir Christopher Meyer of the Press Complaints Commission commended this BBC piece for showing that newspapers sometimes cannot be trusted.
O'Neill provokes controversy: he has been described as a 'smug shite' by gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, as 'exceptionally ignorant' by Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips, and 'entertaining in a Julie Burchill kind of way' by Richard Sanderson of the Little Atoms radio show. He is a passionate defender of free speech, and was one of few British journalists to attack the Austrian authorities for imprisoning David Irving on charges of Holocaust denial; he has also argued against the censorship of homophobic Jamaican dancehall singers by the British police and their 'gay best friends'. Nadine Strossen, President of the American Civil Liberties Union, recently described O'Neill's site, spiked, as 'one of those rare publications that defends free speech even when it is difficult and unfashionable to do so'. O'Neill is a co-founder of the Manifesto Club, which aims to reclaim the creative spirit of the Enlightenment for the twenty-first century, and coordinator of the Freedom Rules blog. He lives in London Bridge.
For more information on media and public appearances visit the News page here.
