Yeah. That's the trouble with a leftie BBC and a socialist press...

Falklands War- glorious memory.

The circus that led up to it- forgotten.

Tories- fearless fighters of inflation.

Except for under Heath, Thatcher (twice) and Cameron.

That quote from Nick Davies:


We need to see all stories in the Mail in this context, and that the alternative reality, the Flat Earth in question is the one created and maintained in the mind of Paul Dacre and his compliant, willing journalists and populated not by all Mail readers, but certainly the great majority of the Commentards. It has enough of a presence to sway politicians and even influence their policy - see dole scroungers, swan-eating Poles, immigrant cats, immigrants in BMWs and so on and so on.

So there is a cycle in which misinformation is repeated so often, and so skilfully, that it supplants critical thought and reality. It becomes reality for readers who perform a sort of mental backflip - they see the world around them, but it is superimposed on this vivid, detailed and persuasive lie.

I was recently told by a Mail reader (who knows me well) recently, and I do not exaggerate, that I know nothing about education and I need to get out in the real world more. Instead of being in school doing - um - education, presumably, or at the DfE doing education or teaching people to do education... No sane person can hold that view, surely? They have to be doing some sort of uncritical mental gymnastics just to function. They are inhabitants of Flat Earth.

I have as of now given up trying to reason with the Mail readers in my family. All of them retired and not as in touch with the world as they'd like to think, in fact they don't think - their world view is presented to them as the gospel truth every time they open that rag. They regale me with stories as to how the UK is going down the pan etc etc, and I then spend too much of my time pointing out the errors in the mail's reporting, because often their comments are so far off the mark, that I can't let it go unchallenged. Often I can even get them to see that they have been hoodwinked with a quick tour of the internet to get nearer to the truth, but then the next time they see me, it's exactly the same as before.
They want to believe what they read, because it mirrors and validates their own prejudices. I can't fight that.

Thanks to Malcolm for mentioning Nick Davies' book. I must try and read that. My recent interest in the DM is because I have been working in a paper shop, and I was getting intensely irritated by the lead stories I see every day, especially those in the Mail and Express.

My post will refer to an earlier book about the British press, written nearly 30 years ago.



This is a chapter heading in Henry Porter's 1984 book "Lies, Damned Lies, And Some Exclusives". The headline was the paper's response to being found out (by World In Action) for sending a "dossier" on Tony Benn (during the Chesterfield by-election) to an American psychiatrist (who was unaware he was commenting on a major British politician, and that his remarks were going to be printed in a newspaper, in an article entitled BENN ON THE COUCH).

At the time we had a Press Council, the PCC came along in 1990.

I reread Porter's book recently, and my overwhelming feeling is that nothing has changed.



The incidents in the book are a great trip down memory lane. Here is a selection.

The Sun fabricating an interview with the widow of Falklands VC winner Sergeant McKay. The tabloids all denying offering money to Peter Sutcliffe's relatives until Sonia Sutcliffe's solicitor produced a file of sample contracts which had been stuffed through her letterbox. A cat belonging to a working miner reported to have been tortured and daubed with the word SCAB (locals said the incident was done by a local youth with a history of animal cruelty, and not by anyone connected with the strike). Heseltine reported to have been dragged to the ground and kicked and punched by the Greenham Common women outside Newbury Town Hall (he said himself that he fell over). Peter Tatchell being demonised during the Bermondsey by-election. A fabricated story in the Express about the Peoples March For Jobs 1983 turning down every job being advertised in the Carnforth job centre (apparently "a land of golden opportunity", with thousands of jobs available - in fact at the time there were 6,610 unemployed in the region). A CHAOS AT CND RALLY headline (17 arrests for minor offences at a rally attended by 200,000 people) - the Press Council said that the paper was entitled to be biased in its coverage. The Mail's story that Nissan would cancel their new factory in Britain if Labour won the General Election (story based on quote from an anonymous Nissan official, with no attempt made to contact the company for an official statement).

If the press were bad then, they are just as bad now, and the PCC are just as big a failure as the Press Council was.

Apparently (according to Wikipedia) the Calcutt report recommended that the new Press Complaints Commission would be given 18 months to prove non-statutory self-regulation could work effectively and if it failed to do so, then a statutory system would be introduced. Surely we need to do that now!

Our forum's front page says "We are not here to hate readers of the Daily Mail, we are here to show them they are being lied to". As we all know, the current system allows newspapers to lie to and mislead their readers, sometimes in the political interests of the papers' owners (or editors), and sometimes just to increase sales. I don't see how any solution other than a body like OFCOM can enforce acceptable standards on the national press in this country.

I saw someone quote the 'asylum seeker allowed to stay because he had a cat' myth yesterday. It seems it doesn't matter how much a story has been debunked (in that case very publically), some people prefer to believe it.

Winterval will be back next year, on schedule. I'd put money on it.

Sorry - couldn't resist!

My dad still believes it.

Doesn't help that the front page of the Mail reasserted it as truth after Ken Clarke called it out as the bollocks that it is.

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The upper hand is on the other foot now.

The dead going unburied has seeped into the public consciousness enough that a lot of people who were around at the time (my mum for one) repeat it as fact and honestly believe it. I think the idea of memory being unreliable and mutable applies to some extent, and the media is happy to go along and lie until the lie sticks and replaces what actually happened (or didn't happen).

I read that when it came out and it was a real eye opener - it's probably why I'm here on this forum now, in fact!

_________________
"To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth."
Voltaire

Nice old woman sent to the stocks over a goldfish.

I worry that where sport leads, the rest of the news will follow.

Although I support Macclesfield Town (and therefore have little to worry about re coverage from the nationals, unless we have another death) my second team has always been Manchester City.

The abject lies, agendas, hypocrasy and bullshit spouted in the last year or so by people scared of a change in the status quo have been exceptional.

In sport you can usually get away with it. But if <insert unpopular minority here> was on the wrong end of the same shit, it could get nasty.

Football reporting had always had a lot of made up filler. That's already permeating into the front of the paper.

That's another thing. We regularly hear about the 26% inflation of the Callaghan government, but never one peep about Thatcher's previously unheard-of achievement of almost as high inflation (22%?) at a time of rising unemployment.

I hadn't seen this story before, but I just looked it up. Its like a microcosm of how misinformation works.

All the facts are there in the article - pet shop owner sentenced to £1000 fine and supervision order for animal cruelty. She didn't take a sick cockatiel to the vet, and it was later found to have a broken leg, and had to be destroyed. Yet the headline and the first four or five paragraphs make it look as if the sentence was for selling a goldfish to a 14 year old boy.

They even have the obligatory outraged quote from a Tory MP. I wonder if they told him the full facts when getting the quote.

I believe this is supposed to be an animal loving country, yet all comments pointing out the animal cruelty charge are red arrowed to buggery. A quite clear demonstration that the headline and the first three paragraphs are all that is needed to promote any lie. Just remember to include the truth a couple of paras from the end to avoid libel actions and/or PCC complaints.