Category Archives: Daily Telegraph
Labour ‘Big Beast’ mauls the Sunday Times!
“Labour coup: Ed Balls and his five fellow plotters
Ed Balls is exposed in the documents uncovered by The Daily Telegraph as the key figure in the plot to oust Tony Blair and replace him with Gordon Brown.”
The story was taken up by most of the papers but without the ‘secret’ documents, written five years ago and ‘given’ to the Telegraph by an unnamed donor. These were said by Ed Balls to have been taken from his desk when he left the Education Department after the general Election. There is now an investigation, headed by Gus O’Donnell, underway to see if there has been any breach of security and in an attempt to find whoever was responsible for removing the papers.
Since the Telegraph’s ‘bomshell’, the media have run with similar stories including one from the Guardian of the acceptance speech David Miliband would have given had he won the Labour leadership election, and a ‘Brothers at War’ frontpager today in the Independent:
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| Independent on Sunday – 12th June 2011 |
Little wonder, then, that by this morning many Labour supporters were feeling jittery and wondering what had hit them! Once most of the articles had been read and discussed on Twitter and those wide-awake enough had written their thoughts in their blogs, the general consensus was that most of the content was supposition, guesswork and ill-informed trouble-making!
Quotations were not, on the whole, attributed to anyone in particular, but gathered from a great many anonymous ‘friends’, ‘senior MPs’, ‘frontbench’ sources. Some of the least convincing were from well-known Conservative political pundits…..
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| Sunday Times – 12th June 2011 |
To which John Prescott responded, adding a link to the part of the article where his name is clearly shown:
If the ‘victim’ in this case hadn’t been a well known politician with a great many ‘followers’ on
Twitter, would an apology have been forthcoming without recourse to the courts?
One last point, why are so many people convinced that to report a case like this to the PCC would be a futile exercise?
Update #1
An article has appeared on the Guardian’s online site: Sunday Times Apologises to John Prescott Over Wrong Quote
(‘Wrong quote’?- He didn’t give one at all to the Sunday Times…)
“He added: “I refuse to accept this mealy-mouthed apology. I want a front page retraction – due prominence – in next week’s Sunday Times.”
Prescott, a potential victim of phone hacking by an investigator working for the News of the World, another Rupert Murdoch paper, has been one of the most vociferous critics of the handling of the hacking scandal by News International and the Metropolitan police.”
Perhaps the ‘mauling’ hasn’t ended quite yet…?
Update #2:
13th June 2011:-
PCC should investigate Sunday Times
‘John Prescott’ quote
Doomed! We’re all doomed! – Or are we?
If you were to glance at the front pages of some of the newspapers this morning, you’d be forgiven for feeling at best a slight frisson of fear, at worst convinced the country was doomed to an epidemic worse than Swine ‘Flu, more deadly than MRSA!
E.coli is not about to strike us all down!
Here we’re treated to another series of vivid, raucous headlines full of hyperbole and little or no substance.
The Express, perhaps is the least frightening, but only because its readers have surely become immune to the sensational headlines, behind which lies not a lot of truth?
The Daily Mail, too, is only slightly less guilty than the Express of composing misleading headlines above often much more innocuous pieces.
“Mutant E.coli is in Britain: Seven victims in UK have new contagious strain that’s killed 18”
But the Telegraph? Surely the Telegraph is more accurate and serious in its reporting?
“As seven cases of the food poisoning bacteria were diagnosed in Britain, the agency said that the mutant strain was so virulent that sufferers risked spreading the infection to friends and relations through close contact.”
These three examples are some of the worst displays of sensationalism and scaremongering found on a very quick trawl through the available headlines today.
Nowhere in those frightening headlines do those papers mention that the people with the E. coli infection in Britain were infected on very recent visits to Germany, not here. We are misled; encouraged to believe that the seven people in Britain with the disease contracted it here.
This deliberate inaccuracy is dangerous. As well as encouraging irrational fear in the population, it will possibly badly affect the sales of fresh vegetables grown or imported by already beleaguered food producers and increase the number of time-consuming calls on doctors and health workers for advice.
This dishonesty may sell papers, but what does it do for the readers? Don’t readers and the general public deserve the truth?
#PRESSREFORM 