Zoo in the head

Mistakes were made

One of the first things they tell you about when you start in journalism is the importance of avoiding passive constructions: never "This was said by X" but "X said this."

Rupert Murdoch has never been one for the conventional pieties, though: you could deduce that from his apology, published in British newspapers this morning, for the appalling newsgathering methods employed by journalists at the News of the World. "We are sorry for the serious wrongdoing that occurred," he says, and "We are deeply sorry for the hurt suffered by the individuals affected": whereas what he means is "We are sorry we did wrong" and "We are deeply sorry that we hurt people." Otherwise, it might look as though he thought someone else was doing the wrong, someone else was causing the pain. And he couldn't possibly think that, could he?

Oh.

Have you met Miss Jones?



In the Daily Mail, Liz Jones retraces Joanna Yeates' last steps and ponders her death's deeper meanings:

Leaving Jo’s flat, I return to my car. My satnav takes me to the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

The theory is the killer took the long route from the flat to where he dumped the body to avoid the CCTV cameras. Perhaps he also wanted to avoid the 50p toll.

I don’t have 50p and try tossing 30p and a White Company button into the bucket. It doesn’t work.

There is now an angry queue behind me. Isn’t it interesting that you can snatch a young woman’s life away from her in the most violent, painful, frightening way possible, take away her future children, her future Christmases, take away everything she loves, and yet there are elaborate systems in place to ensure you do not cross a bridge for only 30 pence?

Finally, a man in a taxi jumps out, and runs to me brandishing a 50p piece.

‘Not all men are monsters,’ he says, grinning. Maybe not. But one monster is all it takes.

Poignant, sensitive, heart-breaking. Or, to take some of the milder remarks from the comments thread, "Shameful, inept, morbid, irrelevant, patronising", "insensitive, lazy, snobbish" and "unbelievably ill conceived".

Hold the front page

The head of Telegraph Media Group's digital operation, Greg Hadfield, has announced his departure, telling a somewhat startled audience at the news:rewired conference that newspapers have no future. Understandably, Telegraph Media Group puts a slightly different spin on the story - it was a 12-month contract which was ending anyway.

But where on earth did Hadfield get the idea that newspapers are in trouble? It can't be from the Telegraph, which is still the kind of alert, responsible and intellectually vital news organisation essential to the health of any democracy: as evidence, may I point you to this story, and this one?

On the mat

A new feature: me commenting on the things that come through my letterbox - magazines, brochures, secondhand books, etc. Today, it's the new issue of the London Review of Books. As usual, the first issue of a new year carries Alan Bennett's diary for the old year (though this year it's been demoted to the back of the magazine: a healthy development, I think, since from its old vantage-point at the front it tended to overshadow everything else). À propos of the Obama inauguration, Bennett writes:

"...I don’t read any official estimates of the numbers though it’s to be hoped they estimate more accurately in the US than they do here, where any demonstration of which the police disapprove – the Stop the War marches, for instance – is routinely marked down whereas demos on which the police look kindly, the Countryside Alliance, say, are correspondingly inflated."

The idea that the police talk down numbers at left-wing (broadly defined) protests and assemblies of all kinds is regarded as a truism by many on the left; but what evidence is there that it is true?

There have been many occasions when organisers of protests disagree with police over numbers present; but I can't see that the police have a strong incentive for talking the numbers down - indeed, I'd have thought that, like any other bureaucracy, they'd be wanting to talk up the difficulty of the job they face and hence boost their claim for resources. On the other hand, protesters themselves have a strong incentive for talking up the numbers.

I'm not aware, either, of any evidence of the police overestimating numbers at right-wing (broadly defined) protests: as far as the Countryside Alliance goes, one thing I recall from being, briefly, a spectator at their 2002 "Liberty and Livelihood" (blecch!) march is that they made everybody walk past a  counting-point to give their numbers credibility; I don't know that the fuzz had much to do with it.

None of this is to say that Bennett is wrong: just that I have no idea why he's so sure he's right. This article suggests that police methodology may routinely underestimate crowd numbers, but not that there is any political bias: the readers' comments set out the arguments nicely.

The picture is from the Grunwick strike of the 1970s - the decade to which, according to the Daily Mail, we are now returning.

What are zoos for?

A good piece by Peter Barber in the FT which covers most of the important issues. A couple of qualifications, though: 1) He relies for statistics and anecdotal evidence largely on organisations, such as Born Free, that are explicitly anti-zoo. 2) The claim that only Asian elephants are in decline over-simplifies the situation: elephant numbers are rising in southern Africa, but elsewhere in the continent their populations are far more vulnerable and uncertain.

The poetry of the press

Over at Qwerty2009, Andy Marshall contemplates the poetry of American newspaper names. For my money, their Plain Dealers and Star-Tribunes have nothing on Irish local papers, of which there are an astonishing number, many with thrillingly rhythmic or alliterative titles: the Carlow Nationalist, Sligo Champion, Donegal Democrat, Connacht Sentinel, Enniscorthy Echo; and, up north, the Down Recorder, Tyrone Constitution and Fermanagh's Impartial Reporter.