The story of a non-story

Having criticised the BBC on Thursday for their consistently misleading, slanted and sometimes downright inaccurate reporting of anything to do with the nuclear industry, it is only fair that I should call out and praise a good piece of BBC journalism.

Chris Mason has an item on the BBC website here about the non-story of "Jumpergate."

A couple of days ago, Jeremy Paxman tried to trap Energy Secretary Ed Davey into telling people to wear jumpers by asking him whether he wears them himself. Ed Davey gave a straight answer to the question - e.g. that he does wear jumpers himself - but was very careful not to tell other people to wear them.

His exact words were "I wear jumpers at home, but you are missing the point here Jeremy, we do need to help people with their bills, I am extremely worried about them, we can use competition the way we have, we can make our homes warmer and use less electricity and gas by going more energy efficient."

Not to be prevented from running a good headline, "Energy Secretary wears jumpers to keep energy bills down " by the little technicality that Ed Davey had not actually said this, various papers such as the Independent duly ran such a headline anyway.

Fast forward to yesterday's Friday morning briefing by the Prime Minister's press spokesman, and Mirror was going for bigger game with the same story, trying to get the PM's press secretary to say anything which could be spun along the lines of "Prime Minister says wear a jumper."

When they got nowhere asking the PM's spokesman if David Cameron wears jumpers (the reply was "The Prime Minister doesn't tend to give fashion advice.") they tried asking him what the PM thought of charities advising people to wrap up warm.

Despite the fact that the PM's spokesman clearly indicated that the Prime Minister "is not going to prescribe necessarily the actions individuals should take" the fact that the spokesman did not explicitly reject such advice was twisted by newspapers and bloggers including the Mirror, Guardian, Telegraph, Mail, and Huffington Post into the suggestion that he had, with misleading headlines like "No 10 says people should consider wearing jumpers."

When Downing street put out a press release explictly repudiating the idea that the PM would tell people what to wear, various parts of the press described it as "backtracking" in spite of the fact that number 10 had never actually said it in the first place.

It all reminds me of the statement attributed to Mark Twain and others that "A lie can get half way round the world while the truth is putting it's boots on." and all credit to Chris Mason for putting out the truth about the ridiculous way the press created and reported this non-story.

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