True News

Cleveleys MP in bizarre love-triangle with conjoined twins watched his two-headed lover eat dogfood whilst listening to Status Quo’s Greatest Hits on MiniDisc.

It’s exactly the sort of rubbish you expect to read in the news these days, as ‘fake news’ is on the rise. At least that’s what some people want you to believe – but in an age of fake news, should you believe them? And if they aren’t to be believed, then is there really all the fake news they claim there is? It’s a minefield.

Ever since President Donald Trump began banding around the term ‘fake news’, it seems everybody is either using, or misusing it. Of course, Hoax news items deliberately written to mislead should rightly be called ‘fake news’ when they are created for the purpose of financial gain, perhaps through the sales of newspapers; or for some other personal gain such as political advantage.

But just because something isn’t true doesn’t make it fake. Most people that like to read or watch the news also enjoy a work of fiction such as a movie or novel. Human beings, on the whole, are equally intrigued and entertained by both the untrue as well as the true. And if they have an ounce of common sense, they can usually tell which is which. If you have to tell people that you are joking, then your joke has already failed. By the same reasoning, there is something seriously wrong with your news reporting skills if you have to tell your readers that you are a real, true newspaper. And yet, last week Blackpool’s amateur publication The Evening Gazette published a series of articles to reassure its rapidly decreasing readership that the paper is a genuine news source.

"There is something seriously wrong with your news reporting skills if you have to tell your readers that you are a real, true newspaper."

In one article they argued that their journalistic integrity was proven beyond doubt by their coverage late last year of Strictly star Gorka Marquez and his claim that he was beaten up in Blackpool; that while other newspapers reported that he definitely had been savagely beaten by locals, the Gazette remained skeptical and maintained a position of neutrality until it was shortly after proven that he made the whole thing up.

It’s a bit of a vain claim. The Gazette’s original report on ‘Gorkagate’, along with most other newspapers stated that he had been attacked. Okay, so they used quotation marks and words like ‘alleged’ to leave room for doubt – but so did nearly every other newspaper. This is common journalistic practice during an ongoing investigation. In follow up articles The Gazette even quoted other newspapers such as The Sun; and they were NOT the only paper to report that there was some skepticism over Gorka’s claims before Police finally dropped the investigation on 14^th December. Even if they showed an ounce more skepticism than the rest, sitting on the fence is not particularly noble or a sign of integrity.

A second bizarre article by The Gazette asserted that they blazed a trail by reporting on Blackpool’s problem with the drug ‘Spice’, and that this goes towards proving they are bastions of truth.

Fact is, they were NOT the first to report on Blackpool’s Spice problem. The Guardian reported the same as far back as November 2015.

So despite being Blackpool’s newspaper, they were beaten to this Blackpool-based story by the national press. What’s more, The Gazette’s coverage of the Spice problem since has been pretty terrible. One article attempting to explain what Spice is had an accompanying stock photograph of a man snorting cocaine, which doesn’t really convince anybody they know what they are writing about. Their best explanation of the drug was an article lifted verbatim from independent news source The Conversation. And they have sensationalised their stories by repeatedly calling Blackpool the ‘Spice Capital’ - a hackneyed term which other newspapers have also applied to Blackburn, Preston and Manchester.

Yet another claim to brilliance by Gazette was that they “revealed” how foreign patients not entitled to free healthcare from the NHS walked out of Blackpool Victoria Hospital with unpaid bills adding up to more than £150,000. Yes they did – more than two weeks after the national press revealed that this was happening in hospitals all over the country and published links to the ‘league table’ of hospital losses which Gazette were just able to pluck the local figure from.

There are lots of reasons to pick fault with these articles, but what really got our heckles up was this:

“Fake news takes many forms…. Comment, unlabelled as such, masquerades as truth; satire is confused with reality.”

Here’s a comment for you, Gazette: you are deeply wrong to even mention satire in the same breath as 'fake news'. Satire is an ancient and noble profession. Parody has always been protected by law. True, there are lines that can be crossed, such as when parody strays into defamation; but at its best parody and satire can get the truth of a matter across in a far more powerful way than a straight-up news report. Some of the most powerful news reporting of the early 20^th century was done through cartoons that are still studied by history students today. You can probably learn as much about current affairs by watching Have I Got News For You as you can from watching News at Ten.

When you tune into BBC News, you know its real. When you watch a comedy show, you should recognise it is for laughs. Shows like HIGNFY or 'Mock the Week' blend news and comedy but neither need to clarify every statement they make. Your target audience should never have to ask "is this comedy?" or "is this real?". When you have to actually tell your audience which you are, you have already failed.

An example of fake news

Why does The Gazette sneer at satirists and parody? These are two vital journalistic tools which many feel report on matters more truthfully than rhetoric. The Gazette doesn't like parody or satire for two reasons: firstly because they have no real sense of humour (as evidenced by their recent attempts at humour on their Facebook page which are mainly just reposts of cat videos) and secondly because satire shines a light on what poor journalists Gazette really are. Just as George W Bush used an attack by an Afghanistan based terror group as an excuse to start a war on an entirely different Arab country hoping nobody would see the difference, Gazette are likely hoping that they can squash the ancient and noble arts of parody and satire by calling them 'fake news', again hoping their readers don't know the difference. Gazette must think their readers are idiots.

At Cleveleys News, we credit our readership with the intelligence they deserve. You won’t ever catch us reassuring the public that we are not ‘fake news’, because we shouldn’t have to. You already know.

Of course, we’re not saying The Gazette are ‘fake news’ either - we’re just saying they aren’t very good news. In every sense of the expression. Sorry Gazette, but you really are terrible at what you do. It isn’t just the constant spelling and grammatical errors that litter your publication, or your complete lack of investigative journalism skills. It’s just, well, everything. And if it hurts to hear this, we’re sorry, but we aren’t the only ones saying this. Speaking personally to an ex-Gazette journalist at a public event a couple of years ago, I asked why they left. They replied “because it’s a s*** newspaper full of mistakes”. At a recent poetry event in Blackpool one piece by a local poet listed the many things he would never wish to do, and “spellcheck the Gazette” brought much laughter from the audience. Everybody knows that it’s true, Gazette - except you.