BNP Follow Up, Bad Week for KM Group

Following on from the last post, I indeed sent my (excellent) letter to the Herald on Monday evening. So far no response, but it will be interesting to see if it gets any further than the Lib Dem effort of previous weeks. This week's Herald out in two days! When cutting the image, I noticed a minor typo! The shame!

In other news, I happened to whizz past an accident on the roundabout where Churchill Avenue meets Canterbury Road. I am NOT apportioning any blame, the bright yellow rectangle showed one of the cars involved was a KM vehicle. Another KM vehicle, presumably there to help (or possibly to get a report for some filler) had parked on the grass verge where Churchill Avenue rises up to the roundabout. I'm sure that Thursday's Kentish Express will have the full details...

Thankfully there appeared to be no injuries. The possible rise in insurance premiums will not be welcome at such a difficult time, although with or without cars if the KM group continues to operate at the end of next year they will have defied some predictions. An ex-KMer gave his old employers a good shoeing this week http://www.countervalue.com/2009/03/30/the-bbc-wont-save-local-papers-nobody-can/#more-462. If you need any more try http://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/news/090227morekmgcuts.shtml.

BNP in the Herald

On March 12 2009 The Folkestone Herald published a letter from the BNP activist for Shepway. The content of the letter was no great surprise, with opening statements claiming ‘genocide’ of the British race showing that some people should really be checking a dictionary before they use 3 syllable words. Anything approaching a half-decent point was lost in the general anti-immigrant-police state-racism rhetoric, although I wouldn’t be surprised if many in the town agreed with the majority of the points made.

In the pic you might not be able to make out the content of this letter but you can make out the presentation, which raises some alarming questions - a newspaper must be impartial, so why is this letter in a box? Why are all the other letters placed neatly in columns, without the luxury of a box to draw attention to them? Why is the BNP letter more than double the length of the permitted word limit? Why not stick it in a ‘Star Letter’ box with a picture of a Golliwog being cuddled by Carol Thatcher* and give the guy a fiver?

Before people cry ‘Michael Howard’ (for he has a regular column), our UFO-spotting friend is the Member of Parliament. Surely a weekly cloumn would be given to any Labour, Lib Dem or even BNP candidate elected. The Herald regularly carries letters from local political parties and organisations, but not in black boxes. The Lib Dems Shepway site even carries a response (http://www.shepwaylibdems.org.uk/articles/000097/the_bnp_are_britains_really_nasty_party.html) it claims was published in the Herald on 19 March. No such letter appeared. Tim Prater of the Lib Dems assures me that the letter was submitted to The Herald on March 15. Were other letters ignored?

Is the box and lack of response due to 1) simple oversight, 2) poor quality of responses, 3) dictated by the need to have an attractive product that sells well and reflects its readership, 4) something more sinister in The Herald? In 2000 the Press Complaints Commission upheld a complaint against the Herald concerning an article about the arrest of six refugees, in which photos were ‘misleading’ (i.e. from a totally different event) and ‘the entire tone of the article was a deliberate attempt to foster prejudice’ http://www.pcc.org.uk/news/index.html?article=MTgzOQ==. For the sake of balanced reporting which informs people of events rather than forming opinions, out of my four suggestions I hope the first is the truth behind this… I’ll put my own two cents over to the editor this week and see if it appears. Watch this space.

*Oddity (as at 11pm March 25) - put ‘Carol Thatcher’ in the Yahoo search box and the third link is a glowing reference from…the BNP! Try the same with Google and the third link is from The Daily Mail, which is the only source cited in the onerous BNP letter to The Herald.

Folkestone Earthquake Reaction

I’m pleased to report Folkestone raced up the news agenda last week, although blink and you’d have missed it. An earthquake measuring a near news-worthy 2.8 ‘rocked’ the town on Tuesday March 3 and showed that papers love a good story regardless of the content.

Having survived the quake myself I can confirm it was hardly life or death stuff, so I’d like to know which earthquake in Folkestone The Sun was covering http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article2289825.ece. Getting the adjective 'rocked' in the first few lines was followed with an interview conjuring up the delightful image of a builder desperately clinging to his scaffolding, life flashing before his eyes. I’d be keen to find out if he really exists. Perhaps he mixed up ‘Folkestone’ with ‘Tokyo’. Most of the other nationals barely touched it.

The local papers (Express and Herald) both led with the quake and were generally more restrained than the nation’s finest, even if the Herald’s assertion that ‘tens of thousands of residents were shocked and confused’ was maybe over-egging it. Both allowed space for the locals to say how scary/boring they had found the experience. The Express kicked off 2 pages of non-news coverage with the front page headline of ‘Did The Earth Move For You!’ resting awkwardly between a badly punctuated question and something Del Boy might say post-coital.

While in 2007 choppers and news crews came to town (and went as soon as it became apparent a few smashed chimney pots was as exciting as it was going to get), there was even less of photographic worth this time. Both local rags carried a map showing significant quakes occurring in 2009, 2007, 1950 and, err…1580 and 1382. Given the lack of news this time round, perhaps some local history would interest and inform the readers? Sadly not. At least the Express gave the pre-1900 quakes four lines. Here is a more interesting graph you can annotate yourself.

The seismic graph which featured in both papers gave The Herald captioning team a bit of a headache, as it looked like one of several irrelevant pics from 2007 pressed into action. Perhaps just putting a picture of a real earthquake from some other place and some other time would have conveyed as much real information and been more interesting to look at? Later in the paper The Herald’s 'irreverent' Martello column gleefully mocked mere mortals who proposed stories to the newsdesk in less than perfect English. Keen readers would have already noted that on page 2 (opposite the caption cock up) an interview with Sainsbury’s staff who have recorded a song for Comic Relief revealed they had ‘worked in [sic] Christopher Biggins’. Perhaps Martello should spend more time checking the pages before they go to print. Pip pip!