The way I see it, either she did it in which case she deserves everything she gets, or she didn’t, in which case she might think back to how she has treated the presumption of innocence in the past. Anybody arrested in connection with a high-profile murder or child kidnapping seems to be all over the front pages with lots of dirt dished, before they are released without charge. In a way I kind of hope she is innocent so that she will get a taste of how all that feels.

Bit uncharitable of her old man to call it a witch hunt, but I suppose he knows her best.

I thought I might do a little analysis, just to pass the time. It isn’t easy to slot some of the headlines into simple categories because some fit into more than one – is a headline about Cheryly and Ashley Cole an X Factor story or a randy footballer story for example? Anyway, this is what they looked like in pie chart form:

All the Express headlines for 2011

All the Star headlines for 2011

The Star’s priorities are clear to see: TV and celebrities, especially Jordan and Peter Andre or Premiership footballers. Three-quarters of their headlines were about celebrities one way or another, assuming Kate & Wills to fall into that category. Only 42 headlines were not concerned with celebrities or with high-profile murders and deaths.

There were a few stories about muslims, scroungers, phone hacking (but only where it involved celebrities or murder victims naturally), and Lottery winners. The nearest it got to news was a handful of stories about the riots, Gaddafi and Bin Laden.

The Express is a bit better inasmuch as it doesn’t obssess about TV shows. Instead it obssesses about health scares and miracle cures, house prices and other personal finance matters, and foreigners. Two-thirds of the headlines fit into those broad categories, with weather, royalty and high-profile murders taking up most of the rest.

Things that may have made the headlines of other papers but did not appear in the Express or Star include:

• Tunisia, Syria or Egypt
• Libya (except about Gaddafi personally)
• Anything else abroad (except for a couple of mentions of the tsunami or how something might affect Brit holidays)
• Berlusconi
• Kim Jong-Il
• Utoya massacre
• Results of local elections, by-elections or Scottish, Welsh and NI elections
• Opinion polls
• PMQs or any other parliamentary proceedings
• VAT increase
• Cuts
• Protests
• National strikes
• Liam Fox
• Phone hacking (except where it impacted celebrities)
• The occupy movement
• Superinjunctions
• Dale Farm (surprisingly)
• Company failures

Those who read ‘proper’ papers, dutifully devouring several of the Sunday editions, and watch QT, Newsnight and all the weekly politics shows would do well to remember that for large chunks of the population this is what counts. Many only skim over the headlines of news anyway, having bought the paper for the sport and human interest stuff.

A bit sobering to consider that all the strategists in all parties and others trapped in the Westminster bubble base their ideas on stuff that a lot of us won’t even know and base their criteria for success on things a lot of us won’t see like PMQ performances, opinion polls and so on.

What was quite shocking really was the almost total absence of anything the slightest bit international. The Express is only really worried about abroad if it gives them a chance to bash the EU or if it will affect holiday destinations or prices.

The question is, does the Express only appeal to people who don’t give a shit about anything unless it might affect their personal pension, house value, health, or monthly budget or does it train its readers to only worry about those things? It has more stories about lighbulbs than parliament during the year.

As for the Star – can a paper that can run 58 X Factor-related headlines in a year and not even mention the PM, Chancellor or any other member of government (or opposition) really call itself a newspaper? Even Harry Potter gets one headline!

And here is the dilemma for political parties which is very topical – how do you write election leaflets that the readership of these papers is going to even look at, let alone pay attention to?

I can sort of see the logic behind the public interest defence without entirely agreeing with it.  It might hold more water if the journalists had a suspicion or suggestion of some kind of illegal or imoral activity and then bent or broke the law to get evidence to back it up, but that is not what is happening.

What they are actually doing is is a blanket trawl through everybody’s phones to see what it turns up.  It is just one big fishing expedition, except you know they won’t throw any small-fry back: they will keep it just in case.   I wonder how these so-called journalists, or rather the investigators they employ, can live with themselves.  Their job is the audio equivalent of rummaging through endless strangers’ laundry baskets in the hope of finding a skidmark. Nice work if you have no self-esteem.

Cutting from the Mirror 21/4/82

It was a while after I heard about Liz Taylor’s death that I remembered the time I met her and how it was splashed across the pages of the tabloids.  I’m not sure, but it might have even been on the front page of one of them.  If so it must have been a slow news day.What happened was that I was in a theatre company that was putting on A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Old Vic and our director somehow persuaded Liz Taylor to pay us a visit.   She was in Little Foxes in the West End at the time so she didn’t actually see us perform but came along after her play finished to see us after ours finished.

I can’t really remember much about that night, possibly because I had a bloody great prosthetic ass’s head on.  No doubt somebody thought it would make a great photo opportunity.  The worrying thing is that a week or so later somebody said that they recognised me from the paper(!)

What I do remember is thinking how old she looked.  Having dug out the newspaper cuttings, which I was a little surprised to find I hadn’t chucked out in the great purge of 2010 when we moved, I looked at them and think she doesn’t look too bad at all.  Of course, at the time she was more than twice my age.  Now I’m looking at photos of somebody only a couple of years older than I am now.  It’s all a matter of perspective really.

I didn’t come out of it too well really.  While the prop might have helped make the photo more appealing to the editors of the Sun and Mirror it meant that the only time I get my photo in the national press (I hope) I am totally obscured.  You only have my word for it that it is me under those big floppy ears.  It also meant that got the rough end of the inevitable “beauty and the beast” headlines and captions.   The text wasn’t too flattering either:

From The Sun

Liz chatted to the cast of a Midsummer Night’s Dream… including an actor who made an ass of himself in the role of Bottom

The Sun also said that the theatre company was called London’s National Youth Theatre, which it wasn’t, so typical attention to detail and truth from that paper.

Anyway, a bit of a detour down memory lane this evening.  A shame it was prompted by somebody’s death.

• Financial crisis was caused by corporate mismanagement, says US government
• Electrical goods store staff ‘lack basic knowledge’
• Tyrannosaurus rex study reaffirms its predatory credentials

Still waiting for a ‘Pope is Catholic’ headline to appear, and something about bears and woods.

I only mention it, even though I disapprove of the Tory tactics, to point out that Clegg missed a golden opportunity to hoover up a few more votes by daring to try the Father Ted defence.  Just by saying “the money was only resting in my account” he could have defused the whole thing, given us a bit of a laugh, and generally amused us.

It is getting to the ridiculous point where the papers will tell you that some new statistics are due to be released, what they will be, what the government is going to say about them, and then how the opposition are going to reply to that.  The serious papers will anyway.  The others will just keep telling you that everything gives you cancer, or cures it, and that Diana is still dead.

I’m not kidding.  This particular story says:

Before launching his “GB on the road campaign”, the prime minister will say the choice is between securing the recovery and a reckless Tory party that will derail it. He will insist that the Tories are alone in believing this year is the right time to cut £6bn in government spending

And then:

David Cameron, the Tory leader, will counter by promising to fight for “the great ignored”.

And to complete the set:

For the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg will say: “The election marks the beginning of the end of Brown.”

Later on it says:

In a London marginal constituency, Cameron will say: “We’re fighting this election for the great ignored. Young, old, rich, poor, black, white, gay, straight

And

Clegg will travel to the three-way marginal seat of Watford. He will say that after “13 years of dodging elections despite being a key player in some of the most disastrous decisions, such as taking the country into an illegal war and a deep recession, [Brown] can’t avoid going to the polls any longer”.

I hope the bussed-in supporters in the London marginal constituency and in Watford have the grace to look surprised by these spontaneous remarks.  No wonder so many people are turned off by politics.  It is not that it is predictable but, worse than that, it is all carefully scripted.

I hope the televised debates show are not scripted, or at least that the scripts are not issued on a press release the day before, or there really will be no point to watching them.

1. Andy
2. Steve
3. Paul
4. John
5. Dave
6. Christopher
7. and so on…

Now I am too lazy to do any research or anything for something as trivial as this, but I would not be surprised to find that Andy, Steve, Paul, John, Dave, and Christopher are amongst the most common names in the workforce so the fact that they call in sick the most (from the sample used) is not really something especially noteworthy.

Wouldn’t you need to find the percentage of people in the workforce with a specific name and then find the percentage of sick calls made by people with that same name to be able to draw any sort of conclusion?    You can’t just ignore the general population and draw conclusions.  It would be like seeing how many dentists died last year that were men and how many that were women and then concluding that male dentists are more likely to die because there were more of them, without taking into account the gender imbalance in the dental profession.

This is just a piece of fluff, regurgitating a press release from Viva entertainment channel, based on a survey, as so much news now seems to be, and nothing to worry about¹ but it is a worry that the same journalists who produce this sort of thing might also be producing headlines about more significant matters, relying on skewed data from special interest groups without giving it, or even being equipped to give it, any sort of validation or basic sanity check.

And this is from one of the serious newspapers. Imagine how much worse it is in the Daily Mail!

For a near-perfect example of the same fallacy being applied to more serious matters I can recommend Don Paskini’s thorough fisking of an ipsos-mori report on local authorities.  To summarise it enormously, a report found that although Labour only control about 10% of councils, various lists of the top-performing councils had over 20% of them (up to 35% for some lists) being Labour.  The summary of the report, which is what a lazy and/or innumerate journalist would print as a headline, was that Tory-controlled councils are better because there are more of them in the top ten, or twenty or whatever.

That is a bit like saying that the British are better long-distance runners than Kenyans because there are more British runners in the London Marathon.

This week’s book recommendation: A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper by John Allen Paulos

1. Unless you are an Andrew who has not had a day off sick in three years who is being unfairly maligned here

Contrast this glitzy postmillennial lifestyle with the the premillennial, time-consuming trek your local newspaper makes each day.  It owes its analog existance to trees that are chopped down, trucked to a mill where they are mashed into pulp, flattened into paper, and transported to printing presses.  There the huge rolls of paper are sprayed with letters and numbers, photos, crossword puzzles, sudoku, and drawings, cut, stacked, bound, and stuffed into trucks.

These bundles are dropped off at news-stands opr distributed to people whose job entials flinging each copy, one at a time, house to house.  Later you step onto your porch, pick up the paper, scan the headlines, and realise everything in it is a day late.  You’ve already skimmed these articles on the web, were fed email links on your PDA or cell phone, or accessed RSS feeds, watched them on CNN, heard them on the radio, or caught a glimpse of them on a news ticker atop a taxi cab.

By the time you read the paper, the news has moved on and so have you.

I imagine the author is well aware of the irony that all this is written in a book that has been through a similar process.

Personally, I gave up reading a national newspaper in about February.  Instead I have several stored searches on Google News for topics of interest.   I added the stored searches’ RSS feeds to Google Reader along with the RSS feeds of parts of the BBC News site and some local papers.  The Guardian’s excellent twitterfeed flashes up with all the main stories from that paper.

It means I miss out on the analysis (but analysis is just another way of saying opinion in most cases) but have time to read other news sources as well now.  If there is anything particularly interesting that I may have missed it is sure to be mentioned in a post on one of the many blogs whose RSS feeds I also monitor on Google Reader with a link if I want to read more.

Not sure how long this can last though, and I hate to admit that Murdoch may have a point.  I can only do this because the newspapers have free-to-view websites and they can only really afford to do that  on the back of advertising revenues from their paper editions which other people buy.  If everybody did what I do then those news sources would dry up.

This is the sort of information that is crying out for presentation in tabular form, and even then it would be hard to work out which is the best deal.  Writing it all out longhand just makes it extremely muddy.  I suspect Vodafone will be happy with that too, along with Tesco, O2 and Orange because this is classic marketing by confusion – just like with any mobile phone plans, gas and electricity tarriffs and broadband connections.  With such intangibles the only way that more than one player can stay in the market is if there is no easy way to directly compare like-for-like costs.

I’m sure Scott Adams wrote about it in one of his books.