It wasn't the Standard that won it claims Gilligan

With the result of the London mayoral contest going the way of Boris Johnson,there will be many commentators who will be saying,it was the Standard that won it.

The statement harks back to the Sun's of the 1992 general election.

In today's Independent,the man behind the headlines, Andrew Gilligan,defends his actions saying that he was merely highlighting the problems of Ken's administration

What the Standard can claim is this. Firstly, in the same way as Boris brought together an existing anti-Ken majority, our investigations into Lee Jasper and the missing millions crystallised many Londoners' existing doubts about Livingstone.

adding

they were factual and measured, thoroughly and transparently sourced, widely followed-up, had important real consequences, such as resignations and arrests, and have of course never, in any specific particular, been denied.

According to Gilligan,Livingstone was given the right of reply,something that he failed to take up

We gave Ken six days to answer our questions before publishing. Five months on there are still no answers. Instead, to our incredulity, he unleashed a barrage of abuse against me and the paper that confirmed not just our stories, but the fears about him

So was Ken simply defeated by the national backlash against the party and the Standard played its part by putting his administration under scrutiny.I am sure this will be featuring in future editions of media studies books

Gilligan is unrepentant over his anti Ken campaign

Andrew Gilligan defends his and the London evening standard's attacks on Ken Livingstone in the Guardian this morning.

If Ken Livingstone loses office tomorrow, however, and Boris Johnson becomes mayor of London, Gilligan will have proved himself one of the one most influential players in the election. For the past six months, he has been waging a relentless campaign in the pages of the capital's only paid-for newspaper, the London Evening Standard, under headlines such as "Ken's adviser is linked to terror group",

According to Gilligan

his style of government is fundamentally unpleasant and unscrupulous and cynical. He's got a sort of governing MO [modus operandi] which I absolutely deplore - which is essentially to segment the population, which is defined by one thing. If you're a Muslim, to Ken that's all you are. I'm saying he practises the politics of division."

Furthermore he believes that Ken is not a progressive but a reactionary politican.

"One of the key problems in this city is there's a massive gulf between the rich and the poor. And what we have in the East End, literally within sight of the City, is the lowest area of employment in the country,

He refutes though one of the main speculations aboit his campiagn which is that he was taken on my Boris at the Spectator following the Hutton inquiry.

My relationship with Boris is not that close, I promise. I've never been to his house, I've never had a non-professional relationship with him.

What the media pages are saying

Katie Allen in the Guardian asks whether the media are whipping up a storm over the economic crisis

It is fair to say headlines from the past week have made fairly grim reading for anyone banking on more surges in house prices. When a closely followed property market survey came up with its weakest result on record, newspapers splashed the story across their front pages and TV news reporters interviewed crestfallen homeowners with tales of financial woe. "More gloom as house prices plummet," said Sky News. The Guardian declared: "House prices fall at fastest rate since 1978."

But is it simply making the situation worse?

Such negativity may not be proven to influence market movements, but it does highlight an inherent tension for the media between trying to inform and wanting to entertain, says Martin Weale, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research thinktank:

Meanwhile in the same paper Peter Wilby looks at the London Standard's possible influenve on the London mayor hustings and in particular former BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan

If Boris Johnson becomes mayor of London next month, he may well, like John Major in 1992, thank friends in the press. This time, however, it will be the Evening Standard, not the Sun, wot won it. Since December, London's only paid-for evening newspaper - and the only paper of any sort to give the mayoral election campaign substantial coverage - has published many stories that have been highly damaging to the incumbent, Ken Livingstone.

In the Independent Stephen Glover takes a close look at the Barclay Brothers at the Telegraph saying that

There are times when it is entirely right for proprietors to intervene

The day of the Churnalist and the Belly dancer

The question that came up over and over again at the conference( The First Casualty-War Truth and the media today)was why journalists in the run up to the Iraq war choose to ignore the evidence that the war was unjustified.


Blame "CHURNALISM" Guardian writer Nick Davies at the conference as he tried to identify a systematic weakness in journalism today.

So what is churnalism? Davies will publish a book next year which he kindly previewed for the audience.It is called "Flat earth news" and the title is a reflection on the way that journalism works today.

For Davies journalism changed in Jan 1986 when Rupert Murdoch broke the resistance of fleet street to commercialism.From Wapping onwards,his research has shown that the average journalist is filling three times more space today.Staffing levels have been cut but output has increased.The journalist has been turned into a "passive processor".

The consequence of this-there is no time for fact checking and news is now created by the PR machine.This can take many forms from the spin department of Alistair Campbell to the corporate generated press release.

Davies cites the systematic manipulation of the Observer in the run up to the Iraq war,a paper that you would have expected would have campaigned against the war was fed constant information by the security services.It is read by Labour backbenchers,those same backbenchers who choose to support the vote on the War

Sharing the stand with Davies was Andrew Gilligan who has first hand experience of the mechanisms of war reporting.He gave the humorous example of the Telegraph which published a report in 2001 about Iraqi belly dances infiltrating Britain with the intent to assassinate opponents of the Saddam regime.A story that was blatant rubbish especially when a journalist on the paper checked to see how many visas the immigration department had issued for belly dancers,the answer being none.

Wars for Gilligan,create a sellers market with greater demand for news and space that has to be filled.Perversely the supply can collapse often due to logistical reasons and therefore the media has to publish rumours and spin

Gilligan on Iraq reporting

I am hoping to go to the The first casualty? War, Truth and the Media Today, in London on Saturday.



One of the speakers is former BBC man Andrew Gilligan and the Press Gazette are currently cattying a piece by him on the reporting from Iraq.it is well worth a read.



I think his speach could be interesting based on this sample

We didn’t get it. We now know that almost everything the media reported about Iraq, before and during the war, was wrong. Not just the fabled WMD threat, not just the supposed links between Saddam and terror, but the claim that force had not been decided on; that it was about disarmament, not regime change; that the troops were properly equipped; that planning for the post-war was being undertaken.