Evening Standard: Did You Hear The One About The Dirty-Mouthed *!%*ers At The Guardian?

It's a f***ing disgrace - the Church Times this week printed the f-word in full. But how much swearing is allowed on Fleet Street? David Rowan investigates

THE Guardian is full of shit - and the Mail, Mirror, Sun and Telegraph don't give a f***. This is not opinion, it is fact - the findings of an Evening Standard survey into newspapers' swearing habits over the past year.

Our investigation follows the shock news this week that The Church Times has, for the first time, used the f-word. The word appeared - fully spelled out, without coy asterisks - in a story about a cycling nun and a disgruntled pedestrian. It may sound like the beginning to a Bernard Manning joke, but it was, in fact, a report on the everyday hostility faced by nuns on the streets.

The results of our survey may shock the fainthearted - and a few of the papers' editors - but Britain's press, it seems, is getting ruder and more fixated with sex than ever.

We selected some of the ruder swear words - the f-word, the c-word and shit (all fully spelled out, unlike the shyness we are showing here) - to see just where the papers' boundaries lay. Then we added a few other key terms that help convey a paper's sense of priorities in the Noughties: 'sex', 'drugs', 'rock 'N' roll', and, to measure the reach of our celebrity culture, 'Geri Halliwell'. The results show the tabloids to be angels compared to those badmouthing broadsheets.

The Guardian is the most liberal in its use of language, with 264 Fs and 44 Cs, followed by The Independent, which manages 82 F-words and two C-words.

The C-word remains the papers' last taboo, although much of the credit for the current crop must go to reviews of The Vagina Monologues (and, in The Guardian's case, an interview with Shane MacGowan). The Times, usually so cautious about avoiding offence, was brought down dreadfully this year by a piece about John Diamond's emails to his editor, which quoted him using all sorts of expletives.

When the Telegraph swears, it's typically in the voice of the late Auberon Waugh, and never the ruder words; although the 46 shits this year mark a vast increase over 1989, when I conducted a similar survey, and the Telegraph let through only five (two of them in reference to Jeffrey Bernard). The Sun and Mail remain the most firmly opposed to the main swear words, although this year both have wavered: the Mail allowed 'shit' in a report on the feud between Frank Field and Harriet Harman, and The Sun let jockey Terry Biddlecombe talk about a horse 'knocking the shit' out of him.

As for the papers' wider priorities, The Mirror is the most obsessed with sex and drugs, and The Guardian with rock 'N' roll (we ought to discount the FT's score of 25 for rock 'N' roll, as a closer look reveals the paper to be less hip than it sounds: the term is used in pieces about Perry Como and, er, Tony Blair).

On their awareness of popular culture, no paper can escape the lure of Geri Halliwell. The Mirror and Sun mention her every day or so, the broadsheets a couple of times a week, and even the FT about once a month, presumably because of her growing macroeconomic significance.

You can understand the FT's priorities by comparing the number of references to God (542) and money (9,487). But if there's a business angle, even the FT will let through f-words and shits, especially in discussing French Connection's fcuk advertising campaign or Bob Geldof 'S latest challenge to intransigent corporations.

Compared with the 1989 survey, most of the press has become more relaxed about swearing, especially on the arts pages. Most papers still discourage the use of such terms unless required by the context of a report - so the Standard's two C-words are direct quotes from The Vagina Monologues and from a Liverpool supporter in a piece about yob Britain.

As for next year's survey, should the Standard come out rather higher in the league, blame this shitty piece for skewing the database. Maybe we can make amends by printing the words 'fiddlesticks', 'bother' and 'shoot' a few times ...

[TABLE]
They said what?

F-word / 'Shit' / C-word / 'Sex' / 'Drugs' / 'Rock 'n' roll' / 'Geri Halliwell'

The Guardian 264 316 44 2,669 3,390 272 91

The Daily Telegraph 0 46 0 1,585 2,430 110 93

The Times 3 37 0 2,574 3,198 256 107

The Independent 82 151 2 2,135 3,118 237 64

Financial Times 12 20 0 579 2,812 25 9

The Daily Mail 0 4 0 2,298 60 9 120

The Mirror 0 33 0 3,865 4,588 185 406

The Sun 0 1 0 3,155 2,359 86 257

Evening Standard 5 99 2 1,508 1,770 125 89

Figures refer to the year to 1 July 2001

(Evening Standard, July 25 2001)

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Evening Standard: Fake websites that make news

The Sun was jubilant when it found pictures of a cross-dressing love-rat on the internet - until it discovered the story was a hoax. But it is not the first time a paper has been tripped up by the web, reports David Rowan

IT WAS the sex-and-stockings story that The Sun found too perfect to resist: a wronged woman takes revenge on her cheating boyfriend by filling her web page with photos of him wearing women s underwear.

"WWW. RAT," screamed Britain s biggest-selling daily last week. "Girl puts pictures on et of ex wearing her red lacy undies after he cheats with her pal. 'You asked me never to show these photos to anyone - guess you shouldn't have cheated on me,' wrote the "hurt, lonely and vengeful 22-year-old blonde" from Newport, South Wales, justifying the 21 rather undignified photographs of her ex that were soon the subject of much inter-office email. Within hours, the site had elevated love-rat Tom Shepherd to global ridicule.

Except that, to The Sun's embarrassment, neither Tom nor the mystery blonde known only as "pimptress" existed.

The story was a confected PR stunt by London web outfit Uboot, which sought to promote a service that lets users put photos online.

"We're sorry if we misled anyone," managing director Edward Orr said later, somewhat implausibly. "It was a bit of a surprise to find that pimptress got so much interest - we've had more than 100,000 hits today."

Mission accomplished, then. But it wasn't just The Sun that was fooled (the paper isn't commenting on the matter, and has run no correction). The story zipped round the world via agencies such as Ananova and AP, and was printed as fact as far away as The Australian. Here, The Mirror was far more streetwise - "clearly a hoax, but amusing all the same," declared its internet column - and The Daily Telegraph was wise enough to hedge its bets with a certain doubt. Technology correspondent Robert Uhlig reported that thousands tried to discover whether the pictures were the internet's most humiliating act of revenge yet, a hoax or a marketing gimmick.

Three years earlier, it fell to Uhlig to report that two American teenagers who had got the world's media salivating with their plan to lose their virginity live online had been part of the biggest online hoax yet. The pay-per-view union of Mike and Diane was never consummated, but that didn't stop the world s tabloids vying to track down these churchgoing typical all-American kids.

The mysteries of technology have an eternal ability to hoodwink normally alert journalists into falling for hoaxes. Earlier this year, this paper was one of several to fall for a claim on a respected website that ballet star Darcey Bussell was to appear in a James Bond movie. It was an April Fool s joke.

Only six weeks ago, The Mirror and even internet trade journal Revolution were among the publications that made great play of another exciting new website, called cheatingscum.com. This one also offered revenge to lovers done wrong, but unlike Uboot's site was open to anyone to expose love rats to the world.

And so they did. Geena from Glasgow used it to denounce George Harris, "who ran off with a girl half his age and thinks he's happy now, but she'll leave him and then he will be alone just like I am now". Rache from Newcastle left Dan Hoxton with this parting thought: "All I can say is if you're out there, Dan, I m having a great time screwing other guys." Brian Green from Cornwall condemned Barbara Townsend, "who ran off with my best mate, the bitch. I hated that stupid sausage dog as well." It was such a good story that it just had to be genuine.

Except that cheatingscum.com, and all the individuals named, were the creations of .net, a print internet magazine that sought to show how easy it is to attract visitors to a site with a marketing budget of zero.

Designed as an antidote to all those crashed dotcoms that spend millions on promoting themselves, the site was launched with no cash and only a few journalists' email addresses. "It seems the people who covered the site were quite happy to accept that it was genuine simply because it made a good story," cheatingscum.com's creator Dan Oliver now reveals on the site. "And in the meantime, they'd helped us notch up our target of 10,000 visitors in a week."

Nor is it only tabloid hacks whose gullibility gets the better of them where the web is concerned. The Independent's respected health editor, Jeremy Laurance, made a noble if excruciating apology in March over a piece he'd written the previous week. The original article reported that British police were trying to close down an internet site that carried pictures of a man eating a dismembered baby.

The shocking website was "further evidence of the extent of child abuse and exploitation published on the internet", and had brought together Scotland Yard and the FBI in their concern over ritual satanic abuse. Except that the pictures on the Californian site turned out to show not human sacrifice but a Chinese performance artist who had been wowing them back home with his nifty images of cannibalism.

"Let's not beat about the bush: I've been had," Laurance owned up. "A reporter in search of a story has, not for the first time, fallen foul of an excess of enthusiasm, credulousness and someone's idea of a joke."

IT'S nothing new for the uncertainties of technological progress to prompt newspaper hoaxes. In 1844, the New York Sun carried a riveting series of reports by one Edgar Allan Poe that described the successful crossing of the Atlantic Ocean via a hot-air balloon - except that no balloon crossed the Atlantic for another century. The New York Sun, though, was then fighting a ruthless circulation war and often deliberately placed hoax stories to generate a fuss that would lift sales.

In last week's case over here, it was The Sun itself that was the victim. But then the Currant Bun has never been too comfortable with newfangled technologies. Five years ago, the then editor Stuart Higgins had to apologise after the paper fell victim to one of the most elaborate hoaxes of the decade , this time involving a videotape that did not, in fact, show Princess Diana cavorting with James Hewitt.

If there's a lesson to be drawn, it's that stories on the web that appear too good to be true probably are. There are few barriers to entry in online publishing, and just because a website promises perfect copy about that sex-obsessed and nefarious internet community, there could still be a 14-year-old joker behind it. Or, worse still, a journalist.

(Evening Standard, July 4 2001)

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