newspaper: May 2015

Tory victory comes at a critical time for media, especially the BBC

It seems a good moment, with a clear election victor agreed far earlier than anyone had forecast, to predict the winners and losers of the media industry now that the Conservatives have returned to power. For the impact of this election on the sector at a critical juncture could be seismic.

Although David Cameron and George Osborne are likely to be kept far busier with new austerity measures, it is clearly the BBC which has most to worry about from the Conservative mandate. With the royal charter set to expire at the end of 2016, there are just 19 months to agree the future funding and structure of the corporation.

Of all the main parties, the Tories have shown signs of being the most hostile to the cost and expansion of the BBC. They were the only main party offering to freeze the £145.50 annual licence fee as a way of saving voters money, putting the pledge at the top of their manifesto’s media wishlist.

Admittedly, the pledge was hedged with the weaselly admission that they couldn’t do anything until after the new charter was agreed - ie, it simply confirmed the 19-month status quo – but as a sign of intent, it was pretty clear: the BBC’s spending and its ability to provide “value for money” will be at the heart of the charter renewal debate. That the Tories meant business was reflected in the manifesto also containing a pledge to continue “top-slicing” the licence fee to fund superfast broadband across the country, a charge taking £150m per annum out of the BBC’s £3.6bn funding pot.

As well as the manifesto focus, there is the fact that senior Tories continue to accuse the BBC of leftwing bias. Sajid Javid took time out as culture secretary in the run-up to the election to warn the BBC that the future charter renewal negotiations would include an analysis of any bias, after taking umbrage at a Today programme mini-debate. In an interview with the Daily Mail, he said: “There was a debate … they were all anti-Tory. It came across as very, very anti-Tory.”

A potentially more difficult challenge for the corporation will be BBC Scotland. Criticism of the BBC and its London-centric coverage heightened during the referendum debate. How much more difficult this will become given the entirely different nature of political control remains to be seen.

A new report by Loughborough University’s communication research unit to be published today shows how much more coverage Ukip garnered in national TV and newspapers than the SNP despite the latter going on to win 50 times more seats.

Almost double the amount of party leader quotes or story space was devoted to Ukip during the campaign period (until the campaign’s last week when negative stories of the Scottish “menace” proliferated). An SNP denied political power by a majority Tory government is likely to focus on any continued diminution of its status while the Conservatives will be in no mood to be generous during the forthcoming funding wrangles.

As for BBC governance, the BBC Trust has already been called a busted flush by a cross-party group of MPs. In bringing in figures such as Sir Roger Carr, Javid signalled that the party is keen to have pro-business leaders identifying a replacement. The other potential loser under a Tory government is likely to be civil liberties. Indeed, within 24 hours of polls closing on Thursday, home secretary Theresa May confirmed that the draft communications data bill, or so-called snoopers’ charter, was back on the agenda now the Liberal Democrats were no longer around to block it. Prior to the election Cameron said that there should be no communication that the government was unable to read.

On the plus side, newspapers will largely breathe a sigh of relief, both local newspapers promised rates relief and the nationals which feared more legislation to increase press regulation in the wake of Leveson. Martin Moore, director of the Media Standards Trust, said that the election result “removes this particular Sword of Damocles” as more legislation was unlikely.

Indeed, at the end of April Javid said his party would not back a Leveson-approved regulator as: “It interferes with the freedom of the press. It goes fundamentally against one of the Leveson principles, which is independent self-regulation.” Besides, press regulation was a job done.

Yet with nearly all major newspapers with the exception of the Guardian, Independent and Financial Times having signed five-year contracts with Ipso, the independent press standards body set up in the wake of the Leveson inquiry, it will be interesting to see whether any organisation considers breaking the contracts.

Media was the 15th most mentioned issue during the campaign, according to Loughborough research, above crime. It is unlikely to leave the political agenda any time soon.

Yes, rightwing newspaper coverage did cause Ed Miliband's downfall

As the Labour party tears itself apart trying to come to terms with its general election performance, it should understand this reality: the right-wing press was overwhelmingly responsible for its defeat.

I agree with my colleague, Jane Martinson, that the fact that the bulk of UK newspapers backed the eventual winner is noteworthy.

It should not be overlooked because I haven’t a shadow of doubt that Ed Miliband lost because of newspaper coverage.

However, this view is not based on a simplistic, and narrow, Sun-wot-won-it analysis. We know that Britain’s best-selling national daily, in company with the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Telegraph, consistently ran virulent anti-Labour material during the weeks of the campaign.

We also know that, based on newsprint sales, 57.5% of the dailies backed the Tories while 11.7 % backed Labour and, on the same metric, 66% of the Sunday nationals urged their readers to vote Conservative.

Related: How the Tories won the general election air war

I also agree that Miliband suffered a pounding from those newspapers that was reminiscent of the bitterly personal attacks on Neil Kinnock in 1992 and Michael Foot in 1983.

I am sure that the relentless ridicule over the six-week campaign may have played some part in the voting decisions of the floating voters who buy the Sun and the Mail (and yes, there are plenty of them).

But that factor, in itself, did not make the really significant difference to the Tory victory in England and Wales.

Instead, to understand why Labour lost, look at the overall polling figures for Nigel Farage’s Ukip. It secured 4.8m votes across the UK and its effect on Labour has not been sufficiently understood.

Despite Ukip winning only one seat, it delivered the best performance by a new independent party in post-war English politics, as the Telegraph rightly reported.

Many, many traditional Labour voters abandoned the party in order to vote for Ukip. In several seats that Labour regarded as winnable marginals, expecting to tip out Tory incumbents, the party was foiled by Ukip.

Just look at the results for Pudsey, Keighley, Cleethorpes, Warrington South, Rossendale & Darwen, Nuneaton, Cannock Chase, Northampton North and Ipswich (and other marginals). In every case, Labour failed because of the votes for Ukip.

I concede that it’s difficult to be sure whether the majority of Ukip’s support came from the Tories or Labour. But there is a big clue to Labour defections by looking at Ukip’s support at the expense of Labour in very safe Labour seats.

In Dagenham and Rainham, for example, there was a 12.5% swing from Labour to Ukip despite the popularity of Labour’s excellent MP, Jon Cruddas. In Hartlepool, a 13.9% swing from Labour to Ukip helped the latter to finish in second place.

In the three seats in Hull – East, North and West & Hessle – Ukip managed second place finishes. Elsewhere, in Merthy Tydfil for instance, there were swings away from Labour to Ukip. And in many safe Tory seats, Ukip pushed Labour into second place.

Ukip’s twin policy plank - halt immigration and pull out of the European Union - clearly appealed to voters in traditional Labour areas. I am not alone in pointing this out. Here’s Oxford university’s Stephen Fisher:

“The rise of Ukip that was expected to disproportionately hurt the Tories, in fact seems to have undermined the Labour performance more”.

Yes, yes, yes. Before Labour beats itself up about its supposed failure to attract support from the middle class, it needs to grasp the reasons for Ukip’s polling success in its working class heartlands.

Related: Tory victory comes at a critical time for media, especially the BBC

But why did Ukip do so well? Because in the five years leading up to the election, the rightwing press lent it, and its policies, credence.

In an effort to ensure that David Cameron’s Conservative party followed a largely anti-EU agenda, newspapers gave disproportionately favourable coverage to Farage and his party.

They certainly poked fun at some of his supporters and, at various points, questioned Ukip’s credibility. Yet they treated the party’s policies, including its anti-immigrant stance, with undue sympathy. And that includes the Sun, which – under instructions from its owner, Rupert Murdoch – has been careful to avoid overt criticism of immigration.

It’s true that only the Daily Express actually endorsed Farage’s party (“Vote Ukip for a patriotic Britain”) after its owner, Richard Desmond, gave it £1.3m.

Much more significant than that single last-minute endorsement was the overall support for years across all the papers of the right.

It has, of course, worked out well for those publishers who favour Brexit or, at the least, some kind of radical reform of Britain’s EU membership. Cameron might well have avoided holding an in/out referendum without Ukip’s existence and its newspaper support.

What remains troubling in the long term for Labour is the possibility that it can never win back support from those who left it to vote Ukip.

Unless Labour comes to terms with the fact that many of its former voters are concerned about immigration and about the EU’s open borders policy, the party’s discussions about its future direction, and about its choice of leader, will be irrelevant.

The press’s role in the 2015 election requires more investigation. As so often, the coverage over six weeks tells us little more than we could have anticipated before the campaign began. Agenda-setting over a longer period is far more important.

Telegraph email backing Conservatives faces investigation by watchdog

The Information Commissioner’s Office is investigating a “small number of complaints” about the Telegraph’s email urging people to vote Conservative.

The email, signed by editor Chris Evans and including links to the newspaper’s election-day leader article, other political coverage and an offer for a free 45-day digital subscription, was sent to the newspaper’s database of emails on the eve of the election.

Some recipients took to Twitter to complain that they either did not know how the Telegraph had got their email address or saying they had only signed up for specific emails such as its technology or finance newsletters.

— Harriet Smart (@harrietlcsmart) May 7, 2015
Eew how have you got my email address @Telegraph - I'm not a 'reader' of yours pic.twitter.com/TsSextE7oJ

The email contained a disclaimer saying that recipients had either “agreed to receive marketing messages by email from Telegraph Media Group” or “signed up for this newsletter”.

The regulator is assessing whether the email breaches either the Data Protection Act or the privacy and electronic communications regulations, which cover electronic marketing including calls, emails and texts.

Some of the Telegraph’s selection of newsletters provide the ability to opt-out of marketing messages, however others, including the technology newsletter, do not.

Sending the email to people who had not indicated they were happy to receive other messages would appear to breach the Telegraph’s privacy policy, which states that if there are no opt-in or opt-out boxes on a signup process “it’s because we will not use your information for any other purpose than that for which you give it (e.g. to administer a subscription).”

A Telegraph spokesperson said: “The Telegraph’s email leader, urging our readers to vote for the Conservatives, was sent to our customer database and the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

“If any readers did receive this email in error, we will, of course, take steps to make sure this does not happen again.”

A decision from the ICO is not expected for at least a few weeks.

Labour gets almost half as much positive press coverage as Tories

The UK press ran almost twice as many articles on issues that were negative for Labour as positive during the election, according to research from Loughborough University.

Of 2,495 news items examined by the team from the Communications Research Centre at Loughborough, 682 focused on issues that were broadly negative for Ed Miliband’s party, compared to 358 on positive issues.

In contrast, 614 items covered issues deemed positive for the Conservative, compared to 502 considered negative.

The contrast in fortunes was even more stark when print circulation was taken into account, with the country’s two best-selling newspapers, the Sun and Daily Mail, even more focused on issues that would play well for the Conservatives.

Loughborough used a ratings system giving a score of one for positive issues and -1 for negative, assessing each news item and then working out an average for each party and each week of the campaign. It then weighted the figures based on the circulation of each title.

Key conclusions on coverage from the report include:

Levels of positive Conservative coverage remained stable during the final stages of the campaign.
Levels of negative Labour coverage reduced in the final days, but still remained significantly high.
There was an appreciable increase in the negativity of SNP coverage in the final stages of the campaign.
Lib Democrats started to register some degree of negative evaluative coverage in the last sample period. Previous to that, they received little evaluative coverage of any kind.

Loughborough University directional election coverage graph Illustration: Loughborough University/Loughborough University

The difference between print press and broadcasters, who are required by regulator Ofcom to avoid bias, is clear in how much more frequently Conservative sources appeared in print than on TV compared to their Labour counterparts.

Labour sources appeared slightly more frequently on TV than Conservative ones, whereas in print the Conservatives accounted for 37.5% compared to Labour’s 31.8%.

Election aftermath: memos to the media for May 2020

No ifs, no buts. This, in the small, stifling area of the universe where journalists and politicians mingle, was a bonfire of the certainties, a pyre of punditry. No one – except John Curtice and his exit pollsters – emerges with reputation intact. No prophet of a columnist saw this coming. No editor believed it possible. Everyone settled for the supposed stasis of a parliament hung, drawn and divided into multi-party segments. So the one great lesson for May 2020 and elections beyond is inescapable.

We’re used to the pollsters telling us what’s happening (as opposed to finding out for ourselves). We somehow believed the politicians have an inside track – until we saw their mouths gape incredulously on Friday morning. Data journalism is only as good as the data it deploys. Shoe leather and inquiring minds still count.

But there are other campaign things that matter to take away from the wreckage of hopes and careers, other media lessons to help make coverage of May 2020 better.

For the broadcasters

The two most influential and appreciated TV election outings had one element in common. ITV’s seven-plinthed debate was tightly run and intelligently organised. It didn’t allow talking over or shouting back between combatants. The BBC’s three solo Question Times from Leeds had exactly the same virtue.

Has the performance on the right – and (to be fair) on the left – been sensible this time round? Hell, not entirely

Making it clear? Nothing is clear amid almighty din. And the Leeds questions themselves – posed precisely by ordinary members of the public – tended to leave the commentariat trailing. The Paxman interviews, the Humphrys, Marr, Snow and Davis interviews? All of them arrived meticulously prepared, taking the evidence of the polls and building. But too many of them seemed not so much interviews as arguments. For instance, the John Humphrys argument with Dave/Ed/Nick in which (shades of 1984) the great interrogator offers a loaded hypothesis about future developments and demands a yes or a no that no politician in his right mind would think it remotely sensible to provide. Nick Clegg wouldn’t lay out his favoured partner for coalition – which was just as well as it happened, because the whole scenario was meaningless.

You can get overcomplicated, overbearing. And, on 2015 form, you can also be too clever by half. There will be more debates in 2020. They’ve happened now for two elections in a row. No windy Downing Street incumbent will be able to dodge them next time – and next time will need organising early, via the Election Commission, rather than staggering into some bedraggled studio late in the day after another negotiation between broadcasting’s awkward squad and the shrinking violets of No 10. But those individual Question Times deserve a traditional slot as well. Democracy means giving the public an authentic, unmediated voice. It can be done, because Yorkshire just did it. Perhaps, somewhere in there, you could already hear the voice of the people who actually went to the polls. Let’s do it again.

Meanwhile, that boring, hermetically sealed campaign the TV teams spent so much time complaining about? The infantile video Polyfilla of people who aspire to run the country playing ball with infants or lecturing small crowds of extras on industrial estates? They – the politicians – only do it for you, the TV producers: weeks of photo ops without point or human content except a few eyeball minutes on the television news each night. But it isn’t news. It’s the precise opposite. It’s political spam. Why not give it up for a few days next time and see whether anyone applauds? No non-news might be very good news.

So would be a full-throated onslaught on the automatic tedium of fairness and balance as inflicted by law and policed by Ofcom. Of course, at least in theory, we like our public service broadcasting to be fair: which means independent and honest when reporters travel out of their offices to a rally. But independent honesty doesn’t mean the kind of mathematically balanced coverage, measured in seconds and minutes, that academics – this year at Loughborough University – rate as statistically fair.

It entails the ability for the journalist on the spot, speaking to camera, producing his witnesses, to posit that candidate A or B is winning, and say why. He or she could do that if this were an Israeli or Nigerian election. Fairness and balance doesn’t mean no verdict, no enlightenment overseas. But in UK elections, by law, we turn constituency reporting into pretty pictures without a point, vox pop interviews without a bite. Tedium self-inflicted.

For the newspaper editors

Hallelujah! cried the Mail on Friday morning. Hail to the precious commodity we call press freedom? Of course. That freedom inevitably means the right to run lead headlines like the Telegraph’s “Nightmare on Downing Street” or the Sun’s “Save Our Bacon” – from the “pig’s ear Ed made of eating a helpless sarnie”. It includes the “right” of the Mail to be named Britain’s “most influential” newspaper on a poll that also put Labour two points ahead. But the question here isn’t about rights, more common sense.

It’s important on many levels that your readers see something to trust in you, so that your scoops count and your leaders may be read with respect. So there’s always a line to be drawn: not to stop you going over it, merely to indicate what’s advisable and what’s merely hysterical.

Has your performance on the right – and (to be fair) on the left – been sensible this time around? Hell, not entirely. There have been good pieces of analysis to cut out and keep (Kettle, Freedland, Rentoul, Collins, Aaronovitch and more). There have been excellent leader articles (in the FT, Indy, Guardian and Times) putting an eloquent point of view. There were unpredictable endorsements – the Indy and FT – that made an impact because they were unpredictable. But there has also been too much malign abuse and dodgy dealing. I sadly agreed with writer Ed Caesar’s tweeted summation of front-page coverage as the campaign closed – “mostly dire, partisan, shouty rubbish”.

And to what purpose? To bolster the reputation of Ipso, the new regulator and its clause number one: “The press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information…” Nightmare on Fleet Street.

The good/bad thing is how little difference all the shouty rubbish seemed to make. The pollsters aren’t using it as an excuse. And the interesting thing was how little account the press took of digital reach (counting, for instance, the Tory press at 5.2m copies against 1.6m on the other side, as though online’s millions didn’t exist). This wasn’t some transformative election on the net. The might of Vice made a stereotypical late effort (“How Five Years of Coalition Have Totally Fucked the Young”). The bravura of BuzzFeed remained undiminished. (“17 Hot Men who Really Want You to Vote in the Election”.)

Election Question Time: tightly run. Photograph: Reuters

… in fact, for all media futures

It isn’t just our electoral system that can’t cope in a complex multi-party world. It’s the media’s way of covering it. Consider the Sturgeon phenomenon, the rise and rise of the SNP. That catches a unique mood. Did Ed Miliband understand that mood when Johann Lamont, walking out as Labour leader north of the border, accused him of trying to run Scotland “like a branch office of London”? Can a devolved press and, particularly, a devolved BBC, treat what happens in Holyrood as British news needing consistent British coverage, or does devolved somehow mean “foreign”?

Crucially, now, how SNP fortunes rise or fall as the fortunes of a new Tory government rise or fall will be vital. The 2016 Holyrood elections will be the springboard for 2020 too. Either the embrace of hated London will trap the SNP in its coils and drain the confidence from Scottish voters – or it will be onwards to a new referendum that could change the nature of Britain once and for all. How many correspondents on the ground in Scotland will that need? How great a break from the current state of things where Glasgow looks after its own broadcasting affairs, the Scottish Sun goes its own sweet way, and most upmarket UK papers manage with two or three reporters north of Watford, let alone Berwick-upon-Tweed? Basic message: Scotland isn’t just up there. It’s down here as well.

For valiant service

■ A Golden Toupee to Andrew Neil, asking incisive questions and pothering stupendous statistics for day after day. Nice to see young talent coming through at the BBC. Andrew won’t even be quite 70 in May 2020.

■ A Golden Horlicks mug for David Dimbleby, who’ll be 81. Thursday night was his last stand, surely: and he stood up straight and sure.

■ A Golden Rinse for Julie Etchingham (45), the cool hand and cool head at ITV’s seven-ring circus.

■ A Golden Welcome Back to Nick Robinson (51), croaking bravely back into action, wit undiminished.

■ And numerous silver medals to the writing press, including first-class travel scholarships for Marina Hyde and John Crace at the Guardian, Ann Treneman (once foreign editor of the Observer) at the Times – and a bronze Poison Pen for Quentin Letts at the Mail to mark his amazing, indefatigable service to bile production at the hustings, in the theatre, or indeed anywhere where bile flows free. Watch it, Dave: Quentin, the hindrance without let, is waiting for you now. Hallelujah!

Where is the 'Ed Stone'? Tabloid hunt for Miliband tablet

A case of champagne is among the rewards being offered by tabloids and rightwing pundits in return for the whereabouts of the so-called “Ed Stone”.

The 10 commandments-style tablet, engraved with five promises and unveiled in the final days before the election, was meant to symbolise how Ed Miliband would keep his pledges and restore trust in politics.

But the gimmick was perhaps the greatest gift Miliband gave to his opponents – and the mockery shows no signs of letting up even after his resignation and the quiet disappearance of the stone.

An 8ft 6in-high, two-ton limestone hulk is not the easiest thing to hide. But the stone, which was rumoured to have cost up to £30,000, is proving remarkably elusive and Labour sources are staying tight-lipped.

The Mail has offered a case of champagne to any reader who has information that “leads to the discovery of the Ed Stone”. The Sun has set up a dedicated “Ed Stone hotline” for tips about the stone’s whereabouts.

But without any apparent success in locating the real thing, the Sun also offered its readers a chance to win a full-size replica of “the Labour loser’s laughable slab”.

The Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday tried some investigative journalism to locate the boulder, contacting more than 50 masonry firms across the UK – none of whom admitted to creating the monument.

None could even agree what kind of stone it was, with the Stone Federation of Great Britain telling the Mail it could be hewn from Portland limestone from Dorset, but another stonemason claiming it might be cheaper, Portuguese limestone.

Several spoof listings for the tablet have appeared on eBay, with prices ranging from £5 to £100.

“Yesterday the world-famous Ed Stone fell over in an unpredictable freak accident and smashed into bits and pieces. The stone is beyond recognition even to the trained eye,” one tongue-in-cheek eBayer wrote. “Good news is: the leftovers are now exclusively available on eBay.”

A spoof eBay listing for the EdStone Photograph: eBay

Labour promised the stone would be erected in the Rose Garden of Downing Street or in the party’s HQ had Miliband won the election. It is believed the tablet was secretly moved to London after its unveiling in a Hastings car park, but no one has spotted it since.

On social media, many suggested its potential whereabouts as well as alternative uses for the stone.

— Stansaid Airport (@StansaidAirport) May 8, 2015
Ed just relaxing at home with his new kitchen table. pic.twitter.com/QzSsyM2FCb

— Kevin Maguire (@Kevin_Maguire) May 8, 2015
For Sale: One Edstone. Hardly used. New £30,000 but will listen to offers. No time wasters. Ring Ed on 0207...

— Jeremy Vine (@theJeremyVine) May 10, 2015
I think I have found #EdStone just by Googling on maps pic.twitter.com/uGlUFqfRJM

12 ways NGOs can fight for a free press

It’s a tough time to be a reporter...

This fight to protect press freedom has to be global, where we all stand up to strengthen voices of colleagues who are being silenced, imprisoned, killed, in growing numbers. Journalism has always been a risky business - but now the risks are rising as never before. Lyse Doucet, chief international correspondent, BBC, @bbclysedoucet, London UK

...but there are pockets of hope

It’s almost impossible to be a reporter in Ethiopia because of systematic government repression (see Human Rights Watch’s recent report on media freedom). And the Committee to Protect Journalists recently published its top 10 censors lists, including Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Vietnam and China. But there are vibrant media communities in many places, including of course citizen journalists, and you can find some of their stories here. Emma Daly, communications director, Human Rights Watch, @emmadaly @hrw, New York, US

Related: Live Q&A: How can NGOs support an independent press?

The threat of terrorism is being used to decrease press freedom

It certainly is in Ethiopia, where dozens of journalists are imprisoned under the country’s anti-terror laws – usually for stories that aren’t remotely connected to terrorism. The same thing happens in Vietnam and other countries. The UK is setting a pretty bad example by using its anti-terror laws to arrest reporters and their sources and publicly taking power tools to destroy hard disks that supposedly have “dangerous” information on them. Peter Noorlander, CEO, Media Legal Defence Initiative, @mediadefence@PeterNoorlander, London, UK

And violence is being used to silence journalists

Trauma exposure in itself can be a form of censorship. On a weekly basis we talk to journalists who fear that the tide of violence they are witnessing may be overwhelming their ability to respond. In places like Mexico and Syria , – but not only in those countries – compassion fatigue, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder can all impair individuals’ abilities to produce nuanced reporting or to just get the news out. Isis and oppressive regimes know this. That is partly why their propaganda feeds contain such a high volume of traumatic imagery. It has a bludgeoning effect. And that also highlights what a remarkably impressive job many local journalists are doing. They are continuing, despite this pressure. Gavin Rees, executive director, Dart Centre Europe, @DartCenter, London, UK

The United Nations is failing to live up to its rhetoric

The biggest obstacle we face as an advocacy organisation working for social justice internationally is the tight grip on information held by the United Nations. The UN should be the gold standard, defending a free and transparent flow of information to and from the public. It calls on governments to establish freedom of information laws and policies, to ensure that the media have access to the information, and to protect the rights of journalists who report that information. Yet the UN itself is governed by no freedom of information regulations or policies.

The UN’s information arms, from the secretary-general’s official spokespersons right throughout the system, regularly withhold information from the media and the public with impunity. The UN asserts its right to selectively inform and withhold, and there are no official channels for “we, the peoples” to demand disclosure of information from the UN. When staff within the UN reveal information, they are often subjected to disciplinary measures, including dismissal. If the UN is to be the global standard-bearer of press freedom, it must model that principle to member states through its own actions rather than obstruct the free flow of information. Paula Donovan, co-director, AIDS-Free World, @AIDS_Free_World, Boston, US

Media companies should train journalists in the developing world

Media companies that work regularly with local journalists as fixers, translators, etc should offer training, insurance, equipment and care to keep them safe, not only from physical but also psychological harm. Some already do that (and have signed on to the new freelancer guidelines). Perhaps that’s impossible if you’re only working with someone for a day, but in my experience the relationships often last over time, yet in some locals are left to fend for themselves. Emma Daly, communications director, Human Rights Watch, @emmadaly @hrw, New York, US

NGOs should look to engage local reporters

Aid agencies need to stop trampling over local media in their rush to get to CNN when there’s an emergency. And they should do all their press releases in appropriate languages, and have linguistically appropriate spokespeople. Anything else and you are actively undermining their ability to do their (crucial in emergencies) job. Imogen Wall, freelance consultant, @imogenwall, London, UK

Related: 11 ways NGOs can work with politicians

Partnering with media companies in the developing world can bring results

BBC Media Action works in 26 countries, has hundreds of media and capacity- building partnerships and reaches more than 200 million people – so the concern that we might impose on media in developing countries is obviously one we worry about. Our experience is, I think, the opposite. Working with BBC Media Action provides our partners with the capacity to be more editorially independent and have greater capacity to resist political pressures than they might if they were on their own. Our programme Open Jirga in Afghanistan, for example, is a popular and highly influential public debate programme that is produced to BBC editorial standards of balance but goes out on the state broadcaster RTA, reaching millions across the country. It wouldn’t be as balanced or respected if we weren’t involved. James Deane, director of policy and learning, BBC Media Action, @JamesMDeane, London, UK

With the state of press freedom in the UK and US, how can western organisations work effectively in the developing world?

On the subject of what we can do inside our own glass houses while we are throwing critical stones at the absences of press freedom elsewhere, it’s very much on point to consider the concluding words in last week’s Comment is Free piece by Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning). She calls for “a clear example to the rest of the world that, in a truly modern democratic republic, the suppression of the press and sources by criminal prosecutions cannot be tolerated. Then the US could no longer be used as an excuse by repressive governments around the world to say: ‘Well, they do it in America, too’.” Norman Solomon, executive director, Institute for Public Accuracy, @NormanSolomon @accuracy, Washington, DC, US

In the digital age, physical distance matters less to those who want to make a difference

Our ability to connect through the internet, through Skype and other links, means we have an unprecedented ability to reach out to help journalists everywhere. There’s nothing better than being “on the ground”, meeting face-to-face. But we can no longer say we don’t have the means to try to connect, no matter where we are. Lyse Doucet

But new technology doesn’t mean reporters are empowered

The broader platform also means that journalists are increasingly potentially exposed. This means digital reporting training needs to come not just with ethical training, but also digital security training. Jodie Ginsberg, CEO, Index on Censorship, @jodieginsberg @indexcensorship, London, UK

Training on its own won’t transform the media

Training on its own won’t work if journalists can’t put that training into effect. We learned this the hard way and have changed our strategy as a result. There is a very useful analysis of the long-term impact of training (or the lack of it) rooted in the BBC’s experience of training journalists in the 1990s here. However, if you provide training within the context of co-producing genuinely independent, strong public interest content, that really can work. James Deane

Read the full Q&A here.

Is there anything that we’ve left out? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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Letter: Jim Markwick made a real contribution to the developing world

Jim Markwick was responsible for a remarkable act of altruism when he persuaded the Guardian in 1973 to take on Gemini, a struggling business devoted to producing news features about developing countries in the Commonwealth.

Gemini posted copy to far-flung newspapers in the pre-internet era and was a major contributor to what was then talked about as a new, less westernised, international information order. It was the brainchild of Derek Ingram, formerly a deputy editor of the Daily Mail, who saw the Commonwealth as a new, exciting project and believed that newspapers within it deserved all the support they could get.

Related: Jim Markwick obituary

The business never made money for the Guardian, which disposed of it after nine years. But its offbeat stories and bold graphics broke new ground at the time. Jim had therefore made a real contribution to the developing world.

Newspapers ignore the Guardian's role in exposing Prince Charles's memos

All newspaper editors are committed to press freedom, are they not? During the Leveson inquiry, some editors devoted considerable space to telling readers that they were fighting for the people’s right to know.

So how did they react to the Guardian’s 10-year struggle, and eventual court victory, that resulted in the publication of letters between Prince Charles and government ministers?

Did they applaud the Guardian for its expenditure of time and resources in order to reveal the pressures applied by the heir to the throne on elected politicians? Did they hell.

The Daily Telegraph’s leading article makes no mention of the Guardian’s efforts. Indeed, it finds it “regrettable” that the supreme court “allowed the letters to be released”. The Prince “should be entitled to have a private exchange of views with ministers”.

The paper also ran a piece by historian Andrew Roberts in which called the Guardian “foolish” for its fight in “forcing these letters into the public domain”.

The Times, even though its leading article was critical of Prince Charles for meddling in politics, managed to overlook the Guardian’s role in exposing the meddling.

The paper argued that “it was right to disclose [the letters]” because “a letter from the prince is not just a letter, but a form of pressure”.

It also contended that it was “disappointing that £375,000 of public money” was “spent on legal battles trying to keep their contents secret”. But it could not bring itself to praise the Guardian for pursuing the matter.

The Sun, the paper that routinely intrudes into people’s privacy, thought the Guardian had secured “a hollow victory”. “The Oxbridge revolutionaries” had “battled for years to uncover the confidential documents” which did no more than “prove is that the prince is well-meaning, reasonable and polite”.

Then there is the Daily Mail, scourge of the Leveson process for its supposed threat to freedom of the press. Well, the paper certainly agrees with the disclosure:

“Unmistakably, the prince sought to use his position to influence public policy. So surely the public had the right to know what he was up to.

May the Mail humbly suggest that if he doesn’t want the public to know about his meddling, he shouldn’t do it?”

So surely the Guardian deserves a pat on the back... I’m afraid not. Paul Dacre just couldn’t bring himself to give credit where it was due.

The Mail also ran an article by Stephen Glover in which he contended that “if the Guardian hoped to discredit [the prince] it has signally failed”.

This fails to take account of the fact that the Guardian fought its freedom of information case on the basis that, whatever the content, the prince’s lobbying was itself of public interest. Its own leader makes that clear:

“The importance of these papers is not whether they reveal the prince’s controversial (or not) views on the European Union directive on herbal medicines. The importance is what they say about his judgment and its constitutional implications”.

The Daily Mirror was delighted that “the public is at last free to read Prince Charles’s black spider memos to politicians” because “in a democracy, people should have a right to know the issues a constitutional king-to-be is raising with government ministers”.

But there was no word about the newspaper that ensured they have, at last, been revealed to the people.

And the Independent? A long leader, Memos put an end to the ludicrous idea that Britain’s monarchy is politically neutral, made out a reasonable case for disclosure. But it did not mention the Guardian’s part in having brought it about.

That’s press solidarity for you. One paper succeeds in a press freedom campaign. All its rivals devote pages to the consequent revelations. And none bother to congratulate it for its efforts. Truly, the Guardian is a paper apart.

Daily Mail publisher loses challenge to JK Rowling ruling

The publisher of the Daily Mail has lost its challenge to a high court ruling that author JK Rowling should be allowed to read a unilateral statement in open court as part of the settlement of a libel claim.

Associated Newspapers did not dispute that she is entitled to such a move – where the claimant alone makes a statement – but objected to a number of terms in the proposed draft.

Rowling brought the action over a September 2013 story in the Daily Mail and Mail Online claiming an article she had written about her time as a single mother in Scotland was a misleading “sob story”.

The Mail printed an apology to Rowling last May in which it accepted that Rowling made no false claims in the article and said that it had paid her “substantial damages”, which she was donating to charity.

She was not at the court of appeal in London on Friday to hear the challenge dismissed by Lord Justice Longmore, Lord Justice Ryder and Lady Justice Sharp.

In January, Associated’s counsel, Andrew Caldecott QC, said that Mr Justice Tugendhat’s ruling, in April last year, was a “most unsatisfactory precedent” and one which, if generally followed, would create difficulties for the offer of amends regime.

This procedure provides for a defendant to make an open offer to pay costs and damages with an apology – with the aim of bringing a speedy end to litigation in cases where a defendant has unintentionally made statements which it admits to be untrue.

If the offer is not accepted, the claimant may only recover damages through the courts if it can prove malice on the part of the defendant.

Caldecott said: “Although this appeal raises important issues, it in no way seeks to dilute or qualify the published apologies to Ms Rowling which she was properly and rightly entitled to.”

The apology, which appeared both online and in the hard copy of the newspaper, was part of an unqualified offer of amends, which was accepted by Rowling in January 2014.

Caldecott said that the whole purpose of a statement in open court was to attract wide publicity, which made it the more important that the statement was confined to, and accurately reflected, the pleaded claim.

Justin Rushbrooke QC, for Rowling, said that the appeal did not, as claimed, raise any important issue of principle or practice in defamation law, but was plainly misconceived and an “exercise in nit-picking”.

He said that only rarely should a defendant be permitted to dictate to a claimant what she was permitted to say in a statement in open court.

It was primarily a matter between the court and the party wishing to make a statement, and the proper arbiter of what was acceptable in a unilateral statement was the judge.

Giving the court of appeal’s decision, Mrs Justice Sharp said that Associated’s contention was a narrow one – that the judge was wrong to give his approval to a statement which went outside Rowling’s pleaded case in that it mischaracterised the meaning complained of and included matters relating to aggravation of damages which went beyond those in the particulars of claim.

Rowling had made an open offer not to oppose the appeal in relation to the aggravated damages objection and the meaning objection now concerned one word only in the draft statement – the word “dishonest”, used in relation to an article written by Rowling wrote on the website of Gingerbread, the single parents’ charity of which she is the president.

Caldecott said the word did not appear in the pleadings and its inclusion in the draft was unfair.

Rejecting that argument as “flawed”, the judge said the allegation complained of was that Rowling had given a knowingly false account of her time as a single mother in which she falsely and inexcusably accused her fellow churchgoers of behaving badly towards her.

This pleaded meaning was accurately and unambiguously set out in the draft statement.

It was plain that anyone hearing it could be in no doubt that this was the meaning complained of, and that the newspaper’s position was that it accepted that the pleaded meaning was “completely false and indefensible”.

The judge said that the one word to which Associated objected did not change the position.

“The sentence of which it is a part is no more than the expression in ordinary and less formal language of the correctly identified pleaded meaning.

“It is indubitably true that the word ‘dishonest’ is not actually used in the pleading, but, as Mr Rushbrooke submits, it is impossible to see how the claimant could have given an account which she knew to be false – and which contained false and inexcusable allegations against her fellow churchgoers – without being dishonest.”

She said that those conclusions were sufficient to dispose of the one live point on the appeal.

Chuka Umunna shows how the media is robbing us of ‘normal’ politicians

I’m no Chuka-ite, but what a travesty if he’s been bumped out of the Labour leadership competition because of media intrusion. Rather than scrutinising the ideas and policies of our political leaders – except to demonise and caricature them if they even timidly step outside the political status quo – instead the media focuses on personality and personal life. Allegedly doorstepping his family, including his girlfriend’s 102-year-old grandmother – is this really how “media scrutiny” should work in Britain in 2015?

Handwringing about the lack of “normal” people in British politics is fashionable, but what do we expect? There are lots of principled individuals out there who would relish representing their community. They take it as read that their beliefs would face heavy scrutiny; relevant personal characteristics, such as personal judgment, would also get a going over. But having the media snooping not just into your private life, but the lives of those close to you? Saying “throw what you like at me” is one thing, but it is deeply presumptuous to adopt such a posture on behalf of those close to you.

Allegedly doorstepping his girlfriend’s 102-year-old grandmother – is this how 'media scrutiny' should work in 2015?

Being “normal” often means having a complex life. A huge chunk of the population have taken drugs, cheated on a partner, slept with or gone out with someone they regret, been unfair to someone close to them or a stranger. Maybe we committed some misdemeanour when we were younger. Personally I would prefer more MPs with complex backstories, because that makes them more representative and more human. But with the promise – the threat – of unforgiving media intrusion into every last facet of our personal life, why do we expect normal people, with complex lives, to stand for elected office? And then we complain that our politicians are boring on-message robots.

Chuka should have expected it and learned to take it, some will say. It’s all part of the territory. If you don’t want that level of intense scrutiny, choose a different path in life. You saw what they did to Ed Miliband, did you not? What a bleak approach, that the price of political service should be having your life and the lives of those who love you torn to shreds. A mean, cruel, macho, debased political “debate”, stripped of humanity or understanding.

Labour’s current leadership contest needs scrutiny, sure: all those bland, vacuous platitudes, but no policies or substance. The media has disastrously failed to scrutinise the government’s policies, often serving as a de facto extension of the Tory party’s propaganda unit. Instead it’s personalities and private lives that are hunted. It’s sad. And we all suffer, and our democracy suffers, because of it.

Ipso upholds accuracy complaint against Herne Bay newspaper

The Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) has ruled that a weekly newspaper published misleading information in breach of the editors’ code of practice.

It decided that the Herne Bay Gazette’s story about an 18-year-old woman, who had found guilty of killing a man by driving while under the influence of drink, was inaccurate.

Joanne Hogbin complained to Ipso about a front page story published in the Gazette’s issue in the final week of December 2014, “Boozy trip just days before teen locked up”.

It stated that her daughter, Bethany Mackie, had “enjoyed a booze-fuelled Christmas trip” to London just days before she was due to start her five-year prison sentence for knocking over and killing a cyclist, Christian Smith.

During her trial she had told the court of her “genuine remorse” and that she was “struggling to deal with” causing Smith’s death.

The Gazette’s article was accompanied by a photograph of Mackie, which had been downloaded from her Facebook page. The caption said: “Bethany Mackie poses with a wine glass days before she was jailed”. But Hogbin said her daughter drank only Coca-Cola on the London trip.

The newspaper explained that the article had not claimed Mackie was drinking alcohol, but only that she had “held a full wine glass aloft”.

After Hogbin’s complaint, the paper offered to publish a clarification on an inside page cross-referenced from the front page, in which Hogbin would be able to state that Mackie was not drinking alcohol.

Ipso’s complaints committee was unimpressed with the paper’s argument about the juxtaposition of the photograph and the “boozy” reference in the headline. It thought it “clearly suggested” that Mackie had drunk alcohol on the trip.

The paper had failed to seek comments from Mackie or her family before publishing the picture, so the committee contended that the paper’s “decision to accompany the front page headline with the photograph demonstrated a failure to take not to publish misleading information”.

It rejected further claims that the paper had breached Mackie’s privacy, intruded into her grief and that the paper used subterfuge to obtain the story.

The committee ordered the Gazette to publish a clarification on page 3, cross referenced to the front page. It should also be published as a stand-alone item, with a headline indicating its subject, linked for no less than 24 hours from the home page of the newspaper’s website. It should then remain online and be searchable.

The clarification should explain that it was being published following an upheld complaint from Mackie’s mother.

• This article was amended on 15 May 2015 to remove an incorrect statement that the article remained on the Herne Bay Gazette website after Ipso’s ruling. The article was in fact hosted by a third party with no connection to KM group.

NB: The Gazette’s original story appears on a site called “Herne Bay Matters” (hence my original mistake, for which I apologise to the KM group). Clearly, it requires Ipso’s attention too.

Source: Ipso

‘Big Brother in crisis’ – Daily Star turns on its old front-page stalwart

It is the most unlikely U-turn since the Sun dumped Page 3 – the Daily Star has turned its back on Big Brother.

The paper, Big Brother’s most consistent fan since it returned to TV on Channel 5, tells its readers the show is “in crisis” after half a million fans switched off.

The Star says viewers are “moaning it was ‘full of wannabes’ and not real people” (although how that differentiates this version from previous series is not clear).

But perhaps the paper’s change of heart should not be so unexpected – until last year both Channel 5 and the Daily Star were owned by Richard Desmond, before he sold the channel to MTV owner Viacom for £450m in a deal completed last September.

This is the first run of Big Brother since then (although there was a celebrity edition at the beginning of the year).

Ratings for Big Brother’s opening night audience this week were down 300,000 on last year, to 1.8 million. Its second episode ratings fell to 1.3 million, said the Star.

A TV insider told the paper it is just a “watered down version of the celebrity version. There’s just as much egotism and attention-seeking but we don’t know who any of these people are – so why should we care about them?”

We may see an echo of the media coverage of the show when it first aired on Channel 5 in 2011 after it was axed by Channel 4, when it was largely ignored by all the other papers apart from Desmond’s Star (and Daily Express).

Eventually the other papers, including the Sun and the Mirror, gave more coverage to Big Brother. It remains to be seen if the Daily Star does the same. Or if this time round, viewers really are fed up with Big Brother.

Smiling "Uncle" Arthur Brittenden, Mail editor and Sun deputy editor

I hadn’t realised that Arthur Brittenden, former Daily Mail editor, Sun deputy editor, and Sunday Express deputy editor, had died until I read the Daily Telegraph’s obituary on Saturday. Brit (or was that Britt?) as he was always known, died aged 90 on 25 April (while I was away on holiday).

But I can’t let his death pass without giving him a proper send-off, not least because the published obituaries are slightly inaccurate and also fail to record one of his greatest anecdotes.

Brittenden edited the Mail for five years from 1966 at a difficult time in the paper’s history. It was selling almost 2m fewer copies than the Daily Express in an era when overall newspaper sales were just beginning their long decline.

His rise to the top spot came as a shock to the staff and, most especially, to the man he replaced, Mike Randall, because he had won the newspaper-of-the-year title only months before.

Randall, composer of the Mail’s code of ethics, later joked that he had been “smiled in the back”. Brit, a tall, impeccably dressed charmer, was known for his persistent smile and for being a witty raconteur.

He loved to tell stories about the Mail’s owner, the patrician second Viscount Rothermere (Esmond), which included visits to his mansion in Gloucestershire and stilted daily phone conversations in which Brit learned that the press baron had no interest in news. It was safer to stick to the weather.

But even that could go wrong, as the Times recorded. After getting no reaction to his news list, Brit said in desperation that it had been pouring with rain. After a long silence, Rothermere asked: “Why are you telling me this. I’m sitting in the office across the road from you, looking at exactly the same damn weather as you are”.

On another occasion, when Brit was suffering from a cold, he told his boss he wasn’t feeling well. “In that case”, said Rothermere, “you should go home and sit by your pool”.

Brit replied: “I don’t have a pool”.

“No pool”, boomed the uncomprehending (and unworldly) Rothermere. “You don’t have a pool!”

I first heard Brit tell that tale when I was the Sun’s assistant editor and he was serving as deputy editor to Kelvin MacKenzie at the Sun in 1981, one the most unlikely double acts in press history.

It proved to be Brit’s last editorial role in a career that began, after he left Leeds grammar school, at the Yorkshire Post in 1940. He was 16.

He saw service in the British’s army’s reconnaissance corps between 1943 and 1946 before returning to the Post until 1949, when he secured a staff job at the News Chronicle.

Six years later he moved to the Daily Express, where he enjoyed a lengthy and successful period, becoming foreign editor in 1959 after a spell as New York correspondent, northern editor in Manchester in 1962 and then deputy editor at the Sunday Express under John Junor.

He had to deal with Lord Beaverbook and had his first experience of proprietorial eccentricity. He told how he received a memo from Beaverbrook in which he warned him against the use of telephones: “Have nothing to do with the telephone, that is my advice. Rip out the cord and throw it away”.

Brittenden was poached by Rothermere in 1964 to be the Mail’s executive editor and graduated to the editor’s chair in 1966. Soon after, the ambitious Larry Lamb was appointed as the Mail’s Manchester-based northern editor and he did not hide his belief that his version of the paper was superior to the one produced by Brit in London.

This uneasy relationship was to have unforeseen circumstances. Under Brit’s five-year editorship, the Mail lost 450,000 sales (while, it should be said, the Express lost 560,000). By 1971, the Mail was being run by Esmond Rothermere’s son, Vere.

The company also owned an ailing red-top, the Daily Sketch, which was suffering from a circulation plunge due to the successful relaunch of the Sun following its acquisition by Rupert Murdoch in 1969. Its editor was Larry Lamb.

Vere Harmsworth took the risk of merging the Sketch with the Mail and relaunching it in tabloid format. And he chose the Sketch’s editor, David English, rather than Brittenden to edit the new paper.

A year later, Lamb hired his former Mail adversary to be his assistant editor. He prospered and was eventually appointed as Lamb’s loyal deputy. He was in post when Lamb was fired in 1981 in favour of MacKenzie.

It was obvious, not least to Murdoch, that a MacKenzie-Brittenden partnership was hopeless and he appointed Brit - by now known affectionately as “Uncle Arthur” - as News International’s corporate relations director.

He picked up a directorship of Times Newspapers in 1982 and worked on for Murdoch for the following six years. He then joined Bell Pottinger as a senior communications consultant, staying on until his 78th year in 2003.

Brittenden was thrice married. In 1953, he wed Sylvia Cadman. After a divorce, he married Daily Express reporter Ann Kenny in 1966. It also ended in divorce and in 1975 he married Valerie Arnison, who died in 2002. He had no children.

*Charles Arthur Brittenden, journalist, born 23 October 1924; died 25 April 2015.

Sources: Daily Mail/Daily Telegraph/The Times/The Independent/Personal knowledge

Sunday Express censured by Ipso for inaccurate prison story

The Sunday Express has been censured by the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) for a front page story claiming that prisoners were being allowed to have their own cell keys and roam at will inside jails.

The regulator decided that the article, headlined “Monsters are given their own cell keys” with a sub-deck “Ian Huntley and Rose West ‘virtually roaming at will’”, was inaccurate and that the paper’s original correction was inadequate.

It was therefore required to publish the decision by Ipso’s complaints committee, stating that a complaint against the paper for publishing a misleading story, had been upheld. The Sunday Express carried Ipso’s statement on page 2 yesterday (17 May), although I can’t find it online.

The original article, published on 25 January, claimed that 28,767 of 84,865 prisoners in custody at the time had keys to “privacy locks” on their cells.

Nicholas Black, who complained to Ipso, said that the headline implied that prisoners had been provided with keys which enabled them to enter or leave their cells at any time. This was not so because prison officers’ keys overrode the privacy locks.

The Sunday Express, having realised within days that its story was incorrect, published a correction in the following issue on its letters page, on page 30. It stated:

“In our article ‘Monsters are given their own cell keys’ on January 25, we said prisoners were ‘virtually roaming at will’ with keys to their own prison cells.

We would like to correct that and make it clear prisoners are given keys to be used to protect the privacy of their cells only at times when they are allowed out of their cells. Prisoners are not allowed to roam at will outside of these times”.

The complainant argued that it was insufficiently prominent, given the fact that the misleading story was the splash and turned to page 2.

The newspaper countered that when it became a member of Ipso it designated its letters page as the appropriate location for the publication of corrections and clarifications.

Ipso was having none of it. In its adjudication, it said: “While the committee welcomed the newspaper’s prompt recognition of the inaccuracy, the publication of the original claim nevertheless demonstrated a failure to take care not to publish distorted information”.

As for the placing of the correction, it said “there was no information published on the [letters] page which might indicate to readers” that it was the location for corrections. It concluded: “As such, the newspaper’s approach did not amount to an established corrections column”.

Source: Ipso

The readers’ editor on … sponsorship of roundtables

“A mother’s diet during pregnancy and in the first few months post-birth is vital for her child’s development and wellbeing. So why isn’t the message getting through to everyone?”

Thus ran the subheading on a feature published on 22 April based on a debate at one of the Guardian’s regular Roundtables, which are sponsored by companies. On this occasion the sponsor was Danone Nutricia Early Life Nutrition.

Well, the basic message is sound enough but some readers felt that a different message was “getting through”. This complaint was from a mother of three: “I’m deeply concerned that the Guardian was fooled into believing that allowing Danone to host a discussion about this important subject could be impartial. Obviously Danone have vested interests because they are the parent company manufacturing and selling products promoting baby formulas and feeds. Please correct the imbalance and make known the error and misinformation about Danone’s impartiality. Mums have a hard enough time with breastfeeding without confusion being created from a normally secure source of information ie the Guardian.”

Mike Brady, the campaigns co-ordinator of Baby Milk Action, also wrote to the readers’ editor. The organisation says it is part of a global network, acting to stop misleading marketing by the baby-feeding industry and to “protect breastfeeding and babies fed on formula to prevent unnecessary death and suffering”. Brady said the Guardian had a conflict of interest in that it was taking sponsorship from a company that broke international marketing rules for baby milk formulas.

“The Guardian claims to retain its journalistic independence, but this case demonstrates the risk of inherent bias.

“There is a clear conflict of interest in having Danone sponsor an event on nutrition in the first 1,000 days from conception … The article promoted the company’s objectives by suggesting nutrition for successful breastfeeding is complex and not well understood, that complementary foods should be introduced earlier than Department of Health recommendations and that “collaboration between government and the food industry” was necessary to educate parents and parents-to-be … it fits with its business objectives of diverting criticism of marketing practices that violate national and international rules and portraying itself as a source of nutrition information.”

The Guardian Roundtable began life in the now defunct Public magazine, which was launched for public sector managers in 2004. It was subsumed into the Guardian’s Society section when the magazine moved online 2009. In the early days of the feature at least half of the sponsorships came from public bodies but that area of sponsorship dried up in 2010.

For many years there have also been Society and Education roundtables on a wide range of topics. Those features, commissioned and produced by Guardian Creative, now the Studio, were published in the G3 supplements. They only moved to the main paper when the G3s closed.

There were more than 80 roundtables sold last year and they cover business and global development topics as well as education and society. Would-be sponsors can suggest a subject but don’t control the title of the debate, the guest list or the copy, which is written by a journalist separate to the chair of the debate, also a journalist.

This is the only complaint of its kind, although there have been consistent complaints that the panels should be more diverse, which organisers accept and are trying to change.

On this occasion the guest list included a critic who refused to attend but who contacted Baby Milk Action. Brady said he wrote to the Guardian before the conference took place to complain of the Danone sponsorship but received no reply.

He also makes a broader point: “Baby Milk Action is concerned about the business model the Guardian has introduced of sponsored content, sections and debates. The benefits to the sponsor are clear: an opportunity to shape discussion of a topic to its own agenda, the kudos of being associated with a leading paper such as the Guardian, and an opportunity to divert attention from negative business practices … At the very least, the Guardian must strengthen its conflicts of interest safeguards for any sponsored content or events. When it hears from invitees that there is a conflict of interest with its chosen sponsor, why not listen to their concerns rather than pressing on regardless?”

He says the benefits for the reader are less clear but colleagues who work within the commercial professional networks argue that sponsors want to be associated with being part of the debate, not to sell things.

There is no point beating around the bush. Serious journalism is time-consuming and expensive if it is done properly and commercial colleagues are under a great deal of pressure to find income at a time when all newspapers are suffering from falling advertising and circulation revenues.

I think it is naive to imagine that any company would sponsor content unless it was in the company’s interest. However, is that an interest that is compatible with the readers’? I am not against sponsored content providing it is clearly labelled for the reader – roundtables are – and it is interesting for the reader. But each deal should be decided on a case by case basis looking at every aspect of a company’s record and stated intentions.

Baby milk is the hottest of hot topics. The anti-baby-milk campaign (initially anti-Nestlé but now anti all of them) has been going on for decades, so trouble on this issue was inevitable. The campaigners are highly critical of scientists funded by the formula milk industry and fight pitched battles at the World Health Organisation, which stated as far back as 1981 that babies should be breastfed until the age of six months.

According to Baby Milk Action, Danone has breached Advertising Standards Authority guidelines on six occasions in the past five years and it has been widely criticised in the press for the way it markets follow-on milk that may be given to a baby from six months, by which time most are weaned.

Zoe Williams reported from Jakarta, Indonesia, in the Guardian on 15 February 2013 on the way in which Sari Husada, a subsidiary of Danone, built up relationships with midwives, which led to increased sales of baby milk formulas. Danone denied there was any connection with giving gifts to the midwives and the sales of formulas.

While this issue is about Guardian processes, I summarised the concerns of the readers to Danone. I asked a spokeswoman what it hoped to achieve by sponsoring the roundtable. She said: “We are passionate about the importance of nutrition in the first 1,000 days [of a child’s life] and take our responsibility as one of the UK’s largest manufacturers for this age group seriously. We have a long history of proactively engaging on early life nutrition policy issues. With a general election this year, the roundtable offered a timely opportunity to consolidate views on the last government’s achievements on early life nutrition and to highlight recommendations to its successor as part of a shared goal to make early life nutrition a public health priority.

“We are genuinely interested in the future health of UK children; this was not an opportunity to promote infant formula. We didn’t and wouldn’t talk about our products at the roundtable. The feeding choices that parents make were discussed by the participants as part of a wider conversation but we don’t ‘own’ the conversation or try to control it. Promoting infant formula or our products in this way is against our own strict internal governance procedures and UK legal requirements.

“We chose to sponsor a Guardian roundtable because this forum ensures that issues are talked over in depth from different angles through a process which is transparent and independent of the sponsor. It brings together experts who may not have previously engaged with one another and welcomes the opportunity to debate opposing views, with an independent editorial write-up post event. The Guardian network approach enables a targeted and engaged audience to be reached.”

The wider issues of sponsored content has led to the setting up of a sponsorship governance group at the Guardian, a weekly meeting of editorial and commercial managers who discuss ethical considerations and any potential conflicts of interest.

The Danone sponsorship should have gone to that group, a fact now accepted by the editors who were involved with the roundtables. I agree with the readers and think it was a mistake to go ahead with the Danone sponsorship because the subject of the debate could be interpreted as being too close to the subject of the controversy that has surrounded the company.

TV licence loophole exploited by viewers – and the BBC's critics

Hot on the heels of last week’s hyperbolic press reaction to John Whittingdale’s appointment as culture secretary, the Sunday Times reported that “1,000 a day stop paying for TV licence”. The story was followed up by the Daily Mail on Monday.

Yet it seems fair to say that very little of that is strictly true. The 1,000 figure comes from a Barb survey which measured the number of households that claim to have no TV, or say they haven’t watched it in the past six months. While it is true that number has gone up by 500,000 between the third quarter of 2013 and the fourth quarter of 2014 (hence the 1,000 a day figure), 200,000 of those are new households and the survey makes no reference to whether or not any of those homes watch TV – live or catch-up on other devices such as laptops or mobiles – or whether they pay a licence fee.

Nevertheless, there is plainly an issue for the BBC with the so-called “iPlayer loophole”. Essentially, you need a licence to watch TV as it is broadcast – that is, as part of a live stream – irrespective of what device you use. But you don’t need a licence to watch TV on demand – again, irrespective of the device you use. So live TV on a mobile phone does need a licence but catch-up on a 42-inch plasma doesn’t.

With on-demand viewing on the increase, the BBC is lobbying for a change in the law to close that loophole. An idea that was supported incidentally in the report on the matter from the select committee chaired by John Whittingdale.

But as is clear from the coverage the bigger agenda for the BBC’s critics – and, interestingly, some of its supporters such Lord Burns – is to see the compulsory licence fee replaced by voluntary subscription.

This is a slippery slope and the BBC well knows this. As a consequence it is not doing everything it can to reduce licence fee evasion such as making iPlayer access – which unlike watching free-to-air broadcast signals can be easily controlled – contingent on owning a TV licence.

In the old days, records were kept of TVs that were sold; these were passed on to the people charged with collecting licence fees. When they found a TV apparently not covered by a licence they’d then have to prove the set was being used and only then would they have an evasion case to pursue. In the digital age where all online devices have unique addresses and where mobile applications – including the BBC’s iPlayer app – identify the devices they send content to – the BBC already has mountains of information it could use to pursue licence fee evaders but chooses not to.

Similarly it would be relatively straightforward to make iPlayer access – which unlike watching free-to-air broadcast signals can be easily controlled – contingent on owning a TV licence. Sky, for example, restricts access to Sky Go online and via mobile to people who have paid a TV subscription. But the BBC is reluctant to do even this in case it sets the corporation on what it regards as the slippery slope towards full-on subscription funding.

So as the charter renewal debate begins to unfold in earnest expect to see more of the same. Critics of the BBC – especially in the press – seizing on anything they think might undermine the corporation and especially its funding. Meanwhile, the BBC, anxious not to give ground strategically where it is committed to the licence fee, hopes no one looks too closely at what it isn’t doing to help itself.

Oh, and while we’re at it: far from going to war on the BBC, as both friends and enemies of Auntie predicted he would, John Whittingdale, not withstanding his background as a former PPS to Margaret Thatcher, is pretty supportive of the BBC. Whilst he sees issues with the licence fee in the longer term, he views it as the best way of funding the BBC for the next decade at least.

Praise for the Sun's domestic violence 'Give me shelter' campaign

One of the outstanding facts to emerge from the book I reviewed today about tabloids (see here) is that they have sometimes launched progressive and socially responsible campaigns.

Sun campaign — Today’s front page Photograph: Public domain

The authors mention the Sun’s series on domestic violence during Rebekah Brooks’s time as its editor. And today the Sun returns to that subject with its “Give me shelter” campaign, which it has launched following the closure of several women’s refuges.

Four Sun pages, including the entire front page, are devoted to the campaign along with its leading article, A betrayal of the abused. One spread carries the pictures of 48 women killed by abusive partners in Britain in a year.

The Sun argues that “victims of domestic violence have been failed by the system at every turn”. The police, for example, have “too often” failed to take complainants seriously. The editorial, which calls it “a national scandal”, continues:

“It is depressing to learn that dozens of victims’ refuges – normally the only safe places to which they can escape and rebuild their lives – have been shut down.

This is both a disgrace and an emergency. Because in an average week two women in England and Wales are killed by a partner or an ex”.

It takes councils to task for closing “safehouses for terrified women, in mortal danger in their own home”, adding:

“While overall violent crime is falling, domestic violence has not done so in the last six years, during which 32 refuges have been closed”.

It calls on the new Tory government, especially chancellor George Osborne, to “sort it out” by finding “enough funding to enable the reopening of the refuges closed since 2010 and guarantee the safety of the rest from councils’ cost-cutting”.

Actor Julie Walters, a patron of Women’s Aid, has backed the Sun’s campaign. She tells the paper: “Refuges save lives. A safe space can be the difference between life and death...

“The most dangerous time for a woman is when she is trying to escape from her abuser”.

The Sun campaign has aroused enormous interest across social media today, most of it supportive with, inevitably, some negative comments too.

But that’s unfair. The editor, David Dinsmore, deserves praise for launching such a worthwhile campaign. Give credit where it is due. This is an occasion where Britain’s best-selling newspaper is using its muscle in a good cause.

Ruth Rendell obituary

Ruth Rendell, Lady Rendell of Babergh, also known as Barbara Vine, who has died aged 85, was a literary phenomenon. From 1964, when her country copper, Reg Wexford, first stepped before the reading public in From Doon With Death, she wrote more than 50 crime novels and seven books of short stories. Many of them were adapted for television or made into feature films; the Wexford books in particular were an enormous success on TV, with the actor George Baker playing Wexford as a big, gruff, rural policeman, solving crime in the fictional Sussex town of Kingsmarkham.

But Rendell was never satisfied with producing the annual whodunnit. She demonstrated this when, rather than follow her first Wexford novel with more of the same, she daringly jumped away from the classic English mystery in her second book, To Fear a Painted Devil (1965), and gave readers a taste of the psychological thrillers to come.

Related: Ruth Rendell: In quotes

The cliched view of Rendell is that she suddenly changed her style when, in the 1980s, she started writing as Barbara Vine, but the truth is that from the beginning, even in the Wexford tales, she concentrated more on character and psychology than old-fashioned police procedure. She wrote 24 Wexford books and produced an equal number of thrillers under the name Rendell. Her first novel as Barbara Vine was A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986), which won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe award. The next year, a second Barbara Vine, A Fatal Inversion, won her the Crime Writers’ Association Golden Dagger.

The big difference with the Barbara Vine stories was that in them she went inside the heads of her psychopathic killers and rapists. It was this that made them so dark and chilling, an uncomfortable read for fans of Wexford who were used to the protection of the country officer standing between them and an unsafe world. Because of this, Rendell’s fans fell into two rather warring camps, those who liked the Wexford stories and those who felt that Barbara Vine was a great “real” novelist breaking new ground. The books were all, however, bestsellers. There might also have been a third camp, those who loved her wonderful short stories. This was a dying, or dead, market in Britain, but Rendell was able to sell short stories in the US to publications such as the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

Although Rendell did not like the title often bestowed on her – queen of crime – calling it snide and sexist, she did not go along with the many reviewers, among them AN Wilson and PD James, who called her a great novelist. “Nobody in their senses is going to call me a first-class writer,” she said. “I don’t mind because I do the very best that I can and thousands, millions of people enjoy my books.”

George Baker as Detective Chief Inspector Reg Wexford and Louie Ramsay as Dora Wexford in The Ruth Rendell Mysteries in 1988. — George Baker as Detective Chief Inspector Reg Wexford and Louie Ramsay as Dora Wexford in ITV’s The Ruth Rendell Mysteries, 1988. Photograph: ITV/Rex Features

A very private person, who could get prickly with interviewers, she nevertheless said that she was going to take an active part in politics when she was made a life peer in 1997. That year she had given £10,000 to the Labour election campaign. In the Lords, Rendell supported the bill to legalise assisted suicide: “The way I’m going it won’t be long, but all my aunts lived into their 90s.”.

Daughter of Ebba (nee Krause) and Arthur Grasemann, she was born in South Woodford, north-east London. Her mother, who had been born in Sweden and lived in Denmark until she was 12, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and Ruth, an only child, was brought up in part by a housekeeper to whom, she said, she was much closer than she was to her mother. Her father she described as “endlessly patient, endlessly loving, and endlessly kind”. She put a lot of him into Wexford.

She went to Loughton high school, in Essex, and was, she said, very unhappy. But she began to find herself when she left school and became a journalist. She worked on the Chigwell Times and by the age of 22 was a top reporter. Trouble came her way when she wrote a story about an old deserted house and invented a ghost; the owner of the house threatened to sue. Shortly afterwards she skipped the annual meeting of a local tennis club and wrote the story up from the chairman’s pre-prepared speech of which she had a copy. After her piece appeared in print she learned that the chairman had dropped dead of a heart attack in the middle of delivering it. She quit before she was sacked.

Related: Ruth Rendell: five key works

Aged 20 she had married Don Rendell, a reporter whom she met when they were both covering an inquest. He became a financial journalist on the Daily Mail and for 10 years Rendell was a wife and mother. She described these as happy years but during that time she went through a long apprenticeship, writing six novels, all of which were rejected. When her seventh, From Doon With Death, was accepted by the small publishing house of John Long, she received £75 for it. “No interviews then,” she said, “nor for the next two novels.”

Later she was frequently interviewed, though she was never a willing subject. Asked once too often what she would have been if she hadn’t become a novelist, she said a country and western singer. It came as a shock when, during an interview oon Norwegian TV, she was handed a microphone and asked to sing. Asked on BBC Radio 4 about how she wrote her short stories, she said: “Oh they just come to me.” She described what drove her to write by saying: “I like to sit at a desk and type.”

Rendell claimed that, when writing her novels, she never did any research but “simply made things up”. Later on, she hired a researcher, but the great detail she gave her stories was the result, she said, of going on long walks, especially in London. She became an expert on parks in the capital.

Her hobby was changing houses; she moved 18 times. For several years, she lived in a pink 16th-century manor house set in 11 acres in Suffolk, before returning to London. Her only digression from a rather set, humdrum routine came when in 1975 she divorced her husband and then two years later remarried him. Asked why, she said that after they separated, she found she couldn’t live without him, because he was the sort of man with whom you could go on a 200-mile car trip and never have to say a word.

Related: No one can equal Ruth Rendell's range or accomplishment | Val McDermid

The Mystery Writers of America gave her three Edgars and the British Crimewriters’ Association awarded her several Golden and Silver Daggers. In 1991 she received the Cartier Diamond award for outstanding contribution to the crime genre. She showed no sign of slowing up: No Man’s Nightingale, published in 2013, was a classic Wexford; and in 2014 she created a new detective, Colin Quell, for The Girl Next Door.

Rendell was very generous and gave a large amount of money away. She was vice-president of the housing charity Shelter and raised money for Little Hearts Matter, which helps children with heart disease. She said she knew what it was like to have no cash, adding: “I don’t think it’s good for people to be born into money and not know what it is never to have it.”

Her husband died in 1999. She is survived by her son, Simon.

• Ruth Barbara Rendell, Lady Rendell of Babergh, writer, born 17 February 1930; died 2 May 2015

Election morning briefing: leaders face one last grilling with one week to go

Bring on the balloons and the party poppers: it’s the final week of the election campaign.

One week today the polling stations will open. One day later we probably still won’t know precisely who will make up the next government.

The big picture

Well, now we know. The Sun has come out for the Tories to “stop [the] SNP running the country”.

In other news, the (Scottish) Sun has come out for Nicola Sturgeon: “Why it’s time to vote SNP.”

The Sun front page — The Sun and the Scottish Sun. Photograph: The Sun/PA

Although Ed Miliband told Russell Brand in his YouTube interview – a contender there for sentences I never thought I’d write – that Rupert Murdoch is “much less powerful than he used to be”, the Sun front pages are consistent with their proprietor’s recent tweets, in which he praised Sturgeon’s “great performance” in the first TV debate and approved of her “clobbering” of Miliband in another.

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, David Cameron continues his pumped-up, “bloody lively” language by promising to “let rip” in the final week of the campaign (no sniggering at the back, please):

Look, when you are a prime minister you have to measure your words carefully, you have to measure your speeches carefully.

But sometimes it is the time to throw caution to the winds, let rip and tell people what you really think.

And what does he really think? Read the article for the full details, of course. But here’s the tl;dr version:

“The world is looking at Britain and saying: ‘You have built some great foundations in these last five years’. And the logical thing when you’ve got great foundations is to build the house on top of them.”
“A good life means that sense at the end of the day, when you get into bed and pull the duvet over you, you think: this is working for me.”
On a boosted SNP at Westminster: “You would have people having a decisive say over the government of the UK who don’t want it to exist.”
On Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander: “They did the right thing in coming into coalition. We have worked well together … So on that level I do respect and like them.”

Friends and foes are fluid concepts today, though, as another Guardian exclusive has the very same Danny Alexander taking “the extraordinary step of lifting the lid on Tory plans for an £8bn plan to cut welfare, including slashing child benefits and child tax credits”. The full story is here.

Alexander reveals that in 2012 a paper by the work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith suggested limiting child benefit and child tax credit to a family’s first two children; removing higher rate child benefit from the oldest child; means-testing child benefit, and removing it altogether for those aged 16-19.

A Tory spokesperson sighed: “This is desperate stuff from the Liberal Democrats who are now willing to say anything to try and get attention. We don’t recognise any of these proposals and to be absolutely clear, they are definitely not our policy.”

You should also know:

Latest polling by Lord Ashcroft suggests Clegg will lose his seat in Sheffield, and Nigel Farage will fail to win in South Thanet.
A van carrying more than 200,000 ballot papers for the parliamentary and council elections in Hastings and Rye, as well as Eastbourne, has been stolen.
The Milibrand interview has so far had 517,869 views, at least some of them by people who are not journalists.

For the full rundown on Wednesday’s news, read Nadia Khomami’s summary here.

Now to the polls. With one week to go:

Guardian election poll projection

Our model takes in all published constituency-level polls, UK-wide polls and polling conducted in the nations, and projects the result in each of the 650 Westminster constituencies using an adjusted average. Methodology.

Diary

After the frantic pace of the last few days, today is quieter, as the party leaders swot up for their appearances on Question Time this evening.

Green leader Natalie Bennett – who isn’t appearing on Question Time – is on the Today programme at 7.50am.
At 8.10am, Danny Alexander is on the Today programme to talk about that Guardian story on child benefit cuts.
Nick Clegg is hosting his regular Call Clegg gig on LBC at 9am.
Nigel Farage is out and about in Aylesbury.

But the main action comes this evening, with the BBC hosting three half-hour interviews with the main party leaders. Each will be interviewed by David Dimbleby and the studio audience:

8pm – David Cameron
8.30pm – Ed Miliband
9pm – Nick Clegg
10.30pm - three further interviews are broadcast separately: Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland, Leanne Wood in Wales and Nigel Farage in England.

The big issue

The Question Time interviews will be the final big set-piece event of the campaign. Will they make a difference? Two previous televised debates – only one of which featured Cameron and Clegg – resulted in snap polls that said … pretty much whatever you wanted them to say. But, overall, surveys of voting intentions did not see a huge shift.

After the seven-way debate at the start of the month, the Guardian’s data editor Alberto Nardelli made four key conclusions. Do they still hold? (The fresh observations are mine; Alberto will no doubt have his own.)

Miliband is pulling up level with Cameron. The two won’t go head-to-head tonight, but the Labour leader will follow the prime minister in the Question Time schedule. It mirrors the Channel 4 Paxman interviews, in which Miliband was broadly thought to have performed well but was just bested by Cameron in the snap polls. Miliband has been more buoyant as his profile has risen through the campaign – yes, including the Milibrand moment – but expect Cameron to be pumping it big-style, and other excruciating phrases.
Farage is too polarising to help his party improve in the polls. The Ukip leader gets a platform only in England tonight. That might perk him up a bit, after his complaint in the challengers’ debate that the studio audience was “ridiculously to the left” (well, at least it removes those pesky SNP and Plaid Cymru supporters). And Question Time is very familiar territory for him.
Clegg is becoming irrelevant. The Lib Dem leader goes third, after Cameron and Miliband. We might have to wait for news of a surge in electricity demand at 9pm to see if viewers take this as an opportunity to put the kettle on.
Sturgeon has broken through to the rest of the UK. Not tonight she won’t: her interview is being screened only north of the border.

Nick Clegg. Mine’s milk, no sugar, thanks. Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images

Read these

In the Australian (prop. R. Murdoch), foreign editor Greg Sheridan goes off-message – or is it on? (so confusing) – with a warning for British voters:

The SNP is the most loopy far-left party in modern Britain outside the Greens. Yet it has managed to get the idea across that any criticism of the SNP is an English criticism of Scottishness.

Writing in the National, Lesley Riddoch warns the SNP against complacency:

It’s not very likely, I’ll grant you, but rock-solid leads have been squandered before by smugness and premature celebrations. For 50-somethings like myself, the memory of Neil Kinnock’s o’er early victory party in 1992 is impossible to erase …

And of course, more recently, there’s the memory of that 51% poll a week before the independence vote.

Melissa Kite, writing in the Spectator, says a Miliband government would be a disaster for rural Britain:

The problem is, the closest this lot have come to the countryside is Hampstead Heath … The left has no clue about the realities of rural existence and persists with useless ideology. They think they can prevent all creatures suffering, and kick the bejesus out of farmers, while still having meat and milk on the shelves of the trendy organic supermarkets they like to frequent.

The day in a tweet

If today were a quote possibly misattributed to Harold Wilson, it would be…

A week is a long time in politics.

The key story you’re missing because of election obsession

Overnight, protests have spread across the US over the death in police custody of Freddie Gray.