1. Polly Toynbee sends tweet encouraging all and sundry to take part in an open-access online poll being run by the BMJ.

2. The Guardian reports result of said BMJ poll.

Then only thing missing, alas, is:

3. The Guardian then realises that reporting a voodoo poll which its own staff have been encouraging people to take part on is low grade self-referential journalism and pulls poll report.

Hat tip: Anthony Wells

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

You have me confused.

It’s this advert of yours for Red Bull which is the cause:

It’s that “Only 8 calories” thing, you see.

Calories are, of course, a measure of energy.

So the advert really says “No sugar. Just energy” followed by “Look how little energy!”

Should I be impressed by it only being energy or by it not having very much energy?

Boasting about its energy and also saying how little energy it has, aside from confusing me, also rather runs into problems with the Advertising Standards Authority’s Code of Conduct and its provisions on avoiding misleading advertisements.

Could you explain?

Thanks.

I once rang the Daily Mail to mildly complain about a story I had a connection with. The journalist I spoke to put me on hold while he conferred with a colleague. At least, he thought he put me on hold. But courtesy of him hitting the wrong button, I got to hear what they were saying. And it wasn’t exactly a master class in concern for accuracy. Yet I still read the newspaper regularly.

Why? Because it would be foolish not to.

1. The Daily Mail is read by 4.6 million people, making it by some margin the most read daily national newspaper. And that’s without even getting into its website, which is now the most popular newspaper website in the world. You can’t be interested in what the media is saying and ignore it.

2. Very large numbers of Liberal Democrat voters read it: around 576,00 Daily Mail readers voted Liberal Democrat in 2010, a number only topped by the 796,000 or so Sun readers who voted Liberal Democrat. That Daily Mail figure is more than the equivalent figures for The Guardian and The Independent put together.

3. The Daily Mail invests heavily in its journalistic resources. Whatever you may think of how they write-up their stories, its journalists frequently break stories due to having the time to do the old-fashioned legwork. Its record in breaking stories about dodgy Labour donations under Gordon Brown was a classic example: the Mail unearthed the story because it sent journalists door-to-door calling on Labour donors until they found something.

4. And then there’s the question of how the stories are written up… In my view, all manner of stories end up being written up in a distorted manner, but you can usually do a reasonable job of extracting the truth from a Mail political story by:

• Ignore the headline: it often exaggerates so much for effect that it doesn’t really match the story.
• Read the first line to get what the story is about, and then read the story from the end upwards: there is often a defence included in the story towards the end which undermines what goes before. Although I’ve read plenty of their stories on political topics which I know about and thought the headline and first-half of the story was distorted, I’ve not (yet) come across one of these where the second-half didn’t provide the explanation as to why the story was wrong.
• Watch out carefully for who is quoted to support the story. The usual structure of the political scandal story is to have a quote from an opposition politician, often calling for an inquiry. There are some, from all parties – such as Vince Cable in the example linked to above – who have a track record of only calling for an inquiry or condemning someone when they have very good grounds to. Then there are others seemingly will happily condemn something based on the merest prod of encouragement from a journalist.

Apply these three tests and you can do pretty well at getting to the truth of a Daily Mail political story. I’ve seen plenty of devastating demolitions of Mail political stories, but those have all been ones where these three tests had warned me already. Of course, one day there’ll be a story that breaks all these rules, and all this leaves aside the question of what stories to choose to run in the first place…

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

UPDATE: And here is a similar list and word cloud for the Daily Star.

Wolmar’s expertise lies in the railways rather than military history and he is refreshingly frank about the limitations of his knowledge of the latter. He has acquired sufficient such knowledge to make the book work well in most parts, though he places too much reliance on AJP Taylor and Winston Churchill at times. Both are very readable, extremely persuasive but also highly controversial historians and to have either as your basic source of information on events is a risky approach. That is the approach that Wolmar takes and as a result, his narrative sometimes suffers. His partial debunking of Taylor’s views on the origins of the First World War, for example, make for a slightly quaint distraction given how much the debate over its origins has moved on anyway since his time.

The other blemish in the book is the paucity and limited detail of the maps, a real shame in a book that relies so much on accounts in which the relative location of places and the geography of the intervening landscape is crucial.

Neither blemish however seriously damages the book’s attempts to entertain or educate, both of which it does admirably. His main thesis is that it was only the development of the railways which made the increasingly large, and so logistically cumbersome, armies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries possible. In the end, however, the railways were also their undoing because defenders could always call up reinforcements far more quickly than attackers who, as they advanced, went beyond the reach of their own rail networks. The result was that stalemate was the norm until the development of reliable motorisation increasingly freed armies from railways.

One side-story which comes up frequently is just how hard railways were to destroy. A bit of damage here and there was easy, but could also be quickly repaired. It was only well into the twentieth century that explosives made large-scale destruction of railways, at least in rugged terrain that required bridges, viaducts and the like, quick and reliable. Until then, the possibilities of speedy repair had made railways a rather robust form of transport.

Another aspect briefly touched on is how railways offer another example of technological development which could both undermine dictatorships yet also strengthen them (cf the debate over Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion). In the case of railways, they both allowed dissidents and dissident ideas to move around but also permitted troops to be despatched quickly to quell unrest.

As these two examples illustrate, there is much to enjoy in this book even if you are neither a serious fan of military history nor of railways.

You can buy Engines of War: how wars were won and lost on the railways by Christian Wolmar from Amazon here.

But this set of five tips is extremely good.

All are, when you read them, very simple. But that’s the art of excellent advice – making achieving excellence a matter of following small steps, each easy by themselves.

Why doesn’t a triumphant British sportsman make it into the top 95 stories on Sky?

via

Mark Cavendish has achieved more in four years than English football team in last forty 

and

Mark Cavendish needs to learn to cycle naked

to this:

Sports Personality of the Year 2011: Mark Cavendish wins BBC award

Hat-tip: James Crabtree

More infographic genius here.

(But of course, in case the boss is reading this, none are quite as good at the one we’ve published at work today.)