David Cameron

[P.K.]

And the words 'A recent survey revealed...' always have the effect of making me want to switch off.

Interesting. I do not mean a "survey" conducted by an appalling rag like The Daily Mail where they go out into the street and ask punters questions like "Do you trust Tony Blair 100%". Were you to ask that kind of question about any politician you will always get the vast majority saying "No" but it gives The Rail the next day headline "90% Surveyed by your Trust Us Until You Die Daily Mail do NOT trust Tony Blair". It's just awful.

 

The Department of Health commissioned MORI to scan the UK National Dailies for stories about the NHS and to categorize them according to content, impact and so forth. So obviously the impact will take into account the circulation figures which for The Rail is a bit of a misnomer as they dump loads of copies in places like Little Chef. Anyway, MORI claims they do their bit e.g.

Slant is measured by trained researchers - they read each story and decide whether it was positive, negative or neutral etc etc

The results are produced every 6 months but I suspect only reported for public consumption annually.

 

I find the results interesting i.e. over 12 months my paper The Grauniad will have on average 87 daily articles compared to The Torygraph's 66 and The Rail's 59. But for the last 12 months - 2004 - The Rail is far and away the biggest current detractor of the NHS. But because it's only doing it to try and diss Labour all the time it's going nowhere.

 

http://www.dh.gov.uk/assetRoot/04/11/81/21/04118121.pdf

 

You know, I can't help thinking that being turned off by a simple word - "survey" - a lot of people are missing out on a lot of interesting and factual data.

[Lonan3]

You know, I can't help thinking that being turned off by a simple word - "survey" - a lot of people are missing out on a lot of interesting and factual data.

 

Sorry, P K. I probably should have made that clearer. Once the details of the survey, or a link to it, are provided - as you have done - then I accept the validity, at least to some degree. What I don't find particularly endearing is the habit that many people have of simply saying 'A recent survey revealed...' in order to support an argument.

I agree that the Mail is - and has always been - a lousy paper (I remember a history project which involved studying a report of the massacre of foreign nationals during the Boxer Rebellion in Peking in 1905 that listed the names of the dead when, in fact, no such 'massacre' had taken place).

However, I think it's impossible to find a British national newspaper that doesn't have some kind of agenda - political or otherwise - which adds a 'slant' to the way they present the news.

Far from trying to defend any one of them, I was merely pointing out that none of them can be considered 100% reliable sources of information.