Nick Davies has a nice telling of the saga of the Haut de Garenne “body” hunt. But he can’t resist using it to bang the drum for his claim that PR now shapes journalism, falling into the trap of – in his words – “fitting facts into fictional templates.”

“Like so many false and distorted stories,” he says, “this one was driven by PR, here from the police.”

This is just plain wrong.

Police statements on the investigation weren’t PR – except by the most tortured and misleading of definitions.

What the media did at Haut de Garenne was take actual police statements and package them up in the most attention-grabbing manner possible. They were marketing the information, in a manner that would have been familiar to the 19C penny press.

When the facts and the statements ceased to be attention-grabbing, the media dropped the story from front pages. Nothing to do with public relations or PR, everything to do with journalism’s modus operandi, which is being rapidly superseded by search.

Nick isn’t really helping his argument or our understanding of the case by flattening the story to fit his own PR argument – unless he thinks the police should remain silent during investigations (and if so let’s hear that argument…).

So, for anyone who wanted to follow the police statements on the skull at the centre of Nick’s story directly, let me introduce internet novelty – the link.