As we enter the final week of campaigning, I thought I'd take a look at what the paid-for tabloids (Mail, Express, Sun, Mirror) have been up to.
Well, the obvious thing is that they are all far more interested in pushing "their" team than in straight reporting. Everything is spun, so that when Tories announce something it's brilliant in the Mail, Sun and Express and a wicked lie in the Mirror. And vice versa.
Given the pro-Leave papers' attacks on Project Fear during referendum campaign, a key feature is that the way they all accentuate the negative, rather than the positive. Let's start with The Sun, since it's the best-seller. It has run 36 Tory-focused pages since the beginning of last month.

Five Conservative-supporting papers majored on the IFS's criticisms of Labour's promise that only the top 5% of earners would pay more tax.
The Mail did at least run a separate story on the IFS's qualms about the Conservative manifesto - that it would almost certainly have to put up taxes and increase borrowing to fulfil its spending plans, in spite of  promise of a five-year tax freeze. Even without the paper's political stance, it's hard to argue against the news judgment that the IFS saying "many millions more" would have to pay more tax under Labour is the more compelling line.
The Telegraph did not mention the scepticism about Tory promises until the sixth of eleven paragraphs, and gave the examination of the Conservative manifesto a total of three sentences.
The Times acknowledged in its second par that the IFS - and the Resolution Foundation i a separate report - had looked at both manifestos, but did not get to the doubts about the Conservative promises until the ninth of its 13 paragraphs and then gave them a single sentence.  
Express and Sun readers were left to think that only Labour promises had been examined and found wanting.

Three papers - the i, Guardian and Metro - took a neutral stance, focusing on the "plague on both your houses" line. The Guardian swiftly moved into the criticisms of the Conservative plans, giving that the top half of the story, with a passing acknowledgement that the attack on Labour was "scathing" before returning to that further down.
The i, yet again, was completely even-handed - apparently the only paid-for Fleet Street paper capable of being so - to the extent that it spelt out the IFS verdicts on various aspects of the manifestos under separate headings in a sidebar.
Metro also went straight down the line with equal to-the-point coverage of the two parties in its brief story.

This is paragraph 4 of the first section of the Editors' Code, which all of our national newspaper editors follow.
At election time, that rule is stretched to - and beyond - what might be regarded as its reasonable limits. We know which side our newspapers are on; readers expect some level of spin.But at what point should we draw the line and say "Enough!"?
Take today's story about documents relating to trade talks with the US, which Jeremy Corbyn says prove the "NHS is up for sale". Do they? That's a legitimate question for journalists to ask. In the news pages you'd expect a report of the claim and verdicts of expert and interested parties on the validity of that claim. 
Old school journalists might play it completely straight - as here:

But it is equally valid - if galling for Labour supporters - for a sceptical newspaper to focus on the rejection of the argument, rather than the claim itself. As the whitetops did today.

When it comes to the redtops, they are always likely to be a bit more aggressive. Was it a "sick joke" and a "stunt" as The Sun says? Is that fact or opinion dressed up as fact?
And what about the Mirror? Is that document "proof" that the NHS is "for sale", as it says. Medicines for the NHS were certainly mentioned in the paper, but there does not appear to have been any conclusion. What certainly hasn't happened is that the NHS has been "sold to vultures".

And so finally we come to the Telegraph. The headline below sits above the main inside story in its election coverage today. It is a news story, not an opinion piece, nor even a sketch. 
This cannot, by any measure, be regarded as a news headline. It doesn't give the reader a clue what it's about. It is entirely opinion. And it isn't even a good heading. 

...and here is its coverage of Mr Corbyn:

This is not true. It may not be in the manifesto.
The promise, such as it is, is to raise the NI threshold from next April so that it eventually reaches £12,500 to match the income tax threshold - which will probably be higher than that by the time NI reaches that level. 
For now, the best voters can hope for is enough to buy an extra cup of coffee a week.
And it's not "for all" as the Express says. He's not giving EVERYONE £460 a year, as the Mail says. It's not for the homeless. It's not for the unemployed. It's not for stay-at-home parents or part-time workers who earn less than about £160 per week.  
​If this were a genuine tax promise, it would be a huge story. But it isn't. It's something that fell out of Boris Johnson's mouth while at a motor industry factory. On the day that the Liberal Democrats launched their manifesto, it was the top political story on the BBC's Ten o'clock News and the main election story in most papers. 
That's their choice. News judgments are subjective. But can't the Mail, Express and Sun - from which the cuttings above are taken - at least put the words in Johnson's mouth and present them as a hope or even a promise rather than the gospel truth. Which it is not.
​Are we being served?