2011-01-15T08:36:00.001-08:00

'Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.'

Mark Twain US humorist, novelist, short story author, & wit (1835 - 1910)

'We make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.’
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William Shakespeare,

All’s Well That Ends Well

Workers celebrate May Day in London

‘This royal throne of kings,

this sceptered isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself…

… this England.’

William Shakespeare, Richard II,

‘See when it happened yeah like boom, it was kinda like a quick ting like boom, went down the road, come back up, boom boom, finished, boom, ghost [we disappeared], you get what I’m saying?’

Michael Alleyne, 18, describes how he, Jade Braithwaite (20) and Juress Kika (19) stabbed to death 16-year-old A-grade student Ben Kinsella.

The North London murderers were being secretly recorded in a police van.

‘The people of

England

, wearied and stunned by parties

And alternatively deceived by each, had almost resigned the prerogative of thinking. Even curiosity had expired and a universal languor spread itself over the land.

The Opposition was visible no more than as a contest for power, whilst the mass of the nation stood torpidly by as a prize.’

Tom Paine, author of The Rights of Man, writing in December 1792

‘It's now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury.
Councillors' expenses?’

Ratcliffe Power Station

As the Twin Towers were still burning, Labour spin doctor (and therefore public employee) Jo Moore used the tragedy to sneak out bad news on behalf of her political bosses, with the expectation that it would be buried in the media as attention focused on New York.

Allow me to demonstrate how it works…

‘We paid $3 billion for these television stations. We will decide what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is.’

Fox station manager David Boylan orders two investigative reporters to quash a story.

‘Anarchy in the UK… it’s coming sometime…’

The Sex Pistols

‘Peaches weds

19-YEAR-OLD CELEBUTANTE TIES KNOT... BUT FORGETS TO TELL HER BOYFRIEND*

Front page of The Mirror, August 13, 2008.

Today's news - tomorrow's chip wrapper.
A telehandler driver rests his mind

A full inside page was then devoted to the marriage of Sir Bob Geldof’s stroppy daughter.

The death of British soldier Signaller Wayne Bland, 21, in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan – and war between Russia and Georgia - was deemed of less importance than Peaches’ marriage, a story on jellyfish appearing on the British coast, US actress Tori Spelling refusing to appear in a Beverley Hills 90210 spin-off and singer Kerry Katona snapped making an advert for frozen-food retailer Iceland.

The Mirror front page on July 5, 1945, featured a cartoon drawing of a badly wounded serviceman offering a wreath to the reader a with a card stating ‘Victory and Peace in Europe’.

Underneath, the text said simply, ‘Here you are – don’t lose it again.’ During the Second World War, The Mirror had been the forces favourite. Later that August ’08 week, Russia threatened Poland with a nuclear strike after the Poles agreed to host a US anti-missile shield. The two top stories on MSN Today? ‘Hilarious video of (football manager) Steve McLaren speaking with a daft foreign accent’, and ‘Discover how Kelly Brook allegedly ended her romance with Billy Zane.’

‘In a democracy the readers are the ultimate arbiters of the sort of news they want to read. If a newspaper’s news content is not right for them they don’t buy it. There is plenty of choice.’

Practical Newspaper Reporting (handbook for trainee journalists)

Geoffrey Harris and David Spark

‘A Day in the Life (of a fictitious trainee reporter):

Debbie’s Day

Debbie is the youngest reporter on the Express. She grew up in the town, did work experience on the newspaper during her schooldays, and discovered she liked it so much that after getting three reasonable A-levels she turned down the idea of university and enrolled on a six-month NCTJ course at a further education college in a nearby city… She has been there now for six months, and despite earning less than her best friend, a trainee hairdresser, is thoroughly enjoying it most of the time.’

Jon Smith, Essential Reporting, the NCTJ Guide to Essential Reporting

(NCTJ: National Council for the Training of Journalists – the examining body for journalists)

‘I feel like I am turning out a load of shit, so I expect them to notice. I’m due a review pretty soon, so I’ll find out then…’

Email from a graduate trainee reporter to her tutor, quoted in Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News

‘But now we are deep into a third age of falsehood and distortion, in which the primary obstacles to truth-telling lie inside the newsroom, with the internal mechanics of an industry which has been deeply damaged. The problem now is not merely at the point of publication but also at the earlier and even more important stage of gathering and testing raw information.’

Nick Davies, Flat Earth News

‘THE TRUTH… Some fans picked pockets of victims… some fans urinated on the brave cops… some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life…

The Sun, April 19, 1989

‘The error staring them (Sun reporters covering the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium disaster) in the face was too glaring…

it obviously wasn’t a silly mistake; nor was it a simple oversight…

It was a classic smear.’

Stick It Up Your Punter: The Rise and Fall of the Sun,

Peter Chippendale and Chris Horrie

‘The real cause of the Hillsborough disaster was overcrowding… the main reason for the disaster was the failure of police control.’

Lord Justice Taylor, who led an inquiry into the 96 deaths

Preceding Jade Goody's coffin into the church was publicist Max Clifford, the ringmaster who Private Eye stated has made £200,000 from her demise. In the weeks leading up to and the week following her death, her story was rarely far from the front pages of the red tops – even her two sons, aged three and four, were splashed across the front pages of both The Sun and The Mirror a few days after her passing. More possible pics/interviews for the diary, chief? How about a Christmas interview with the father?

‘Christmas without Mummy’

Front page of the Sunday Mirror, December 27, 2009.

Kate Mansey’s article then detailed how the star’s children spent their Christmas, even managing to crowbar in a Michael Jackson link (‘she’s dancing up there with Jacko’) – they’ll like that. When are their birthdays, Kate? We can milk those for a good few years yet. Mansey was the winner of the 2008 British Press Awards ‘Young Journalist of the Year’. Either she is adept at this brand of ‘journalism’, or our brightest are redirected by an industry for the most part obsessed with sleazy drivel. Whatever the cause, the result is the same.

Important stories dropped.
.

Feeding frenzy at the zoo - Jade Goody enters
church a final time as the paparazzi get to work

‘Editors must not use the fame, notoriety or position of a parent or guardian as sole justification for publishing details of a child’s private life.’

Clause 6 of the Press Complaints Commission code of practice. The Press Complaints Commission is a toothless body run by the industry itself. Which is why they get away with this mawkish rubber-necking. The purpose of which may best be explained by Chomsky…

‘The non-elite mass media are basically trying to divert people… Let them get interested in professional sports, for example. Let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems or something like that. Anything, as long as it isn’t serious.’

Media observer Noam Chomsky, talk at the Z Media Institute, June 1997

But you don’t have to have celebrities or sports stars on your patch to blatantly divert people.

Censorship – and that includes self-censorship – is thriving…

‘Busy police chief tells it like it is!

One of the things which concerns me, as the Divisional Commander, is so much of what we see on television or in the newspapers is about horror stories such as people being attacked in their own homes.

We see or hear so little about many of the good things.

Hopefully this column will concentrate on some of those good things…

Something we’re finding more and more is young people with alcohol. It’s not a good thing when children are staggering around because they’ve got hold of some tinnies.

As a parent, please be aware of the danger to your child if he or she gets hold of booze and remember the police are here to help if you have a problem.’

On the Beat with Chief Superintendent David Sykes,

Tameside Advertiser, Thursday 27 July, 2000. Page 21

The page lead article. The Tameside Advertiser is delivered to nearly 100,000 homes, covering the Hyde area of Manchester…

‘Drugs claim two more young lives

A man died after taking drugs in a public toilet.

Anthony Greenwood, an unemployed fence maker, overdosed on a lethal dose of methadone and heroin on October 12, 1999.

An inquest heard this week how he was found in a toilet cubicle in Greenfield Street, Hyde, by his friend Alan Bayley who had earlier given him £20 for drugs and arranged to meet him there…

A 21-year-old overdosed in a shopping centre toilet cubicle four days before Christmas Day, an inquest heard. A security guard discovered Lee Stephen Walker sitting on a toilet facing the wall surrounded by drug paraphernalia on December 21, 1999.’

Tameside Advertiser, also on Thursday 27 July, 2000. Also on page 21. But considered not to be a page lead, buried way back on page 21

‘Even where sleep is concerned, too much is a bad thing.’

Homer (circa 7th Century BC). But was it sleep, ie inattention, this crazy juxtaposition? This skewed news value?...

‘Everyone needs to be prepared to believe the unbelievable.’

John Humphries, reading out an appeal by
Action on Elder Abuse.

Tameside Advertiser editor Claire Mooney and Chief Superintendent Sykes focused on beer-swilling teenagers whilst, on their patch, young addicts were being pulled out dead from public toilets.

Perhaps those kind of stories don’t shift furniture and cars for advertisers. That wasn’t the only elephant in the room they missed between them as they connived to give people more of the ‘good things’. The world’s spotlight was shining on Hyde only five months before: Doctor Harold Shipman was convicted of the murder of 15 patients. He’d been arrested in 1998 after what is believed to have been a 27-year killing spree which cost the lives of at least 215 people on their patch - in and around Hyde. The youngest confirmed victim was 41, although high court judge Dame Janet Smith DBE, in her 2002 report, seriously suspects he murdered a four-year-old girl.

Shipman's Hyde surgery

‘In my view, the primary reasons why this investigation failed were that CS Sykes instructed DI Smith to undertake the investigation and kept to himself the responsibility for supervision. He was culpably wrong in both respects... I am critical of CS Sykes in other respects also. Once the investigation was under way, he failed to realise that DI Smith was out of his depth.’

Dame Janet Smith, The Shipman Inquiry

Dame Smith may have used clear, critical thinking in her summing up, but some things don’t change.

‘Concentrating on the good things’, the area’s police chief maintained happy links with the chief hack of the local free-sheet (not the boss – that’d be someone in the advertising department) even after the Shipman murders. And why not? His copy was free, didn’t rock the boat, and filled a space. To have slated him would have killed The Golden Goose of Page 21. The only alternative to that would have been stories reflecting the general sense of depression in the area, which was escaped from, by some, with drugs…

…And the car salesmen and conservatory company bosses don’t like their ads sat beside those kinds of stories. Let’s get things straight, Claire, before you print any more of these disturbing headlines. You’re just here to scribble copy. It’s the ad team that brings the hard cash in – we pay your wages. Upset that apple cart, and you’re down the road, understand?

Now, Father Christmas is coming to the shopping centre next week. How about a big splash that we can use as a tie-in to the local traders? A front page one, please. Mock up on my desk by the afternoon, so that sales can start hawking spaces. Oh, and drop this plate off in the canteen, will you, there’s a good girl.

Right, where were we?... Suppliers… these toilet rolls are too expensive for a start…

‘In a well run society, you don’t say things you know. You say things that are required for service to power.’

Noam Chomsky, What We Say Goes

Murdoch's Wapping headquarters

‘The new ethic is that journalism is a commodity, purely to generate money. This is the Murdoch effect.

Wapping is a cultural Chernobyl, spewing its poison across the whole journalistic landscape.’

German newspaper Die Welt’s prize-winning foreign correspondent Reiner Luyken, interviewed by journalist John Pilger, in Hidden Agendas.

‘And now to our favourite topic – sleep.’

BBC Breakfast presenter Sian Williams introduces stage hypnotist Paul McKenna to the show, January 19, 2009. The BBC bills Breakfast as their ‘flagship early morning television news programme’. McKenna was plugging his new book,

I Can Make You Sleep (out now in all good bookshops).

Even Alastair Campbell, who had done so much damage to the BBC, was allowed to plug his debut novel All in the Mind on the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show on October 26, 2008.

‘A lot of thought seems to be going into making (TV news) thoughtless… A flawed media, I suggest, leads to a flawed democracy. Ill-informed citizens cannot make proper judgments about their leaders' actions, about the actions that take place in their names, about the laws that govern them. The media matter.’

Former BBC Ten O’Clock News anchor Michael Buerk laments dumbing-down at a Ryerson University talk to journalism students in Toronto, Canada.

‘A TV producer, who once believed the media was honourable, told me how his child’s sixth birthday party opened his eyes. He had hired an entertainer for the sons and daughters of other television executives. The act flopped.

‘Don’t worry,’ the entertainer told him, ‘I’ll get them to guess TV theme tunes. That always makes them happy.’

For once, his sure-fire hit failed. The children stared blankly at the wretched man as he played the jingles for Hollyoaks and Emmerdale. My friend learned then what he ought to have guessed years before: television executives do not allow their children to watch the programmes they push at the masses.’

Nick Cohen,
Waiting for the Etonians

‘What we are looking at here is a global collapse of information gathering and truth-telling. And that leaves us in a kind of knowledge chaos, where the very subject matter of global debate is shifted from the essential to the arbitrary; where government policy, cultural values, widespread assumptions, declarations of war and attempts at peace all turn out to be poisoned by distortion; where ignorance is accepted as knowledge and falsehood is accepted as truth.’

Nick Davies, Flat Earth News

To explain:

‘The Associated Press is the essential global news network, delivering fast, unbiased news from every corner of the world to all media platforms and formats. Founded in 1846, AP today is the largest and most trusted source of independent news and information. On any given day, more than half the world's population sees news from AP.’

Facts and Figures, AP website

(My emphasis)

‘Our customers know they can trust Press Association's reputation as a fast, fair and accurate source - the news as it happens, without spin… Press Association news wire service is taken by every major national and regional media organisation.’

Press Association website (My emphasis)

‘Brown took the Tube to the event, impressing at least one student, Rohini Simbodyal.

‘We got on the Tube and people were looking at Gordon Brown,’ Simbodyal, 20, said. ‘People were amazed, saying: 'It's Gordon.' But everyone was very British, they looked and then looked away. A few people came up and shook his hand and said 'Good luck.'

‘He was just like a normal guy,’ she said.’

Daily Mail website Mail Online May 12, 2007.
Spotter: Iain Dale.

Spinning machine

Taken for a ride on the big spinning machine. Passing off Rohini Simbodyal, the black, minority and ethnic officer for Labour students as an ordinary passenger, Gordon Brown’s PR machine even suckered sworn enemy The Daily Mail into repeating their sugar-coated spin. Job done well, Rohini is now a Labour Councillor in the Jubliee ward of Enfield, North London. Cynical manipulation aside, this story serves to show how the media don’t check their facts, relying instead on wire copy and the PR machine to serve up their stories: this lie traveled the world, appearing in USA Today, and Australia’s The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. I found that out with a quick Google of Ms Simbodyal’s quote. How long would it have taken a journalist to do the same with: ‘Rohini+Simbodyal+labour’? Try it for yourself – in two seconds you’ll have pages of stories relating to random passenger Rohini’s links with Labour. And that could have been done as easily in Sydney as in London.

The problem was that the story had been served up by news agency Associated Press (AP). AP has clout – news editors believe AP copy. But AP, together with fellow wire services Reuters and the UK’s Press Association, has been battered into submission by bean counting owners, suffering severe staff cuts.

Something has to give, and that something is time for attention to detail. Therefore, when AP gets lied to by someone with an agenda –a spin doctor, say - that lie gets injected into minds around the world. So Rohini gets to be an average passenger, Gordon – or David Cameron – get to be men of the people – and we get manipulated. Now imagine that degree of manipulation and truth-bending constantly going on, story after story, day after day, media outlet after media outlet. On and on and on…

indoctrinate

/indoktrinayt/

• verb cause to accept a set of beliefs uncritically through repeated instruction.

— DERIVATIVES indoctrination noun indoctrinator noun.

— ORIGIN originally in the sense

teach or instruct: from French

endoctriner, from doctrine ‘doctrine’.

Compact Oxford English Dictionary

‘I run the paper purely for the purpose of
making propaganda, and with no other motive.’

Press baron Lord Beaverbrook (1879-1964),
speaking to the Royal Commission on the Press, 1947.
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In 1960, the News Chronicle was shut down, heralding the start of British journalism’s slide towards a corporate death-grip. The bean-counters took over Fleet Street, men interested only in the bottom line.

Did this free journalists from propagandist proprietors? The first thing the new bosses did was slash jobs. Instead of meeting and developing contacts, the over-stretched (and often cheaper, trainee) reporters were reduced to manning telephones and re-writing press releases – side-stepping or toning down stories which might upset advertisers.

The news desk became a news factory, churning out copy to fill space. Any copy, from anywhere; preferably light and risk-free. From the stripped down, over-stretched news rooms of the free weeklies and national dailies, a torrent of glossy public relations material is converted straight into printer’s ink, as proper scrutiny of the powerful goes undo; a state of affairs predicted during The Great War. During that conflict Intelligence Captain Charles Montague’s role was to escort journalists and dignitaries to the front. This early media handler believed that the Press would be used to deceive the enemy in the next war.

‘He reckoned ‘a large staff department of Press Camouflage’ would be needed: ‘The most disreputable of successful journalists and “publicity experts” would naturally man the upper grades’…

…Argument and reason would be replaced by emotion and ‘the practice of colouring news, of ordering reporters to take care that they see only such facts as tell in one way.’

The moral downside of it was that the untruthful journalist, the ‘expert in fiction’, having gained high distinction by his ‘fertility in falsehoods for consumption by an enemy’, would continue to thrive after the war was won, ‘in that new lie-infested and infected world of peace.’

Churchill’s Wizards – The British Genius For Deception 1914-1945, Nicholas Rankin

'Cheryl Cole keeps 'best-dressed' crown in Glamour. X Factor judge Cheryl Cole has retained her crown as the world's best-dressed female celebrity.'

BBC ‘News’ website, 25 April 2010
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Forward to The Trough

Conflict 6 - Media