The Media Blog

Times takes Royal Wedding cover crown

Naturally every newspaper has gone with the royal wedding on its front page today - there's just no getting away from it -and most have predictably gone with exactly the same image, give or take a millisecond here and there.

Each have embellished the image to a lesser or greater extent - a weak pun on The Sun versus the pristine front page of the Mail (while The Mirror weaves in the unfortunate bridesmaid who has become an overnight web sensation). But ultimately this safest of choices - exactly the same image their editorial predecessors would have gone for in happier, less competitive times for their business - shows the newspaper industry's collective preference for not straying too far from the crowd or historic precedent:   

              

The Telegraph, FT and Guardian have also toed the line, with the Guardian even using the 'sealed with a kiss' headline that it shares with the Express:

             

Which leaves The Independent and The Times fighting it out to be the best of the bunch. The Independent, as is its wont, has certainly dared to be different with its 'cut out and throw away keep' Tracey Emin scribble (still depicting that kiss). But the less said about this aberration the better:

So it falls to The Times to win, hands down, the battle of today's royal wedding front pages. It has focussed on the Austin Powers moment when William and Kate departed Buckingham Palace. Even many of those who tried to avoid the big event, have grudgingly admitted this was a nice, lighthearted touch and it certainly helped the event stand out from the more tedious pomp and ceremony of the day and tiresome discussion of the dress which could have marked any such event in any era. 

Many commentators, and the Clarence House PR machine, have laboured hard to brand the royal couple "progressive", "modern", "fun" but The Times is the only paper to have reflected any of these apparently noteable traits on its wraparound cover:  

How to handle Twitter hecklers... the Edith Bowman way

Not only did Radio 1 DJ Edith Bowman spend the Royal Wedding reporting on the event from St Andrews University, she also took time to respond to sweary critics on Twitter, after her choice of outfit made her an unlikely trending topic. First up was @joapet, a self-confessed job seeker:

And then came @JohnnyTattoo40: 

Phwoarr! Look at the policies on that

It sounds like the name of a game show from the now defunct L!VE TV (9pm, just after Topless Darts) but 'Whose Boobs Are These?' is actually the title of an article posted on the Telegraph website this afternoon (hat tip @MatthewWells). The state of the art annotation is the Telegraph's own. As is the high brow political debate:   

The Telegraph may simply be trying to deflect from an altogether different sexist comment made during Prime Minister's Questions of course.

Outrage at BBC 'death scene' exposes Mail hypocrisy

The Daily Mail is up in arms today about the BBC's decision to screen the final moments of a man dying of cancer.

The Mail accuses the BBC of doing it purely to attract viewers with a macabre spectacle.

The Mail raises a good question.

What kind of media outlet would sensationally show images of a man dying simply to draw people in?

Yes, you guessed it.

On the very same day the Mail criticised the BBC it ran with a story at the top of its website, accompanied by very graphic images of a 'human cannonball' at the Kenty County Show missing his safety net with fatal consequences. The story is here though we would not recommend visiting it or viewing the Mail's detailed photo gallery of the victim's fall to earth.

The People's big 'Exclusive': Somebody call Trading Standards

It's easy to forget that Sunday newspaper The People still exists. But every now and then the paper steps out of the shadows with claims of a scoop all of its very own.

After weeks of scrabbling around, trying in vain to dish some dirt on Prince William's stag do all other tabloids had pretty much given up the ghost on that coveted exclusive. But The People never gave up and this morning it hit the nation's newstands with this splash, right.

What they don't tell us on the front page - and why would they - is that the pictures are actually nine years old and absolutely nothing to do with Prince William's stag do.

What's more, it's not even that "exclusive" given the pictures, taken at a friend's 21st birthday party, circulated widely online in 2002 and appeared in a number of overseas publications at the time.

The degree to which this cover attempts to mislead readers suggests The People should actually be answerable to Trading Standards rather than the PCC on this one. 

20 years of Sky Sports: So that's where all our sport went...

It's 20 years today since Sky Sports, as we have come to know it, burst its way onto UK TV screens, revolutionsing sports coverage in the process. It's also 20 years since terrestrial viewers have had their live coverage of many major sporting events reduced to half-views in crowded pubs or nocturnal radio reports of overseas batting collapses. 

The jewel in the crown of Sky Sports is undoubtably its live coverage of the FA Premier League. Since the broadcaster paid £302m in 1992 to outbid BBC and ITV, live, televised football has changed, almost unrecognisably into an all-singing, all-dancing, cheerleading, firework-detonating, multi-screen extravaganza where the sport is just one 'stakeholder' in the overall marriage of 'multi-platform entertainment experience' and commercial juggernaut.

In pure coverage terms, live football has gone from a handful of televised games per year to a handful of televised games per day.

There are many arguments against showing major sporting events on a subscription channel of course, - not least that BARB figures show such channels command a fraction of the overall viewing audience. But for better or worse Sky has certainly brought a pace of change to televised sport, including the introduction of new technologies from unimagined camera angles to HD and 3D TV, via a headying array of on-screen graphics and stats.

The riches and media sway brought by the channel have also transformed sportsmen, chiefly footballers, from gaudily-clothed, super-cocky nightclub scrappers in semi-detached houses into gaudily-clothed, super-injunctioning nightclub scrappers in semi-detached reality. It put beyond any reasonable doubt, for once and for all, the question as to whether footballers have more money than sense. Even in the eighties, it was still borderline.

However, the choice for armchair sports fans remains the same: pay up for Uncle Rupert or scratch around for scraps among late night highlights shows. And with news yesterday that Rupert Murdoch is now sniffing around Formula 1 it's easy to believe the next 20 years will see more sports disappear behind the Sky paywall.

Online jokers mess with the Indie

Who knew that you could alter URLs for the Independent's website and they would still work? That's how the below webpage started circulating wildly on Twitter today, following the Indie's rehashing of the 'Kate Middleton' jelly bean PR stunt.

It seems a prankster - and astute media pundit - amended the URL to read "/utter-PR-fiction-but-people-love-this-shit-so-fuck-it-lets-just-print-it" and then shared their handywork with the Twitterverse. Many assumed it was a genuine complaint from a sub editor at the Independent.

However, we should stress, this is clearly not the URL the Independent gave its own story and we would absolutely discourage others from changing any website's URLs:

 
 

Did Sun snapper use Kate's Crapper?

Today's Sun 'Exclusive' offers a sneak peek at the hotel suite Kate Middleton will use the night before she gets married. 

It includes a series of photos highlighting all the fancy fixtures and fittings around the £150k Goring Hotel suite. But look closely and you may notice something about this stalker special.

If you look at one of the early photos, the toilet seat in the bathroom is most definitely down. But later in the same photoshoot the toilet seat is now up, leading me to wonder whether, in the intervening minutes the Sun's snapper had taken his own Royal Wee in Kate's Venerable Crapper: 

 
 Left, the toilet seat is down. Right, now it is up...

Of course truth is often stranger than fiction and with that in mind it seems more likely the Sun's photographer may actually have lifted the seat just so that Sun readers could look right down into the toilet - perhaps a 'Kate's-eye-view' should nerves get the better of her. How nice.

How Hugh Grant's super scoop scuppers week-old Daily Mail story

If you haven't read Hugh Grant's account of how he turned the tables on a phone-hacking former hack, by recording a candid conversation between the two, then you really must. It's brilliant stuff.

An added little bonus of the under-cover recording, which took place when Grant visited the pub of former News Of The World reporter Paul McMullan, is that it undermines a story published in The Daily Mail, dated 4 April and exposes some of that paper's current newsgathering tactics:

Hugh! Is that a dictaphone in your pocket, or are you just
pleased to see Paul McMullan again?

Clearly McMullan couldn't resist the temptation of selling yet another story to the Mail, because this follows one in January, when McMullan happened to be a chance passer-by when Grant's Ferrari broke down in Kent, again covered in the Daily Mail (for which they reportedly paid McMullan £3,000). 

Of course it was in the landlord's best interests to claim his boozer is Grant's "favourite pub" despite it being the actor's first visit. The Mail weren't about to edit out such a claim. (McMullan also granted an interview to The Guardian on the proviso they promote his pub in the resulting article - they duly obliged).

A more major detail, you would have thought, would have been the fact that McMullan the innocent landlord in this tale is heavily linked to the News Of The World phone hacking scandal, whose victims allegedly included Hugh Grant.

Did the Mail not think this relevant, or express surprise that Grant's "favourite pub" should belong to an alumnus one of his most notorious tabloid tormenters?

Or did they not remember McMullan's chance encounter with Grant on the hard shoulder of the A256 in January? It was only three months ago, after all.

Clearly it would not be in the Mail's best interests to be too honest about their sources or check the credibility of the stories they are handed. However, it is rather sweet that what McMullan thought was yet another chance to cash in on Grant with an easy pay-cheque from the Mail and get some free publicity for his pub in the process, has backfired so spectacularly.

And what a beautiful sting in the tail this story has. Compare the two photos below. The one on the left was taken in January when Grant begrudgingly accepted a lift from McMullan on the A256. Not a happy Hugh. But the one on the right was taken when Grant had a dictaphone almost poking out of his top pocket, having turned the tables so spectacularly on McMullan. A very happy Hugh:

And your point is...?

Daily Star Sunday columnist Joe Mott recently made a bid to be promoted into Division Three of the media world's League of Morons with a quip about AIDS. But upon seeing Mott's byline photo a trend began to present itself. In fact, I'd go further. I'd say an infallible way of identifying an idiot presented itself.

You see, idiots in the media clearly elect to have a picture taken of themself while pointing. Don't believe me? Check out this gurning rogues gallery of pointing idiots:

  (Clockwise from top left: Jeremy Clarkson, Garry Bushell,
Jim Davidson, Jeremy Kyle, Joe Mott, Glenn Beck)

The 'point' is visual shorthand for "I have a point" (see, they are quite literally pointing) for those who lack the eloquence to get their point across in words, or lack the kind of target audience who could independently digest said 'point' without some kind of clear reminder to look for a point among the words they are reading or hearing.

They probably think it looks as though they're saying "I'm about to clobber YOU with my massive wit" but Clarkson, for example, looks like he's actually saying "If YOU tell anybody it was me who left that in the toilet I'm going to run you over".

Moron of the week...

It's some testament to the utter pointlessness of the Daily Star Sunday and the barely negligible notoriety of columnist Joe Mott that it has taken at least 36 hours for anybody other than the paper's readers to discover this comment (right).

For those of you who don't speak moron, what Mott is saying is that if Gervais was gay we could all be forgiven for thinking he must have AIDS.

Or at least we could, if we were as ignorant as Mott.

He can't quite bring himself to say the word AIDS, obviously - he probably thinks that's one way people can catch it - but perhaps such innuendo is what passes for humour in the mind of Mott and the evolutionary lost tribe of Daily Star readers.

Hat in tree: Shocker

A great scoop here from North Yorkshire...or is it?

It certainly plays to our love of classic local news stories but rumour has it that sadly it's an April Fool story, dragging its heels.

Sign of the times? BBC criticised for fact-checking

The BBC has been criticised for attempting to "cover up" the deaths of two horses during its broadcast of Saturday's Grand National from Aintree, after its commentators didn't offer an explanation during the running of the race as to why screens had been drawn around two prone horses.

Head cheerleaders for this accusation are the Daily Mail and The Telegraph. Fortunately, the excellent Tabloid Watch blog has already done a great job of listing the lengths the BBC actually went to - on its website, on Twitter and on air - in order to keep viewers fully informed. 

But while The Mail and the Telegraph's criticism doesn't stand up to closer inspection, it does offer some insight into those papers' attitudes towards fact-checking.

Grand National

The strongest criticism against the BBC appears to be that its commentators and reporters waited until they had the full facts at the end of the race before confirming and commenting on the issue of equine fatalities which will always prove controversial around Grand National time.

For its part Aintree makes it very clear to all racegoers, through on-course announcements and via its racecards and information points, that protective screens will be drawn around any prone horse or jockey if they require treatment on the course. Seeing screens drawn around doesn't automatically mean a horse is dead or being put down. It doesn't mean the jockey is seriously injured either. 

While it is a worrying sign, it is first and foremost a precaution used to keep prying cameras out and to give medical teams and their patients the privacy needed to deliver effective care.

Similarly there are nine veterinary surgeons deployed around the two-and-a-quarter mile course whose priority is to stay in touch with the field as they get spread out and observe all horses, running and fallen in case treatment is needed. They remain in radio contact with one another and the course stewards, but probably don't consider updating the BBC as a priority until after the race. 

Sadly on this occasion two horses did die, but the BBC was clearly waiting for confirmation of these facts before announcing it to a worldwide audience of millions, or speculating about the welfare of a horse or jockey live on air. 

Understandably they waited until they were 100 per cent sure. Then, armed with the facts the BBC was very unambiguous regarding what had taken place.

It's a sad, but telling state of affairs when media outlets would criticise a rival for fact-checking.

Daily Star stops even pretending...

The newspapers are divided on what today's biggest story is but The Daily Star is in no doubt: it's the return of Big Brother, of course. The dead-in-the-water reality TV format is being resurrected for Channel 5, owned of course by Daily Star proprietor Richard Desmond:

 

 

Exposed: The Somerset 'Turtlepig'

Regular readers will know that here on The Media Blog there will always be a warm welcome for a great local news story (such as 'Newport Bench Still Facing The Wrong Way'). And the Bridgwater Mercury has unearthed a classic of its kind this week. It is clearly a major local news story for the people of Bridgwater, involving as it does both the Bridge and the water:

  
You can read the full story here. Including the immortal line:

Coral Pople told the Mercury at the scene yesterday: "I've been here for 45 minutes. Everyone was saying it was a turtle – but it looks more like a pig to me."

Have Bona, will polish

Repeat after me: There is nothing funny about 'Bona' hard wood polish, or its advertising slogan "When the Wood Matters". Therefore sniggering at this US television advert would just be childish:

(Hat tip: Lucy Tobin)