KAYA Cheshire may have only recently turned 18, but she’s got far bigger things to worry about than boyfriends, make-up and A-levels.

The aspiring journalist has turned her compassionate personality and hard working skills to a global issue in the fashion industry – whether airbrushing in magazines is really right.

The student from South Wales used London Fashion Week this week to promote her Natural Beauty: Keeping It Real campaign that she launched via Battlefront, a Channel 4 funded project that helps 14-21-year-olds platform charity campaigns…

She says: “When I started studying media at school, my eyes were suddenly opened to airbrushing. Previously I had assumed that all of these celebrities and models were just blessed with good looks, but really, computers are used to make them look perfect.

“While airbrushing contrast and lighting is often essential to getting the right picture, using the technique to make women facially different or slimmer or lighter in skin is just plain wrong.

“Then I read a piece by the plus-size model Crystal Renn who was airbrushed to make her look thinner. This woman is a beautiful, natural lady who represents real women and still the magazines change her to suit the ideal – it just made me so angry.”

You can read the full story here.

To give an example: if a blogger were to complain to the PCC about a newspaper taking their work and reusing it without credit, the PCC looks at just the individual case; even if it finds in favour of the blogger it doesn’t (except in exceptional cases) look at how widespread the problem is or attempt to track the frequency of the problem over time.

In defending this approach the PCC usually says that, first, these are the rules the industry has decided for it and, second, that its public opinion research shows there is very little public appetite for it to become a more general regulator (though others have a different take on public opinion).

It is a very different approach from that taken in other spheres. Imagine if, for example, the response of the industry regulator to cases of dodgy door to door sales by electricity companies had been, “We will deal with any individual complaints about specific sales people, but if there’s an overall problem with this in the industry that’s a matter for someone else”.

This issues around this question of approach have been highlighted in a recent case involving The Sun. As Richard Osley described the case:

An unnamed woman from Camden rapped The Sun for it’s use of ‘gender bender’, the pretty thoughtless shorthand slang used to describe transexusals and transvestites. The full details of the complaint are not published but a case summary reads as follows:

COMPLAINT: A woman complained to the Press Complaints Commission through Liz Willows of the Camden LGBT Forum that the newspaper had raised a breach of Clause 12 (Discrimination) in referring to her as a “gender bender” in the text and headline of an article originally published in 2008 but still hosted on its website.

RESOLUTION: The complaint was resolved when the newspaper wrote to the complainant accepting her concern about the language used and removed the article from its website.

DATE: 25/5/2010

So The Sun has noted concerns over the use of ‘Gender Bender’. Does that mean they are reviewing the appearance of the word in other stories on its website. Boy George is described as a ‘chart-topping gender bender’, actor David Tennant apparently once played a ‘gender bender barmaid called Davinia’ and a murderer learned about his ‘gender bender grandad‘ at the age of seven.

As Richard points out there is an oddity here: if The Sun thought it right to change its website in one case, why not in the others? The PCC’s perspective when I asked them this is to say that, “The cases cited in the blog all predate the resolution of the complaint from Ms Willows (and two of them do not concern transsexuals at all).”

Even granting the point in brackets, it’s an explanation that leaves me rather uneasy. After all, those other stories are still on the website and old stories on newspaper websites carry on picking up readership for a very long time. The date of original publication mattered much more when newspapers became tomorrow’s chip paper and only a few ventured to libraries to look up old copies. On the internet old stories are much newer than the used to be.

More positively the PCC also said, “We do seek to use rulings to promote future good practice and a set of standards to which newspaper and magazines should adhere going forward”. But it strikes me that in plenty of industries the response to an ruling such as this would be a much more comprehensive attempt to change existing copy. Imagine if a financial regulator ruled that an insurance firm had been misleading in a leaflet; would old copies of the leaflet be left online unchanged?

It will be interesting to see what the review of the code the PCC enforces finally produces later this year – and how many of the proposals which various bloggers grouped to together to make get through.

The finding comes in a YouGov poll for The Sun which finds that 37% think in such circumstances Cameron should try to form a “grand coalition” with Labour and Lib Dems and a further 24% think he should “seek to work with the Liberal Democrats”. Only 20% said he should “seek to form a minority government, without doing any deals with any other party”.

Although The Sun has previously come in for criticism for commissioning poll results that it hasn’t published, this result is published in the bottom left corner of page 4 in today’s edition.

My latest one has caught a bit of media attention this time as you can see from the New Statesman and The Guardian, who report:

The Sun’s failure to run the results is likely to be seized upon by critics of the paper who have accused it of not publishing the details of polls that are unfavourable to the Conservatives. The Sun announced it was backing the Tories, after 12 years of support for Labour, in September last year. Last week the Lib Dems accused the paper of suppressing the results of a YouGov poll that showed that if people thought Nick Clegg’s party had a significant chance of winning the election, it would win 49% of the votes, with the Tories winning 25% and Labour just 19%.

The Sun also decided not to publish the details of another poll taken yesterday that was favourable to the Lib Dems. It showed that 29% of people thought the Lib Dems were being the most honest about spending cuts, compared to 26% who named the Conservatives and 21% who plumped for Labour.

The Sun’s decision not to run the “bigot-gate” poll was highlighted by Mark Pack, co-editor of the Liberal Democrat Voice website. He noted the results had appeared on the YouGov website – in compliance with the rules of the British Polling Council. There is no question YouGov had done anything wrong. Pack added: “The Sun do commission more opinion polls than you would expect them to publish … but it’s very striking when you have the Sun running a story and they have put forward a polling question that gives a very different slant [in its results].”

The Sun had not responded to the Guardian’s request for a comment by the time of publication.

As I said to the paper, YouGov are following the industry rules fully and placing the full information on their website. It’s a credit to the British polling industry that, for those firms who take part in the British Polling Council (BPC), we have rules which enforce such transparency and so allow such stories to be unearthed. All is not perfect in the polling industry but in this respect the members of the BPC deserve credit.

All the main parties have promised to cut the government’s deficit after the election. Which party do you think is being the most honest about what spending cuts they would make to deliver this?

Liberal Democrats 29%
Conservatives 26%
Labour 21%

… and then there’s this:

Gordon Brown was challenged on Wednesday morning by Gillian Duffy, a 65-year-old voter in Rochdale. Mrs Duffy complained about taxation for pensioners, immigration from eastern Europe and students’ tuition fees. At the end of the televised encounter, Mr Brown told her ‘it was very nice to meet you’. But when he got into his car, Mr Brown said – unaware that his microphone was still on – ‘That was a disaster – they should never have put me with that woman… She’s just a sort of bigoted woman that said she used to be Labour.’ Which of these statements comes closer to your view:

It’s a storm in a teacup. Mr Brown was simply trying to let off steam in private. We should not think the worse of him: 50%
Mr Brown is a hypocrite – saying one thing in public and the opposite in private. Now we know just how much he despise [question truncated on results sheet]: 46%

My own view on the Brown quote is that, as I said yesterday, the real story of the caught comments shouldn’t be the use of “bigot” but rather the intolerance Brown seems to have for meeting people who don’t agree with him – even if, as in this case, they end up supporters of his. That fits in with many other accounts of his behaviour and matters because disliking people who don’t agree with you is far more dangerous – thanks to the group think mentality it encourages – than someone using too blunt language.

Asked the impact on their voting intention of those papers opposing Nick Clegg becoming Prime Minister, 15% said it made them more likely to vote Liberal Democrat and only 4% said it made them less likely, making for a net +11% saying they are more likely to vote Liberal Democrat.

Of the rest, 19% would vote Liberal Democrat regardless, 35% would not vote Liberal Democrat anyway and 27% said it wouldn’t alter their vote but they weren’t yet sure which way to vote.

The question doesn’t capture the potential agenda setting power of these three newspapers, but on the other hand the question was (deliberately) asked in a low key way, with no reference for example to the tax or residence status of newspaper proprietors such as Rupert Murdoch or the Barclay brothers. Moreover, so far part of the impact of the three titles running strident anti-Liberal Democrat stories has been to generate coverage by TV broadcasters about whether or not a smear operation is taking place.

Given that the public says it trusts TV much more than newspapers this, combined with our poll finding, illustrates the risk the three newspaper titles are running with their reputation, especially given the publicity given to the explicit comments by The Sun’s political editor that he sees it as his job to help get Cameron elected.

Journalism overall is a deeply distrusted profession in the UK and it’s a rare business situation where reducing levels of trust doesn’t end up damaging commercial prospects. Therefore not only may a backlash to their coverage drown out their attempts to influence the election result, but a hostile public reaction makes the commercial future look tougher  for all three titles who – along with other newspapers – are trying to find ways to persuade people to pay them for news.

I asked George Pascoe-Watson, former political editor at The Sun, about this trust issue at an event a couple of weeks ago and he rather dismissively said it was “fashionable” for people to say they don’t trust journalists. Even if you agree with that (and I think he misses the more substantial changes at work), fashion is what make people spend or stop spending money all the time.

The end result may be that the newspapers fail to damage Nick Clegg’s reputation but end up damaging their own – winning votes for the Liberal Democrats but losing customers for themselves. That’s at one end of the spectrum of possible outcomes, but it shows how much is at stake not just for political parties but also for newspapers.

The poll was carried out 23-26 April online by Vision Critical (Angus Reid), a member of the British Polling Council. 1,810 British adults were surveyed and the data was weighted by age, gender, social class, region, newspaper readership and past vote. The full question was, “The newspapers in this country tend to take a position and support different parties at election time. It has been suggested that the Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph do not want Nick Clegg to be Prime Minister. If those newspapers were to take this stance would that make you more or less likely to vote Liberal Democrat?”. Data table here (Excel file).

Courtesy of social media, there is increasingly a different pattern: grumble online, see other people also grumbling online, grumble some more and hey presto – the complaints reach a much wider audience as online word of mouth spreads the word.

There is a classic example of this old versus new media conflict at work today. Following his surge in the opinion polls, Nick Clegg on the morning of the second TV debate faced a barrage of attacks from a number of British newspapers, including The Sun, Daily Mail and Telegraph. Probably weirdest amongst these attacks are those over a newspaper article Nick Clegg wrote and had publised in a national newspaper eight years ago.

So outrageous was this article that, er…, it took eight years for the Telegraph and Mail to get round to reporting it.

One reaction to this has been a burst of spurious other ‘shock revelations’ posted to Twitter but people angered by the newspaper industry’s behaviour – with the hashtag for these messages #nickcleggsfault making it into the Twitter worldwide trending topics list. (See the Metro’s report for a selection of the best and this post for the meme’s origin.)

As previous incidents such as the Jan Moir controversy have shown, a sudden upsurge of popular opinion via social media can at times be too much for the traditional media establishment to ignore.

The big danger for several newspapers this time round is that they are already rated the second-least trusted profession in the UK in MORI’s annual trust surveys (only just beating politicians) and they are facing steady falls in the number of people willing to buy their content. Being the brunt of such public anger and ridicule may firm up support and sales from their core audience – or may further damage their reputation and feed further declines in sales.

A Harris poll for the Daily Mail, the first in-depth survey of the public response, showed him decisively ahead of David Cameron and Gordon Brown on measures of energy, honesty and strength.

The survey of over 1,000 people who watched the clash found 32 per cent intended to back Mr Clegg’s LibDems – level with the Tories – and just 26 per cent Labour.

Those poll results are dramatic – and reflect what we’ve seen in other polls too. But most striking is the Daily Mail’s editorial reaction. Smart tabloid editors know the dangers if their paper gets too far out of line with the views of the readers. That’s why when there is the occasional story that completely misjudges its readers, the point is rarely repeated. It’s also part of what holds newspapers back from simply trying to lead public opinion in any way they wish.

The Mail’s reaction – knowing of course that many of its readers have now started liking Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats – has been two-fold.

First, the reporting of the story is pretty straight, such as:

Nick Clegg revelled in a surge of support last night after his X Factor-style TV triumph … The result will send shockwaves through both Labour and Conservative high commands … The positive response to Mr Clegg, who pitched himself as an outsider ranged against the two ‘old’ parties, has rattled Conservative strategists. The Tories had been hoping to win around 20 Liberal Democrat seats, mostly in the South and South West.

And so on.

But second, even where the paper runs an op-ed piece putting the boot in to the party’s policies (see the panel from Edward Heathcoat Amory) it’s far more restrained than usual when a tabloid gives something a going over.

Labour and Conservative strategists will certainly be wondering what to do next. So too will many editorial teams.

UPDATE: The Sun repeats the point: it gives the party an unabashed positive write up at the top of its story on the YouGov poll (that it commissioned) which puts the Liberal Democrats in second. It’s not until you get to the twentieth of the short paragraphs that there is a direct negative comment about the party.

Do you think the following will or will not happen if the Conservatives win the coming election?

The number of crimes committed each year will fall: 22% will, 47% will not – net -25%
The quality of education in state schools will improve: 25% will, 46% will not – net -21%
Britain’s economy will grow stronger: 32% will, 36% will not – net -4%