54) As they seem to say at The Guardian, never let truth get in the way of a dodgy story.

My
earliest experience of the wanton
disregard  that newspapers have
for the truth was when, in about 1977, I was working on the Seat belt campaign
at Y&R. (Y&R, short for Young and Rubicam, that’s an advertising agency
to the uninitiated.) For some reason, now long forgotten, I was phoned by the
Daily Express to discuss the new commercials we were making – the first that
had been done without Jimmy Savile. (Yes, amazing to think that he was once
regarded as the  safe, sober, avuncular
voice of reason who might persuade you to do the sensible thing. And, actually,
he was rather good at it. But that’s another story – that, being in an almost
unimaginable past, is another country.)

“So”
asked, the voice at the other end, “are you the chap who wrote the ‘Clunk,
click, every trip’ line.”

“NO!”
I said, vehemently denying I had anything to do with it. Not because I didn’t
think it was any good – if it wasn’t exactly poetry it was undeniably
memorable, which is, after all, the first job of any advertising line -  but because I did not want to be seen to
be  laying claim to something I had not
done. That would have been regarded as a court martial offence, and a capital
one at that, in the Y&R bar. Just in case my new friend in Fleet Street –
in 1977 he probably really was in Fleet Street - had misheard me, I was at
pains to repeat my denial. “No, absolutely not, I did not write it.”

Sure
enough, in the next day’s Express, there I was: Richard Phillips, the man who
had written the famous line, ‘Clunk click, every trip.’

Since
then I have had, I suppose, first hand knowledge of  about a dozen stories that have appeared in
the press, and every one – and I really do mean every single one – has got key
facts wrong. Each and every one was, to a greater or lesser extent, downright
misleading.

And
yet, still I continue to be a voracious reader of newspapers and, even more
incredibly, choose to believe  what is
written in them, even while simultaneously
believing  - knowing – that nine tenths of it, probably ten,  is utter
bollocks.

Strange
indeed. I can only try to explain this bizarre behaviour that flies in the face
of all reason by suggesting I like reading newspapers and I am interested in
the sorts of things they write about – sport, politics, current affairs – and
that it would leave a hole in my life if I didn’t spend time – several hours a
week  I am sure – reading them. If I properly
accepted, as I should, that they are not to be believed then I would have to
further accept  that this was a
completely pointless exercise and  find
something else, probably even more pointless, to fill the time.

So,
as so often in life, common sense loses out and on I go, soaking up the
fantasies as if they were the facts they are claimed to be.

However,
just recently a couple of big stories have caught my eye which I could just not
let pass without a bit of further investigation.

One
was the story of the ‘Tory party bullies, which I wrote about in post 51.  If you
can be bothered, please have another look at it. You will see that, with
even the tiniest amount of drllling down – to use Evan Davies  favourite phrase – it becomes quite clear
that The Guardian was making claims that even their  own ‘evidence’, when properly examined,
showed were completely inaccurate. Nor, in the case of this story, has The
Guardian been alone.

A
short while after these unsubstantiated Guardian allegations, the BBC, ran a story one evening on  ‘Newsnight’ (editor: Ian Katz, formerly of The Guardian) and again on Radio 4’s ‘Today’ the following morning, about a
file that had been submitted to Conservative Central Office in 2011 purportedly
containing multiple allegations of bullying.

Yet no
effort was apparently made to see if this file existed. On  the ‘Today’ programme they added a telling
footnote saying that the BBC had not, in fact, seen the file, which, though an
extraordinary admission of dereliction of duty, at least had the benefit of
honesty and was something they had signally failed to mention during the ‘Newsnight’
coverage.

Just
think: the BBC, supposedly the most unimpeachable source of journalistic truth
in the world, ran an incendiary story, implicitly supporting the claim that the
Chairman of the Conservative Party had so completely ignored his duty of care
to his employees that his inaction  led
ultimately to the suicide of one of  them,  without bothering to make sure  that the file, this ‘smoking gun’, actually
existed.

Surely
the first thing any half decent
journalist would do,  when
presented with the news of the existence of this file, would  be to
ask if a copy had been kept and then to ask to see it, to check if the
claims were true.  And if this  journalist was told that for some
unfathomable reason, no copy had been kept or if he was denied access if it had,
would he not have thought, ‘Do you know what, I smell a bit of a rat here and
maybe I shouldn’t go throwing all this mud around until I have some firmer
evidence.’

As I
have said in my previous post, I have absolutely no idea what the truth of this
Tory bullying story is, but I do know that a lot of wild accusations have been
chucked around by The Guardian and the BBC backed up by supposed evidence that
doesn’t stand thirty seconds of even the mildest forensic examination.  Quite why this might be the case, I know not
– although I suspect - and I freely admit that I have sucked this theory out of
my thumb - that there might be people on the political left making common cause
with some within the Conservative party (my enemy’s enemy etc.) who wish to
damage David Cameron  and that they see
an attack on his  supposedly close
friend, the Chairman of the Conservative Party, Lord Feldman, as being a jolly
good way of getting at him.

But
my quarter baked conspiracy theories are bye the bye. What I am on about here
is the inaccuracy/carelessness/dissembling of the press and in particular, The
Guardian, since it is always on its high horse about the need to expose the
truth and to defend civil liberties and
generally presents itself as,
well, the guardian, of all that is right and proper.

Surely,
The Guardian above all other British newspapers
has a moral duty to  show some
scruples about the stories it prints.

Yet
it continued not to concern itself with scruples when it launched attack after
attack on the Government over its handing
on the flooding crisis of recent weeks.

As Storm
Frank swamped Yorkshire, the Guardian ran this headline:

‘Government warned
about funding cuts weeks before Yorkshire floods.’

It expanded on this idea in the first paragraph:
'The government was warned by its own
advisory body that a funding gap could leave swathes of the north vulnerable to
flooding just weeks before the deluge this Christmas, official documents show.’

Official documents!!!
There
it was - another smoking gun. And as it turned out one that bore a
remarkable similarity to our  previous smoking gun, in that  its bullet
chamber turned out to be equally
empty. In the second paragraph came the name and words of the man behind
this
supposed warning,  ‘Prof Colin Mellors, head of the Yorkshire regional flood and coastal
committee (RFCC), said ‘funding cuts could mean discontinuing some flood
defences, according to minutes on the government’s website.’

Hm. That quote from Prof. Mellors didn’t seem to me to mean
quite the same as 'leav(ing) swathes of the north vulnerable to flooding’.  Clearly someone at The Grauniad had made, what
might be charitably called,  a leap of
the imagination. But still, they thoughtfully provided us with the link to the
government website, so we could look for ourselves.

So I did look for myself and what I found was a 140 page
document - the minutes of a meeting chaired by the aforementioned Prof. Mellors.
I can’t say I could bring myself to read
this stultifyingly dull document in detail - I would be amazed if anyone could
stay awake long enough - but I did scan it twice looking for any of these
words, and, as far as I can see, neither 'swathes
of the north’ nor even 'funding cuts
could mean discontinuing some flood defences ’ appeared anywhere.

Being rather baffled, I wrote in the Comments  section underneath the article much of what I
have written above, and added:

‘Now possibly,
these exact words from Prof Mellor are buried somewhere in the text, and I
missed them - if anyone else can be bothered to wade through the 140 pages and
they find them, please let me know - but sure a hell, they are not triple
underlined or have even the slightest prominence. If this was a 'warning’ it
was certainly at the extremely mild end of the warnings spectrum.’

Someone called Billy Mansell – presumably another saddo like me
with nothing better to do than spout off in the Comments section – replied
thus:

Took less than a
minute to find the section (2.9).

Now I’m sure some
deniers will continue to quibble that the exact wording of the papers is not as
the article but the intent is clear from Prof. Mellors’ words.

And I, in turn, looked up section 2.9 in the minutes and then
posted this reply to Billy Mansell:

‘Item 2.9 is this as far as I can see. 'With ever
tightening budgets, it is clear that there will need to be even firmer
prioritisation, especially in relation to maintenance activity and it is likely
that the Asset Maintenance Protocol (agreed by RFCCs in 2011) means that we will
be asked in the New Year to consider sites where maintenance might be formally
discontinued. Some RFCCs have already started to consider and implement such
possibilities and it is obviously important that such difficult decisions are
based both on proper risk assessments and reflect local choices. It is
important that the region itself makes such choices.’

Are you seriously
telling me, (I asked of Billy Mansell),
that the Guardian’s precis is an accurate reflection of this?’

I won’t pretend that I was able to persuade Billy Mansell of my
point of view but I think anyone with the least objectivity – not a type
commonly found amongst Guardian comments contributors, admittedly – would have
to agree that The Guardian headline and article were a gross distortion of the
facts on which the story was supposedly based.

And The Guardian wasn’t done yet with spurious attacks on the
government about the flooding

A couple of days later, it ran this headline:

Experts
criticise George Osborne over flood protection funding

And the article underneath began as
follows:

George Osborne has been accused of
jeopardising Britain’s crumbling flood defences over the past five years by
prioritising cuts to the deficit, and has also been warned that infrastructure
spending may need to rise sharply to adapt to climate change.

The warnings from leading academics came as parts of
the UK were hit by Storm Frank on Wednesday, with hundreds of
homes evacuated and thousands of people left without power.

Professor Simon Wren-Lewis, of Oxford University,
who has analysed data on recent flood spending, said there was little sign that
the government had changed course to take into account the growing threat of
extreme weather.

“What you would really expect is to see spending at
a much higher level,” he said. “It doesn’t seem like the same kind of reaction
which we know has happened to the threat of terrorism, where we know spending
levels have increased by a large magnitude.”

Fair enough you might think.  Very newsworthy. Not quite experts in the
plural as the headline claims but still, a professor from Oxford – must know
what he is talking about.

However, once again, all was not quite what it seemed.

Buried further down in the article – in paragraph 8 – which, I
suspect,  is probably a bit further than
most readers usually get, was this revealing littile detail. 'Wren-Lewis, who
sits on the Shadow Chancellors panel of Economic Advisors …’

Ah. Quel surprise.
Perhaps not the impartial academic one might have thought him to be (or rather ‘they’ as the headline claims)  but possibly someone with a teensy weensy
bit of a political axe to grind. The
Finacial Times has said of this panel: ‘Mr.McDonnell’s seven economists are
unified in their opposition to Mr.Osborne’s spending cuts.’

For your further instruction here is
the full list of the McDonnell panellists.

1.    
David
Blanchflower, who calls himself a “Tory-baiting Ivy League economist”

2. Mariana Mazzucato, who said, “Look
at the few countries that have achieved smart, innovation-led growth, you’ve
had this massive government involvement” She formerly advised discredited
motor bike loving Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, in the Syriza
government.
3. Anastasia Nesvetailova who has said “The
paradigm that governed…private market actors and society for the past few
decades will have to be rethought.”
4.Ann Pettifor, a former adviser to
Ken Livingstone
5.Thomas Piketty, French best selling author who Evan Davies and Paul Mason
swoon over, and whose starting point on the panel is to “expose austerity for the failure it has been in the UK and Europe”.
6.Joseph Stiglitz Winner of the 2001 economics Nobel Prize, and another adviser to the Greek (Syriza)
finance ministry and, for good measure, the SNP

7. And finally, Simon Wren-Lewis himself, who claims that, “Among economists with expertise, there is a clear majority view
that fiscal austerity is significantly contractionary”

One has to say that none of the quotes attributed to
Mr.McDonnell’s panellists are very surprising in that they are all very much in
Mandy Rice Davies territory: Well they would say that wouldn’t they?

But what alarms me is that, as we have seen from both the
bullying and the flooding stories, the Guardian is just as predictable. They
too would say that wouldn’t they.

And clearly they would say it whether or not it was true.

The Guardian, whose every editorial reeks of self
righteousness, whose columnists, Polly Toynbee, Owen Jones et al, never
fail  to
claim the moral high ground, seems to have no more conscience about
bending the truth around hairpin corners than the Sun or
the Star.  

Is the government guilty as charged over the flooding?

Haven’t a clue. Neither have I about the truth of  the bullying allegations  at Conservative Central Office.  But I do know this: I am not likely
to discover the facts of either  matter from The
Guardian.

.