SubScribe: March 2012 Google+

Saturday 31 March 2012

Pies, pasties, petrol, panic and propaganda





If Dave and Georgie Porgie are wringing their hands this weekend, Ken McMeikan, Len McCluskey and Rupert Murdoch must be rubbing theirs with glee.
The Government has had such a torrid week of behind-the-sofa cringe-making embarrassment that no one seems to have felt the need to examine the facts behind the stories.
Mr Murdoch, who could be forgiven had he fallen out of love with his London newspapers, must be delighted with them. With the Sunday Times sting on Peter Cruddas and the Sun's 'Who Vat all the pies' campaign over the price of a cornish pasty, the Murdoch press set the agenda for  a week that saw the Tories in free fall.
And in the middle of all that came the tanker drivers' strike vote. That  should have created an opportunity for statesmanlike leadership and common sense, but instead brought on a display of breathtaking ineptitude and reverse ferreting that left the impression that the Government was not simply out of touch but out of its tree.
Leaving aside Mr Cruddas and his appalling braggadocio, SubScribe is going to focus on the 'important' things in life: pasties and petrol.
The Sun has gone to town on the pasty tax  with its Marie Antoinette imagery (including helpful hints in case its readers doesn't know who she is or what she said) and its crusade for the working man. Those toffs in Downing Street don't have a clue. Good, honest, poor working folk like their pies and sausage rolls and those know-nothings with their £250,000 dinners are upping the price by 20%. It's a scandal.
War was declared. Osborne was questioned about his Greggs habit (it seems he hasn't got one), Cameron told us he'd bought a pasty from a kiosk at Leeds station that turned out to have closed five years ago. Oops, said the Downing Street spinners, it wasn't Leeds, it was Liverpool; well it's all oop North, in't it?  And then, God save us, we were treated to the sight of Ed and Ed from the other side queueing up in Greggs to buy job lots of sausage rolls.
Meanwhile the Sun's red T-shirted brigade were out and about in Trafalgar Square trying to give away Greggs pasties, then a buxom Marie Antoinette headed for the Treasury to dole out more calories and saturated fat, and finally today there is a coupon in the paper that can be exchanged for a pie or pasty in Morrisons.
Have you noticed the word that features frequently in the paragraphs above? It starts with a capital G. And so does this campaign.  
Greggs' stock had been rising all year in a most pleasing way, thank you very much. Then came the Budget bombshell. The City took one look and decided it would do the baker no good at all. The shares dropped 5% in a day and carried on falling.
The Sun's campaign was a godsend and Ken McMeikan, the chief executive, embraced it enthusiastically,  starting petitions in his shops, giving interviews, appearing on YouTube and, most of all, seeing his shopfronts blazoned across every newspaper and TV bulletin. And the price of all this publicity?  A few free pasties for the Sun to give away. 
The Sun argues that the nation's workers are entitled to a hot pie in the middle of the day without paying tax on it. After all, they aren't taxed on the sandwiches or doughnuts they buy from Greggs. A cold sausage roll is exempt; so why not a hot one from the same shop? Sounds reasonable. 
The Government's response is  that everyone will be paying  less income tax and the money to fund the cut has to be found somewhere.  You'd have to eat a gazillion sausage rolls a year to be worse off. Back bounces the Sun with an avatar for the 21st century to replace Blair's Mondeo Man. This version earns £19,000 a year, eats a hot pasty every other day, smokes ten fags a day and drives 7,000 miles a year in his Ford Focus. Thanks to Mr Osborne, he will lose £191.52 a year - while the caviar-munching champagne class will be quids in.
Of course, it's not only Greggs customers who will be affected.  If you buy a bit of hot chicken at Tesco or a polystyrene cup of soup at Waitrose, or a panini at Costa  you will also have to pay more than you are used to. They may not have quite the same 'hard-up workers' appeal as that Greggs pie, but they're all in the same boat.
 We're all used to being asked 'eat in or takeaway?' and accept that we will pay a different price depending on whether we choose a paper bag or china plate;  if Greggs decided to charge more for hot food  to cover the cost of running the heating cabinet we'd swallow that. We can therefore clearly cope with different price structures for the same item, so why - apart from the Greggs share price (now in gentle recovery) and a bit of Tory bashing - are we getting so heated about sausage rolls and pasties? 
If you want a hot snack at lunchtime you could wander down the high street and go into Pete's Plaice, Joe's Pizzeria, Betty's Burgers.   In every such establishment you would pay VAT. So why should Greggs be any different? Why are we defending this big (and getting bigger) organisation when it is simply being put on the same footing as McDonalds, Colonel Sanders, Dominos?  
The Sun may like to portray itself as the worker's friend, but it may also consider the pie tax an easy stick to use against Cameron while buffing up News International's tarnished relationship with the public.  The Government has made a complete hash of getting its message across; but that doesn't mean it's necessarily the wrong message. A little bit of impartial scrutiny rather than partisanship from all the papers would not go amiss.



Running on empty II


Which brings us to the other communications fiasco: the petrol non-strike.
This time the winner from the governmental shambles is Len McCluskey, the Unite general secretary who has managed to escape the union leader's traditional pantomime villain role, courtesy of the ridiculous behaviour of the British people and those we elected as our leaders. 
At the beginning of the week, the Mail had the whole script nicely worked out according to the stereotype:

Motorists are being held to ransom by 1,000 militant tanker drivers who yesterday voted for a national strike

No room for doubt there, then. Those nasty reds have crept out from under the bed.; a few people are going to make everyone's  lives a misery . Well yes, when you look at the number, it does seem small. But the union held a proper vote and achieved a commendable turnout - over 70% in all but one of the seven companies balloted. There were 2,062 drivers eligible to vote, 1001 backed a strike. Not quite half, but the day we get a Government elected with the support of  48% of the electorate will be one to remember.
Even with the votes in, the union didn't give the required seven days' notice that it intended to strike. There was just a general assumption that it would be over the Easter holidays - and we all know the shenanigans of  advice, counter-advice, panic, pandemonium and, for one woman, near tragedy that ensued.
We saw pictures of queues, men flogging jerry cans, signs saying 'no fuel', and plenty of mockery of the Tories, but what about the basic dispute. What was it all about?
For a start, how much are the putative strikers paid?  £45,000 was the figure most often bandied about. Wincanton is said to pay its drivers that sum plus overtime, but it  seems to be one of the top payers.
Ads for ADR drivers with the paperwork that allows  them to transport hazardous goods suggest that they can earn between £9 and £14 per hour. It seems the usual working pattern is four 12-hour days on followed by four off, so for a 48-hour week the annual basic pay seems to be about £35,000. 
Have you read anything anywhere that spells out the working pattern? There have been plenty of Q&A panels, but none seems to have addressed the basic pay, terms of employment, holiday entitlement, pension arrangements.
The big issue has been safety. But still there are big blank holes on pages where there might be some explanation of what training drivers are given, how this has been truncated - if, as the union claims, it has. What are the rules on how long a driver can sit in his cab? How many miles can he drive? Has any newspaper enlightened us? All we have seen are generalisations about contracts being squeezed and greater pressure on drivers to 'turn and burn' - whatever that means - and drive faster. The latter being an interesting concept in a speed-limited vehicle. Are they driving like idiots at 56mph down country lanes then?
So forgetting all the politics, including Mr Miliband's silence on the issue - maybe the etiquette of not speaking with your mouth full of Greggs sausage roll -  there are two points I'd like explained.
First, did anyone really think that there would be a strike over Easter? If I were running this dispute I wouldn't ask my members to  walk out on what I guess should be the most lucrative overtime weekend of the year; I'd let them fill their boots  to prop up the bank balance and endear myself to the public by not interrupting the Easter getaway. Then I'd  call the drivers out in just in time  to disrupt the return to work and school.  It would be interesting  if the papers could tell us what the overtime payments are for the Easter weekend and how many drivers, if any,  will be on the roads. 
Second, in a dispute about safety, how can it be that the Government is relaxing the rules to ensure that fuel gets to the petrol stations by the weekend? Either it is safe for drivers to be on the roads for eleven hours or it isn't. You can't just up the limit from nine  hours for political expediency. What sort of example is that showing the employers? Are the drivers agreeing to this? And if so, why? And why has no paper done anything more than report the suspension of the rule without questioning it? 
I was hit by a lorry on the M25 at 9 o'clock on a Friday night; the driver had been through four countries that day. I'm surprised that tanker drivers work 12-hour shifts and slightly alarmed that they spend nine of them on the road. I don't want to see them driving for 11 hours on any day, but especially not in the very week that parents are piling their families into the car for long journeys on unfamiliar roads.


liz gerard, March 31, 2012
Twitter: @gameoldgirl

Thank you for sticking with it to the end. Please do share your thoughts below. And please take a look at the other posts. They are all media related.

Sold down the river the Beeb's flotilla and fireworks fiasco - and a feeble fightback. Why didn't the top man have his hand on the tiller?

Hello and goodbye to Wapping a personal diary of life inside the fortress in the days before the strike that changed newspapers forever

Out of print a love letter to newspapers in this digital age. Why they don't have to die if we have the will to let them live and thrive

Why local newspapers matter Why we should care about the revolution in the regional press

Missing: an opportunity How the hunt for Madeleine McCann could be turned into a force for good instead of just a festival of mawkish sentimentality

Riding for a fall Does buying a ticket for a jolly day out at the races mean you are fair game for the snobs who sneer and snipe?

Just a pretty face Illustrating the business pages isn't the easiest job in the world, but spare us the celebs who aren't even mentioned in the story

Food for thought a case study in why we should take health advice with a pinch of salt (and a glass of red wine and a helping of roast beef) 

The world's gone mad Don Draper returns and  the drooling thirtysomethings go into overdrive But does anybody watch the show? (But there is more Whipple in this post!)




Sunday 25 March 2012

The world's gone mad





In case you hadn't noticed, Mad Men returns to our screens on Tuesday. Well, to some of our screens. The series is being imported on the Sky Atlantic channel, which last week enjoyed a total audience of three million.
The programme will be available to fewer than half the country's households, but that hasn't deterred our newspapers, which have been in a Downton Abbey-like frenzy all month.
Christina Hendricks, January Jones and Elisabeth Moss - the three leading women, in case you are not an aficionado - have been on the news pages, fashion pages, features pages. You name it, they've been there, done it. 
We've also seen interviews with Matthew Weiner, the show's creator,  a controversy over the falling man poster, and an unexpected publicity coup for the Cambridge Satchels company, thanks to the disclosure that all 300 members of the cast and crew had  been given one of its old-style school bags.
Yes, the show comes from the same pedigree as the Sopranos - which ended up being acclaimed 'Greatest TV Show Seen on the Planet in the History of the Universe. Ever'. I admit to being a fan, but let's be honest, as a minority sport is it really worth all these column inches? Or are the people putting (mostly quality) papers together entertaining themselves rather than their readers? 
It comes to something when a respected newspaper like the Observer interviews an American TV critic, simply because he's seen the opening episode in advance (and is, of course, sworn to secrecy on its contents).Its big sister the Guardian put no fewer than five writers on the case, assigning each to interview one of the leading actors, then went on to  publish a survival guide blog on how to cope socially if you don't have Sky and don't know what to say at that water cooler.
The hype started early, like those anniversary pieces that always appear days or even weeks before the event in case someone else gets in first - the Titanic centenary is well under way and don't even ask about the Queen's jubilee.
Anyway, back to Draper and co. The i on Sunday was off the mark a couple of weeks back with a quiz inviting readers  to decide which character they most resembled. Last Wednesday the Mail told us that you could now do much the same thing on an internet game. Meanwhile the daily Independent was producing an armchair guide to the Sterling Cooper etc etc empire, complete with a splendid spidergram.There was even a slot in the Telegraph's motoring pages on the prestige cars preferred by admen on either side of the Atlantic.
The Telegraph did at least try to dress up the puffery  as something a little more substantial by asking real advertising agencies whether working life was really like that in the Sixties (answer: it was even more debauched). And the Mail, that bastion of  feminism and the rights of working women, deserves half a brownie point for focusing on the sexist ads that the likes of Sterling Cooper etc etc produced in that era.
Perhaps the cutest - and most irresponsible - approach was that of the Times2 team who dressed Tom Whipple  and Carol Midgley in 1960s garb and got them to spend a working day on the sauce to see how well they were able to do their jobs. The result was a witty and original feature.
Of course, the biggest plum in the final weekend before D-for-Don Day was to talk to the main mad man: Jon Hamm. Having secured the interview, The Times went overboard, putting his picture on the front of both the paper and  the magazine cover.
But the ultimate disappointment was to see the  Magazine - winner this week of the  UK Press Awards supplement of the year gong - run with the tag line 
Jon Hamm: I am not Don Draper: I am not this brooding, sad, angry guy
Er, no. Anthony Hopkins isn't a cannibal; Daniel Radcliffe isn't a wizard. Jon Hamm isn't an advertising man in a time warp.
Whisper it quietly: he's an actor.It's all fiction. Get over it.
Ambridge, of course, is something else entirely.....




**Thank you for reading this blog. If you would like to see future posts, please click the follow button on the right or you can follow me on Twitter: @gameoldgirl.  Please feel free to leave your comments below and it would be great if you could share or tweet  to increase the audience. Thank you for your time.


Saturday 24 March 2012

Running on empty




Man bites dog. What somebody somewhere wants to suppress. Anything that makes a reader say 'Gee whizz!' 
We all recognise these definitions of what is news. 
Well, how about adding to the list  'Something the reader already knows and which is beyond their power to change'?
No one who travels by car, whether as driver or passenger, can have failed to notice how the big numbers outside petrol stations are getting bigger almost daily and that the dials on the pumps go round faster every time you fill up.  
Yesterday the AA announced that the average price of a litre of unleaded had reached a record of 140.2p. That's £6.37 per gallon. This information was passed to most newspaper readers this morning. Some used it as a filler, some as an inside top or page lead. The Telegraph splashed it under this  banner

£100 to fill a family car

And that, pretty much, is the beginning and end of the story. We've hit a rather spurious landmark with the £1.40 and with a bit of engineering can approach the £100  tank. It's actually £98 for the cited Mondeo (£103 for a diesel car, but this story is about unleaded; diesel's been over £1.40 for ages). Petrol has been going up for a while, breaking records on the way, so what's so special about this milestone? 
Ah yes, of course, it's Budget week and that nasty Mr Osborne decided not only to start taxing granny at the same level as everyone else, but also declined to waive the 3.02p fuel duty increase lined up for August.   
This increase will, according to the AA's Paul Watters, add a further £3.80 to the cost of filling a tank.Have I  missed something here? That Mondeo tank took 70 litres. By my reckoning the extra duty will lift the cost by £2.11. But suggesting that subs should check simple arithmetic is a side issue.
Mr Watters and Brian Madderson, who represents people who run petrol stations, both predict that petrol will cost £1.50 a litre by the summer. This, they say, is partly as a result of that duty increase  (Mr Madderson says it's 4p  a litre - but that would still add only £2.80 to that Mondeo tank) and partly because of the increasing price of oil, which they attribute to worries about Syria and Iran .
Now if you've broken down at 3am on a rainy country lane, the yellow AA van is a welcome sight. The organisation styles itself the fourth emergency service. It is the motorist's friend. But it is also a lobby group. It doesn't release data about average fuel prices simply to inform us; we can find out all we need to know for ourselves. It does so to put pressure on the Government. 
Rising fuel prices affect us all, whether or not we drive, since most of what we buy spends at least part of its journey in lorries that gobble up diesel. So the issue is certainly  important. But do a few contrived sums, a manufactured landmark and  the predictable opinions of a couple of blokes with vested interests constitute the most important story of the day?
OK, Saturdays are different. It's the day we all troll off to Sainsbury's to feed our families and our cars, picking up the  paper as we make our way to the till, muttering about the pain inflicted on our bank balances by the shop and the forecourt.
The AA is not daft. It always releases its fuel price figures on a Friday  to catch that market. It knows that Fridays are often slow news days. I have to confess to having pounced on  the AA numbers in desperation when searching for a business news splash, justifying the decision with the rationale that Saturday papers have a different, softer, feel. 
But we can still cover softer stories with rigour and vigour. For a start we could explain why petrol prices are so high when oil is not as expensive as it was in 2008. Then it was approaching $150 per barrel; today it is around $125.   But in those days the pound was worth nearly two dollars; today it trades at  about $1.58. That's why we have to pay more.
If we want to create a splash we could also look at the impact of rising fuel prices on various aspects of the economy, on prices across the board, the effects on all businesses, not simply the road haulage companies who are always ready to pitch in their twopenn'th.
Or we could look at the reasoning behind the extra fuel duty - what used to be called, with some irony,  the accelerator - and the environmental case for stopping people driving so much. We could even examine the national infrastructure, the state of public transport -  particularly the railways with their indifferent service, inadequate rolling stock and rocketing fares. Put those right and we might be more willing to forsake the car.
Or maybe, when we hit that £1.50 milestone, we could have a jolly inside page/spread on previous landmark price rises with great vintage pix and 'that was the year that was' stuff to remind us what we, our parents and our grandparents were doing when petrol cost five shillings a gallon, 50p a gallon, 50p per litre, £1 per litre etc. 
But let's not pretend that it's news. 
And if we're still in any doubt, let's keep the AA in the front of our minds as we go back to that Northcliffe adage: "News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress. Everything else is just advertising."


**Thank you for reading this blog. If you would like to be alerted to  future posts, please click the 'join this site' button on the right or you can follow me on Twitter: @gameoldgirl.  Please feel free to leave your comments below and it would be great if you could use the share or tweet  buttons to increase the audience. Thank you for your time.

Some like it hot

Updated June 8



Well here we are in flaming June, shooting the breeze in our strappy tops and sandals. Er, not quite. After three months of drought, we are about as anxious for more water as Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. We wish we hadn't turned off the heating and put those winter clothes up into the attic. Edgbaston is flooded, the Suffolk Show has been cancelled, there are severe weather warnings all over the place and it looks grim, grim, grim.
So just to cheer us all up, here's a reminder of what it was like in March when the clocks were going forward to herald the start of British Summer Time. The post below commended Tom Whipple of The Times for his object lesson in how to write a weather story.
In today's paper he offers young reporters another such lesson - and I include some excerpts and a link at the foot of the post. This may seem dull bread-and-butter stuff, but as the BBC demonstrated at the weekend, we should never be too grand to learn.



If petrol prices going up are not news, then nor are the clocks going forward.
Time was that papers would put a little reminder on the front page illustrated with a  clock set at 2. But this year the arrival of British Summer Time is joined by the onset of a warm spell guaranteed to cheer  us up for the weekend. And most papers took the opportunity afforded by this happy coincidence to run jolly spring flower pictures with a bit of fluff about the weather.
This is just the sort of story that is a staple of bank holidays when nothing happens and the most junior reporter is assigned to write the wrap. The result is usually  an abundance of cliches and a turgid list of traffic jams, with details of road accidents that wouldn't make a brief in a local paper on any other day.
What sheer joy it was then, to read Tom Whipple's effort in The Times this morning. Charming and well crafted from beginning to end, it was a masterclass in how to approach such an assignment and should be required reading for every student of journalism.

The signs are there if you know where to look. B&Q is stockpiling barbecues. Sainsbury's has ordered emergency sausages. In  Wiltshire, the River Bourne is so low that the village of Collingbourne Ducis has cancelled its annual rubber duck race. And, if you go outside, you won't need a jacket.

Apart from the unnecessary commas, isn't that a wonderful intro? Who could resist reading on? Those who do are told the essentials, start of summer time and start of summer (well at least a summery weekend), some temperature forecasts, and then back to the way the country is responding:

In Cambridge, where the botanical gardens are in full bloom, Scudamores Punting Company has had to rush its punts out of winter hibernation early. Perhaps responding to this news, a Pimm's spokesman was one of a number of drinks companies to predict the first sales spike of the season.
But the grounded ducks of Collingbourne Ducis are not the only constituency to wish it was, well, nice weather for ducks...

And so he neatly brings back the duck race from the intro to rehearse  the worries about the drought. He then moves on to signs of spring and a variation on the 'first cuckoo' tradition before noting, with the scepticism one expects of a science correspondent:

The arrival of the first hot weekend has generally been marked in the British press by a new, equally honourable, tradition: listing which Mediterranean regions are (however briefly) cooler. thus, central Britain today and tomorrow will be warmer than Barcelona, Istanbul, Majorca, Malaga, Malta, Venice and, if you believe the Metro, the Sahara desert.
The country will also, for the sake of balance, be colder than Corfu, Rome and Cyprus.

Whipple reports on further effects of the warm weather, mentions the debate about permanent British Summer Time and general concerns about global warming, before concluding with a final paragraph as enchanting as the first.
It is a masterpiece, and for those willing to cross the paywall, here is the link to the online version:


So how did others tackle the story? 
The Mail took a more conventional approach:

This weekend sees the switch to British Summer Time and, appropriately, it has been met with the first surprise heatwave of the year.
Far from the usual case of it being summer time in name only, Britain will today bask in temperatures up to 10C higher than the seasonal average, forecasters said.
The heatwave is expected to hit the south hardest, with predicted maximum temperatures of 21C (69.8F) in Berkshire, Surrey and Hampshire.

When we reach the fifth par, we learn
For the next few days London is expected to be warmer than typically sun-soaked capitals much further south like Madrid, Rome and even Athens.

Meanwhile the Telegraph dives straight in with this intro
Britain will be hotter than the Mediterranean and Bermuda this weekend as temperatures rise to more than 68F (21C) in parts of the country.
Enough said.





And so to rainy June...


In the Met Office they are putting a positive spin on the situation. "At the moment," explained Charles Powell, a spokesman, "we have wet days interspersed with the occasional dry day." By the end of the month - by, in fact, Midsummer's Day - he expects a dramatic reversal. "We will see more dry days," Mr Powell said. "Interspersed with wet days."


And so Whipple strikes again. It's an intro that breaks almost all of my golden rules. It has five sentences. It has two quotes, both of them interrupted by attribution. We have the dreaded words "a spokesman". We have "explained" instead of the simple "said".
And it works a dream.


He continues:
In other words, a very bad summer will have become an averagely bad one. But before barbecue sales have a hope of overtaking umbrella sales, we have two days of what, were it not June, would be termed a very bad autumn.


The story then catalogues all the bits and pieces you expect to find in a weather roundup: the official warnings (sadly, not about sun factors but about falling trees), people in trouble, the effects on the hosepipe ban, before returning to the art of writing with the final three paragraphs, which I reproduce in full:


As the bunting still lining the lampposts at Torquay seafront was battered by the spray of crashing waves, some were tempted to describe the weather as a grim end to the joy of the Jubilee. But that would be to ignore the grim start to the joy of the Jubilee.
Because for Torquay's sodden Union Jacks, the only appreciable difference is that while on Sunday they were sodden with fresh water, yesterday's high winds meant they were also sodden with salt water.
And it is by such fine gradations that the relative grimness of a British summer is measured.


What a joy! And in a 543-word story, how many times does Whipple use the word rain? Once.


I realise that I risk being accused of puffing The Times, which is definitely not my intention. But this man has class. If you can bear crossing the paywall, here is the link to the article as it appears on the web.


http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/weather/article3438509.ece

Suddenly the prospect of winter doesn't seem quite so awful: what will he make of blizzards and black ice? It'll be good, no doubt. 
But, like the rest of the country, I'd prefer to wait a while for that one.




Thank you for sticking with it to the end. Please do share your thoughts below. And please take a look at the other posts. They are all media related.


Sold down the river the Beeb's flotilla and fireworks fiasco - and a feeble fightback. Why didn't the top man have his hand on the tiller?


Hello and goodbye to Wapping a personal diary of life inside the fortress in the days before the strike that changed newspapers forever


Out of print a love letter to newspapers in this digital age. Why they don't have to die if we have the will to let them live and thrive


Why local newspapers matter Why we should care about the revolution in the regional press


Missing: an opportunity How the hunt for Madeleine McCann could be turned into a force for good instead of just a festival of mawkish sentimentality


Riding for a fall Does buying a ticket for a jolly day out at the races mean you are fair game for the snobs who sneer and snipe?


Just a pretty face Illustrating the business pages isn't the easiest job in the world, but spare us the celebs who aren't even mentioned in the story


Food for thought a case study in why we should take health advice with a pinch of salt (and a glass of red wine and a helping of roast beef) 


The world's gone mad Don Draper returns and  the drooling thirtysomethings go into overdrive But does anybody watch the show? (But there is more Whipple in this post!)






Wednesday 14 March 2012

Food for thought




Fantastic news yesterday: swap your breakfast bacon for a kipper and you might live forever.
You think I'm kidding? Well it's in the papers and it comes out of a Harvard study, so it surely must be true.
Replacing red meat with poultry, fish or vegetables cut the risk of dying by up to a fifth 
writes the Telegraph's medical editor.
Replacing one serving of red meat with an equivalent serving of fish reduced mortality risk by 7 per cent.
reported the Daily Mail.

So, too, in various forms did the Guardian, the Independent, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Sydney Morning Herald and the American news networks. 
But you'd be forgiven for missing this earth-shattering gem as it generally appeared halfway through a story about how eating roast beef will kill you - and how eating sausages will kill you faster.  A story that the Telegraph  splashed under the heading
Red meat is blamed for one in ten early deaths 

Now I always thought that death was 100 per cent certain. So the news that a bit of fish 
might cut that risk to 93 or 80 per cent (depending on which paper you're reading) is pretty amazing.
On the other hand, it seems that if you have bacon for breakfast or a hotdog for lunch every day you'll be dead in a fortnight:
For each serving of processed meat...the risk of dying from heart disease rose by 21 per cent.

The risk increases by 21% with every serving? Surely not?
Of course I'm being facetious. But these linguistic infelicities demonstrate the dangers in translating scientific research into a news story - and there were many pitfalls in this story.

It's understandable that the findings of Frank Hu's team at the Harvard School of Medicine should be  afforded international coverage. A huge study -  covering 120,000 people over more than twenty years -  by the world's foremost university demonstrates that a fundamental element of the Western diet could be lethal. Who could question the results?
But how many reporters actually read the paper produced by Mr Hu and published in the Archives of Internal Medicine along with 30-odd references and footnotes? And how many simply rewrote agency copy or a press release? The chances are that at least some  were relying on a precis of a precis of a precis. 
Did they speak to Mr Hu? Did they raise any questions? Well, the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Mail and the American and Australian news media all have the self-same quote from Mr Hu, so either he's extraordinarily consistent in his use of language or it came from a handout.

The conclusions reported across the media were that eating 3oz of red meat every day meant you were 13 per cent more likely to die "early" than if you didn't; that if you ate processed meat such as sausages or bacon, that risk was even greater. If you ate fish, poultry or vegetables instead, you would live longer. And if one in ten men had halved their meat intake they wouldn't have died.
The reader was not  told who took part in this study, what age or race they were, what their general health was, how the research was conducted, what might constitute an "early" death.

And so to the research. 
The Harvard team observed 37,698 male health professionals from 1986 (when they were aged between 40 and 75) until 2008. It also studied 86,644 female nurses from 1980 (then aged between 30 and 55) until 2008. None showed signs of cancer or heart problems at the start of the investigation.
Over the period of the study 8,926 of the men and 15,000 of the women died. In each case about a third of the deaths were from heart disease or cancer.
So what we know for sure is that  coronary disease or cancer killed nearly 6,000 men  before they reached the age of 97 and about 9,500 women  before the age of 83.
We also know from the published paper, though not from the press, that the participants were overwhelmingly white.
The sample is therefore 120,000 white Americans who all work in the same industry -  one that is known for stress, long hours and disturbed sleep.  They may therefore start off with a raised (or, indeed, reduced) risk of heart disease or cancer. And while having a huge sample from the same background may be useful as a constant, how can we assume that the results will apply to white Americans in all walks of life, to black bankers, Latino factory workers or Asian businessmen, let alone the entire Western population?


The methodology was to ask the participants to fill in a questionnaire  every four years, the key questions being how often they consumed various foods of a "standard portion size", with possible answers ranging from "never" to "more than six times per day".
For red meat, such as roast beef, the standard portion size was set at 3oz - which happens to chime roughly with health officials' view of the recommended maximum daily intake.
I'm not sure how I would have answered that. I don't eat meat every day, but when I do I'd look on 3oz as a pretty dismal portion. So say you have 6oz of roast lamb on Sunday, 3oz of  cold meat in sandwich on Monday and an 8oz steak on Wednesday, how do you report that?
The answers were analysed with allowances made for "variables" such as age, weight, whether the subject smoked or exercised or took vitamin pills or aspirin. This led the researchers to the assertion:  "Men and women with higher intake of red meat were less likely to be physically active and were more likely to be current smokers, drink alcohol and to have higher body mass intake."

From the analysis, the researchers concluded: 
We estimated that substitutions of 1 serving per day of other foods (including fish, poultry, nuts, legumes, low-fat dairy and whole grains) for 1 serving per day of red meat were associated with a 7% to 19% lower mortality risk. We also estimated that 9.3% of deaths in men and 7.6% in women in these cohorts could be prevented at the end of follow-up if all the individuals consumed fewer than 0.5 servings per day of red meat.
So they are not saying that red meat is to blame for one in ten deaths. They are saying that if all 37,000 men had cut their meat consumption to half the recommended maximum level, 538 of them - some of whom could  have been in their nineties - might not have died over the course of 22 years.

And what of that generalisation about smoking, drinking and general couch potatoery? Can you just discount all those factors as "variables" that have been taken into account without explaining how?

I once worked for a national newspaper editor who wearied of the endless Westminster soap opera being seen as the default splash. "Haven't we got a good health scare?" he would ask.
He knew what sold papers.  The thousands of comments appended to the various online reports of this study bear that out, so you can't blame the Telegraph for latching on to it; the only surprise is that the Mail and Express went with the drought instead. It's just that even the most authoritative research may not be all that it seems.

Mr Hu, however,  seems to know when he's on a winner. He simultaneously published another study - in another journal - that found that one can of fizzy pop a day increased the risk of heart disease in men by 20%. The subjects of his study? 38,698 health workers who were observed between 1986 and 2008. Fancy that! 
Now the thing is, were these cases of heart disease really the result of fizzy drinks - or the consequence of eating too many hotdogs? 
Or maybe that sweeping generalisation in the meat study was the true nugget of common sense: if you're a lardarse boozer who eats too much junk food, drinks too much Coke and doesn't move about enough, you may not make it to 97. 


Thank you for sticking with it to the end. Please do share your thoughts below. And please take a look at the other posts. They are all media related.

Sold down the river the Beeb's flotilla and fireworks fiasco - and a feeble fightback. Why didn't the top man have his hand on the tiller?

Hello and goodbye to Wapping a personal diary of life inside the fortress in the days before the strike that changed newspapers forever

Out of print a love letter to newspapers in this digital age. Why they don't have to die if we have the will to let them live and thrive

Why local newspapers matter Why we should care about the revolution in the regional press

Missing: an opportunity How the hunt for Madeleine McCann could be turned into a force for good instead of just a festival of mawkish sentimentality

Riding for a fall Does buying a ticket for a jolly day out at the races mean you are fair game for the snobs who sneer and snipe?

Just a pretty face Illustrating the business pages isn't the easiest job in the world, but spare us the celebs who aren't even mentioned in the story

The world's gone mad Don Draper returns and  the drooling thirtysomethings go into overdrive But does anybody watch the show? (But there is more Whipple in this post!)
















Thursday 8 March 2012

SamCam and the cameraman



Jimmy Carter did it; Clinton did; Dubya and Blair did it - sometimes together. Sarko does it, Obama does it, even Gordon Brown does it. So of course Cameron, Osborne and co must do it. Jog, that is.
Back in the 80s it was something of a novelty to see a world leader pounding the pavement. Then it became a standard summit photo opportunity to see a whole clutch of them turn out with puffing security guards in their wake. At times it was almost as competitive as the mums' race at primary school sports day.
By now you'd have thought we'd be used to the idea that our leaders expect to be fit for office in every sense and that the early morning trot round Downing Street would be less newsworthy.
But then along came  Steve Back. He snapped David Cameron looking a little puffed out and the picture made it into print. The Prime Minister ribbed him about the unflattering image, the seed  of a "story" began to germinate and the Mail was there to harvest it.
So this week we were treated to a picture of Samantha Cameron looking tired and a little sweaty alongside another where she is fresh faced and bouncy: 

She looked as glamorous as if she were heading to a glittering engagement...full make up: foundation, a rose-tinted blusher, pink lipstick and mascara. Her hair, pulled back into a ponytail, was glossy and freshly washed....in stark contrast to her appearance last week, when Mrs Cameron was spotted on her early morning run looking nothing short of bedraggled. 



The Telegraph took the same tack, though it did have the decency to acknowledge Back as  its source, quoting the photographer:

"When I first photographed Samantha running about two weeks ago she looked a mess. Today with her make-up on and her hair swept back she looked more like she was made up for a ball than the park. I think they've deliberately smartened up..."

Well, in these lean times you have to make a crust where you can. Back may have cottoned on to an image makeover. It does seem odd to put make-up on and to wash your hair before rather than after your jog. But neither paper appears to have bothered to ask No 10 whether that was the case; there is no  'No comment' or even an 'Of course not.' 
So can we trust the evidence before our eyes? The earlier photograph of Samantha was clearly taken at the end of her run - and she's obviously had a good workout; her hair is sticky and she has taken off her sweatshirt and tied it round her waist. The new photograph, on the other hand, looks as though it has been taken the moment she emerged from Downing Street to set off. Hardly a fair comparison. And if she had decided to spruce up after the Mail's bitchy report  a couple of weeks earlier, who could blame her?
Does any of this matter? Well, the Mail dressed up its coverage in a ballgown of gushing, admiring adjectives -  but this was no glittering Cinderella gown, rather an artificial Ugly Sister affair that could never disguise the malice beneath.  
And the Telegraph? Well! Someone needs to teach the editors there a lesson or two in juxtaposition. They should have learnt  from the hilarious picture of the Queen and two duchesses over a ginormous witchcraft heading. Clearly not. The SamCam makeover was on the same page as the report of the Leveson inquiry. 
Now I may be off beam here, but I thought Leveson was looking into media standards -  with a particular accent on invasions of privacy. 


Thank you for sticking with it to the end. Please do share your thoughts below. And please take a look at the other posts. They are all media related.

Sold down the river the Beeb's flotilla and fireworks fiasco - and a feeble fightback. Why didn't the top man have his hand on the tiller?

Hello and goodbye to Wapping a personal diary of life inside the fortress in the days before the strike that changed newspapers forever

Out of print a love letter to newspapers in this digital age. Why they don't have to die if we have the will to let them live and thrive

Why local newspapers matter Why we should care about the revolution in the regional press

Missing: an opportunity How the hunt for Madeleine McCann could be turned into a force for good instead of just a festival of mawkish sentimentality

Riding for a fall Does buying a ticket for a jolly day out at the races mean you are fair game for the snobs who sneer and snipe?

Just a pretty face Illustrating the business pages isn't the easiest job in the world, but spare us the celebs who aren't even mentioned in the story

Food for thought a case study in why we should take health advice with a pinch of salt (and a glass of red wine and a helping of roast beef) 

The world's gone mad Don Draper returns and  the drooling thirtysomethings go into overdrive But does anybody watch the show? (But there is more Whipple in this post!)