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Story · all 20 words

The Story That Got Away

I worked on a weekly local newspaper for two years in my early twenties. Circulation eleven thousand, staff of five, offices above a carpet showroom.

It was the best training anybody could have, because on a paper that size you write everything – inquests, planning applications, a man who had grown a very large marrow – and you meet every single person you write about, in the street, the following Tuesday.

That last part is the entire discipline of local journalism. National journalists do not have to buy milk from the people in their stories.

The one I got wrong was about a primary school.

A parent came to us claiming that the school had quietly stopped providing hot meals for children on free school meals, and was giving them sandwiches while everybody else got a cooked lunch. She was upset, specific and completely convincing, and she was, it turned out much later, describing three days during a kitchen breakdown.

I had one source. I should have had three. I was twenty-three and I wanted the story to be true, which is the most dangerous thing a reporter can want.

I did ring the school. The head was on leave and the deputy said she could not comment, which I wrote up as “the school declined to comment”, and that sentence is technically accurate and profoundly misleading, and I knew it at the time in a way I did not admit to myself for about six years.

My article was careful. It said parents claim. It did not exaggerate a single fact.

The editor wrote the headline, which is how it works everywhere, and the headline said SCHOOL ‘SHAMES’ POOREST PUPILS. Nobody had used the word shame. It was in quotation marks, which is the oldest trick in the trade, and it was on the front page.

A regional television programme broadcast a piece on the Wednesday. A national tabloid picked it up on the Thursday and by then it had a photograph of the school gates in the rain, which was misleading in a way I could not have explained but which everybody understood perfectly.

The coverage lasted about nine days. The media moved on to something else entirely. The rumour lasted three years.

The council did eventually look into it and published a finding that no child had been treated differently and that the kitchen had been broken for seventy-two hours in February. That was reported, accurately, in about two hundred words, on page eleven.

There was no evidence for the story and there had never been any evidence, and I had produced eleven column inches without any.

What I have thought about ever since is that nobody in the chain lied. The parent believed it. I quoted her fairly. The editor wrote a headline that was defensible. The tabloid reprinted what we had published. Every individual link was reliable enough to survive a complaint, and the finished thing was false.

The deputy head who could not comment took early retirement that summer. I have no idea whether those two facts are connected and I have never had the courage to find out.

I do not think the paper was biased against that school. I think it was biased towards a good Thursday, which is a different thing and probably worse, because nobody has to decide to do it.

A colleague pointed out something to me at the time that I did not want to hear, which was that I would never have run it about a private school, because a private school would have had a lawyer by Tuesday.

I left journalism at twenty-six for reasons that had nothing to do with any of this. I still subscribe to that paper, which now has two members of staff and comes out fortnightly.

And I have never since believed a single thing I have read about a school, a hospital or a court case on the strength of one source, which is either wisdom or damage, and after twenty years I still cannot tell which.