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Apocalypse now (although you might not have noticed because it happened in the North)

28/12/2015

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Embed from Getty Images

A couple of Christmases ago, Buzzfeed's Tom Phillips had fun predicting how the media might report the end of the world.
The Mail fumed "We TOLD you so"; the Guardian was relieved that Islington appeared to be safe, but fretted about quinoa supplies; the Telegraph had a moan about Twitter; the Times's survival guide was hidden behind a paywall; the Express had the SAS confirming that Lady Di was murdered.
You can't beat a good parody. And Phillips is good. (To remind you just how good, here's the link to his 29 stages of a Twitterstorm).
But his job is made easier when papers live down to their stereotypes - as they have done this weekend in reporting the floods that have threatened or engulfed most - yes, most - of England and all of Wales.
front pages
For the Mail, the squandering of 0.7% of the national budget on overseas aid is to blame (not the failure to use more of the remaining 99.3% on UK flood defences) - and oh, the delicious irony that some of that money sent abroad is used to protect Serbs from flooding.
For the Express there is, as there is every week in winter, another storm on the way. But never mind, here's a picture of Darcey Bussell and another of Barbara Windsor for good measure.
For the Telegraph, the floods bring an opportunity for a jolly picture of a couple of lads with brooms helping the clean-up, but are not as important an event as the number of foreign doctors working in the NHS. 
flood alerts
The map above is the one published by the Government's flood warning information service last night. At the time there were 140 red alerts, including 24 severe warnings where there was a danger to life. ​
​
Four Sunday papers splashed on the flooding, almost all had a picture on the front and most did a couple of pages inside. Coverage was hardly incisive, but remember the papers were put together by skeleton Boxing Day crews and contacting people in authority - or with authority -  to add gravitas would have been tricky. 
​This morning there is a flood picture on every front page. Again, the people putting the papers together will have been working under the constraints imposed by the Sunday of a bank holiday weekend. But by this stage, they should have recognised that there was a big story to cover and called in reinforcements if necessary.
The trouble is, they didn't truly recognise that this was a big story. 
Sun and Mirror
For the Sun, "York submerged" was worth a picture, but not sufficiently important to dislodge the prepared cocaine-in-churches story with its punny splash head. Meanwhile the Mirror thought prisoner release blunders going back a decade made a more timely main story.
Turning to the inside, the Sun continued punning on its spread, while the Mirror couldn't find enough of interest in the floods to fill even two pages.
Like the Telegraph and Independent, it chose not to give the story a clear spread  - and then plonked Ed Balls's chairmanship of Norwich City and a story headlined "Whip bosses of bra show" on top of the ad. The truncated flood coverage included the paper's rugby correspondent bemoaning the fact that his first Christmas with his son was ruined and fears for future episodes of Emerdale if the film studio were inundated.
Sun spread
Mirror spread
Express
You might think that the Express, which specialises in dire weather predictions, might go to town when the devastation actually arrived. But, no. It is more concerned with looking to the next storm, both on the front page and the inside spread - both of which look just like any one of a dozen front-inside combinations from the past year.
So what's the beef? What more is there to say? After all, nobody died. 
Well, just imagine what the coverage would have been like had that map looked like this (excuse the clumsy photoshopping):​
London 'alerts'Picture
The papers would have found plenty to say then. We'd still have had the "ruined Christmas" stories, the human interest, the rescue of the pensioner from a sinking Land Rover (see it on this video).
But there would also be a more forensic examination of possible causes and possible courses of action to prevent future calamity.
There would be proper consideration of issues such as climate change and land management -  including tree felling and dredging - as well as flood defence policies and planning decisions that allow the building of homes on flood plains.
Thought would be given to where people who have been flooded out will live for the next nine months while their homes are made habitable - after all, there is supposed to be a housing crisis. There might be descriptions and case studies from those who have lived through this before of what the evacuees can expect.
There would be panels on where people can go to for help, financial and otherwise (in a Facebook post this morning, Christopher Everard reports on a £50m government scheme that is supposed to make funds immediately available to flood victims through local councils, yet this does not appear to have been widely publicised - most notably by the councils concerned).
There would be a full appraisal of the insurance industry with a breakdown of cover available or denied, premiums and how much each bit of a clean-up operation costs rather than the random millions and billions that are thrown out as "the cost of the floods".
There would be analysis of government policy on flood defences over the past 30 years; how much is being spent on what and where; which schemes are in the pipeline and whether they will still seem adequate in the light of recent experience; which schemes have fallen victim to austerity cuts. 
And most of all, the papers would examine what the Environment Agency was up to; who are the people in command, both ministerially and in executive positions?
It would have taken more than a couple of pages to do that - and the space would​ have been found. 

But not this time. Because this time the victims were in the North. In the regions. In the provinces. If it wasn't a holiday weekend, would the floods have been accorded even the attention they received this morning?
 i and Guardian
Only three of today's papers have the floods as the sole editorial element on their front pages: the Mail, the Guardian and the i - and the latter two keep their puffs.
The Guardian also has three pages inside, including some good river height graphics and a bit of climate analysis.
Times spreads
The Times, above, gives the story two inside spreads, including decent statistics and  a useful Q&A that is entertainingly written. But the "Christmas flooding" label is a bit naff and was that jolly picture of daffodils in Maidenhead a good call? Yes, it showed the dramatic contrast in the weather, but also a lack of sensitivity to the seriousness of the subject. Imagine putting a "happier times" touristy shot on a Syria spread.
But only one paper really removed its metropolitan blinkers to grapple with the scale of this story. The Mail not only devotes its entire front - plus a substantial turn on page 2  to the floods, it completes the package with four inside spreads.
Mail spreads
The angle of the splash is predictable (indeed, I predicted it on Twitter last night) in that it repeats its demand for overseas aid money to be diverted to UK flood relief.
But whatever you think of that notion, the Mail can hold its head up for consistency. Its coverage of successive floods has been extensive and its Christmas appeal has been to raise money for the victims. The appeal was launched on December 9 and by Boxing Day, more than £1m had been raised. There is a coupon in today's paper and links from its website for those who wish to contribute.​
It's a rare day that SubScribe takes its hat off to the Mail. And, largely thanks to the failings elsewhere, that day has dawned.
Mail appeal
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Grandparents' tale of woe is only part of the story

27/7/2015

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Southend Echo
Daily Mail
Social workers can never win. They are accused of incompetence and complacency if they fail to protect children from abusive or murderous parents and they are described as acting like the Stasi if they remove children from their families.
On Tuesday last week they came under fire again when the Southend Echo reported the case of a couple who had been refused permission to adopt their granddaughter.
The splash treatment was stark, but the text by Christine Sexton was written straight, making clear from the outset that the story was being written based on information from the couple rather than an independent source:
Picture
A couple claim their granddaughter has been taken away by social services because they are too old to look after her.
The couple, from Shoebury, started looking after the three-year-old girl when her mother was hospitalised with depression.
The doting grandparents were first told to give the girl up for fostering, but now, just six months after her mother was taken ill, Southend Council's social services department has put the girl up for adoption.
The devastated grandparents claim they were told it was because they are too old to look after her.


Towards the end of the story there was a quote from the council saying that while it could not comment on individual cases, "we should highlight that age is not the deciding factor in our assessments of prospective carers" .

The Mail picked up on the story and splashed with it the next day. In its eyes there was no doubt why the grandparents' application had been refused:
Picture
The grandparents of a three-year-old girl have been blocked from adopting her because they are "too old", it emerged last night.

The report went on to say that the couple's daughter had been "persuaded" to sign a form giving up the child while she was in a mental health hospital and without legal advice. It continued  that the grandparents had attended a court hearing on June 17, but that they had been "unable to argue their case as they could not afford legal representation". Their case had now been taken up by a solicitor who had waived her fees.
The Mail also quoted the council spokeswoman saying that age was not the deciding factor.
Mail inside coverage
The turn of the Mail splash from last Wednesday and Thursday's follow-up
Both papers followed up the story on Thursday. In the Mail, Steve Baker, a Tory MP who sat on a Commons working group on fostering and adoption in the last Parliament, and John Hemming, a former Liberal Demcrat MP who runs the Justice for Families campaign group, both questioned the mother's capacity to consent to her daughter being put into care. A second Tory MP offered an anodyne comment about the child's welfare being paramount and preconceptions about age.
Evening Echo
The Echo produced a spread in which the grandmother said that she had been told that another reason she had not been allowed to adopt the child was that she had suffered post-natal depression 31 years earlier. That story then went over the ground of the original piece, and was bolstered with a case study of another couple aged 62 and 70 who had fostered hundreds of children.
The council clearly felt aggrieved by the media interest because that afternoon it tweeted a link to an edited version of the judgment issued on June 17, which had just been published by the family court in Chelmsford.
Stephen Hodges
In his adjudication, district judge Stephen Hodges, left, describes how the mother had, since adolescence, suffered from depression, self-harming, a personality disorder and a neurological problem that tended to lead to epilepsy. In January this year she had cut herself with a kitchen knife in front of the child and was subsequently sectioned.
The child then spent three days with the grandparents before being moved into foster care because the mother objected to her being with her parents. The little girl had been in foster care ever since. Her mother had been discharged from hospital, but was readmitted in May and had accepted that she could not care for her daughter. They had a "goodbye" meeting on June 5 and the mother had expected a final care order to be made at the June 17 hearing - which she did not attend.
According to the judgment, the grandparents had chosen that hearing to make their application to care for the child - even though they had been in possession of the social services' assessment of their unsuitability since March -  and they refused the judge's offer of an adjournment to allow them to prepare formal statements. They had no legal representation, but told him that they wanted the matter dealt with that day and the grandfather gave evidence under oath. 
In that evidence, he said that they had previously been asked to care for the child, but they had not done so because his wife was ill and his daughter did not want the little girl to go to them. He spoke of conflicts between his wife and daughter, the difficulty in keeping the peace at home, and how his wife's problems with their daughter brought on her depression. He had been to many meetings in relation to his daughter as she grew up, but that his wife had not attended because of her depression.
The social worker's assessment said that the mother had had an unhappy and dysfunctional childhood and the judge noted that she had on various occasions said that she was abused physically by her parents. He concluded:

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The main concern...is the fact that this family would be in my judgment completely unable to cope with the triangular relationship of C, M and the grandparents....I just cannot envisage how the triangular relationship can possibly work.

The judgment includes two quotes from the viability assessment, neither of which refers to the grandparents' age, but the judge says "this is not a short document", so it is perfectly possible - likely even - that it does include concerns that at 82, the grandfather might have difficulty dealing with a teenager.
The impression conveyed by the edited judgment released to the public is of a woman in her early 30s who has had a troubled childhood - the viability assessment refers to "extensive professional involvement" - and who is not now able to look after the daughter she loves. She has said goodbye to the child - a scene the judge said she described in "heartrending" terms - and wants her to live with a stable "forever" family rather than her own parents.
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The Echo responded to the release of the ruling by publishing it in full. The Mail responded like a cat that misjudges a manoeuvre: hope no one notices and walk on, nose in the air, as though nothing has happened. There has been nothing in the paper on this case since Thursday.
The Telegraph, on the other hand, pitched in on Saturday with a page lead headlined Full story of grandparents 'too old to adopt'.

Except it isn't.
The judgment in this case was delivered in private and its release to the public two days after the case hit the newspapers cannot be coincidence.
The grandparents' case seems hopeless when you read the ruling, yet there was enough in it for a solicitor to come forward and offer to represent them without payment. And the point the MPs picked up on - that the mother signed away her rights to her daughter while being treated in a mental health unit and without an legal representation - remains unanswered.
The Mail's first story notes that the social workers' assessment of the grandparents is not available to the public - quite rightly so - but the judge says the couple had been in possession of a copy since March 24. Why didn't Christine Sexton of the Echo or Andrew Levy and Rosie Taylor of the Mail ask to see it? And if they did, and were denied access to the document that supposedly corroborated the grandparents' claim about ageism, then shouldn't they have smelt a rat? They should certainly not have taken the couple's story at face value.
There is little doubt from all the material available that both mother and grandparents love the little girl at the centre of this case.  What we don't know is whether the decisions made along the way will make it more or less likely that she will live happily ever after.
It is seven years now since Camilla Cavendish started writing in The Times about the need for greater openness from family courts - a campaign that earned her the Paul Foot award and led to some changes in the privacy rules. Yet we still cannot be sure that families are seeing justice.
The only reason this case from Shoeburyness reached the public consciousness was because someone mentioned age. That turns out to have been a side issue, and we shall probably never know the full story. That may be right and proper, a family's private traumas should not be aired for public entertainment. 
But if women are being coerced into signing away the right to look after their children when they are not mentally fit, in order that councils can meet adoption targets - as the grandparents' lawyer and MPs suggest,- then we need to know.
The journalists covering this story have fallen for the clickbait angle and missed the real issue.
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The Mail, the Guardian and this Snowden interview

7/4/2015

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Its work transcended the parameters of individual category awards because of its ramifications and impact.  The judges said the fact that it polarised opinion even within the press showed how important it was.
It was the view of the judges that it showed courage in producing the most impactful piece of journalism during 2013 with a story of global significance that went to the heart of the debate on press freedom. 
The unanimous decision of the judges was that the best of British national newspapers in 2013 was The Guardian. 
This was the British Press Awards citation a year ago when it honoured the Guardian for its Snowden files coverage.  Rob Evans and Paul Lewis were also honoured for their work on the NSA leaks, winning the news reporter of the year prize for what the judges described as their "incisive and genuinely sensational stories with eyebrow-raising power".
The Guardian and the reporters have made the most of the material: if you search for "Edward Snowden" on the paper's website, Google will turn up more than 600,000 results (which is not, of course, the same as 600,000 stories). There is the stunning interactive"NSA files decoded", which earned the paper the digital award at the Press Awards and the innovation prize at the British Journalism Awards in December. There are stories, analyses, interviews, debate, commentary, links to books - masses of them. 
Oh yes, and there was that Pulitzer Prize. And the European Press Award. And the Orwell Prize. And the Paul Foot award. And the Right Livelihood award....
But as the Press Awards judges noted last spring, Edward Snowden's leaks polarised public opinion and the newspaper industry.
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Daily Mail
The Daily Mail has never been the Guardian's greatest fan, nor has it been shy about saying what it thinks about the paper or Snowden. To the Guardian he is a whistleblower, to the Mail a traitor.
Over recent months, the Mail has seized every opportunity to attack the Guardian - examples include a Saturday essay by Stephen Glover on Nick Davies - "the man who did for the British Press" - and even a dig over an art critic who dared to express a contrary opinion on the Tower of London poppies. Last week a leader about Nick Clegg's call for a "public interest" defence for journalists who wind up in court turned into an attack on the Guardian and its "almost psychotic hatred of a commercially viable free press". 
Today the paper leads on a Snowden television interview in which he avoids answering questions about whether he had read all the documents he leaked. The tone of the story leaves the reader in no doubt of the Mail's opinion of Snowden:

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Traitor Edward Snowden has revealed he did not read all the top-secret intelligence documents he leaked – a move which put lives at risk from terrorists. In a television interview the fugitive squirmed as he admitted only ‘evaluating’ the files stolen from GCHQ and the US National Security Agency.
The story turns to page 4, where the basement is about the Guardian and a change of online heading on the story - from "Edward Snowden tells John Oliver he did not read all leaked NSA material" to "John Oliver presses Edward Snowden on whether he read all leaked NSA material". As the Mail says, a definite watering down. But the Guardian says that's because the first heading was inaccurate. Also true, as you can see for yourself in the video at the top.
The Mail leader writers are again called into action to opine that the paper is a passionate defender of free speech, but that this has to be balanced against public safety. A view with which few would take issue. But, as ever, it has to be coupled with a swipe at the Guardian and its "supreme arrogance".
Mail page 4 basement
So far, so par for the course. But SubScribe has questions for both papers.
First, why is the Mail splashing on this story, other than as a vehicle with which to attack a paper that it despises? Do its readers care? A former Mail Online writer who contacted SubScribe after the James King "My year of ripping off the web" blog noted that she had never seen any news organisation so influenced by readers' whims. Stories on the website's home page were moved up and down according to the number of clicks, she said. As I write this, the Snowden story does not feature on the home page at all. And I have scrolled up and down three times to make sure.
Second, why did the Guardian not publish anything in its print edition on the Snowden interview? For the past two years, his every utterance has been deemed newsworthy - the paper even splashed on his opinion of proposed British surveillance laws. But while this latest story appears online, it is nowhere to be found in the newspaper.

This spat is hugely entertaining for journalists. But in their coverage - and non-coverage - of this story,  both papers have been following their own agendas without any regard for the reader. 
And that is unforgivable.
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CEO sacked: what's hair colour got to do with it?

28/11/2014

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Daily Mail
Oh dear, another disastrous business chief wrecking the company and waltzing off into the sunset with a bumper payoff.

This one, it seems, blagged her way into the job, cut Thomas Cook's market value by £360m in her brief stay and pocketed £8m for her trouble.
Not quite.

The departure of Harriet Green as the tour operator's chief executive is the main business story in every paper today (apart from the Daily Star). She's also on the front page of the Times, which follows up with a home news story, a business spread and a business commentary. 

It is one of those counter-intuitive statistics - like the one about more Poles living in New York (it used to be Chicago) than in any city other than Warsaw - that more business people read The Times than any other national paper, including the FT. So if The Times gives Green that much space we can be sure that it's not just another here-today-gone-tomorrow, pick-up-the-payoff story.

The Mail's headline, taken piece by piece, is accurate. But it gives totally the wrong impression.

Harriet Green did email the Thomas Cook out of the blue to tell him that his company needed her. She was right. It did. She is a turnaround specialist and Cook was in a mess. It had debts of £1.6bn, its market cap was £146m and its share price had fallen to 11p.

That was in 2012. Yesterday she left the company abruptly and its share price fell by 18%, wiping - as the Mail reports - some £360m from its value (now nearly £2bn). The immediate assumption of many was that the slump was because of her departure. How would the business manage without its saviour?
Cooler heads suggested that the company results, complete with a warning note on next year's profit expectations, also announced yesterday may have had more to do with the decline.
 
Is this labouring the point over the headlne? Probably. And I haven't even started on the first word yet. So let's move on to the text. 
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She sleeps for less than four hours, chose her husband in seven seconds and transformed the fortunes of Thomas Cook within months.
And now, just as speedily, outspoken Harriet Cook has left - with £8m in her pocket.
This is a page three lead. She is an attractive woman who has done something unusual and it's fair for the Mail to tailor the story for its "lay" mostly-female readership. The breathlessness of the intro pars are understandable - and they do at least get across the point that Green had been a success rather than a par-for-the-course big-payoff failure.

The story is written by City Correspondent James Salmon, who sneaks quite a few businessy facts into the lifestyle narrative. The final two pars are jam-packed and along the way he tells us that Green's strategy had involved 2,500 job cuts and the closure of more than 300 travel agencies.
Guardian
Neither the Guardian nor the Sun pulls its punches in reporting that Green had been sacked, or ousted. The Mail is hintier, pointing out that she had said only last week that there were many things yet to be done.

The paper is not renowned for its approval of women in the workplace and it tends to hold the belief that those who are successful must be strident, demanding, careless of their families and either unfeminine or glamorous wonderwomen.

Green falls into the latter category. In the Mail's book she is a fitness fanatic with a voracious work ethic who needs less sleep than Margaret Thatcher. She spends the week in a five-star London hotel away from her husband - the man she chose in seven seconds but whom she sees at their Oxford home only at weekends. She is in the gym with her former Royal Marine personal trainer at 5.30am and is a devotee of hatha yoga. 

We learn her height, that she likes of diamonds and designer clothes - and that fellow board members had become frustrated by the "personality cult" that she had "cultivated with outspoken comments on everything from working mothers to overweight staff". 
How much of that would we have been told had a man made a similar unexpected departure?

The bottom of the piece directs us to a commentary in the business section headlined "Why Harriet had to go" in which Associate City Editor Ruth Sutherland's admiration for Green is apparent, even while conforming with the Mail ethos:

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One cannot help but wonder whether her flamboyant femininity played a part in her abrupt exit. If that is the case it would be an astonishing display of ingratitude to a woman who, in terms of commercial performance, has outshone many male executives.
Privately, sources say Green has a "highly personal style" that some found difficult to take. 
Unusually for a chief executive of either sex she is open about her personal life and her family. Her departure comes just a few weeks after a jaw-dropping interview conducted in the gym of Brown's hotel, a five-star Mayfair hotel, which none of the rest of the board knew about until it appeared.
Times magazine
The interview in question appeared in The Times Saturday Magazine a month ago. Was it "jaw-dropping"? No, it was an excellent read, thoroughly businesslike and balanced. Damian Whitworth talked to Green, to her staff and to her colleagues. To put that whirlwind marriage in context, she says that she chose Graham Clarkson in seven seconds but that he took more than nine months to reach the same conclusion. In other words, like many men and women before her, she took one look and thought "he's the one". They used to call it love at first sight. Nobody said it had to be mutual.

The Whitworth interview is strong - and recent - enough to have formed the backbone of most of today's coverage. All the rivals had to do was add the pejorative verbs and adjectives:

The Guardian was happy to oblige, emphasisng Green's "robust" management style and publishing more tittle tattle than the Mail: colleagues living in fear of her public humiliations; employees receiving dressings-down while her beautician gives her a manicure; "ballistic" demands of her brother, hired as a driver. Allegations which are all denied - after the mud has been thrown and stuck.
Jim Armitage in the Independent couldn't resist having Green "stomping around" in her Gucci heels.
Times spread
But that, joyously, was that. The Express ran a straight story and a good commentary on its far-back City page. The Sun, too, avoided the clichés. The Times's coverage across the board was exemplary, with some nice work from Dominic Walsh and a charming little panel from Martin Waller on the curse of awards. Green recently won Veuve Clicquot's businesswoman of the year prize and Waller's piece recalls others who fell off the pedestal no sooner than they had been crowned. 

The paper had the advantage, of course, of that Whitworth magazine special - which was equally straight down the line.  (It even showed gender equality in giving us the athletic preferences of others in the Thomas Cook team, including Green's successor,) 

The Times has devoted much space to the disproportionate number of women in top FT companies' boardrooms. The Mail's page three heading aside, today Fleet Street's male-dominated business departments showed that they have moved into the current century. Now all we need is for those old boardroom bores, who might tolerate a roasting from a man but definitely not from a woman, to get with the programme.
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The importance of public art

2/11/2014

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#458175360 / gettyimages.com
No doubt about the top half-term attraction last week: the Tower of London poppies had families squashed six deep trying to snatch a glimpse and a selfie of Paul Cummins's inspired installation.
How many were there to remember the fallen, how many wanted to see the spectacle and how many just wanted to know what all the fuss was about is hard to say. What is certain is that a piece of art had captured the public imagination on a scale unseen probably since the Tutankhamun exhibition rolled into London in the 1970s. It had been thought that four million would turn out to take a peek, but that may turn out to be a wild underestimate, given the clamour last week.
SubScribe thought in August that newspapers didn't seem to be taking much of an interest in the project, although they perked up once Wills and Kate turned up.
Then there was some sniffing about where the money from the sale of the poppies at £25 a pop was going. Only a pound a flower for good causes? How dare the artist, his team of workers and those who  risked their money to finance the venture take anything for their efforts? 
That million quid or so from the poppy sales will have been magnified several times by the raised profile of this year's appeal - especially with the withdrawal from Afghanistan last month. And there will be plenty of commercial enterprises that will have benefited from the installation. I bet the organisers wish they hadn't decided to clear it away so swiftly after its completion in time for Remembrance Sunday next week
Money. Have you noticed how everything ends up being reduced to its monetary value. 
We just don't get public art in this country. "Look at that!" we cry. "We could have paid for 12 nurses for a year with that. What a waste of public money!"
Yes, we need nurses. But a dozen more on the national strength won't make much difference to anyone, and what happens next year when the money that would have been saved by not buying the painting or statue or book has gone.
A piece of art lasts forever. Or should. 
Public art, usually sculpture, lifts the spirit, makes the humdrum more bearable. It's not there for the elite and is as available to the harassed mum with a screaming toddler on one arm and a baby in a pram heading for the shopping centre as it is for the duchess. It is indiscriminate. It is there to be enjoyed by black, brown, white, young, old, fat, thin, married, single, able-bodied or lame. No one can stop you looking. No one can stop you interpreting it in your own way.
But public bodies have to be brave to invest in art. There will always be someone to complain, as the Birmingham MP John Hemming did this week, that councils should instead focus on emptying the dustbins. The Arts Council is always the first to have its budget cut whenever there is a financial squeeze. The whingeing about the licence fee - the "scandal" that we should have to pay a hundred and fifty quid per family for unlimited access to everything the BBC has to offer - is incessant. Particularly from the corporation's rivals.
Mail page 3
So this week there has been much debate about the depiction of a pair of Brummie sisters and their children in bronze outside the Birmingham library. What sort of an ideal of family life is this supposed to represent? 
Well, as SubScribe has written elsewhere, there was no intention to produce an ideal but to portray a "real" family.
The Mail, which was appalled by Gillian Wearing's sculpture, has squealed with delight at the poppies - now that millions have given it their seal of approval. On Friday it devoted a full page, a leader and a diary note to attacking the Wearing work. You could fairly say it was sneering.
SubScribe chooses the word because that is the one it tossed at the Guardian when one of its arts critics dared to suggest that the poppies might be a bit sanitised as a representation of the blood of war. Jonathan Jones actually applauded the fact that people were moved by an artwork, but he took issue with the number of poppies in the installation - one to represent every British serviceman or woman killed during the First World War.
It was, he thought, too inward looking, too nationalistic. What about the millions from other nations? If we wanted peace and  reconciliation, why were we concerned only with our own? As a payoff he said that if Cummings had wanted to depict the horror of war, he might have filled the Tower moat with barbed wire and bones.
It was an opinion, an art critic's appraisal of a piece of art. Not all of the piece was antipathetic, but it was the questioning sentences that upset the Mail and prompted a debate into which even the Prime Minister was drawn.
Yes, it was that serious.
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Here is the Mail last Wednesday. The "sneering Guardian" didn't call anything fake or seek to replace the poppies with bones. One of its critics used some of those words, not necessarily in the same order.
Daily Mail 30-10-14
Robert Hardman followed up with an essay on Thursday. On Friday and Saturday the Mail's leader writer and two columnists all sang the same chorus of condemnation of the Gillian Wearing family statue. Perhaps whoever put Wednesday's spread together thought that all newspapers insisted that all of its writers stick to the party line. The idea that someone who was allowed to write a blog on the Guardian website might express a view that hadn't been vetted and approved by the Secretariat was unimaginable.
The Mail was not alone in this, because by the time Cameron was asked to comment on the Jones view, other papers were talking about "the Left" and "Guardian lefties" wanting the poppies wrenched out out and replaced by barbed wire.
The Mail and Jones are both right - and both wrong. Both pieces of art make a political statement. But both are deserving of their place in our open spaces. Public art matters. The French understand it - look at the "papier mache" sporting figures on the bridges over the road from Calais to Boulogne, whose only purpose is to look nice and raise a smile.  
We are rubbish at it. We are too prosaic. We see accurate almost-photographic style representations of everyday objects as good art. We need educating. Bring on more public art in all its forms.

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It's 3-1 against the Star on Coldplay Chris

29/10/2014

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Star
Jennifer Lawrence has been househunting in Islington and has told estate agents that she's eager to find a "cosy pad" with Chris Martin. 
She apparently loves England and can't wait to put down roots. She's also cleared all her stuff out of her former boyfriend's flat when she was in London earlier this month "to symbolise the start of her new life with Chris.  Buying a house together in London is the icing on the cake."
Awww, sweet. After the heartbreak of the conscious uncoupling with Gwyneth Paltrow, it's all going to turn out all right for Chris. 
Or so the Star told us in its showbiz lead yesterday.
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But the Mail and Sun had different ideas. They spoilt the fun with news that the couple had split after a four-month romance.  Jen dumped Chris "a few days ago", after he had been out to a family dinner with Gwynnie, according to the Sun. They've gone their separate ways, said the Mail, attributing the report to the website E! News.
Today the Mirror's US Editor weighs in with a page 3 lead that adds flesh to yesterday's Mail and Sun stories.
He reports that Jen was fed up with Chris's continued closeness to Paltrow, who was apparently spotted tenderly stroking his face at that dinner, "while a glum Jennifer was pictured elsewhere in Los Angeles having dinner with a friend".
Sources close to the Hunger Games star said: "Jen felt there were three of them in the relationship and didn't feel comfortable..She is one of the most desirable women in Hollywood and quite rightly deserves to be leading lady for any man and not play second fiddle."
So what we'd really like to know now is...
How long had that estate agent story been sitting in the Star reporter's notebook? If only they had got it into print a day or two earlier...
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In the eye of the beholder...

28/10/2014

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Renee Zellwegger was back on the Mail front page this morning with the heading "Another new look for fresh-faced Renee". 
Good to know that the sarcasm machine is still well-oiled.
Obediently following the instruction to "See page 7", we found three more pictures of the actress and a story from the "Mail Foreign Service". 
Good to know that it wasn't too busy with ebola or Isis.
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Hair swept up in a messy bun, Renee Zellweger’s fresh-faced appearance dispels any notion that her recent change of look was merely the result of make-up.
Spotted for the first time since her headline-grabbing transformation, the actress appeared somewhat tired and anxious as she ran errands over the weekend in Mississippi.
What is that first paragraph trying to say? Well, we're supposed to infer that she must have had surgery. But if Ms Z were to protest, the paper could argue that it was simply saying that last week's chiselled look was more than foundation, powder and blusher deep.
Headline-grabbing transformation? Ouch. Transformation, that is, from the "puffy rounded cheeks and pout" for which she was previously known. Double ouch.
The Express also ran into the actress out and about during breaks in filming a new movie, which both papers dutifully name. But Laura Holland saw her through differently tinted spectacles:
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Bridget Jones actress Renee Zellwegger is looking more like her normal self after rumours she had cosmetic surgery...
The 45-year-old was much more recognisable...wearing casual clothes and her blonde hair stylishly scraped into a bun...
So far so good...suggestions of surgery were silly, says Zellwegger. "Perhaps I look different. Who doesn't when they get older. I'm happy."
Is Holland convinced?
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Yet the Jerry Maguire actress was almost unrecognisable - with her super line-free forehead, altered brow and puffy face.
Ouch, ouch, ouch! So when the Express says she looks more like her normal self, it didn't mean that she looked like her normal self, just less unlike her normal self than last week? And while she was much more recognisable, she was still almost unrecognisable - so was she completely unrecognisable last week? 
Confused? You bet. So were the subs. The contradictory headlines play nicely against each other - but not with the copy underneath. And that's the general idea.
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Press freedom, Hacked Off and credit where it's due

7/10/2014

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#163938228 / gettyimages.com
SubScribe is not a fan of Hacked Off. This website does not believe that the Leveson inquiry was a good idea, that statutory involvement in Press regulation was desirable or necessary, or that people who believe themselves to be aggrieved should have any role in determining the fate of those they perceive to be at fault - in either the civil or criminal courts.
SubScribe is even less of a fan of newspapers with entrenched ideas. An open mind is an essential part of a journalist's make-up. Approaching any subject with preconceived ideas is likely to lead to important nuances being missed or overlooked.
The Daily Mail has ranted loud and long about Leveson, the royal charter, the Guardian's role in unearthing the hacking scandal and about Hacked Off.
On Sunday, its sister paper splashed on the fact that Kent Police had used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) to trawl through phone records and uncover the identity of the source of the Chris Huhne speeding ticket story. This was even though a judge had ordered that the source should remain anonymous.
Press Gazette has for more than a month been seeking signatures on a petition to stop police using this act to spy on journalists. The Save Our Sources campaign began after the disclosure that the Met had gone through the Sun political editor's phone records to discover whose leak started the Plebgate scandal.
littlejohn
Today Richard Littlejohn jumps on the bandwagon with a blast at both forces, a quick jibe at Leveson and a reminder that many journalists have been arrested since the phone hacking scandal broke in 2011 and that some are still "languishing" on police bail after three years. The headline on the piece is reproduced above.
SubScribe would hazard a guess that Littlejohn is no supporter of Hacked Off. But he doesn't mention the organisation in this column. It's appearance in the heading is hardly likely to have been the work of a lowly sub, rather to have been dictated from above. As it happens, Hacked Off is standing four square alongside the Mail on this. 
Dr Evan Harris, associate director of the organisation, stood up at the Liberal Democrats' conference in Glasgow yesterday and persuaded his party to adopt a policy of creating public interest defences in law to protect responsible journalism.
Harris, a former LibDem MP, said that his party's ministers should do more to enhance, improve and protect press freedom, particularly in relation to investigative and public interest journalism. He pointed to various examples where this might work:
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First is RIPA, and the lack of safeguards for journalistic material, including confidential sources and indeed for legally privileged material. The report of Operation Alice into the Plebgate affair 
revealed...that the police had got the phone records, both the mobile phone and the desk phone, from Tom Newton-Dunn, the political editor at The Sun... 
There is no judicial oversight or indeed any oversight for 
the police for that decision. The police authorised themselves to do that, something they...should not be allowed to do. There must be greater safeguards. 
Harris endorsed Press Gazette's SOS campaign and even went on to suggest that hacking by journalists might be acceptable in the right circumstances:
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The second area dealt with in this amendment are public interest defences. For example in the Computer Misuse Act, which would mean that when Sky News hacked into the computer of the "canoe man", who you may remember faked his death to get insurance money, they would not 
have been threatened with the chilling impact of a police investigation. 
Similarly with the Bribery Act. The Sun...ran an operation to expose fraud at a magistrates' court where a clerk was letting people off speeding tickets. And they ran the risk of a police investigation because they were effectively breaking the Bribery Act and had no statutory defence. 
If the News of the World, instead of their thousands of innocent victims of hacking, had hacked the phone of Jimmy Savile to expose him when the police were failing to do so, then they should not have faced for that example the threat of a police investigation. But there is no public interest defence.
The Sun, which has made a formal complaint about the Met's use of Ripa to track Tom Newton Dunn's phone calls, reported Harris's speech, but not his association with Hacked Off. A deliberate omission?
This is not the first time Harris's addresses to conference have attracted the Sun's attention. Three years ago it wrote:
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A women's think-tank yesterday blasted the Lib Dems for plotting war on Page 3 — and hailed The Sun’s curvy babes as role models.The party’s po-faced conference motion this week to stop shopkeepers selling The Sun before a 9pm “watershed” was condemned by the organisation WomenOn.
The group said of the crusade led by Evan Harris: “Where should it stop? Should we ban all photos of people lest someone somewhere finds them attractive?”
Ex-MP Dr Harris brandished photos of topless Page 3 models on Monday as he ranted against “sexualised images” in newspapers and lads’ mags.
His potty idea for a TV-style watershed to restrict when publications can be sold is now official Lib Dem policy. WomenOn said it “smacks of desperation”.
It's good to know that at least one paper doesn't hold grudges.
Or maybe it's a case of "my enemy's enemy is my friend"?
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Should we be on first-name terms?

29/9/2014

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Georges
When you see "George" in a headline, who do you think of? The no-longer-eligible bachelor, the boy who is third in line to the throne, or the man in charge of the nation's wallet?
The Mail's splash today says "George scraps pensions tax". It feels wrong, too chummy.
We're happy with George for Clooney or the Prince, but not for Osborne. Why? Because he's a politician? What about Boris?
Because there's more than one George so it could be confusing? There's more than one Ed.
Ah yes, Ed. We're happy enough with Ed for Miliband, but not for Balls.
Perhaps it's because of the count - as in Ken for Livingstone. 
Or is it a sign of affection or at least familiarity? Maggie wasn't much shorter than Thatcher - and it was always Maggie, never Margaret: she was the Queen's sister.
How do these conventions become established? Nobody ever called Major "John" in a heading or Blair "Tony", but Brown was occasionally "Gordon". Cameron is "Dave" only when the sub is conveying a jeering tone.
Your thoughts would be welcome.

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The Mail and the Sunday Tel's Yazidis exclusive 

28/8/2014

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Mail Krohn
When does a piece of writing count as being in the public domain?
Is it legitimate to pick it up and reprint in full under a picture byline, once it has appeared on the internet?
The Mail and the Australian had a jolly little spat in June about Mail online snippets that bore a striking resemblance to stories that had appeared in the Australian.
Is it more acceptable to lift copy if you give full credit? 
SubScribe admits to having been dismayed  to be at the end of a caustic tweet from Nick Cohen after running an extract of one of his rather good articles in the Columnists page of this site. It was supposed to be a compliment. 
So it's an interesting sphere to examine.
A couple of weeks ago, this blog was surprised to find that both the Telegraph and the Mail carried first-person pieces from Jonathan Krohn, the first journalist  on Mount Sinjar in Iraq, where the Yazidis were beseiged and dying of thirst after fleeing ISIS.
Krohn was freelancing, and is renowned as a wunderkind, but it takes some kind of superman to produce two completely different colour pieces about airdrops and rescue efforts for two papers on the same night.
A little research showed that he had filed the "Mail" piece to the Sunday Telegraph on Saturday and that it had been posted online in full. It was, however, cannibalised to form part of a portmanteau splash for the print edition. SubScribe thought this was a waste of a scoop - and the Mail apparently did, too. For there it was on page 7 the following day.
Krohn has now been in touch to say that he filed to the Telegraph, for whom he was contracted to write. He wasn't remotely dismayed that his story had been carved up. He was delighted to have the joint splash byline and to have got the exclusive. The treatment, he said, was the Telegraph's call. To an old sub, that came as an astonishingly refreshing attitude and for a moment lifted the gloom about the future of the trade.
Krohn added that he hadn't written for the Mail. Mobile and satellite signals were unreliable up on the mountain and when he got down on the Tuesday he discovered a number of emails in his inbox from the Mail, asking if it could.use his material.
By the time Krohn read them, someone in Kensington had taken the decision to go ahead anyway, and there was his original copy in all its glory, complete with picture byline and boast about "the first Western journalist to reach Mount Sinjar".
SubScribe assumes that a large cheque is in the post.


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    Liz Gerard

    Liz Gerard

    New year, new face: it's time to come out from behind that Beryl Cook mask. 
    I'm Liz Gerard, and after four decades dedicated to hard news, I now live by the motto "Those who can do, those who can't write blogs". 
    These are my musings on our national newspapers. Some of them may have value.

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