Daily Mail Watch

A tabloid-friendly guide to the EU and ECHR

Posted by dnotice

October 31st, 2011

While media watching, one thing you notice is a repeated confusion between the European Union (EU) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) (run by the Council of Europe, CoE).

This may be completely inadvertent, but the Sun, Daily Mail and Express do make this mistake on a regular basis, amongst other “errors”.

I thought I would help them out.

Wikipedia has the following diagram showing how the jurisdiction of various European bodies overlaps*, as well as a few extra bits**:

As you can see there is a clear overlap between the EU and CoE/ECtHR – in fact to join the EU you must be a member of the CoE/ECtHR – but it is clear that there is a significant difference between the two, even when simply looking at the members of each.

The main difference is that one is more trade-related; one more co-operation related.

The EU was set up in 1958 by various western European countries, but not the UK (which created the European Free Trade Association in response), to help them trade with each other.  In fact, the basic idea of the EU is to create an economic bloc between various countries via a single internal market.

The CoE was set up in 1949 – by the UK among others – is more of an inter-governmental co-operation organisation, kind of like a Europe-only UN, with a specific focus on civil rights by the European Convention on Human Rights, which the UK drafted, and a less obvious focus on pharmacology standards.

So while it can be seen that there are similarities between the two, there are obvious differences.

Hopefully, the tabloids will read this and take note, especially as the EU has already attempted to point this out, albeit without success.

* There are a few bodies which aren’t shown on the diagram, including the Central European Free Trade Agreement (which will probably be swallowed up by the EU in the future given the EU’s Candidates and Potential Candidates), and the Customs Union of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia which is rarely mentioned in the UK.

** The other items are the European Free Trade Association; the European Economic Area; the EU Customs Zone; and the Schengen Area; as well as showing non-EU countries countries which have agreements to mint €s, but not those which decided to use it, without reaching a formal agreement, due to historic reasons.

Categories: EU | No Comments

We regret the error…

Posted by dnotice

October 31st, 2011

You may or not know that the Daily Mail has recently started a “Corrections and Clarifications” column.

It appears to be an attempt to defend the current status of media self-regulation, which is currently being investigated by the Leveson inquiry.

By way of keeping track of what is published Dave Cross has started up a site which feeds the Mail’s corrections into one place: Corrections and Clarifications.

As Dave points out:

It’s a pretty half-arsed affair for many reasons. The only way to find it is by searching for it by title. There’s no link for it anywhere on the site and it doesn’t seem to have been given its own section. Most bizarrely, the corrections don’t appear in the main web feed for the paper.

None of the corrections link back to the original story and in many cases you only get a vague description to help you work out which story they are talking about. And even if you work out which story they’re talking about, it’s often impossible to find the story on the web site as it has been removed.

Any suggestions can be emailed to corrections@mailonsunday.co.uk or sent via post.

Categories: Housekeeping | No Comments

The Second Annual Media-Watchery Meetup

Posted by sim-o

October 10th, 2011

Do you fancy a pint?

The gang behind The-Sun-Lies, Mailwatch, Expresswatch and numerous other media watching blogs are having Their second annual Media Watch Meetup. The first one, held in August just gone was such a success they couldn’t wait another twelve months so it’s being held in a couple of weeks.

Do come along for a drink or two and a chat about the papers, blogging or just to say hello. Best of all it’s free (apart from the beer which you’ll have to pay for yourself. We’re not *that* nice). There’s no entrance fee and you won’t need to buy anyone a beer to gain access to any of our top bloggers and you can stay as long as you want or until the pub kicks us all out. You can just turn up or or go to the Facebook event page and let us know to expect you.

So, are you coming then?

The Monarch pub, Chalk Farm Road, Camden (map).
Saturday 29th August October
3pm on

Categories: Housekeeping | Tags: meet-up | 2 Comments

Clear evidence that Daily Mail planned to use invented eyewitness accounts

Posted by Tim Ireland

October 3rd, 2011

Amanda Knox has just been found not guilty of murdering her room-mate Meredith Kercher. An Italian court upheld her appeal against a 26-year sentence, and similarly overturned a 25-year sentence imposed on her ex-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito.

Below is a screen capture from an article published by the Daily Mail soon after the verdict. This article by Nick Pisa was clearly published in error, as it declared that both Knox & Sollecito were found guilty, when nothing like this happened:

But what is more significant is that we know this article was prepared in advance of an event that no-one at the Daily Mail could possibly have witnessed… which means that Nick Pisa and the relevant editing staff at the Daily Mail were prepared to print the following eyewitness accounts as if they were genuine, when everyone involved with preparing this article must have known that they described events that had yet to happen:

“Amanda Knox looked stunned this evening after she dramatically lost her prison appeal against her murder conviction….”

and

“As Knox realized the enormity of what judge Hellman was saying she sank into her chair sobbing uncontrollably while her family and friends hugged each other in tears.”

and

“A few feet away Meredith’s mother Arline, her sister Stephanie and brother Lyle, who had flown in especially for the verdict remained expressionless, staring straight ahead, glancing over just once at the distraught Knox family.”

In the same article, the Daily Mail of all papers has the temerity to sniff at the “media circus” around the trial; one caption even labels them ’scum’. But I can only see one ‘news’ paper inventing reactions from the prosecution following an event that never happened:

Prosecutors were delighted with the verdict and said that ‘justice has been done’ although they said on a ‘human factor it was sad two young people would be spending years in jail’.

The Daily Mail even give a full account of events that didn’t follow the event that didn’t happen:

Following the verdict Knox and Sollecito were taken out of court escorted by prison guards and into a waiting van which took her back to her cell at Capanne jail near Perugia and him to Terni jail, 60 miles away.

This is a clear-cut case of entirely invented detail that cannot be explained away as part of any standard verdict-preparedness process. In fact, it goes well beyond the ‘X actually said this to my face’ antics of Johann Hari, but I doubt very much if we will see Nick Pisa admitting to any wrongdoing or offering to attend journalism school anytime soon.

UPDATE (4/10/11 10:28): Tim emails Nick Pisa for a quote.

Categories: News | 23 Comments

Amanda Knox is guilty!

Posted by dnotice

October 3rd, 2011

You may be aware that Amanda Knox has been cleared of murder.

However, if you’d stumbled upon the Daily Mail’s website, you would have thought otherwise.

This was published on the Mail’s website as soon as the judge said “Guilty”.  However, he was referring to her being “guilty” of defamation, not murder.

Nevertheless, it appears that whoever publishes articles on the Mail’s website jumped the gun. A piece went up with the URL slug-words: Amanda-Knox-verdict-GUILTY-appeal-murder-conviction-rejected.

The artice has since been removed, but a screenshot was taken by @syn for posterity.

While it has captions including “Media scum”, what it interesting is that the Mail’s erroneous article has “quotes” from the prosecution.

The killer paragraph is:

Prosecutors were delighted with the verdict and said “Justice has been done” although they said on a “human factor it was sad two young people would be spending years in jail“

Clearly they would only make such comments upon there being a guilty verdict. Even ignoring the fact that she was innocent and so the quotes would never have been made, the timing of the article on its own (8:50 p.m.) would suggest that the “quotes” are fake.

Categories: Media, News | 3 Comments

The Birth of a Meme

Posted by Dave Cross

September 28th, 2011

[This is cross-posted from davblog]

It’s not often that you can trace a tabloid meme back to its beginnings. Over the last week we’ve seen the birth of a new tabloid meme and, luckily, we’re able to see where it comes from.

Here’s the seed. It’s from the Frequently Asked Questions page on the BBC Religion religion web site.

Why does bbc.co.uk/religion use BCE and CE instead of BC and AD?

In line with modern practice bbc.co.uk/religion uses BCE/CE (Before Common Era/Common Era) as a religiously neutral alternative to BC/AD. As the BBC is committed to impartiality it is appropriate that we use terms that do not offend or alienate non-Christians.

There is something important to notice here. From reading the answer to question, it’s clear that it’s only talking about the BBC Religion web site – this is not a BBC-wide policy. Also note that this page has been there for some time. There’s nothing at all that indicates that this is a new rule. But that’s not how it seemed to various Mail columnists.

In the Mail on Sunday on 18th Septamber, Peter Hitchins wrote this:

The BBC’s Chief Commissar for Political Correctness (whom I imagine as a tall, stern young woman in cruel glasses issuing edicts from an austere office) was hard at work again last week.

On University Challenge, Jeremy Paxman referred to a date as being Common Era, rather than AD. This nasty formulation is designed to write Christianity out of our culture. Given the allegedly ferocious Mr Paxman’s schoolgirlish, groupie-like treatment of various prominent atheists in recent interviews, maybe he favours this far-from-impartial view.

I’m guessing that Hitchens just happened to be watching University Challenge, got annoyed by the use of “Common Era” and decided to use it at the end of his column to have a little go at the BBC. It probably wouldn’t have gone any further if it wasn’t for James Delingpole.

On Saturday Delingpole wrote a piece for the Mail entitled “How the BBC fell for a Marxist plot to destroy civilisation from within”. I swear I’m not making this up. The piece reads like something from The Onion but, amazingly, he seems to be completely serious. It’s Delingpole who links Hitchens’ annoyance to the FAQ page I quoted above. He writes:

No longer will [The BBC's] website refer to those bigoted, Christian-centric concepts AD (as in Anno Domini – the Year of Our Lord) and BC (Before Christ). From now on, it will use initials which strip our traditional Gregorian calendar of its offensive religious context. All reference to Christ has been expunged, replaced by the terms CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before Common Era).

But the BBC isn’t doing this because it has been flooded with complaints, you understand. Nor is it responding to public demand. No, as it primly explains on the Q&A page on the section of its website bbc.co.uk/religion, it is doing it to be ‘in line with modern practice’.

He’s getting it completely wrong, of course. As we’ve already established, the FAQ page is only talking about a single section section of the BBC’s web site. But Delingpole isn’t a man who ever lets facts stand in the way of a good rant. Building on a non-existent foundation he spins a magnificent conspiracy theory about pernicious left wingers destroying the British way of life.

Then, on Sunday, Chris Hastings ties it all together, building on Hitchens’ annoyance, the BBC FAQ and Delingpole’s rantings to produce a front-page story with the headline “BBC turns its back on year of Our Lord: 2,000 years of Christianity jettisoned for politically correct ‘Common Era’”.

But, of course, the story doesn’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny. In fact it is full of internal contradictions.

The Corporation has replaced the familiar Anno Domini (the year of Our Lord) and Before Christ with the obscure terms Common Era and Before Common Era.

A bold statement which is rather shown up by the following sentence which admits that University Challenge and In Our Time “are among the growing number of shows using the new descriptions” – indication that the BBC’s evil plan isn’t quite as advanced as Hastings would like us to think. It’s also interesting that he uses the phrase “new descriptions” as the terms have been around for 150 years.

If you get to the end of the article, he has asked the BBC for a statement on the issue. They say:

The BBC has not issued editorial guidance on the date systems.

Both AD and BC, and CE and BCE are widely accepted date systems and the decision on which term to use lies with individual production and editorial teams.

A lesser man would have realised that this statement completely overturns the argument of the article and may even have thought better of submitting the story. Hastings, however, knows that most Mail readers don’t get past the first couple of paragraphs of a story and decided to press ahead safe in the knowledge that very few people would get to the end and realise the embarrassing truth. And it seems he was right to do so, as this story currently has over 1,500 comments, the vast majority of which are from people who obviously didn’t get far past the headline.

I thought that would have been the end of it, but this nonsense now seems to have gone viral. Yesterday the Mail published “Our language is being hijacked by the Left to muzzle rational debate” by Melanie Phillips (don’t read it – really, you have been warned) and “The BBC just loath anything that smacks of tradition” by Reverend Peter Mullen. Neither of these articles show any evidence of the authors having taken any time to investigate the story at all. The story has also moved beyond the Mail and has been covered by other papers like the Telegraph.

So there you have it. The birth of a new anti-BBC meme. One throwaway remark from a Mail writer and within a week the BBC is under attack for something that it hasn’t done. Well done Peter Hitchens. And the brilliant thing (as far as the Mail is concerned) is that the BBC is in a lose-lose situation here. If programmes stop using BC and AD then the paranoia of the Mail will be proved correct. If, however, (as seems far more likely) a mixture of the two systems continue to be used as it has been for several years, then the Mail will be able to point out every use of BC and AD as a triumph for its campaign.

One more nail in the coffin of rational debate in this country.

P.S. For more detail on the story see these two great posts over on Tabloid Watch.

Update: I’ve just seen this in an old article on the Daily Mail site:

A comparison of this latest finding with city walls and gates from the period of the First Temple, as well as pottery found at the site, enable us to postulate with a great degree of assurance that the wall that has been revealed is that which was built by King Solomon in Jerusalem in the latter part of the 10th century BCE.

And, you know what, not a ripple of complaint in the comments.

Categories: Media | 4 Comments

Media Watch Meet-up

Posted by Tim Ireland

August 5th, 2011

A small group of liberal elitists behind The Sun: Tabloid Lies, Mail Watch, Express Watch and other personal attacks on common sense and decency will be meeting for a London-centric Chardonnay-quaffing* session at The Monarch in Camden at 2:30pm on Saturday 6th August, 2011.

Members of the public are invited to attend, provided they are not operating under the constraints of an imaginary legal device.

Those attending may be exposed to furtive whispers about media standards as a spectacle, media-watching as a sport, and other aspects of the vast left wing conspiracy to impose accuracy and accountability on a self-regulated system that’s doing just fine without our incessant meddling.

[*There may be some drinking of popular colas and lager beer, purely for the sake of appearances, should a photo opportunity arise. PS - bring a camera.]

Media Watch Meet-up

2:30pm
Saturday
6th August 2011
The Monarch in Camden:
http://www.monarchbar.com/contact/

Bags will be searched for pie.

Categories: Media | 2 Comments

The Mail on Teenage Abortions

Posted by Dave Cross

July 5th, 2011

[This is cross-posted from Davblog]

A lot of tabloid watchers have obviously been looking elsewhere today, but the Mail still manages to peddle its usual level of bullshit.

I was particularly drawn to this piece [istyosty link]. In it they examine recent Department of Health figures on the number of girls of sixteen or under who have an abortion.

The Mail line is predictable.

Campaigners warned that the alarming figures, revealed by the Department of Health, were representative of a society where abortion was ‘on demand’ – even for very young girls who legally should not be having sex.

But there’s another way of looking at this data.

Here’s the table that the Mail published.

Now I’m not saying for a second that this is an acceptable level of teen abortions. Obviously anyone would hope for those figures to be far smaller – zero even. But take a close look at the figures for the last four years.

The number of abortions carried out on girls of sixteen and under has fallen every year since 2007. In fact the figure is now 15% lower than it was at its peak.

Surely that has to be seen as a good thing. That’s a substantial fall over four years. But no. The Mail looked at these figures and decided to spin it as a comment on our over-sexed society rather than the success story that it undoubtedly is.

Categories: Healthcare | 10 Comments

Rock music kills child, claims Daily Mail

Posted by sim-o

April 27th, 2011

This post was originally posted by Simon HB at his No Rock and Roll Fun blog and is reproduced here with kind permission.

The death of Isobel Jones-Reilly is a terrible thing, a terribly sad story.

But no story is so heartbreaking that it’s not going to get the Mail moralising and blaming everything in the modern world (istyosty.com link):

Ecstasy death girl, 15, ‘idolised drug-taking musicians and was hooked on the internet’

Right from the first three crappy depersonalising words of the headline on Arthur Martin and Tamara Cohen’s shabby piece sets the tone for a careless, thoughtless long honk as the Mail drags the body of a dead teenager up and down the streets.

Let’s start with that claim she was “hooked on the internet”. You might think that if Isobel really was hooked on the internet, she’d be getting lambasted in a different part of the Mail for sitting in her bedroom looking at a screen. Her very real death was in the very real world, surely?

But how does the Mail know about this being addicted to the web, except for when she had switched the computer off and gone out with friends?

But one of her teachers blamed her downward spiral on an addiction to the internet.

Really?

Jaye Williamson, who was Isobel’s English teacher at Chiswick Community College, in West London, said: ‘She was into the kind of things that teenagers get into, but she got hooked on the worldwide web. She was part of the Myspace generation. She got caught and we are devastated.’

“Part of the MySpace generation” pretty much tells you to what extent Williamson is an expert witness on these matters. To be fair to Williamson, her quote sounds like something somebody who is still upset and confused by the death of a young person they knew might mumble out if being badgered for a quote from a shitty journalist.

Certainly, the Mail offers no other evidence for this “addiction” to the internet, and doesn’t seem to consider for a moment that ‘doing stuff on the internet’ is what people do now. It reports memorial events organised online and scrapes Facebook photos and YouTube videos from tribute sites without seeming to realise that this is the sort of “being sucked in” to the internet that is meant to be the bogeyman in the story.

So what of Martin and Cohen’s second bold claim, that Isobel “idolised drug-taking musicians”?

Did she edit a fanzine called something like ‘Works and Plectrums’? No.
Had she shot a YouTube video in which she cheered while waving round pictures of Pete Doherty? No.
Have Martin and Cohen got details of a tattoo she had reading “Bands who take drugs are cool”? No.

Their claim seems to be based on one single quote:

‘Like many teenagers she idolised musicians who took drugs and it was hard to tell them the pitfalls of copying such behaviour.

‘These bands seem to have it all and the kids just want to copy them. It’s just desperately sad that it’s ended in the death of such a beautiful and lovely girl.’

And who gave this line to the Mail?

Diane Bardon, 50, whose son David was at school with Isobel

So the parent of another child at her school farts out a suggestion that maybe she was “idolising” drug-taking musicians “like many teenagers” – a vague and empty claim that, you’ll note, can’t even stand itself up by suggesting a name or two of whose these musicians might actually be – and suddenly it’s up in the headlines.

There’s a dead child, a mourning family, and all the Mail is interested in doing is kicking the corpse to see if it can somehow blame the internet and rock music. What a triumph for journalism.

Categories: Music | Tags: children, death, drugs, Internet, Music | 12 Comments