Disgraced MP Chris Huhne was ridiculed on his first day in Wandsworth jail yesterday — after a warder called him to breakfast by yelling “Order! Order!”

Only one small problem with the story: it was a complete fabrication.

The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade has the story:

According to the article, “the mocking warden” mimicked the commons speaker by saying: “The right honourable member for Wandsworth North — down to the office.”

It also said other prisoners laughed at Huhne, that they had bullied him and that he had been transferred to a wing for vulnerable prisoners.

But the story was just that – a story. When Huhne’s partner complained about the article to the Press Complaints Commission, the paper was unable to substantiate any of the claims.

The result? The PCC negotiated a resolution of the complaint, which involved The Sun removing the article from its website and publishing the following “correction”:

“In an article, ‘Order! Order! The Rt Hon Member for Wandsworth. Come to the office’ (13 March), we stated that a prison officer ridiculed Chris Huhne by calling him to breakfast on the Tannoy system.

We also reported claims by families of inmates that he had been moved to a wing for vulnerable prisoners after being bullied and badgered for money. We have been contacted by Mr Huhne and his partner Ms Carina Trimingham who say that he was not been moved or bullied and got on well with other prisoners. We are happy to set the record straight.”

In other words, the main page one page story breached the first, and arguably most important, clause of the editors’ code of practice, about accuracy.

Happy to set the record straight? You bet. Happy because the commission did not feel it necessary to censure the paper for publishing claims that it obviously could not prove.

Happy because it published the mealy-mouthed correction seven weeks later at the foot of page 2. Happy because it had got away with a flier. And it didn’t even have the grace to apologise.

Of course the too-good-to-be-true-(literally) story was picked up by the rest of the press. And not just by the tabloids.

Roy Greenslade’s own Guardian still has the story here (‘The disgraced former cabinet minister Chris Huhne was ridiculed on his first day in jail, when a prison officer called him to breakfast shouting “Order! Order!”, it was reported’), as do the Telegraph here (‘Disgraced former Cabinet minister Chris Huhne was ridiculed on his first day in jail when a warder called him to breakfast shouting “Order! Order!”, it was reported today’).

Only the Independent (of the non-paywalled quality press) appears to have updated its original story to reflect the facts rather than The Sun’s inventions.

* Stephen Tall is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice, a Research Associate for the liberal think-tank CentreForum, and also writes at his own site, The Collected Stephen Tall.

In its own terms, of course not. Its own self-promoted myth that it was ‘The Sun wot won it’ for the Tories in 1992 with its anti-Kinnock front page belies the reality: it backs the party it thinks is most likely to win.

It’s in that narrow sense that it’s interesting The Sun has declined to back either the Tories or Labour today for the first time in its 44-year history:

Who you choose today must be a local decision, not a national one. Read the leaflets. Listen to what all the actual candidates are telling you, and judge them individually. Did they deliver on their 2009 promises? Have they the right priorities for the next four years? Let them all win back our faith the hard way. One by one, from the bottom up.

Which, to be fair, is excellent advice. To put it another way…

SHOCK! as, for FIRST TIME EVER, The Sun urges its readers to THINK FOR THEMSELVES who to vote for at election bit.ly/10u18Z3

— Stephen Tall (@stephentall) May 2, 2013

The Sun (and by extension, its owner Rupert Murdoch) is hedging its bets. It’s not leading public opinion; it’s waiting to find out from the voters who they think it should endorse.

* Stephen Tall is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice, a Research Associate for the liberal think-tank CentreForum, and also writes at his own site, The Collected Stephen Tall.

Last week a young woman came to talk to me about her housing situation. Her frustration was obvious. She was working hard in a low-paid job and was stuck in an overcrowded home with a young family and desperately needed to move to a bigger home. She couldn’t understand why she had to wait so long to get a home that was the right size for her and her family. It’s a story that will be familiar to Sun readers across the country.

But this young woman’s frustration would have quickly changed to disbelief if she’d also known about Labour’s better-off bedroom blockers. Right now, there are thousands of families with children who are forced to share a bedroom with their parents. In Scotland alone, there are nearly 60,000 living in homes that are too small for the size of their family. And during Labour’s 13 years in government, waiting lists in England almost doubled — from just over one million to nearly 1.8million households.

But despite millions of people waiting for a decent home, Labour continued to hand out around £75million a year to subsidise the lifestyles of high-earning social tenants. Social tenants live in homes that are let at low rents to people in housing need. They are usually provided by councils and not-for-profit organisations such as housing associations. Under Labour’s rules, such tenants — reported to include the likes of Bob Crow, the RMT union general secretary who earns £145,000 a year — have their rent subsidised by you and me. Even Labour MPs were able to get in on the act. Frank Dobson lived in social housing when he was earning a six-figure salary as a Cabinet minister under Tony Blair, claiming he “wouldn’t be able to afford” to pay market rents.

There are about 20,000 households with an income of more than £60,000 being subsidised in this way. Each of these households receive thousands of pounds from the taxpayer every year. This is unfair and wasteful, yet during 13 years of government, Labour did nothing to bring it to an end. Where Labour failed, the Coalition is putting things right.

Danny lists the measures taken by the Coalition to, in his words, “make sure the wealthy pay their fair share”:

1. the cap on the total amount of benefits households can claim at £26,000, the average annual income;
2. the end of the subsidy on spare rooms (aka ‘bedroom tax’) which he says will “help free up some of the one million bedrooms not being used in this country and ease pressure on housing stock”;
3. giving social landlords the power to charge tenants with an income of more than £60,000 a fair level of rent;
4. a new super-duty ‘Mansion Tax’ of 15% on the purchase of homes worth more than £2 million by certain companies; and
5. by increasing to £10,000 the amount you can earn without paying income tax.

He concludes:

If you are working full-time on the national minimum wage your income tax bill will have been cut in half. And everyone who had their tax rate doubled by Gordon Brown’s 10p shambles will be paying no tax at all. Next April, that tax cut will go up to £700. So from April 2014, there will be no income tax at all on the first £10,000 of your salary. That was the Lib Dem promise in 2010. And we have delivered.

You can read Danny’s article in full here.

First, he set out  what the Bill is trying to do:

The Bill creates a Serious Harm Test to prevent frivolous claims. It makes user-friendly the defences of honest opinion, truth and qualified privilege, and introduces an important public interest defence. It creates rules for the internet and abolishes the presumption of a trial by jury in libel cases.

Judges are working to modernise court procedures so libel claims are decided quickly, with a level playing field for the rich and not-so-rich.

It is a charter not for the Press but for the public, for whom the Press is public watchdog.

Then he describes the problems with the Puttnam amendments:

They try to force politicians and the Press to come to a compromise. The aim is well-intentioned but would violate our human rights and freedoms.

Max Mosley failed to persuade our courts, or the European Court of Human Rights, to adopt a rule making it easy for victims of media intrusion to get a gagging order against publication.

The Puttnam amendments propose to build such a requirement within an arbitration scheme, paid for by the Press and underpinned by threat of punitive damages inflicted on those who refuse to join and obey.

He likens the overall effect as “burning the house to roast the pig.”

You can read the article in full here.

* Caron Lindsay is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings

The Sun, 12th October, 2012

Notwithstanding the fact that he was our Hero of the Week just three weeks ago, we have rarely been slow to criticise Nick Clegg. His slavish devotion to the EU, his potty support for the Alternative Vote and his obsession with House of Lords reform have all, quite rightly, seen him pilloried on here over the last couple of years. But credit where it’s due. On Radio Five Live today, the Deputy PM was asked to support a campaign – which is backed by his Lib Dem colleague Lynne Featherstone among others – to have The Sun’s Page 3 banned. It would have been easy for him to score an easy political point in front of a live BBC audience by saying he backed it. But he didn’t. Indeed, he went further by pointing out that it was not the Government’s role to tell editors what they should put in the pages of their newspapers. He even said he was relaxed about his children looking at it when they’re older. Mr Clegg’s advice to those eager to have it scrapped was simple: “If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.” Ms Featherstone et al – please take note.

The Sun, 28th September, 2012

For more than two years, Nick Clegg has been a political punch-bag And not without good reason. His humiliating U-turn on tuition fees, the national rejection of his plans to change the voting system and his petulant rejection of boundary changes after the Tories blocked House of Lords reform have all been worthy of scorn. Even his attempt to say sorry for trebling rather than scrapping tuition fees backfired when it was set to music and became a YouTube hit. So it’s to his enormous credit that despite all the setbacks, the Lib Dem boss delivered such a powerful speech to his party’s conference this week. Challenging his delegates to get used to the hard choices of Government rather than the comfort of opposition, he insisted that spending cuts were vital to the UK’s long-term economic health. It may not have been the message his delegates – many of whom wish the party were in coalition with Labour rather than the Conservatives – wanted to hear, but it will have played well in the real world. Nick Clegg’s political obituary has already been written by many, but his speech suggested he could still be alive and kicking after the next election.

* Stephen Tall is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice, a Research Associate for the liberal think-tank CentreForum, and also writes at his own site, The Collected Stephen Tall.

Except, it isn’t.

Last week I heard a new “Wisdom Index” ICM poll had us at 18% and I was stunned. Such levels of support have been unheard of since entering government, surely this must be a wild outlier or freak poll? After some inquires I discovered this poll differs from all others, and instead of asking respondents how they will vote, asks how they think others will vote if a general election was held that day.

I was sceptical of such a method, especially as it was giving us much higher levels of support; so I dug a little deeper and found this poll wasn’t an outlier – every Wisdom Index poll published in 2011 and 2012 has us at 16-19%. This is roughly the same level of support we were getting from 2007 until the spike of support at the 2010 general election:

I asked Martin Boon, director of ICM, if this new method had ever been tested in the run up to a general election. He directed me to a paper he wrote for the International Journal of Market Research this summer, where I was astonished to discover that ICM used this method on the eve of the 2010 general election. That poll not only predicted the result of each party more accurately than any other pollster, but it managed to get the Lib Dem vote exactly right (23%) where all others failed – many spectacularly overestimating our support.

But if the Wisdom Index poll is correct, why are all the other polls showing such a low level of support for us?

Two factors come into play here. Firstly not all polls are so dire – the most accurate pollster, ICM, maintains our support in the mid-teens, which is within the margin of error of their own Wisdom Index. The polling method by ICM differs from other pollsters such as YouGov by adding back in 50% of unsure voters to the party they did turn out for in 2010. This adjustment technique gave ICM a higher accuracy in the 90′s where most pollsters underestimated Conservative support due to wide spread dissatisfaction within their ranks. When it came to casting votes, ICM was largely right in predicting around half of those dissatisfied Tories would come out to vote Tory again. ICM predicts the same will be said for half of our disaffected 2010 voters, which is why YouGov (who discount ALL “did vote, won’t vote” supporters) give us much lower scores than ICM

Secondly, YouGov produce a daily poll, as opposed to the ICM monthly, so when you average out the polls in any given month the YouGov polls have a magnified effect. As YouGov’s polling suppresses our own vote significantly, this results in a constantly depressed LD vote in any average poll. I find it suspicious that the daily YouGov poll is sponsored by The Sun, whose owner largely blames the Lib Dem surge in the 2010 general election in denying a Conservative majority. It is to Rupert Murdoch’s advantage that a constant media narrative is weaved into the national psyche that we will be crushed at the next election. He probably thinks that if enough people believe this false prophecy, it may just come true.

Before concluding, there are two notes of caution to mention. Firstly the Wisdom Index seems to be most accurate when used on polls that enjoy widespread public engagement such as general elections. Where it has been used on referenda it has been found wanting, and perhaps the same will be said of low turnout elections such as the Police Commissioner elections later this year. Secondly, it has only been tested (albeit very successfully) on one general election. Whilst it proved amazingly accurate once, only more testing will prove its true reliability.

Nevertheless, as the Wisdom Index was the only poll that got our support right in the last election and gave an accurate indication of where we were in the subsequent two local elections, I’m prepared to trust its predictions over the next General Election. Therefore, I am publicly recanting my doom laden estimates of our demise in 2015 and calling us back into play. As the great Liberal peer John Maynard Keynes once said: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

* Lev Eakins is a former Manchester Councillor and parliamentary candidate who now lives in Sussex.

Liberal Democrat MP for Edinburgh West Mike Crockart agrees. He told me:

I can’t believe that the Page 3 debate is still running.  The Sun’s editor needs to listen to people and act to take note of this campaign. In this day and age it’s ridiculous that women are still being objectified like this. Add to this the fact that images of ‘perfect’ women in magazines and papers leads to low self-esteem and unhappiness in a huge number of young women and the case for an end to Page 3 is overwhelming.

I asked former Liberal Democrat Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone what she thought of Page 3 during last night’s webinar. She said that she found it offensive.

If you’re on the Tube and somebody’s reading the Sun and Page 3 is there for all to see, it’s awful. I don’t want my daughter seeing that. I wish people would stop buying the Sun. That’s the real answer.

She went on to talk about what happened in the wake of a Fawcett Society General Election hustings at which she and Harriet Harman jokingly agreed to ban it should they get the chance. The Sun picked up on this, and a few days later, there on page 3 were two half naked girls, Harriet from Peckham, and Lynne from Hornsey.

There are, of course, two sides to every story. Charlotte Henry puts the opposing view over at Digital Politico:

The act of appearing in, purchasing, and looking at Page 3 is conducted by a collection of adults in full knowledge of what they are doing.

Not wanting Page 3 to be censored isn’t itself implicit support for the hyper-sexualisation  and objectification of women, and it isn’t support of misogyny (something I have been accused of for sharing my view on this,) and it certainly doesn’t justify rape culture.

It just isn’t very liberal to campaign for the removal of items in a newspaper, just because you dislike them.

Whatever your view, it’s a good thing that the issues around the portrayal and status of women that this campaign raises are being talked about. What do you think?

* Caron Lindsay is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings

Frankly, I think people who dodge the tax system are the moral equivalent of benefit cheats.

Both sets of people think they can bend the rules everyone else lives by for their own benefit.

The Coalition are already cutting income tax for working people but the truth is, if everyone paid what they owed, we could have even lower tax rates.

Whether you’re a tax dodger or a benefit cheat, our approach is the same — we will track you down and when we find you, we will come down on you like a ton of bricks.

Let’s also not forget what our taxes are for. They bring in the money that funds our schools and hospitals. They build our roads and they police our streets.

He went on to outline the measures the Government is taking to make sure people pay their tax which should bring in an extra £7 billion a year by2015.

You can read the article in full here.

* Newshound: bringing you the best Lib Dem commentary published in print or online.

Here’s Labour leader Ed Miliband proudly bathing in the reflected glory of The Sun (before Rupert Murdoch’s fall from grace, natch) — what do you think might be being said or thought by or about him?

And the winner of our last caption comp is…

Some fantastic entries for our most recent caption competition, Clegg, Cam & Lansley “You can hear the white coats flapping” Edition.

The winner, according to The Voice’s judging panel of one, was this one by Joshua Dixon, with a highly commended offering by alistair here.

Got a photo of a prominent Lib Dem you think would work well for a future caption competition? Then please email us at voice@libdemvoice.org.

* Stephen Tall is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice, a Research Associate for the liberal think-tank CentreForum, and also writes at his own site, The Collected Stephen Tall.

Rupert Murdoch’s News International launched a campaign of bullying against senior Liberal Democrats in an attempt to force through the company’s bid for BSkyB, high-level sources have told the Observer.

Lib Dem insiders say NI officials took their lobbying campaign well beyond acceptable limits and even threatened, last autumn, to persecute the party if Vince Cable, the business secretary, did not advance its case.

According to one account from a senior party figure, a cabinet minister was told that, if the government did not do as NI wanted, the Lib Dems would be “done over” by the Murdoch papers, which included the now defunct News of the World as well as the Sun, the Times and the Sunday Times.

And of course News International had a proven track record of doing over the Lib Dems, as this Sun front page reminds us.

The reason? Well, that was explained clearly enough by former Sun editor David Yelland before the 2010 general election:

Make no mistake, if the Liberal Democrats actually won the election – or held the balance of power – it would be the first time in decades that Murdoch was locked out of British politics. In so many ways, a vote for the Lib Dems is a vote against Murdoch and the media elite.

As Vince Cable reminds us today, that prophesy came to pass (almost). In the end, though, it was News International’s total and utter failure to keep its own house in order that has brought to an end its stranglehold on British politics.

They ask Murdoch to respond to public opinion by changing his commercial strategy in the UK: withdrawing his News Corporation bid for BSkyB and concentrating all his efforts on cleaning up News International.

The letter in full:

Proposed take-over of BSkyB by News International

Ever since the report of our Information Commissioner ‘What Price Freedom?’ and the conviction and imprisonment of Goodman and Mulcaire in 2006, there has been growing concern about the policy and practices of UK newspaper titles owned by News International.

Recent weeks have seen the publication of a flurry of further allegations against your company’s publications in the UK which have shocked and sickened the British public, and rightfully so.

It now appears that:

- an investigator working for your newspaper the ‘News of the World’ hacked into the phone of a kidnapped young girl and deleted her messages, giving her family false hope that she may still be alive.

- journalists and editors are implicated with police officers in illegal arrangements to obtain contact details of members of the royal family, which has put the royal family at risk through a completely irresponsible breach of security.

- people working for a News International title have hacked into phones and invaded the privacy of victims of terrorist attacks and the parents of dead soldiers.

We have no doubt that these events led directly or indirectly to the decision of your organisation to close the ‘News of the World’ this week, seeking to draw a line under this terrible affair.

However recent events have made clearer that illegal activities were not limited to the ‘News of the World’. There is now evidence that your papers the ’Sun’ and the ‘Sunday Times’ improperly obtained the medical records of the then Chancellor Gordon Brown so they could run a story about the health of one of his children – as a result of activity which could not possibly have any public interest defence.

People who were in charge of these newspapers are still employed by you at News International in the UK. Your son James, current chairman of News International, and a senior executive at News International’s parent company News Corporation, has admitted that he authorised cash payments to victims of phone hacking, payments which he himself has now admitted were wrong.

People working for your company have sought to cover up the many wrongs which it has committed. Your company has been accused of lying to the Press Complaints Commission, by the chair of the Press Complaints Commission. Only yesterday the police accused News International of trying to undermine the ongoing police investigation into the affair.

News International is simply no longer respected in this country. Given the history of the last six or more years, it should be of little surprise to you that many people in this country have no desire to have any more of our media fall into your hands, tainted as News International is by a history of completely unacceptable journalistic practices. News Corporation, as the owner of News International must take some responsibility for this.

Two days ago the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said you should do the decent thing and withdraw your bid to take full control of BSkyB. Many others have said similar things.

We hope you will respect the widespread expressions of public opinion and change News Corporation’s commercial strategy in this country.

We therefore ask, both on behalf of our party but also on behalf of a very large number of people in this country, that you now withdraw your News Corp bid for BSkyB and concentrate all of your efforts on cleaning up News International. We are clear that this would be the right thing for Britain, and for the reputation of broadcasting and journalism in the UK. We hope you are willing to give a positive response.

Rt Hon Simon Hughes MP
Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Commons

Tim Farron MP
Liberal Democrat Party President

Rt Hon Don Foster MP
Liberal Democrat Spokesman for the Department for Culture Media and Sport

Mr Clegg said: “Of course some people come up to me and say, ‘Oh we don’t like the Government doing this and doing that’. But more people come up to me and say, ‘I think you are doing a really good job’. A woman did exactly that when I was in a local supermarket at a checkout in my Sheffield constituency the other day. She came up with a furtive glance and a whisper and then she scampered away. Maybe people don’t think it is fashionable to show support at the moment.”

Nick takes the opportunity of the interview with the paper’s political editor Tony Newton-Dunn (son of ex-Tory now Lib Dem MEP, Bill) to make clear his own personal

Groundedness …

“Look, I am a very lucky man. I work incredibly hard and I take the honour of being in government very seriously, but I have always been a balanced kind of guy who is a father before he is a politician and who has got three lovely little children I dote on. When you get home from work you can’t constantly worry about your work. You have got to read the latest book, help with the latest bit of homework, have arguments about turning off the latest Wii video game. That is my life – and it is a life that keeps my feet firmly on the ground.”

… Resilience …

“I am very resilient and I never give up. … We might look back on this as the most difficult phase of all. We have still got a bumpy road ahead economically, but the hardest political decisions and announcements have already been set out there. Many of those anguished internal debates are now behind us. Now it is up to whether our judgments on the economy stand the test of time.”

… and optimism

“I have got so much faith in the fair-minded character of the British people and, indeed, of Sun readers. There are lots of people who perhaps don’t go on marches but who quietly recognise that this Government has a difficult job and I have a difficult job in it. We are doing our best and I am doing my best. If we don’t sort things out there isn’t a bright future for the country. It is as simple as that. In the long run I think people will see that.”

KAYA Cheshire may have only recently turned 18, but she’s got far bigger things to worry about than boyfriends, make-up and A-levels.

The aspiring journalist has turned her compassionate personality and hard working skills to a global issue in the fashion industry – whether airbrushing in magazines is really right.

The student from South Wales used London Fashion Week this week to promote her Natural Beauty: Keeping It Real campaign that she launched via Battlefront, a Channel 4 funded project that helps 14-21-year-olds platform charity campaigns…

She says: “When I started studying media at school, my eyes were suddenly opened to airbrushing. Previously I had assumed that all of these celebrities and models were just blessed with good looks, but really, computers are used to make them look perfect.

“While airbrushing contrast and lighting is often essential to getting the right picture, using the technique to make women facially different or slimmer or lighter in skin is just plain wrong.

“Then I read a piece by the plus-size model Crystal Renn who was airbrushed to make her look thinner. This woman is a beautiful, natural lady who represents real women and still the magazines change her to suit the ideal – it just made me so angry.”

You can read the full story here.

To give an example: if a blogger were to complain to the PCC about a newspaper taking their work and reusing it without credit, the PCC looks at just the individual case; even if it finds in favour of the blogger it doesn’t (except in exceptional cases) look at how widespread the problem is or attempt to track the frequency of the problem over time.

In defending this approach the PCC usually says that, first, these are the rules the industry has decided for it and, second, that its public opinion research shows there is very little public appetite for it to become a more general regulator (though others have a different take on public opinion).

It is a very different approach from that taken in other spheres. Imagine if, for example, the response of the industry regulator to cases of dodgy door to door sales by electricity companies had been, “We will deal with any individual complaints about specific sales people, but if there’s an overall problem with this in the industry that’s a matter for someone else”.

This issues around this question of approach have been highlighted in a recent case involving The Sun. As Richard Osley described the case:

An unnamed woman from Camden rapped The Sun for it’s use of ‘gender bender’, the pretty thoughtless shorthand slang used to describe transexusals and transvestites. The full details of the complaint are not published but a case summary reads as follows:

COMPLAINT: A woman complained to the Press Complaints Commission through Liz Willows of the Camden LGBT Forum that the newspaper had raised a breach of Clause 12 (Discrimination) in referring to her as a “gender bender” in the text and headline of an article originally published in 2008 but still hosted on its website.

RESOLUTION: The complaint was resolved when the newspaper wrote to the complainant accepting her concern about the language used and removed the article from its website.

DATE: 25/5/2010

So The Sun has noted concerns over the use of ‘Gender Bender’. Does that mean they are reviewing the appearance of the word in other stories on its website. Boy George is described as a ‘chart-topping gender bender’, actor David Tennant apparently once played a ‘gender bender barmaid called Davinia’ and a murderer learned about his ‘gender bender grandad‘ at the age of seven.

As Richard points out there is an oddity here: if The Sun thought it right to change its website in one case, why not in the others? The PCC’s perspective when I asked them this is to say that, “The cases cited in the blog all predate the resolution of the complaint from Ms Willows (and two of them do not concern transsexuals at all).”

Even granting the point in brackets, it’s an explanation that leaves me rather uneasy. After all, those other stories are still on the website and old stories on newspaper websites carry on picking up readership for a very long time. The date of original publication mattered much more when newspapers became tomorrow’s chip paper and only a few ventured to libraries to look up old copies. On the internet old stories are much newer than the used to be.

More positively the PCC also said, “We do seek to use rulings to promote future good practice and a set of standards to which newspaper and magazines should adhere going forward”. But it strikes me that in plenty of industries the response to an ruling such as this would be a much more comprehensive attempt to change existing copy. Imagine if a financial regulator ruled that an insurance firm had been misleading in a leaflet; would old copies of the leaflet be left online unchanged?

It will be interesting to see what the review of the code the PCC enforces finally produces later this year – and how many of the proposals which various bloggers grouped to together to make get through.

It is, to put it politely, woeful. Not only does it make the assumption that Sun readers will instantly recognise the Obama imagery – by no means a certainty – but it fails the crucial credibility test.

The famous Kinnock light-bulb front page of 1992 captured, cruelly but brilliantly, the nation’s last minute doubts that the Labour leader was prime ministerial. But is there anyone who really looks at David Cameron and thinks, “There’s our Obama”? No.

I was fully expecting a full-tilt Sun attack on either/both Clegg and/or Brown: as they showed 18 years ago, going negative can work. I guess I should be grateful that Murdoch’s rag has thrown away the opportunity to lash out at their opponents in a way which might inflict damage.

By drawing the ludicrously hyperbolic Obama/Cameron comparison, it does almost seem as if The Sun is over-compensating: this arty-farty front page invites derision. Indeed it’s already started …

(Image courtesy Mattleys).

The finding comes in a YouGov poll for The Sun which finds that 37% think in such circumstances Cameron should try to form a “grand coalition” with Labour and Lib Dems and a further 24% think he should “seek to work with the Liberal Democrats”. Only 20% said he should “seek to form a minority government, without doing any deals with any other party”.

Although The Sun has previously come in for criticism for commissioning poll results that it hasn’t published, this result is published in the bottom left corner of page 4 in today’s edition.

All the main parties have promised to cut the government’s deficit after the election. Which party do you think is being the most honest about what spending cuts they would make to deliver this?

Liberal Democrats 29%
Conservatives 26%
Labour 21%

… and then there’s this:

Gordon Brown was challenged on Wednesday morning by Gillian Duffy, a 65-year-old voter in Rochdale. Mrs Duffy complained about taxation for pensioners, immigration from eastern Europe and students’ tuition fees. At the end of the televised encounter, Mr Brown told her ‘it was very nice to meet you’. But when he got into his car, Mr Brown said – unaware that his microphone was still on – ‘That was a disaster – they should never have put me with that woman… She’s just a sort of bigoted woman that said she used to be Labour.’ Which of these statements comes closer to your view:

It’s a storm in a teacup. Mr Brown was simply trying to let off steam in private. We should not think the worse of him: 50%
Mr Brown is a hypocrite – saying one thing in public and the opposite in private. Now we know just how much he despise [question truncated on results sheet]: 46%

My own view on the Brown quote is that, as I said yesterday, the real story of the caught comments shouldn’t be the use of “bigot” but rather the intolerance Brown seems to have for meeting people who don’t agree with him – even if, as in this case, they end up supporters of his. That fits in with many other accounts of his behaviour and matters because disliking people who don’t agree with you is far more dangerous – thanks to the group think mentality it encourages – than someone using too blunt language.

Asked the impact on their voting intention of those papers opposing Nick Clegg becoming Prime Minister, 15% said it made them more likely to vote Liberal Democrat and only 4% said it made them less likely, making for a net +11% saying they are more likely to vote Liberal Democrat.

Of the rest, 19% would vote Liberal Democrat regardless, 35% would not vote Liberal Democrat anyway and 27% said it wouldn’t alter their vote but they weren’t yet sure which way to vote.

The question doesn’t capture the potential agenda setting power of these three newspapers, but on the other hand the question was (deliberately) asked in a low key way, with no reference for example to the tax or residence status of newspaper proprietors such as Rupert Murdoch or the Barclay brothers. Moreover, so far part of the impact of the three titles running strident anti-Liberal Democrat stories has been to generate coverage by TV broadcasters about whether or not a smear operation is taking place.

Given that the public says it trusts TV much more than newspapers this, combined with our poll finding, illustrates the risk the three newspaper titles are running with their reputation, especially given the publicity given to the explicit comments by The Sun‘s political editor that he sees it as his job to help get Cameron elected.

Journalism overall is a deeply distrusted profession in the UK and it’s a rare business situation where reducing levels of trust doesn’t end up damaging commercial prospects. Therefore not only may a backlash to their coverage drown out their attempts to influence the election result, but a hostile public reaction makes the commercial future look tougher  for all three titles who – along with other newspapers – are trying to find ways to persuade people to pay them for news.

I asked George Pascoe-Watson, former political editor at The Sun, about this trust issue at an event a couple of weeks ago and he rather dismissively said it was “fashionable” for people to say they don’t trust journalists. Even if you agree with that (and I think he misses the more substantial changes at work), fashion is what make people spend or stop spending money all the time.

The end result may be that the newspapers fail to damage Nick Clegg’s reputation but end up damaging their own – winning votes for the Liberal Democrats but losing customers for themselves. That’s at one end of the spectrum of possible outcomes, but it shows how much is at stake not just for political parties but also for newspapers.

The poll was carried out 23-26 April online by Vision Critical (Angus Reid), a member of the British Polling Council. 1,810 British adults were surveyed and the data was weighted by age, gender, social class, region, newspaper readership and past vote. The full question was, “The newspapers in this country tend to take a position and support different parties at election time. It has been suggested that the Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph do not want Nick Clegg to be Prime Minister. If those newspapers were to take this stance would that make you more or less likely to vote Liberal Democrat?”. Data table here (Excel file).