The great coal con

I wonder if the Gazette is being paid for advertising space, when I read tonight's shamelessly biased article calling for the return of coal mining. It's not the first such article to appear in the Gazette. When South Tyneside Green Party tried to respond to the last piece on carbon capture and storage (CCS) with this press release, the Gazette spiked it.

Tonight's piece is one of the most shocking examples of industry PR masquerading as journalism that I've seen for a long time. Claims are unsubstantiated and hyperbolic terms such as 'trailblazers' indicate an uncritical approach to coal. And frankly, the Gazette is wearing out the 'King Coal' brand.

Bryan has already covered the excellent U.S. this is reality campaign highlighting the simple reality: there is no such thing as clean coal.

Here is this is reality's new video, created by film gods the Coen Brothers:

Tory rottweilers

Today seems to have been a day for Guardian commentators to take apart the dishonest and the dodgy. Polly Toynbee, who I normally can't stand, has done a reasonable job of lifting the stone to uncover the Taxpayers' Alliance. The group is used by the Tories as a kind of off-balance-sheet PR group to bash the civil service or just moan about anything where tax is spent on stuff they don't like.

Often, their claims are repeated in the news media and on blogs without the kind of intelligent skepticism that should be employed with such narrowly focussed special interest groups. Their tactics closely follows those used by similar groups linked with the Republicans in the US. Their purpose is to generate media outrage and provide an opportunity for Tory spokesbods to get their mugs on the telly.

Whilst they rightly challenge public sector profligacy, they are relatively silent when it comes to tax evasion. Don't want to get off message with those donors do they?

It's no surprise that the Taxpayers' Alliance has aligned itself with fundamentalist road group the Association of British Drivers. The ABD, another group not unfamiliar with getting itself in the press, is pretty much against anything they consider to be anti driver. The ABD has bought into the religion of climate change denial and rabidly challenges any road safety initiatives which could slow down drivers.

Like the Taxpayers' Alliance, the ABD is named so as to give the impression that they represent a body of society, when in reality they have no such remit. Like the Alliance, their press releases are treated with undeserved reverence and unquestioned trust by the media.

Lobby groups like these are formed, or used by, political interests to build an angry and outraged consensus. They offer simple messages which are easily picked up and cut and pasted into articles, where real context, too complex to fit into the average news story, is lost.

Perhaps many journalists and bloggers don't want to, don't have the ability or don't have the space, to critically examine the output of these groups to an adequate extent. Or perhaps they are so blinded by political allegiances that such material, no matter how badly manipulated, is too good to waste.

Pied Piper Peston

Today, BBC journalist Robert Peston sat before MPs and denied any responsibility for the start of the run on Northern Rock.

Bollocks.

The BBC reporter's breathless exclusive of Northern Rock's application for a loan facility from the Bank of England started the media frenzy and subsequent run on the Newcastle bank. I remember the Newsnight and early morning Radio 4 Today programme where Peston was wetting himself with glee at the attention. I'd never heard the word 'unprecedented' used so much by one person. And to think the shit the Today programme got for the 'sexing up' Iraq affair.

From then on, if there was bad news in the finance industry, Peston was the man to deliver it.

There's no doubt that Northern Rock's board and executive ran a risky and ultimately unsustainable business model. Borrowing short to lend long is always going to come unstuck, especially when borrowing from the developing basket case that was the US financial sector. But while the money rolled in and share prices were healthy no-one complained.

Peston's mealy mouthed excuse that the run was exacerbated by what he claimed to be poor branch capacity and website infrastructure doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Few, if any, retail banking organisations could stand the sudden onslaught of a media driven panic that Peston wrought. I remember on the morning after that first report television journalists hanging around outside Northern Rock branches asking customers if they were worried and thinking of closing their accounts. This was wag the dog reporting in action.

Peston's evasions in the committee today suggest that he was fed the Northern Rock loan story. He's certainly not facing the possibility that his exclusive was intended to bring Northern Rock down to be picked up by another hungry bank at a bargain basement price.

There needs to be a full accounting of the whole debacle, from the lax regulation, over confident boardrooms and fickle and greedy investors, to the media panic machine fed by the likes of Peston, and the people who fed Peston his exclusive.

Peston wasn't responsible for the run, but he holds some responsibility.

Shields Gazette: inaccurate and misleading

Part 1 of the Press Complaints Commission's Code of Practice states:

"The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, including pictures."

In this article in tonight's Gazette they've clearly broken this guideline with this statement:

"A CALL to expand Newcastle Airport has been given cross-party support by all South Tyneside's political groups"

Note "all South Tyneside's political groups". Well, that's quite a bold claim since only three local political groups, Labour, Tories and Alliance have been quoted in the article. Nowhere to be seen are the Lib Dems, Progressives or the Green Party. I don't know about the Lib Dems, they're schizo on matters environmental, the Progressives would probably love the idea but the Green Party definitely doesn't support the expansion of Newcastle Airport. Quite the opposite.

Plans to increase flights at Newcastle fail on both environmental and economic grounds.

The "sustainable jobs" and "more efficient and cleaner types of energy" claims from Coun Anglin are laughably nonsensical and stand up as well as used toilet paper. And smell as shitty too. David Potts may love the idea of flights to New York, but shouldn't expect many New Yorkers to come to the North East on lavish shopping trips. Ahmed Khan, as spokesman for the party that's not a party, is spouting the same development and trade bullshit that framed the arguments for concreting Fellgate. It's touching that all three councillors were so quick to jump together into the palm of professional lobbyist and Labour old boy Brian Wilson.

So much for opposition.

But given the Gazette's current editorial embargo on dissenting press releases, and careful news management for its chums, don't expect any real voices of opposition to appear in its pages any time soon.

What price a free press?

I'm normally not one to regurgitate Private Eye's work, but a piece in today's Eye puts the view of the Johnston Press as a bastion of local press freedom in doubt.

Milton Keynes Citizen journalist Sally Murrer was charged with soliciting and receiving leaks from one Mark Kearney, the ex police officer at the centre of the Sadiq Khan bugging scandal.

Murrer faces a lengthy and expensive battle against the charges, which are under laws designed to protect the Police from whistleblowers and those who report their stories. No problem, you would think. It's normal for newspapers to support their journalists through such trials, especially when fighting what is such an unjust law. But not so. According the the Eye, the Johnston Press, the owners of Milton Keynes Citizen, has failed to fund Murrer's defence - instead offering an interest-free loan to pay her legal costs.

Local reporters in South Tyneside now know how far their employers will go to protect them, as Johnston Press, as well as owning the Milton Keynes Citizen, also owns the Shields Gazette.

Unfortunate timing

Page 5 of tonight's Gazette featured an article about a road safety initiative - a safe crossing point for horses in Sunderland Road at Cleadon. It featured horse rider Toni Keighley who, after a road accident in which a horse had to be destroyed, petitioned for a reduction in road speed limits on roads frequented by horse riders. However, next to the article, in the 'Court Round-up' column, a small paragraph told us that:

Toni Keighley, 22, of Whitehall Street, South Shields, was fined £100, with £45 costs, for driving without insurance. Her licence was endorsed with six penalty points for driving without insurance.

It might be a different Toni Keighley of South Shields (or a misprint) but it leaves me to wonder if anyone proof-reads the pages after the mischievous newspaper elves have finished with the page-setting.

Driving the ABD mad

Loony driving lobby group the Association of British Drivers has got twisty knickers again, over a report suggesting an across the board reduction in urban road speeds to a maximum of twenty miles an hour.

The group, which also worships climate change denial, claims that drivers will kill ten times more people because the reduced speed limits will force drivers to glue their eyes to their speedometers. Yup, I know it seems too stoopid to be true. But read it for yourself.

ABD blow hard Nigel Humphries said:

"All you achieve by making people drive down the road looking at their speedometer is 10 times as many deaths and that's before you cause more accidents because people aren't looking where they're going."

Okay, I know Mr Humphries' sentence doesn't make much sense, and I'm sure there's nothing in the Highway Code or the proposals that makes "people drive down the road looking at their speedometer" forsaking all other considerations. Bjorn Lomborg would be jealous at Humphries' ability to pluck something as eye-catching as "10 times as many deaths" out of the air without providing any evidence to back it up.

By the way, sack the lazy BBC journalist who couldn't be bothered to ask. I suspect that if Humphries had claimed that speed cameras were an EU/alien conspiracy to force us to buy cheese-flavoured petrol it would have been accepted with equal reverence.

Back to the research. Our Transport Research Laboratory survey said:

"20mph zones across the UK and in other European countries found child road accidents fell by 67%, cyclist accidents by 29% and traffic flow by 27%."

Hmmm. So no sign of a tenfold increase in deaths. And remember that's "before you cause more accidents because people aren't looking where they're going" - so that's a tenfold increase, plus whatever other number Humphries can come up with.

Did Nigel Humphries make the tenfold increase up, or can he substantiate his claim?