How journalism works: sins of omission

I have several friends and friends-of-friends who work in Civil Service press offices. In the pub on Saturday night one of them mentioned, with a groan, that the Mail on Sunday had spent the second half of the week ringing round every single government department asking them how much of the meat in their staff canteens was halal.

As a life-long vegetarian I applaud the Mail group for developing a sudden interest in the finer points of animal welfare - obviously this story has NOTHING to do with the fact that halal meat is something Muslims eat. No no no. It's all about how inhumane the halal slaughter process is. To prove it, there's even an angry quote from someone at animal rights group Viva!, an organisation the Mail has not previously expressed a great deal of love for as one of its leading lights is Heather Mills. She got the full Jan Moir treatment in July when the Mail's resident hate-monger visited her vegan cafe on the south coast.

Anyhow, it turned out that the vast majority of canteens in government buildings don't actually serve any halal meat as a matter of course, although most can order it in if required for specific functions and events.

However, I found this out by speaking to some government press officers. You wouldn't have found it out by reading the Mail on Sunday. Its story simply listed all the places that DO serve halal meat - Wembley Stadium, some pub chains, a few hospitals and some schools - in order to prove that we're living in what the headline calls "Halal Britain"

Had it emerged that every building in Whitehall was stocked to the rafters with ritually slaughtered sheep and cows, you can bet that it would have been right there in the headline. However, in Mail World if a fact doesn't fit the story, it's always best to leave it out.

Who's furious, exactly?

You know what you're getting with the Daily Star and progressive liberalism it ain't, so complaining about the horrendous way it reported a "story" about transsexual prisoners being allowed to request a strip search by a member of staff who shares their adopted gender seems rather redundant. Let's just say that the paper ran with the headline*:

BEHIND BRAS
Tranny strip-search fury

...and that it all went downhill from there, even managing refer to people whose:

"meat and two veg are still intact"

Classy. As I said, complaining about the use of language such as "trannies" in a Daily Star story is somewhat pointless. Suffice to say it wouldn't pass muster with the good people at Trans Media Watch. So let's ignore the bigotry (and the, er, interesting choice of photo on the website) and focus on the facts, starting with that headline. There's "fury" about these new rules, apparently. As the first sentence says:

"Female prison officers are angry at new rules which mean they may ordered to strip search transexual [sic] lags"

Further down we're told that;

"The move is creating unrest among female prison officers reluctant to strip-search male inmates."

But the only quote in the story, direct or otherwise, comes from a spokesman for the Ministry of Justice who, somewhat predictably, points out that these are not "new rules" but draft guidelines that have yet to be approved or implemented. Nowhere is there any evidence whatsoever of "angry" prison officers reacting with "fury". There's no quote from a named or anonymous prison officer expressing any opinion at all. There's not even that tabloid staple, the made-up quote that perfectly matches the paper's editorial line using language only ever deployed by tabloid hacks. They can't even get a response out of the Prison Officers Association, who are never shy about generating a media profile.

In short, there's absolutely no evidence of anyone being "furious" or "angry" about the proposed guidelines. Yet the Star manages to put "fury" in the sub-head, "angry" in the opening sentence and "unrest" further down the story.

Surely if prison officers up and down the land are up in arms, as the paper suggests, they'd be able to find at least ONE person who could actually say so?

*That's in the paper itself - the website used the slightly tamer "Female guards may be forced to search male trannies"