Silly Season Strikes

The Herald’s ‘Fur flies over council jolly’ on August 6 represented the best reporting seen in the paper since someone cut and pasted whatever the Telegraph had printed about Michael Howard’s expenses.

It made a welcome change from the previous month’s front pages, which were between bizarre to banal. The first inklings that either news was drying up or hacks and editors were getting lazy was a headline story about 3 girls prosecuted for shoplifting, complete with pics looking suspiciously as if they had been lifted from Facebook. I wouldn’t want to condone any crime, but to splash 18 year old girls who have been caught doing something supremely idiotic across the front page seemed a little OTT.

One of the girls was the daughter of the head of Brockhill School, who had claimed to be cracking down on bad behaviour. The Press Code article 9(i) states: Relatives or friends of persons convicted or accused of crime should not generally be identified without their consent, unless they are genuinely relevant to the story.

Unfortunately I didn’t get round to asking the editor if there is a genuine link between a head teacher insisting on discipline and a teenager being an idiot (even if they are related - the girls are 18), though looking through the cases on the PCC a ruling against the Herald seems unlikely. Stories of burglaries, fights, and drunkenness didn’t make the front page. Oddly the story cannot be found on the http://www.thisiskent.co.uk/ site, but an (alternative) opinion piece is here http://www.my-kent.com/index.php/Kent-News/heads-daughter-in-shoplifting-gang.html.

Following this, on July 23 a mother of a disabled child blasted the ‘piggish’ council for not providing a lift in her home for her disabled son, It was only in the last couple of paragraphs (tucked on the inside of page 3) that the council outlined the lengths it had gone to; “Patio doors have been installed and doors have been widened…The family have been offered a number of other properties which are already adapted…We’ve done everything we can an gone beyond the call of duty because of the relationship we have built up with the family”.

I am definitely not one to give the council undue credit, but here are concrete examples of the good the council has tried to do, rather than the usual evasive and woolly answers that appear. Still, I suppose ‘Ungrateful mum blasts council’ is a difficult headline to carry.

Topping these examples was a July 30 master class in how to make a non-story front page news. Hilarious punning headline ‘Cops don’t give a hoot about me’ kicked off the story of Brian Maxted, a kindly 72 year-old who runs the Folkestone Owl Sanctuary. Brian returned from a brief holiday to find his laptop, £50 cash and stationery missing and was upset that a month after the event a CSI had not visited.

Again, anyone who managed to read the story to the end (turning over to the foot of page 3) would have noted the police response effectively killed off the story. There were no potential leads as “the owner allows many people into his property and has given them all keys”. Neither Brian or the police mentioned a forced entry, leading to the possibility that the nicest take on Brian’s laptop going missing would have been ‘Trusting man victim of theft’. At least that’s nicer than ‘Idiot gives out keys to home’.

I suppose the problem is what can papers do when news is thin on the ground? There are no big meetings or decisions to lead with. There are some summer events, but when one of your reporters is off in Nepal on ‘holiday’ (http://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/news/090803chrisnepal.shtml) I guess news is harder to find.

The Kentish Express appears to lead with human interest type stuff, which is not to be confused with hard news but at least avoids the need to manufacture front page splashes out of total non-starters. Of course all press outlets are in competition with one another, and what better to drive sales than to scream about Pig Flu, Global warming and, err… trusting geriatrics? There may be pertinent issues contained within the stories, but the total lack of any decent investigation in to the issues leaves the locals with shallow sensationalist dross.