The Ernst & Young report on UK national news­pa­pers is avail­able here if you really want to read it. It is worth a look, BUT (…that’s a big but btw) it has the most irrit­at­ing consultant-style stuff in it.

I know journ­al­ists are often accused of twist­ing quotes, but their liber­ties pale in com­par­ison to con­sult­ants’ abil­ity to man­u­fac­ture metrics.

Take this example on CD/DVD add-ons:

43% — Ernst & Young employ­ees respond­ing to a recent internal sur­vey who would be pre­pared to pay for a cov­er­mount (Base: 100). In most cases the premium would have to be within £1.

Yup, the con­sult­ant writ­ing the report has emailed co-workers to gen­er­ate some graph porn. Sheesh.

They may not be able to con­struct a viable rev­enue model, but they cer­tainly know how to make up numbers.

There are prob­ably earlier examples of the non-denial denial in polit­ical cam­paign­ing, but this is my per­sonal favour­ite. It’s from the dirty tricks hand­book of one­time Phil­adelphia Inquirer owner, journ­al­ism edu­ca­tion phil­an­throp­ist, and gen­eral bad egg, Wal­ter Annen­berg:

One day in 1966 a Demo­crat named Milton Shapp held a press con­fer­ence while run­ning for gov­ernor and Annenberg’s hand-picked polit­ical reporter asked him only one ques­tion. The ques­tion was, “Mr. Shapp, have you ever been admit­ted to a men­tal institution?”

“Why no,” Shapp respon­ded, and went away scratch­ing his head about this odd question.

The next morn­ing he didn’t need to scratch his head any more. A five-column front page Inquirer head­line read, “Shapp Denies Men­tal Insti­tu­tion Stay.” I’m not mak­ing this up.

Poet Philip Lar­kin wrote that what will sur­vive of us is love.

His dirty tricks are in the grave. What will sur­vive of Annen­berg is his money.