Tales from the Twat Controller

A front-page story from The Times is little more than a government press release.

Happy New Year. For the first edition of 2023, I’m focusing on a single news story from a single paper to break down the techniques used in it. There are plenty of other distorted takes on the train strikes, which I’ve covered previously here:

• Kay Burley's Super Sounds of the 70s | Media coverage of the rail strikes certainly has a retro feel to it. (Jun 21, 2022)

• Not taking the Mick | Mick Lynch's fleet-footed approach to interviews means the dirty tackles are coming. (Jun 22, 2022)

• A counterstrike by His Majesty's 1st Battalion of Bastards (Volunteer Regiment) | Coverage of strikes is not journalism but propaganda.

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The load-bearing inverted comma is an important tool for newspaper headline writers. It allows the use of a punchy line while maintaining the most wafer-thin pretence of distance. Today’s Times front page showcases a classic example:

 Millions 'will shun trains for ever' 

The inverted commas allow the paper to claim it is simply quoting a source while the presence of those words in the headline makes it clear to the reader that this is the view it most supports. It doesn’t say…

Government claims strikes will permanently damage railways

… or…

Union says ministers are blocking strike deal 

… because the paper’s perspective privileges the government's voice over unions. That continues in the subhead, which reads:

As the latest strikes bring the worst disruption for three decades, unions are told a generation will turn against rail travel.

There are several things going on here: 1) “three decades” is used instead of 30 years because it sounds more dramatic 2) the “worst disruption” claim is presented without a source¹ 3) the unions — never “striking workers” — are framed like irresponsible children who understand their industry less than sensible ministers 4) the “generation will turn against rail travel” line is repeated for emphasis.

The story is bylined to four people:

Steven Swinford, the political editor.
Andrew Ellson, the consumer affairs correspondent
Dominic Hauschild, a news reporter/producer for The Times and Times Radio
and market reporter, Tom Howard

That’s a lot of pairs of hands for a piece that clocks in at just 767 words and hinges on a single anonymous government source. Byline inflation — where senior hacks get their name on a piece because of its prominence or because they contributed a single quote — is also pretty common.

Now let’s look at the claim that provides that striking headline. It’s introduced in the first paragraph of the story:

A generation of passengers will be put off travelling by train for good because of industrial action, ministers fear, as Britain enters the worst week of rail disruption for 30 years. 

The key here is “ministers fear”. A five-year-old may “fear” that there is a monster in their wardrobe; I certainly fear that Jacob Rees-Mogg is part-Babadook. Fear can be based in reality but it’s supposed to be a journalist’s job to interrogate that “fear” and see if it intersects with fact.

The Times story takes a piece of government rhetoric and treats it as serious without question. Are people who have moved to houses specifically because of their proximity to a station likely to abandon rail forever? Are people without cars or other good public transport options going to say, “I’m done with trains!”? No, of course not, and it feels ludicrous to even have to explain that.

Millions of people have been advised to avoid using the railways as the country faces five days of industrial action, effectively delaying the return to offices by a week as an estimated 80,000 trains are cancelled. 

Again, there’s the old familiar trick of pretending that there is no crossover between those on strike and “the country”. Staff on the railways were key workers at the height of the pandemic but are now the faceless mass behind “industrial action”.

The Times would no doubt plead limited space but the absence of a source for the 80,000 train cancellations figure is worth noting as is the lack of a comparison to the number of cancellations on the rail network in any given ‘normal’ week. This all plays into painting a picture of railways that would be just fine if it weren’t for the workers.

The next paragraph features a very familiar weasel word — “could” — and gives the benefit of anonymity to “rail industry sources”:

The Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union is staging two 48-hour walkouts today and on Friday, and drivers from the Aslef union will strike on Thursday. Rail industry sources have claimed that 16 million journeys could be affected this week. 

The structure of that first sentence, laden with cliché, also demonstrates the culture of a newspaper owned by a notorious strikebreaker; with “staging” and “walkouts” it’s possible to demonstrate disdain for the very notion of striking while pretending to be merely reporting facts.

Ministers and the industry are increasingly concerned that the strikes are doing long-term damage to rail travel while costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds. Rail travel is already significantly below pre-pandemic levels because of the rise in the number of people who are now choosing to work from home. 

A government source said: "This is an act of self-harm — a generation of passengers will just write off the railways. We're talking about permanent scarring. The longer the strikes continue, the greater the risk." 

The claim presented in the first paragraph — and previously pushed in the headline, subhead and opening paragraph — is simply echoed by the quote in the second. The provision of anonymity here allows the “government source” to talk tough without the risk of any comeback and to make claims that they will not be required to support.

This news story, like much of the coverage of strikes, approaches them in isolation, acting as though the industry’s problems would evaporate were the workers to simply accept their lot. It also gives the reader the impression that the RMT’s objections are simply about pay rather than conditions and working practices (especially the push for driver-only trains). Avoiding including details of the causes behind the dispute is a way of leaving readers to draw their own conclusions, as is the elision of strikes by the RMT (which mostly doesn’t represent train drivers) and Aslef (which does).

The choice, number, and placement of quotes in a news story are always worth looking at too. Anonymous government and rail industry sources are quoted at the top and the story is framed by their arguments. The first union voice comes in the middle of the report:

There are no signs of resolution. Mick Lynch, general secretary of the RMT, accused the government yesterday of blocking a deal and said that "unprecedented ministerial interference" was hampering the train companies in negotiations. 

He said, "The train companies say their hands have been tied by the government while the government, which does not employ us, says it's up to the companies to negotiate with us. We are always happy to negotiate — we never refuse to sit down at the table and talk — but these companies have offered us nothing, and that is unacceptable." 

Notice how an anonymous government source simply “said” the series of incendiary comments about unions but Lynch “accused” the government. The spin is slight, but it’s there in every sentence. Take this one:

Passengers, including those returning to work after the festive break, have been warned to expect "significant disruption" as only a limited number of trains will run.

It’s redundant to include the clause — “those returning to work after the festive break”
— but it’s in there to hammer home the implication that the strikes are unjustified and purely designed to inconvenience “the public”, a group of which the strikers aren’t part. Industrial action before Christmas was wrong because it would “ruin Christmas”, now it’s bad because it is spoiling one of our most sacred celebrations “the return to the office”, which commemorates the Magi’s return from annual leave.

Continuing the pretence that things would be just fine without the Mick Lynch mob snarling everything up, the paper returns to the plight of the hospitality industry:

[It] called yesterday for an end to the strikes as restaurants, pubs and bars braced for another £200 million hit to their takings this week. The cancellation of rail services is estimated to have already cost the industry £1.5 billion in lost sales over the festive period. 

Again, we are given figures without sources and expected to take them on trust. Look also at how the following quote is introduced:

Emma McClarkin, chief executive of the British Beer and Pub Association called on the unions, the rail companies, and the government to find another solution to "avoid delivering another catastrophic blow to our already struggling industry." 

The government is included there like an afterthought.

A final anonymous quote hammers home the disingenuous and deceptive framing:

A rail industry source said: "With dissatisfaction levels rising, the strikes clearly risk a permanent decline in train journeys. That is bad for the industry, the environment and our hard-working staff. The customers we depend on are likely to become more disllusioned and many will abandon the railway." 

That isn’t simply a journalist failing to look out of the window to see if it’s raining, it’s a group of journalists accepting the word of the mad scientist with the weather machine that he’d dearly love there to be blue skies, even as he hammers away at the perpetual storm button.

Finally, this paragraph…

Unions rejected claims yesterday that they were running out of money. The Public and Commercial Service union told Times Radio that industrial action could continue until summer. 

… is extremely sneaky. Where did those claims that unions are running out of money come from? An anonymous government briefing to… Stephen Swinford of The Times last week. The same Stephen Swinford bylined on today’s story.

The Times’ front page is a news story in name only; while it has some of the trappings of reporting, its intent is not to inform but to influence in the government’s favour. The reader is not given two sides to compare, but one side to support and another to condemn. I know the journalists, sub-editors, and editors who produced the story would vociferously argue otherwise but we should refuse to reject the evidence of our own eyes and the precedents of history.

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1. It’s always “the worst” since the last time.