Another symptom of Flat Earth News syndrome?

Sara Bedford asks a good question today: "Is the Daily Mail guilty of a contempt of court?". She noticed on their website a story about the "Torture Brothers" case that a court illustration had a caption which included the surname of the boys. She has a screen capture of it with the surname blanked out to illustrate what she saw (see right).

The offending page has been taken down and as far as I can tell any google cache references to it have also been cleared - I guess The Mail asked them to wipe their caches when they realised what had happened. So it seems like it was an error that has been rectified.

This does however throw up some interesting questions. In "the good old days" ((c) Daily Mail) when men were men and papers were papers I think something like this would have been much less likely to happen. That's because sub-editors and proof-readers would likely have been more involved and a clanger like that would have been caught. But nowadays with the much more compressed news cycle and the pressure to get the online content published and out I wonder if some of these steps are no longer there? Otherwise surely someone would have spotted this?

Nick Davies in Flat Earth News covers how the modern press is so overwhelmed with deadlines and lack of resources that mistakes frequently occur. I wonder if this is another example of this problem?

I have contacted the Mail to ask for their comment about what happened here but they are yet to get back to me. I will update this post when they do.

Why are the Taxpayers' Alliance quoted so often?

What have all these recent stories got in common?

They all include a quote or comment from a spokesperson for the Taxpayers' Alliance.

I have noticed this for quite a while now. It seems like almost any story that involves tax or even the BBC license fee in any way will likely have a "response" to the story from the TPA. It was brought home to me quite acutely when I was on holiday in Ireland and I happened to read a few UK newspaper articles. Every single one of them had a quote from them. I even heard them mentioned on Irish radio!

According to Wikipedia they employ 13 staff and have been around for 5 years or so and have around 18,000 members. They have been accused of being a front organisation for the Conservative Party but they deny this.

Don't get me wrong, I am very impressed with the TPA. They are a campaigning organisation who have positioned themselves very well and clearly know how to get coverage for their views. In some cases I even agree with them!

The problem is that they now clearly have disproportionate influence. They represent one sort of view from a particular political perspective and yet they are called upon for comment on virtually every story that involves tax payers money which is a lot of stories!

I suspect there is a fair bit of "Flat Earth News" going on here too. I am not naive enough not to realise that at least some of the stories will have been fed to the media by the TPA themselves and therefore they are almost bound to get a quote under those circumstances. The point is, why do the media so often run with stories like this along with the obligatory TPA quote which invariably makes it seem like tax payers money is always, always wasted?

There needs to be more balance. If lots of these stories are originated by the TPA then journalists need to come up with their own stories more rather than have them fed to them by an organisation like the TPA who are clearly prolific in this field and will continue to be so. If they are sourcing the stories themselves then they need to look around for more quotes to achieve a bit more balance.

Oh and I am happy to give my tuppence worth on stories if the media are stuck for someone else to quote....

UPDATE: Mick Fealty writing on Slugger O'Toole has also provided his view on this.

Andy Coulson will go - and soon

Following yesterday's revelations about the Murdoch owned papers apparently having paid £1m to silence victims of phone-tapping (the Guardian splashes on it today) the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson is now under extreme pressure. He used to be editor of the NOTW but resigned in 2007 over the royal phone-tapping scandal involving Clive Goodman and is now head of communications for the Conservative Party.

I read Flat Earth News last year, a book by journalist Nick Davies that exposes the methods used by Fleet Street including in Chapter 7 "The Dark Arts" a detailed description of how, according to Mr Davies newspapers regularly use Private Investigators to source information for stories and that the PI's sometimes use unethical methods to get it. Phone-tapping is mentioned as one of these methods amongst many others and yesterday's revelations don't come as a huge surprise to me.

The focus now seems to be on Mr Coulson's position within the Conservative Party. He was editor of the NOTW at the time when some of the alleged actions took place and as Andrew Neil said on Newsnight last night "it beggars belief" that he was not aware of what was going on. It seems to me that must be right. Either he knew what was happening, or he had lots of out of control journalists working for him who pulled the wool over his eyes. I can't imagine that someone who could be duped so easily could run communications for a large political party.

If Mr Cameron is smart (and we all know he is) he will be lining up a potential replacement as I write. He may claim to be "relaxed" about the situation but not so relaxed as to not have a Plan B I am sure. Cameron will not want the taint of this story to start damaging the Conservative Party; that is what will start to happen if he doesn't do something quickly. We know David Cameron can be ruthless when it comes to the crunch (a putative Prime Minister has to be sometimes) and this situation feels very crunchy indeed.

I expect Mr Coulson to be out by the weekend.

UPDATE 1: I just wanted to make clear that the Guardian journalist with the splash on this today is also Nick Davies the author of Flat Earth News mentioned elsewhere in my post.

UPDATE 2: My blog post here has very kindly been included and linked to by The Guardian in its coverage of blog reaction to the story.

James Graham is spot on about Jo Swinson

James Graham did an extremely good post today about the treatment of Jo Swinson MP by The Daily Telegraph regarding the suggestions that she submitted receipts for make-up and other cosmetics. He describes their treatment of her as mysoginstic and he is spot on. He also rightly points out that it is bollocks anyway but they have worded the article cleverly to make it seem like she has done what they imply.

There's no point in me repeating what he has said as he has taken the words right out of my mouth so please read his post here and then have a look at the letters he has sent to The Telegraph, the BBC (who picked up the story and effectively republished it with embelishments in a full Flat Earth News styley) and The Guardian who really should know better than this.

Please visit his blog and post your comments of support if you agree with his analysis. And if you have time write some letters! A line has to be drawn now. The media is starting to think it can rip into all MPs for anything at all, even effectively fabricated stories and expect no comebacks.