peterms

I'm trying to think why an Irishman would order Guinness in an airport bar in Detroit. Homesickness? Filming a documentary? Performing a Dadaist sketch? Surely not in expectation of a decent pint.

May involve fasting.

No, it needs to be saved. That will require a change of governance as well as staff.

PVs are always better for the tories, because postal voters tend to be older, more likely to be unable to get to the polling station and so on. It's not a new thing. For the predictions, it feels even more uncertain than usual, to me. As well as the normal difficulty in making predictions when there are lots of new people coming on to the register with an unknown or incompletely known propensity to vote, and the (possible) difficulty of predictive models developed incrementally over many years adjusting to a changing model of campaigning, there is also the further uncertainty of how Brexit will affect voting. Will it override other factors, or not? I see the forecasts as a bit of short-lived entertainment, and not to be taken too seriously. But we'll soon see how well they have done. Hung parliament, I would say. And Swansong to be the first party leader to step down, possibly leaving trails of fingernail marks in the carpet in the process. This may be a triumph of wishful thinking.

Well don't leave it there, man! We want the full story.

It's not about what I want them to write, it's that the way the story is written flies in the face of the very basics of reporting. It's not about what extra sources they have looked at, and it's not about what the Libdems do with their daft barcharts. It is about the decision to present an utterly striking difference reported by the study in the way they reported it. It is about the editorial choice made by the BBC in respect of how this specific story has been covered. This is not a difficult concept to grasp. Trying to divert this simple point into being instead about your perceptions of what I would like to see, is odd.

I have no problem with them covering extra points as well. What I am saying is that in an article about misleading information, a finding that one party has presented over 5,000 misleading pieces and the other party none, is such an obvious, glaring, central and newsworthy issue that to bury it under these ancillary points as they did cannot be a normal news presentation (which would have been more like the way ITV covered it), but can only be a deliberate decision to stifle it. The headline compounds it by talking in general terms about party communications being misleading - the old, old false equivalence game again. This is so blindingly obvious I can't understand why you don't see it. It is a case of going easy on the government by not highlighting the astonishing finding of the study. Presumably this was done out of timidity and fear of retribution rather than love for the tories, but it's unacceptable in any event.

There's no room, what with Kuenssberg and Peston already in there.

This is how journos are trained to present stories. Key point in the standfirst (and whoever adds the headline reflects it), then subsidiary point, then proceed to detail. It's absolutely basic.

Journalists are trained to identify the key points of a story, and to present them prominently, early in the story, before readers lose interest. This was so decades ago when Harold Evans wrote his seminal work on journalism, and it's even more the case now that the internet has brought many competing sources, and reduced attention spans still further. In a story about misleading ads, the discrepancy between several thousand from one party and none from the other is very obviously a key point, a staggering imbalance, and clearly newsworthy. This would be so even if the issue of whether the tories can be trusted had not become a theme of the campaign, which as everyone and especially journaliists covering these issues knows, is one very prominent theme. This piece of information was buried. As another journo commented, you have to get past the headline, the standfirst, and 18 paras before discovering it. Including other information doesn't mean the piece is balanced - it's the use of other and less dramatically newsworthy information ro submerge the key point that is in fact the cause for concern. I don't believe the author failed to understand the importance, significance or relevance of the point in question. Neither do I think he has forgotten the very basic principles of how ro write a story, because it would be hard to see how he could hold down the job if that were so. I don't suppose it is naked political bias and the journo is a tory activist. I'm more inclined to think it's the BBC wanting to softpedal, avoid criticism from the government (especially with threats about the licence fee being aired this week), and not cause a stir. That is a problem. It seems like a failure of journalism on quite a basic level, and one more example to add to a growing pile of concerns about how the BBC is managing its reporting of politics and this election.

That'll be the additional cost they want to pay for the same drugs as now.

The point being made is that the article states that 88% (5,952) of Conservative ads, and no Labour ads, were found to be false or misleading; and the headline presented the issue as being that political ads in general are misleading. If you don't think that is a slanted presentation, I find that astonishing.

What he's referencing is this work looking at facebook ads and seeing which were found to be misleading, here. It looked at several thousand ads. It is a different piece of work from the total of 31 that were "flagged", which doesn't seem to indicate whether they were identified for review or found to be untruthful.

Can't link the tweet itself, it contains a word which the site rules don't approve of.

That sounds unlikely. He had just been speaking with (or was being spoken to by) the cyclist when they were both standing still, before the cyclist turns away. It looks like he was just moving past him and didn't expect the armwaving to be repeated, so had to dodge. He then gives the cyclist a look, kind of "Watch what you're doing" rather than the reaction of someone who believes he has been assaulted.

I assume she was retweeting praise of herself, as some people like to do, and hadn't thought too much about the rest of the tweet. The problem is that by doing so, she may be perceived as endorsing the "cult" line, probably didn't mean to do so, and didn't really think about it. It looks sloppy rather than malicious, to me.

I think the reaction was different because the situation was different. At the tory conference, it is reported that there was a scuffle, described as "handbags". Because it involved trying to enter a secure area, security procedures were triggered, part of the venue was locked down for 20-30 minutes, and police and paramedics were called. The MP was sent home, which rather suggests more was involved than simply being pompous and challenging the staff who prevented entry. In the Leeds incident, an entirely false story was generated in order to direct attention away from the issue of the child lying on the floor, and it was repeated and amplified to millions without even the most basic verification being done, by very experienced journalists. These situations are not comparable.

The DUP will support the tories, I think. But the polls are very difficult to read. I wouldn't want to be a pollster right now.