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.

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.

“Confidential” is an interesting (that’s polite speak) word to use.

Because what is in the report? Well, it is actually a collection of views already expressed in public, in Parliament and recorded in Hansard, by Liberal Democrat Parliamentarians which her and Lord Graham Tope have drawn on. Moreover, as a submission to a consultation, far from being “confidential” not only are its contents culled from what is already in the public domain but it too will be published.

Not exactly “confidential”.

Furthermore, what none of the quotes from the report in Andrew Grice’s story say is that Annette Brooke and Graham Tope actually welcome planning reform. The report is about how they want to see it changed – to toughen up the stance on sustainable development.

As Annette Brooke put it politely, “The Indy might have found it helpful to contact Graham or me before publishing”.

Quite.

That it should be The Guardian perpetuating the sexist shopping clichés? Less impressive. Though given the paper’s vision of only women doing cleaning or its obsession with photos of Sienna Miller, not too surprising either.

I was going to buy a product from the Cleaning and Laundry products part of The Guardian’s online shop.

But then I noticed that every identifiable person in photos in that section is a woman.

So could you tell me, are men allowed to buy household cleaning and laundry products too?

Thank you.

Yours etc.

It is also at the heart of many a public inquiry. Want to know why something happened? Who pays whom is again right at the centre of the story. Whether it is understanding drugs policy and the economics of the illegal market or looking at problems of rail safety, following the money reveals the systematic features that shape the behaviour being probed. Understand the financial incentives and you understand a large part of what is going on.

But there’s an exception.

Step forward, Lord Leveson and his inquiry. Many people being asked for their views. But the inquiry isn’t following the money.

Instead, it is studiously ignoring the money. For where are the the advertisers, the sellers or the  purchasers of newspapers?

When you buy a newspaper, sell a newspaper or place an advert, you’re funding journalism. You may be funding a brave investigator unearthing corruption. Or a sordid fly-by-night who bullies, lies and intimidates. Either way, it is your cash that is keeping them in business.

So why in this inquiry should those doing the funding get a free pass and not have their own behaviour looked at? After all, we know from the few occasions when people do withhold their money how quickly even mighty multinationals react.

Some stories do not betray their unpleasant sources and disreputable tactics when they appear in print. But plenty do.

And if newsagents are happy to still sell them, advertisers still happy to have their words appear next to them and the public still happy to buy them, is it any wonder the stories have been so widespread for so long?

Here’s today’s coverage:

Daily Mirror – p.1
Daily Star – p.1
Daily Telegraph – p.1
The Guardian – p.1
The i – p.1
The Independent – p.1
The Times – p.1

The Sun – p.6

Daily Express – p.7 (a Princess Di’s death exclusive is on p.1)

Daily Mail – p.10

Well, I say revelations and the story is written that way – complete with references to correspondence seen by the Guardian and a freedom of information request.

Except … take a look at Hansard: each time the Prince of Wales has been consulted, it’s been reported in public to Parliament in a debate which then has its full transcript published online and free for anyone to read. (The process of consultation is also documented in public on the Cabinet Office website.)

Nor are these Parliamentary references hard to find – I found them myself by simply searching in the first place for “Prince of Wales” and “prerogative”, seeing the formal phrase used each time and then searching just for that.

The moral of the story? If you want to hide something, tell Parliament…