Slick reporting: the Guardian gets spun by Greenpeace

Whales don't bother me, and I try not to bother them. On the whole, I'm against oil spills and the unnecessary killing of whales. But regardless of that, I prefer my newspapers to deal in facts rather than unfounded prejudices or hysterical assumptions. Nonetheless, I still read the Guardian.

Fact: This is a dead whale. Everything else is speculation

So I was less than impressed by a Guardian article last week implying that the US authorities had suppressed evidence that the Deepwater Horizon spill was responsible for killing a number of whales. There's an irony in the fact that whales have a lot to thank the oil industry for, since its emergence led to a massive reduction in whaling when we realised that fossil oil was a lot better for lighting homes than whale oil. But that's another story.

My job means I know a bit about oil spills without being an expert, but you don't need to be an expert to see that the Guardian's correspondent was being led by the nose. This is a growing problem in journalism, and one that I've touched on before: many journalists let their guard down as soon as they're presented with research that reflects their own beliefs or seems obvious. So when Greenpeace (hardly the most objective of sources) told US Environment Correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg that evidence of whale deaths was being suppressed, she compliantly repeated the activists' line.

In short, Greenpeace was able to get emails proving that the US National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration had prevented the release of photos showing a dead sperm whale. So far, so good. Suppression of information should always be questioned by journalists, and I don't blame Greenpeace for taking the partisan line it did: they're activists. That's their job.

Goldenberg reports Greenpeace's take on the story, but doesn't seem to have bothered contacting the NOAA to ask why the pictures were suppressed, preferring to speculate. To her credit, she does report that the NOAA admits it has no idea how the whale died. She also adds that there are 1,200 whales in the Gulf of Mexico, which should have made her stop and think. 

The discerning reader might ask whether one whale dead from unknown causes – out of a population of 1,200 – is really a story at all. The editors, perhaps aware of the thinness of the story, published three very similar pictures of the whale, even though the Guardian usually makes do with one picture and leaves the printing of several near-identical pictures to the Daily Mail. So it's clear that an emotional reaction was being sought. 

It then published the story under the very dubious headline 'US downplayed effect of Deepwater oil spill on whales, emails reveal'. The US didn't downplay the effect; it didn't know what the effect was. Nor does Greenpeace, as its press release freely admits.

I've got a particular problem with this paragraph:

NOAA did put out a press release about the dead whale. However, the release was edited and shortened in a way which appeared to minimise the effects of oil on whales

If you read the press release, it's clear that the NOAA did nothing of the sort. It did what any science-based agency should do: it reported the known facts unsensationally without speculating or pursuing a separate agenda. Of course that wasn't good enough for Greenpeace, which naturally wants to demonise the oil industry. As I've said, they're activists and that's their job. But that paragraph could have been written by Greenpeace, and a newspaper shouldn't be colluding with anyone to spin the news. 

That leaves the Guardian in the embarrassing position of seeming less objective than the activists who provided the story.

Moral: Believe what you want, unless you're a journalist.

Smoke and mirrors at the BBC

"Oh goody, another survey. It's got numbers in - no, not just numbers, statistics - so it must be true. Plus it supports what I want to believe, so I won't look at it too closely."

And so, with a flourish of a mouse, the BBC website finds itself carrying this nonsense:

Smoking in the car breaks toxic limit (BBC Health, 16 October 2012)

The article, by Health Editor Michelle Roberts, claims that "smoking in the car, even with the windows open or the air conditioning on, creates pollution that exceeds official "safe" limits. Roberts got the story from a journal called Tobacco Control, which is run by the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal). All fairly respectable, and I daresay I'd be tempted to take the evidence at face value if the BMJ claimed that homeopathy is bunk. But a glance at Tobacco Control's website shows that it's already nailed its colours to the mast. Tobacco Control isn't science, it's advocacy. Any journalist should treat it with scepticism.

For those who don't know, BMJ is wholly owned by the British Medical Association, which recently called for a ban on smoking in cars and later had to admit that it had relied on sensationalist, long-discredited data. One might also criticise them for authoritarian control-freakery, but that's a subjective judgement and a journalist should rise above it. But whatever one's views, a good journalist should immediately ask themselves what agenda, if any, is being pursued.

So, let's have a look at those claims:

1. "A Scottish team who took measurements during 85 car journeys found readings broke World Health Organization limits"
2. "The researchers … analysed air quality data during a number of journeys ranging from about 10 minutes to an hour in duration"
3. "In 49 of the 85 journeys in total, the driver smoked up to four cigarettes"

Wait, wait, hang on a minute. None of those journeys lasted more than an hour and yet in 58% of them the driver got through FOUR cigarettes. There's no evidence that people smoke much in cars with kids in them, yet this survey had the drivers practically chain-smoking. That on its own is enough to dismiss the entire study. All we've learnt so far is that the University of Aberdeen, which carried out the research, is a bad place to study science.

Mind you, the article says "up to four". So it could be as low as zero. You can try to get something better out of the abstract if you like, but that's just as vague. Finally:

4. "During these 49 smoking journeys, levels of fine particulate matter averaged 85µg/m3, which is more than three times higher than the 25µg/m3 maximum safe indoor air limit recommended by the World Health Organization"

Pretty damning, huh? Since the headline cites the WHO's recommendations, we ought to check them. I've provided a link so you can check them yourself, but the relevant paragraph says this, with the number the researchers relied on highlighted:

Guideline values

PM_2.5
10 μg/m³ annual mean
25 μg/m³ 24-hour mean
PM₁₀
20 μg/m³ annual mean
50 μg/m³ 24-hour mean

Now, this is particulate matter, and I have to take it on trust that the harmful bits in tobacco smoke fall into that category. But WHO is quite clear: this is not occasional doses or a safe limit. The WHO's guidance is that average concentrations of small particulate matter should not exceed 25 microgrammes during the course of the whole day. Isolated or occasional readings above this limit are irrelevant. So the headline isn't just misleading: it's wrong.

What this study actually shows is that, if you lock yourself and your child in a car for 24 hours and chain-smoke constantly, it probably won't be very good for the child. It says nothing about the real world. Put it another way:

"We have created an entirely fake and unrealistic scenario that has produced results that bear no relationship whatsoever to the real world but which we think should be used as the basis for legislation."

Moral: You can always get the numbers you want if you skew the research, and you can always find a journalist who's gullible, lazy or as unprincipled as you.

Quick fixes for the lazy writer

Every editor thinks he can make writers better (see point 2 for why some of these words are highlighted). But few editors can face the truth: most writers think they're good enough already. And even if they know they're not, they can't be bothered to learn all the editor's cherished rules. They don't care about the difference between participles and gerunds.

A couple of weeks ago, I was in the pub with an author who told me that he deliberately writes about leveraging strategic solutions to turnkey issues going forward, because that's how the industry people he deals with talk. Makes you want to weep, doesn't it?

This post isn't for him. It isn't for the editor either. It's for the business writer who knows that his writing can be improved but hasn't got the time or inclination to learn any self-important editor's rules that he suspects were concocted randomly on a Wednesday lunchtime between the third pint and the second whisky. 

This post isn't about how to make your writing beautiful. To paraphrase Steve Jobs, it's about making stuff a bit less sucky.

1) Put words in a natural order
Here's a simple sentence: "Jane ate chicken yesterday." Keep to that order of events as much as you can: "Who did what when." 

So, when one of my authors wrote something similar to this: "ABC Co in 1999 implemented a business restructuring", I changed it to "ABC restructured its business in 1999."

2) Keep the subject next to the verb
Look at the opening of this post: every subject is right next to its verb except in one instance, where the adverb 'deliberately' has inserted itself. I haven't gone back and edited it to make this happen. That's how I write, and I'm feeling a bit smug that I was already subconsciously obeying my own rule. 

Every sentence introduces a subject, and every subject does something, as revealed by the verb. As soon as your readers encounter a subject, they want to know what the action was. Don't leave them in suspense. Answer the question 'who did what?' as soon as you can by putting the verb straight after the subject.

3) Keep the sentences short
Read it aloud and don't breathe till you reach a full stop. If you run out of breath before the end of the sentence, it's too long.

4) Use simple phrases
Don't write "more cost-competitive when compared to" when you could write "cheaper than". Don't write "due to it being" when you could write "because it is".

5) Delete adjectives and adverbs
You probably use three times as many as you need. "Total" can almost always go, closely followed by "overall", "ongoing", "rather", "very" and "quite". 

6) Ditch the numbers
Words are for telling stories. Numbers are data, and readers don't absorb data when reading stories. That's why someone can write: "Rates fell 11.2% from $9,468 to $8,330," and half of their readers wouldn't notice the mistake. And don't write 50% when you mean half.

7) Ditch the initials
Any paragraph spattered with initials looks daunting. Where possible, write the names of organisations in full, unless it's an organisation better known by its initials (OPEC, for example). Then consider knocking it down to title case: Opec.

8) Break any rule if doing so makes the sentence read better
That goes for all these rules too.

Moral: You're smart, you're articulate and you know your job. Simple language conveys that better.

A shameful failure of ethics at the Guardian

Readers of the Guardian newspaper in the UK rightly criticise the 'gutter' press for whipping up hysteria by pandering to the prejudices of their readers. But Friday's web version showed that the paper isn't averse to doing the same thing itself, while its readers are just as prone to moronic mob behaviour.

It began with a link on the Guardian website's front page, concerning the hunt for missing five-year old April Jones: 
 
Go to the story, and you get a video clip of notorious Sky News journalist Kay Burley interviewing someone who I presume isn't a police spokesman but seems close to the investigation. He reveals that the police are now treating the abduction as a murder investigation and that the police are now looking for "a body". 

Burley then calls across two women, to whom she was speaking earlier, to ask for their reaction. That's where it all goes wrong.

Here's the Guardian's story in full:

Sky News presenter Kay Burley on Friday chose – live on air – to tell two volunteers searching for April Jones that "having spoken to the family" they "don't expect to find her alive".
Stunned, both women struggled to offer a coherent response.
Within minutes Twitter was ablaze with complaints. Tom Watson MP said Burley's questions were "insensitive bordering on cruel".
Take a look at the film to make up your own mind (start watching at 1 minute 10 seconds): do you think Burley was right to tell the volunteers?

If you retweet the story, your "suggested" tweet reads:

April Jones: was Kay Burley right to say family 'don't expect to find her alive'?

You'll notice that the Guardian urges you to start watching at 1 minute 10 seconds. This is deliberate: that way you miss the interview with the spokesman and the crucial moment when Burley calls "Donna" over. If you start watching where the Guardian tells you to, you'll probably miss the fact that Donna was standing just off camera and heard every word. A second woman then arrives, who seems to be Donna's friend and seems to have been part of an earlier interview. Here's a transcript:

Kay Burley: I want to chat to Donna who we were chatting to a little while ago. You've heard the news.
Donna (choked voice): Yeah, he's just said. ... (breaking up) I'm sorry.
Woman 2 (off): What's happened, what's happened? We haven't heard.
KB (awkwardly): OK, I didn't know you hadn't heard.
W2: No, we hadn't heard. We've been helping ... [indistinct]
KB: OK, let me just tell you what we've heard from the police - is that it's now become a murder investigation. And they have spoken to the family and they don't expect to find her alive. I'm sorry to have to tell you in circumstances like this. Would you like to say anything or…
W2: If they haven't found her, there's a chance… (the rest of the interview is Woman 2 expressing continued hope).

That's very different from how the Guardian presents it. According to the Guardian, Burley "chose – live on air" to break the news to these women. This makes it sound like she deliberately sought them out for that purpose. But she was clearly surprised to learn that the women didn't know and was momentarily at a loss what to say. She is offering them the chance to terminate the interview but is interrupted by Woman 2, who is keen to have her say.

Donna said, "Yeah, he's just said." So Burley didn't tell her. The second woman says, "We hadn't heard." 'Hadn't heard' is the pluperfect tense, meaning she has heard now – before Burley tells her. So, contrary to what the Guardian says, Burley didn't "choose" to tell either woman the news, and she didn't do it accidentally either. Donna learned it from the spokesman, while her friend learned it either from the spokesman or from someone else off camera. 


So the Guardian is either lying in an attempt to blacken a competitor's star reporter, or it put the video up without watching it and relied for its analysis on Twitter. We can discount the latter option, because whoever wrote the un-bylined story tells us exactly where to start watching so we get the most damagingly misleading impression possible of Burley and Sky. The Guardian even adds an extra dishonest twist, saying "both women struggled to offer a coherent response" when the second woman is perfectly coherent and is keen to offer her view on camera.


The manipulation by the Guardian of its readers doesn't stop there. Compare how the Guardian reports Burley's words with what she actually said to the volunteers:

"they [the police] have spoken to the family and they don't expect to find her alive" (Burley)
"Burley chose … to tell two volunteers searching for April Jones that "having spoken to the family" they "don't expect to find her alive"." (Guardian)

There's a slight misquote - "have" becomes "having" - which enables the newspaper to give the impression that Burley spoke to the family privately and is now telling the volunteers, whereas she quite clearly said that the police had spoken to the family.

The Guardian implies that Sky is ghoulishly exploiting this tragedy. Its readers, who are invited to comment below, are far more explicit, since they are as bad as Twitter users when it comes to hysterical, ill-informed abuse of people they don't agree with:

My God, the pits…
…cruel and cynical…
…crass insensitivity…
Unnecessary, underhand and despicable…
A new low for the Murdoch empire… 
etc, etc

The Press Complaints Commission's guidance says: 

"In cases involving personal grief or shock, enquiries and approaches must be made with sympathy and discretion and publication handled sensitively. This should not restrict the right to report legal proceedings, such as inquests."

Since these two women were volunteers and not family, I'd question whether the guidance even applies here. Even if the women hadn't already heard the news (which they had, albeit only moments before), there's nothing wrong with a reporter clarifying the facts with two members of the public who have volunteered to be interviewed. What was she supposed to do? Tell them to wait till they could read the story in tomorrow's Guardian? 

I'm surprised so many people are upset that news organisations supply news to members of the public. It seems to be symptomatic of the "Sky = Murdoch = Evil" attitude that abounds post-Leveson, where even a picture of Murdoch rescuing a kitten* would be met with howls of rage from "sickened" Twitter users.

Was this a shameful piece of reporting? Yes, but by the Guardian, not Sky. It told at least two deliberate lies in order to whip up a hysterical response against a competitor, adding the reaction of Tom Watson, who has campaigned against the Murdoch media for nearly a decade and is hardly an objective voice. 

Saying "make up your own mind" to readers is truly ironic, considering the way the paper has cynically tried to manipulate their reactions from the start. 

Moral: Ethics exist at the Guardian, as long as they can be exploited for competitive advantage

*Disclaimer: Image might have been manipulated

Apostrophes in plurals

There is a simple riposte that all grammarians are familiar with hearing. It goes something like this: "The rules are too complicated and who gives a stuff anyway? People know what I mean."

Boots: remarkably thick, even by cat standards

True, and I know what my cat means when he follows me into the kitchen and wraps his tail around my leg. He wants feeding. In fact, almost every attempt by my cat to engage my attention can be translated as "Feed me". 

So "They know what I mean" is only a valid argument if you aspire to no higher level of communication than my cat, who is remarkably stupid even by cat standards.

When it comes to apostrophes in plurals, those who say the rules are too complicated seem to have devised a rule of their own that is almost infinitely more convoluted than the real rule. As far as I can gather, it goes something like this:

No apostrophes in plurals, unless it's a foreign word, an abbreviation, an acronym, a word I don't know how to spell, a word that ends in a vowel that isn't 'e' or word that is in any way a bit funny or unusual

Poor me. I'm going to stick with the super-intellectual rule laid down by those Grammar Nazis (or is that Nazi's?)

No apostrophes in plurals

Admittedly, that's a simplified version. The full, long form is as follows:

No apostrophes in plurals. Ever

That includes abbreviations, which is much easier now that dots are considered fussy. Sorry if that's too complicated. Leave your WTF?s in the comments section.

Moral: The simpler the rule, the easier it is to devise something far more confusing

The Olympic visitor's phrasebook

July and August will see the UK spend two weeks enjoying the fruits of a £9-25 billion (depending on how you do the sums) investment in a Festival of Minor Sports. It has another name, but it is illegal to use it unless you are a multi-billionaire corporate sponsor.

Of course, very few British people will be at the events themselves, since most of the tickets are too expensive or have been promised to bureaucrats, politicians, sponsors or other apparatchiks and freeloaders, while unauthorised persons within a five-mile radius of any venue are likely to be shot with bazookas if they come near. Special measures have also been taken to ensure that the most important visitors need never see the vulgar plebs known as 'Londoners'. However, the more adventurous might find themselves dealing with the colourful patois used by the locals, so please cut out and keep this guide in order to save embarrassment:

Words and phrases you might encounter

"Welcome to London"

Sit down, shut up and empty your pockets. We'll be along to strip-search you in three hours.

"A good service is operating on all routes"

A train will arrive eventually. Probably.

"We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause you"

We can't be bothered supplying the service you've paid for. What are you going to do?

Choob

Spelt 'tube', this is London's underground railway. For the convenience of all, it stops running just before the pubs close.

Pub

Where Londoners gather before fighting each other.

Pub grub

Something wriggling in your salad.

Night bus

Mobile vomitorium

The Bill

Police

The Fuzz

Police

The Filth

Police

Crisps

Thinly cut potatoes, deep fried and dusted with industrial waste, known as 'chips' in the USA.

Chips

Deep-fried potato sticks, known as 'French fries' in other parts of the world, except in France, where they are unknown.

Chippy

A carpenter, or a shop selling fish, mystery-meat pies and deep-fried horse penises.

Yingerrrrrluuuund!

A word of obscure origin, chanted in a pub before hitting a foreigner.

Yeeearsenooooo! Cheeyelseeyee! Cmonyouspurs! Meeewor!

Names of London football teams. Chanted in a pub before hitting another Englishman. Other clubs are available, but if you hear the names 'Fulham' or 'Queens Park Rangers' chanted menacingly then you have entered a surreal plane of alternative reality.

"Do what, John?"

"Pardon?", in the sense of "Say that again and I'll lamp you."

Lamp

Hit

"May I help you?"

Spend some money or get out.

"Got a light?"

Give me your wallet.

Moral: The English are charming when sober, whenever that is.

Over-egging the pudding

The Guardian seems to have a fascination with sports writers who construct sentences in much the same way a seven-year old bakes a cake. The basic ingredients are there, but then their enthusiasm gets the better of them and before you know it, a simple jam sponge is adulterated with noons, hundreds and thousands, half a bowl of Coco Pops, mashed banana and a sausage roll.

Chief football writer Kevin McCarra is the master when it comes to producing collections of thoughts that all vaguely relate to the subject but are thrown onto the page in a random order. When enough sentences have been written, the result is split into paragraphs and published as an article. 

Now the football season is over, the torch has been passed to Mike Selvey, who brings his own unique talent to the task of making cricket seem more baffling than it really is. 

Whereas McCarra uses the Random Sentence Generator®™, Selvey has his own fog machine. The result is that his sentences resemble a forgetful old man shuffling round his flat trying to find his glasses. Midway through the search, it becomes clear that he has forgotten where he started and is no longer sure exactly what he was looking for. Here's how he describes Ravi Bopara's innings in yesterday's one-day match against Australia:

He and Eoin Morgan, who was within the merest smudge of a mark on Hotspot of being lbw to the second ball he faced (Aleem Dar, the third umpire may have heard a noise as well for it transpired that the inside edge was scarcely detectable by Snicko either), had added 79 in 73 balls for their fourth-wicket partnership when, having made 82, with eight fours, from 85 balls and with the testing total of two runs needed from 29 deliveries, he attempted the sharpest of singles to Brett Lee at mid-off, who flung down the stumps with the batsman still well short in his dive. (Guardian, 2 July 2012)

The sentence starts with Bopara, but by the end Eoin Morgan, Aleem Dar, Snicko and Brett Lee have all got involved. The poor verb somehow has to make sense of 105 other words, 24 of them nouns. It's an impossible task. 

Speaking of McCarra, he seems to have an understudy in Barney Ronay:

No doubt due in part to Ukraine playing in Donetsk on the same night, but also, perhaps, appropriate tribute to that reigning-in, the one-bank-of-eight defence that here was absent from the start. (Guardian, 15 June 2012)

It's always good to remove unnecessary ingredients from a recipe, but I strongly recommend keeping the main verb. I'd also recommend learning the difference between 'reign' and 'rein'.

Moral: Put two nouns and a verb into a bowl. Stir gently. Leaven with commas and lightly season with adjectives. Add no more than one conditional clause or the mixture will not rise.