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Why newspapers are dying

Posted on March 14, 2013 by

The calmer heads found in the Scottish independence movement – and in our better moments we like to consider ours among them – can often be heard cautioning against over-deploying allegations of bias, and citing Hanlon’s Razor in doing so.

(And to save you clicking on the link, that’s the one which runs “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”.)

cutthroat

It is, of course, possible and frequently the case for BOTH to be present – a glance at any Scotsman column by Michael Kelly or Brian Wilson will verify that – but this morning we’re going to focus on the latter side of the equation.

Opinion columnists like Kelly and Wilson are an easy target, and we’ve had much fun with them over this site’s history. But news reporting ought to uphold higher standards, and today Scotland’s two supposed “quality” native publications have conspired to produce some quite spectacular examples of why rapidly-declining numbers of people are inclined to believe anything they read in newspapers any more.

We’ll start with the trivial. Here’s a snippet of the Scotsman’s front page this morning:

scotsmancheats

We’re told that Scottish rugby coach Scott Johnson “stopped short of branding Wales cheats” in comments on last Saturday’s encounter in the Six Nations at Murrayfield. So that’s pretty clear, then.

heraldcheats

Oh. Except maybe it isn’t, because the Herald’s headline for the same story is unambiguous – “Johnson accuses Wales of cheating”. Here we see a straighforward example of two reporters not just reporting a story, but spinning it.

(Johnson was “furious” in the Scotsman, while the Herald’s take was that he “express[ed] concern that his comments would be characterised as ‘a tirade’ whereas his tone was reasoned as he reflected the concerns many have for the risk to the sport if the issues leading to so many failed scrummages are not addressed”.)

Now, within the context of sport that’s quite a big deal in itself: the c-word is still used very sparingly by professionals and retains a hefty amount of power as a result. It’s rather like “liar” in Parliament in that regard – politicians spend much of their time trying to imply their opponents are lying but very rarely come right out and say it, and it attracts severe censure from the Speaker if used in the House Of Commons.

But sport, for all the excessive importance regularly attached to it and however annoyed Scott Johnson might personally be at seeing his words misrepresented, isn’t a matter of life and death. So how did the two papers report something that was?

Today’s Herald covers a story in which Saudi Arabia executed seven men for robbery, punchily entitled “Saudi Arabia executes seven for robbery”. It contains a couple of interesting sentences:

“Human rights activists said the seven men were executed by firing squad yesterday – not beheaded as is customary […] The men were granted a stay of execution but were shot in Abha, the capital of Asir, one of the least developed parts of the country.”

The Scotsman reported the judicial killings too.

scotsmansaudi

There’s a rather odd and seemingly contradictory passage in the report:

“The original sentences called for death by firing squad and crucifixion. However, Saudi Press said yesterday that the seven were beheaded.

The oil-rich kingdom follows a strict implementation of Islamic law, or Shariah, under which people convicted of murder, rape or armed robbery can be executed, usually by sword.”

It seems a touch unusual that a “strict implementation of Islamic law” would have imposed a sentence of death by firing squad in the first place (Sharia law somewhat predating the invention of the gun), and firing squad followed by crucifixion would appear to be gilding the lily a touch. The idea that the kingdom, under international pressure, would have switched from firing squad to beheading is just downright weird.

Looking for a tie-breaker, we checked the Independent, which asserted firing-squad executions in its title but was short on detail. The Telegraph went a little further, including a quote from a supposed observer:

“A witness told AFP by telephone that ‘the execution was implemented a while ago at a public square in Abha,’ adding that the defendants were ‘shot dead’ and not beheaded as is customary in the kingdom.”

(A couple of days earlier, the same paper had reported the startling 21st-century news that “Saudi Arabia may be forced to change its method of execution from beheading to the firing squad after running out of swordsmen”.)

Russia Today also went with the firing-squad line, having noted in a previous article that The seven men were facing a firing squad, with one to be publicly crucified for three days thereafter”, and the Washington Post, Amnesty International and United Nations all concurred. That, frankly, was good enough for us.

Then we read the Daily Record’s version.

“Seven men convicted of theft, looting and armed robbery have been beheaded in Saudi Arabia, a week after their families appealed to the king for clemency, the country’s official news agency said.”

We decided to have a look at the website of the Saudi Press Agency for ourselves, given that it had been cited by both the Record and Scotsman. We could find no reference to the story at all – the only result for “execution”, “firing squad”, “behead” or “abha” concerned a totally different case in which a Nigerian man was beheaded in Riyadh yesterday for drug trafficking.

As we weren’t there, we can’t say definitively whether the Scotsman and Record reports are wrong, but nor can we find any supporting evidence in the place where both of them say they got the story from, or anyone else backing them up.

The incident brought to mind a time quite a few years ago when we worked in an office where someone (not us) often bought the Daily Sport, when it still had vague pretensions of being a real newspaper just a little downmarket from the Star. One edition carried a particularly grisly front-page eyewitness account of an electric-chair execution in the United States, full of stomach-turning detail (related with barely-concealed glee) of the smell of burning fat, smoke coming from the condemned man’s ears, his eyeballs melting in their sockets and the like.

The story the following day, noting that the execution had in fact been cancelled at the last minute and apologising for any offence, was a lot smaller and less prominent.

Now, we’re not saying that the Scotsman and Daily Record have sunk to the foetid depths of the Sport. They haven’t. (We glanced gingerly at a recent copy for the purposes of this piece and it’s like Der Sturmer crossed with Razzle, an utterly horrifying vision of extreme-right-wing porn-tabloid hell.)

But when readers can no longer read news reporting with a reasonable expectation that it’s giving an honest and accurate account of events – whether they’re as insignificant as a rugby coach criticising his opponents or as serious as young men being led out in front of a baying mob and murdered by the state – then the basic bond of trust which is central to all professional journalism is broken, and that’s a story whose final outcome is never in doubt.

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31 to “Why newspapers are dying”

  1. Bill Fraser
    Ignored
    says:

    You mean (shocked face) the newspapers are making things up :-0

  2. Rev. Stuart Campbell
    Ignored
    says:

    I really wanted to also squeeze in something about general press standards regarding this bit from a Tom English piece in the Scotsman today, but just couldn’t make it fit anywhere:

    “Green and Lawwell have very different approaches when handling the jaded business of the Old Firm’s potential route out of Scotland. Green barks and Lawwell purrs and, seemingly, in the middle of this ménage a trois sits Longmuir, chief executive of the Scottish Football League.

    To those who say that Rangers can not join English football, Green cites sex discrimination law, vows legal action and writes to the Prime Minister. Lawwell shows more restraint, preferring to do his business in the shadows, but his desire to get out of Scotland is just the same. You can absolutely see their point and neither can you fault them for trying to create a more lucrative future for their clubs. That is what they are there to do. That is their modus operandi.”

    http://www.scotsman.com/the-scotsman/opinion/comment/tom-english-longmuir-sounds-like-old-firm-talking-1-2835125

    That’s not a “modus operandi”, you muppet. That’s a raison d’etre. You can’t say two people do things completely differently and then speak of their collective “modus operandi”, because that would mean they were both doing things the same. Gah.

  3. mato21
    Ignored
    says:

    No such censure in the Scottish Parliament though for using the word liar  as recently witnessed at FMQs and levelled at the F.M

  4. kininvie
    Ignored
    says:

    There’s a simple explanation, and it’s all to do with the lingering death of the print media. There are very few newspapers who can afford to retain a stable of correspondents – especially foreign correspondents. So they use the big wire agencies for almost everything that is not home news. And because they have no means of checking the accuracy of the agency stories, they just print whatever’s said by whichever agency they have contracts with. And of course, the agencies differ, usually because they are just picking stuff up from the nearest local agency in their turn…
     
    If you take a quick whirl through #saudiarabia, you’ll see the contradictory reports are not confined to the Herald & Scotsman, but surface in much of the world’s English-speaking media. The bizarre sub-plot concerns Saudi Arabia ‘running out of swordsmen’ to do the beheading.

  5. David McCann
    Ignored
    says:

    Got it in one Rev.
    I recommend a read of John Pilger’s take on modern propaganda.
    When he met  Leni Riefenstahl and asked her about her epic films that glorified the Nazis she told him that the “messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above,” but on the “submissive void” of the German public. Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? “Everyone,” she said.
    http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-new-propaganda-is-liberal-the-new-slavery-is-digital
     For German public, substitute Scottish public.

  6. Rev. Stuart Campbell
    Ignored
    says:

    “There’s a simple explanation, and it’s all to do with the lingering death of the print media. There are very few newspapers who can afford to retain a stable of correspondents – especially foreign correspondents. So they use the big wire agencies for almost everything that is not home news”

    Well, yes, obviously. I don’t really expect the Scotsman to have a reporter stationed in Saudi Arabia, permanently or even temporarily. But I can’t actually find ANY root source saying these men were beheaded, and the very specific one mentioned by both the Record and Scotsman has nothing on the story at all.

    Plus, the most basic (and cost-free) rule of good journalism is still the same – if you don’t know, don’t just make shit up. Say they were “executed” and don’t go into any more detail than that. The method isn’t the important aspect of the story.

  7. Cath
    Ignored
    says:

    “the “messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above,” but on the “submissive void” of the German public.”
     
    That is so true. What bothers me now is – whether by design or laziness – stories are picked up by the media and they run with them as fact when often they are downright lies. This happened over Iraq and is happening big style over the debate in Scotland right now. Because everyone is seeing and reading the same stories everywhere, they are assumed to be factual. After all, surely the whole media wouldn’t be lying, right?
     
    But I guess if newspapers no longer do real journalism and simply print press releases – from the government, their favoured political parties and business – and pick up newswires from agencies, that will happen.
     
    So basically if governments or intelligence agencies want propaganda now they need do nothing other than make sure newswires pick up their stories and that will guarantee a spread with no pesky journalists asking whether the story is true or makes sense.

  8. Dcanmore
    Ignored
    says:

    Many years ago when I used to work for my local newspaper, a Junior Reporter colleague of mine had aspirations to work for the national press (as you do). But his way of doing it was to write up local stories and sensationalise them into creative fantasy pieces so he would ‘get noticed’ by potential future employers in Glasgow. It didn’t last long as he was reined in one day by the editor and got the verbal ‘hair dryer’, told to stop writing complete bollocks and do what he is supposed to be doing, ie report the facts as given. Needless to say, a couple of years later he got his dream job with a Glasgow-based daily writing utter shite!
     
    Unfortunately he swapped the idea of being a good journalist with that of a hack cultivating a reputation for notoriety and ended up being neither.

  9. Craig P
    Ignored
    says:

    I can’t read the phrase ‘modus operandi’ any more without thinking of that Chewing the Fat sketch…

  10. ronald alexander mcdonald
    Ignored
    says:

    The accurate message that people like you are relaying is that the press are not in the truth business. The good thing is that the majority don’t believe a word that’s written anymore. I’m sure the vast majority of punters  buy The Record for the football coverage and don’t even read the political vomit  they produce.
    They  dug a hole for themselves by concentrating on the leaked document last week, to mitigate attention of the GERS figures. The consequence is that it has enabled the SG to produce a paper highlighting the conflict- Oil industry v UK Govt. oil revenue  projections. Happy days.  

  11. Doug Daniel
    Ignored
    says:

    Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News paints a depressing picture of the “churnalism” that has seemingly replaced journalism, and yep, it’s basically a case of squeezed budgets and diminishing news teams trying to do everything on the cheap and cutting corners where possible.
     
    This is why I don’t hold journalists up in any more esteem than your average blogger. People say that bloggers rely on the media to get stories on which to comment, but that’s basically all the newspapers do, by taking press releases and wire agency stories and just putting a spin on it.
     
    And that’s the main problem. Newspapers don’t see their job as being to give us the facts and let us make our minds up ourselves – their job, as they see it, is simply to sell newspapers. That leads to facts being massaged to fit agendas, because it’s not news they’re trying to sell us, it’s stories. Daily Mail readers don’t want to read that immigration is actually good for the economy – they want to read that foreigners are coming here and taking our jobs. Express readers don’t want to read that squeezing public spending is making the UK’s economic problems worse, they want to read that illegitimate benefit claims are rife and that we need to punish poor people. Oh, and that Diana was killed in a conspiracy. Grauniad readers don’t want to read that Labour are a bunch of neo-liberal bastards, they want to read that Labour are still a left-wing party, with masses of spelling mistakes.
     
    Newspapers are no better than blogs, which is why I get all my news from blogs these days. At least bloggers are more likely to be trying to speak out against stuff, since they’re not under the pressure to submit to the whims of advertisers and media magnates.
     
    There are still good journalists out there, but like good bands, they are surrounded by an almighty sea of shite that makes it hard to pick them out.

  12. David McCann
    Ignored
    says:

    Aye Doug. And to paraphrase Pilger.
    We need to ‘clear out decrepit myths and other rubbish while stepping angrily over the babbling brook of bullshit’
     

  13. Vronsky
    Ignored
    says:

    If someone is telling porkies then the effect will be the same, and whether they’re twats or merely twits is usually of secondary importance. 
    However It is possible to distinguish stupidity from malice – there is a test you can apply.  Errors arising from stupidity will be random.  A twit who thinks that today is Tuesday will sometimes think it’s Wednesday, sometimes Saturday, and sometimes even get it right.  The twat on the other hand is eerily consistent in getting it wrong all the time.  The behaviour is uniform, the conclusion never varies.  The bias in the MSM against the SNP and the broader independence movement shows utterly no sign of random fluctuation, ergo it is malicious.  When was the last time you saw a news story that was positive about the SNP, but wrong in its facts?  Negative about the Union, but wrong in its facts? 

  14. Craig P
    Ignored
    says:

    The thing people need to watch out for (and this is a general point and not aimed at anyone here), is that when you stop believing the mainstream message, you open yourself up for all kinds of alternative messages – massively liberating, but there are plenty mad ideas out there that are not worth entertaining.

  15. Bill C
    Ignored
    says:

    @Vronsky – I think it is not only “malicious” but also orchestrated.

  16. JasonF
    Ignored
    says:

    There is the ‘rule’ that if both/all sides are complaining, then there probably isn’t any bias; there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of claims for bad reporting in newspapers from the NO side.
     
    As for the BBC (in London), it is criticised by both the left and the right, though this doesn’t mean it’s not favourable towards the establishment. But that’s not to say that BBC Scotland is institutionally bias just because most of those complaining are pro-indepedence; it’s probably more likely that there are individual personal and broader cultural causes for its imperfections.

  17. Marian
    Ignored
    says:

    Glad you’ve spoken out on this issue for there is little doubt that it is it is opinions and propaganda we now get instead of hard facts when we open a newspaper or watch TV news and current affairs. Opinion has taken over from hard facts in practically everything we get to read, see and hear these days. Its quite sad really that it has come to this for it is not so long ago that the Telegraph did us all an enormous service by exposing the Westminster expenses scandal yet they have now also joined the others and succumbed to printing propaganda instead of hard facts when it comes to their coverage of the independence referendum. It does not appear to have occurred to the perpetrators that the public are not buying these newspapers because they don’t like being lied to and told what to think.

  18. Dorothy Devine
    Ignored
    says:

    JasonF says:
    14 March, 2013 at 1:11 pm

    There is the ‘rule’ that if both/all sides are complaining, then there probably isn’t any bias; there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of claims for bad reporting in newspapers from the NO side
     
    Don’t give them ideas, they’ll be flooding the press with imagined slights ,setting up the same on BBBC Scotland – OK that one has been done by the chairchoob and obviously “done for” Isabel Fraser.

  19. Morag
    Ignored
    says:

    Was it my espousal of Hanlon’s Razor over the Lockerbie affair that started this habit of referring to it?

    I’ve had a few depressing experiences with journalists that colour my interpretation of everything I read in the press.  One of the first I remember was when I graduated as a vet from Glasgow University.  As it happened, another girl from the same town had been at college with me and graduated with me.  My mother thought the local paper would be interested in this local double, so she phoned their office.

    The reporter was indeed very interested, taking down all the details, until he asked, “and did they both go to Wishaw High?”  As it happened, both of us had been sent to school in Glasgow – me to Hutchie and my friend to Park.  That was the end of the conversation.  We hadn’t been to the local school, so he wasn’t going to report it.

    Another was when my beloved cat won the non-pedigree title in the cat equivalent of Crufts, in 1989.  Another local paper phoned me to get the story.  I happily told the reporter everything about how I had adopted the cat after he was brought to my surgery to be put down, and what a wonderful companion he was.  The resulting article was appalling, describing my cat’s condition when I first acquired him as if that was how he was when he won the prize more than ten years later, and getting about every possible fact wrong.

    More recently, I was trying to coach a journalist through a story on the new Lockerbie evidence.  The man really and honestly wanted to report the actual situation.  I had prepared a press briefing trying to explain it as clearly as I could.  He still repeatedly got it wrong.  There must have been more than half a dozen exchanges of emails with me trying to point out that no, that wasn’t what we were saying, and him having another go and still failing to get it.  The final article was OK, though a bit mealy-mouthed, but my God he was hard going.

    I try to remember all this when I read any newspaper article.

  20. CameronB
    Ignored
    says:

    Too many people are overly keen to apply Hanlon’s Razor in the most inappropriate circumstances, such as when considering a crime, or when the information available comes to you via the MSM (and appears to be scripted).

  21. Holebender
    Ignored
    says:

    … and they’re doing it deliberately!

  22. Garve
    Ignored
    says:

    Following the recent tragic hot air balloon accident in Egypt, both BBC and ITV news reported that the accident may have been caused when a rope became tangled around a helium tube. In fact, a search for ‘Luxor accident helium’ finds dozens of articles, many from titles you’d imagine took their journalism seriously, such as the Guardian. Helium isn’t used in hot-air balloons – the clue is in the name – and even if it was, helium’s not flammable.
    I guess thinking and factchecking just keeps journalists away from the pub for longer than they’d like.

  23. Craig P
    Ignored
    says:

    O/T, but I wonder if anyone else has seen this?
     
    http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21783506
    “unfortunately we can’t magic away the bad bits [of the UK economy], finance and energy”
    Don’t worry Robert, come 2014, if you are lucky, the Scots will vote for independence, and take the terrible burden of oil and gas revenues off your hands – LOL

  24. kininvie
    Ignored
    says:

    Everything that has been said about newspapers above is (in general) true. But we do need to ask ourselves why it is that Mail online is the second most-read site in the world despite our fulminations? Short answer: because sensation sells and truthful facts do not. With respect to the Rev, I’d point out that ‘Saudi running out of beheading-qualified swordsmen’ is a great story, and well worth making up a firing squad for….
    On a more serious note, we get nowhere by trying to demand truth from the MSM. They don’t care; their readers don’t care. Better to combat it in their own terms.

  25. BillyBigbaws
    Ignored
    says:

    Another reason for the popularity of Mail Online is that, whatever you might think of their journalistic standards in terms of writing, they have the best photographers and picture editors in the business.

    Seriously, look at a Mail story covering, say, the aftermath of the Fukushima tsunami, and a similar story from any other British paper. The Mail will vastly outstrip them all in terms of it’s pictures. And since a lot of folk are only on there for gossip about the size of some celebrity or other’s bum, pictures count for a lot.

  26. Morag
    Ignored
    says:

    Following the recent tragic hot air balloon accident in Egypt, both BBC and ITV news reported that the accident may have been caused when a rope became tangled around a helium tube.
     
    You cannot be serious!

  27. kininvie
    Ignored
    says:

    @billybigbaws Mail also has a ‘scrag team’.  If you agree to an interview, you’ll be visited, given a complete makeover, & put into the ‘right’ clothes, so that you will look the way the Mail wants you to look in the photographs. Beware, Billybigbaws!

  28. deewal
    Ignored
    says:

    Bill C says:
    14 March, 2013 at 12:46 pm

    @Vronsky –” I think it is not only “malicious” but also orchestrated.”

    Of course it is. I’ve been saying this for months. It will get much, much worse.
    Does anyone think that the Great British State is going to just roll over and allow Scotland it’s Independence ? Really ?

  29. gavin lessells
    Ignored
    says:

    I believe that the credibility of the press may be challenged by drawing the attention of the general Scottish public to blogs such as this.
    It is for this reason that I have printed a fairly substantial number of leaflets drawing attention to sites such as this.
    I am lacking an outlet for distribution for reasons I will not dwell on. I am happy for Wings to reveal my cyber whereabouts

  30. BillyBigbaws
    Ignored
    says:

    @ kininvie,
    That sounds awful. I like to do my own make-up.

    The benefits claimants with ten kids and a mansion who appear so frequently in the Mail’s pages must get a shock when the ‘scrag team’ turns up with a van full of burqas.



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