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April 06, 2006
Journalists Report: Our Job is Too Difficult
An amazing little piece in the Media Guardian:
A group of home affairs correspondents has accused the Home Office of
"dishonourable tactics" for releasing such a glut of statistics and
research reports that proper media coverage is impossible.
Members of the group, made up of reporters from the Press Association, the BBC and national newspapers including the Times, Daily Telegraph and the Guardian, fear the Home Office is using the tactic to "bury bad news" by overwhelming reporters with information on the last Thursday of every month.
This day has become known as "research Thursday" among the journalists.
"When a large number of documents were issued on the first 'research Thursday' after the general election, we were assured it was a one-off incident to clear a backlog generated by election purdah," reads the letter, addressed to the Home Office director of communications, Julia Simpson.
"This is clearly not the case and this week's repetition leads many of us to fear that the practice has been instituted deliberately to 'bury bad news'.
"If this is, indeed, the case such dishonourable tactics could only serve to damage the relationship between the home affairs correspondents and the Home Office press office. We hope you can return to issuing this important research in a more balanced manner."
Quite stunning really. Home affairs is a pretty senior position on any newspaper and here are these people saying, in effect, "Our job’s too difficult". They want their information spoon fed to them perhaps?
Sigh. Look guys, it’s your job to find out what those bastards are doing. If they’re flooding you with information then you’ll just have to dig through it to find out where the lies are. Hire some more people perhaps, work a little harder possibly.
You could, if you thought about it, actually take advantage of all this wonderful new technology there is out here now. Grab the documents, stick them up on the web and point bloggers at them. If anyone finds anything interesting in the docs either ask them to write it up or credit them (and pay them) as a researcher on the subsequent piece. It would cost you a couple of hundred quid on each story uncovered and you’d have hundreds of people eagerly scouring the files in search of something worth that fee.
You might not think it would work but believe me, there’s some 300,000 (absolute minimum) UK based bloggers and if you look around a few sites you’ll see that people already dig through these reports. In far greater detail than you ever do and with a great deal more expertise in some cases. All you’ve got to do is figure out a way to harness that effort. Something that isn’t actually all that difficult.
I’ll organise it for you myself if you ask politely.
April 6, 2006 in Media | Permalink
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Last week eight research papers, including major sets of figures on race crime and motoring offences, were published simultaneously on the Home Office website. They totaled 550 pages.
The same day, Clarke held a press conference on the Identity Cards B... [Read More]
Tracked on Apr 6, 2006 10:43:21 AM
Comments
The complaint is also that they are released just half an hour before the Home Office press conference, so I can't see what 300,000 bloggers, most of them teenage girls, who be able to do in that time.
Ok I'm being facetious, the idea is not a bad one, but I'm not sure how you'd then sort through the thousands of loopy responses you'd get from most bloggers. You'd have to hire some more bloggers to do that, and it'd start to get very expensive.
Posted by: Matthew | Apr 6, 2006 9:34:31 AM
The Home Office already stick the documents on the web, for example here:
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/whatsnew1.html
So why don't bloggers just analyze the data directly, and leave journos to do what they do best, whatever that is?
Posted by: chris | Apr 6, 2006 10:30:44 AM
If the Bank of England or the BLS or someone decided to just dump an entire month's statistics on the market on the last Thursday of the month, it would take about a nanosecond for them to be politely but forcefully asked to sort out a proper bloody release schedule. By the time you and you army of imaginary bloggers (how many bloggers care about evidence enough to dig through primary sources and divide numbers one by another? I count me, Matthew, Chris Dillow and Chris Lightfoot in the UK, plus you if there is an angle relating to the Guardian or there's cash in it. That's five and we are all quite busy already. There are about a score other buggers who think they do the same, but if you imposed a bar of "understanding why the BCS is more representative than the reported crime numbers" you would certainly not get into double figures) had dug through this undifferentiated mass, the figures would no longer be "news", which is presumably the intention.
It's not at all too much to ask for a sensible schedule of news releases to be planned and stuck to, and it's not asking for spoonfeeding at all. You should hear the screams that go out in the market when two companies decide to report FY results on the same day. I would suspect that this is just incompetence on the part of HO civil servants that has led them to such utter lack of consideration for end users rather than anything more sinister, but it's not unreasonable to ask them to get their stuff together.
Posted by: dsquared | Apr 6, 2006 11:06:56 AM
I was once told by a business consultant that if you do a good job you give the customer a 10 page report; if you do a bad job you give the customer a telephone directory. The point was that having a report the size of a telephone directory served two purposes:
1. It made it look like you were thorough and the sheer bulk gave the impression of good value for money.
2. The larger the report, the less likely the customer would actually read the whole thing, and hence discover that there was no "real" content.
Posted by: JohnM | Apr 6, 2006 11:19:26 AM
I tend to agree with Tim that the media,should be doing more incisive research on the Home Office's published documents and should be harassing them with Freedom of Information Act requests as well.
However the Opposition poltical parties should not be relying on the press and media (or even bloggers) to do their job of keeping the Government of the day under scrutiny - they should be doing far more research, using the FOIA and asking proper Parliamentary Questions for the stuff that the Home Office do not publish.
It is also true that most bloggers do not care to do this sort of thing for fun or for no money, even if there are slightly more than 5 of us in the UK who could do so 8-)
Why is anyone surprised by the attempts to "bury bad news" amongst a flurry of other documents all released at once ? The Minister in charge of Home Office Research is the former spin doctor Andy Burnham, who has been persecuting the London School of Economics and Simon Davies over the Identity Project report, which did analyse the controversial Identity Cards scheme, despite the lack details published by the Home Office. He is also responsible for the utterly discredited £1.7 billion a year figure for alleged "identity theft".
Remember also that Statistics Commission the independent watchdog on the accuracy of Governemnt Statistics has heavily criticised the Home Office's abuses in their Crime Statistics User Perspectives interim report December 2005 (.pdf)
"However our impression is that, faced with a sceptical and at times antagonistic press, the Home Office and other official bodies have sought to contain the flow of statistical messages – prescribing the frequency and form in which statistics are released, and making sure that policy responses are issued at the earliest possible moment, sometimes ahead of the figures themselves."
The figures on alcohol related violent crime following the change to longer pub opening hours were also shown to be false.
Lasr week's withdrawal of the published racial crime statistics, under protest from the Police, is another example.
The National Audit Office's unprecedented refused to sign off on the Home Office's finacial accounts - a sure sign of internal chaos and incompetence within the Home Office.
Remember that, according to Sir Stephen Lander, the former head of the Security Service MI5, now chair of the Serious Organised Crime Agency all this Home office spin is used to create a self fulfilling vicious circle feedback loop, which is then used by the "brains at the Home Office" to set the priorities for law enforcement, according to the amount of "column inches" which are generated for a particular crime in the newspapers.
Is it not time that the Home Office was reformed, or abolished in its current form ?
Posted by: Watching Them, Watching Us | Apr 6, 2006 12:34:41 PM
Yup. I concur with Tim. I think a good example is the way that pressure groups like the PCG (Professional Contractor's Group) and Shout99 have uncovered shenanigans in the small print of various budgets (e.g. IR35, S660a). They have revolutionised the freelance IT consultancy industry with the countermeasures on offer to IT contractors. If the blogosphere had been big back in 1999, it would definitely have been one of the arenas in which they played a part.
Posted by: DWMF | Apr 6, 2006 12:35:00 PM
Much of the blogosphere is into IT in some way, so yes, IR35 would have got a lot of press (from Allan at the very least).
I think that dsquared is wrong about people going through documents. Curious Hamster did a fine job on the £1.7 billion fraud rubbish, and Unity is always superb on the fineprint of various laws and directives. Most peopel could be persuaded to look at stuff properly if they were to get cash out of it.
DK
Posted by: Devil's Kitchen | Apr 6, 2006 12:58:45 PM
A dose of common sense perhaps?
So the journos have got all the documents at once - it surely can keep them going on news articles for the next month. They are not under any pressure to report absolutely everything at once, the day after are they?
i.e. can't they just pick through it and develop newsworthy articles over a period of time?
Maybe news is too disposable? they are looking for tomorrow's throwaway headlines rather that inciteful analysis and reporting? seems like it to me.
Also - I think a lot of journalism is too much opinions and columnists now rather than actual facts and decent analysis - The Guardian is the prime suspect here.
Posted by: angry economist | Apr 6, 2006 1:14:52 PM
[can't they just pick through it and develop newsworthy articles over a period of time?]
but this isn't a remotely efficient scheduling algorithm. It's not like it costs any more for the Home Office to schedule these things sensibly.
Posted by: dsquared | Apr 6, 2006 1:28:40 PM
FWIW I believe that the bunching is intentional.
Several years back I had a minor run in with the HO about how difficult it had been made to access the latest official crime stats on the HO's website and phoned the official contact point to complain.
At the Time, Blunders was Home Secretary so I certainly didn't believe that the difficulty was accidental. And that was long before the recent Hoon outburst about how the government's problems are the fault of the media. However, I credit them with sufficient intelligence for parading that as an excuse to encourage Labour supporters - for surely they can't be that stupid to really believe their own propaganda.
Posted by: Bob B | Apr 6, 2006 2:39:25 PM
(how many bloggers care about evidence enough to dig through primary sources and divide numbers one by another? I count me, Matthew, Chris Dillow and Chris Lightfoot in the UK, plus you if there is an angle relating to the Guardian or there's cash in it. That's five and we are all quite busy already. There are about a score other buggers who think they do the same, but if you imposed a bar of "understanding why the BCS is more representative than the reported crime numbers" you would certainly not get into double figures)
I disagree most strongly with the tenor of these comments. There are six of us.
Posted by: Phil | Apr 6, 2006 4:52:40 PM
Could you make that 299,999? I'm far too busy at the moment.
Posted by: Sam | Apr 7, 2006 12:00:51 AM
I'm far too busy too. Since I work in government, I will stick to my working culture - I think I'll respond to this, and other blog postings all at once on the last Friday of every month.
Posted by: angry economist | Apr 7, 2006 9:27:22 AM
Minor one, since it's connected to my real subject area: the "violent crime fell after 24-hour licensing was introduced" stats were emphatically *not* shown to be false.
They were released at a politically opportune moment, and it's possible that the police crackdown on violent town centre behavior also had some bearing on the fall (although sending more police to deal with a problem often causes reported rates of it to rise, for relatively obvious reasons).
That is not the same as being shown to be false, no matter how often the Telegraph or its readers assert otherwise on the basis of no evidence.
Posted by: john b | Apr 7, 2006 12:41:15 PM
After a week, or however long it takes to spot the one interesting report that has been buried with the others, it isn't news.
Newspapers don't carry stories on last month's government press releases.
Posted by: james C | Apr 7, 2006 6:37:57 PM
In the city I live in, journalists ARE spoonfed. They hate it. Bloody hacks. Never happy. And they don't pick holes in the spoonfed information either, which is about all they would be useful for, other than ensuring a constant revenue stream for the pubs around Schumann.
Tim adds: Why, that’s just what I did on my only trip to Brussels. Pints with Elaib and the odd (well they were part of his group so they were indeed odd) MEPs. Plus get stiffed by an editor I was writing for. The all inclusive journalistic experience.
Posted by: auntymarianne | Apr 8, 2006 8:32:23 AM
This is just another sign of the decline of investigative journalism in the big media.
Investigative research is increasingly becoming unofficially outsourced to bloggers, due to the benefits of technology and the time and financial constraints in alot of the traditional media.
As we all know, there is a risk with investigative journalism in that you can spend ages researching and going through documents and possibly have nothing to show for it afterwards.
Tim's proposal is a good one - I would happily sign up as a researcher, but as others have suggested, maybe a bit of foresight and decent scheduling of releasing information might make a bit more sense...
Posted by: John | Apr 8, 2006 8:06:14 PM
