Grant Shapps & Smear Campaigns

[Wraith]

Yeah, I blanked on the thread title. Forgive me for the shitty one I went with.

BBC (sort of) sorry for Grant Shapps Wikipedia smear reportage

That must have been awful for you, smarms Beeb news chief

The BBC has apologised to MP and former Conservative Party chairman Grant Shapps for the way it reported allegations regarding Shapps and Wikipedia, which were based on a single anonymous source.

Shapps lost the position of party chairman and left the Cabinet, despite running a successful general election campaign. He is currently a junior minister.

During the campaign, the Guardian alleged that an account “run by Shapps directly or by someone else – an assistant or a PR agency – under his clear direction”, had been suspended for editing the Wikipedia entries for Shapps and others.

Shapps acknowledged editing his entry under his own name in the past to remove bogus information, such as the suggestion that he was a Jehovah's Witness, but furiously denied the Guardian story.

The Guardian's anonymous source for the allegation turned out to be Richard Symonds, a LibDem activist and employee of Wikimedia UK, the UK affiliate of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The story was curious to begin with. In a remarkable piece of journalistic clairvoyance, the account in question, Contribsx, was only suspended minutes after the Guardian story reporting the suspension was published. Editing your own entry is not forbidden on Wikipedia, meaning there was no justification for blocking Contribsx at all. Symonds' version of the story changed, with him admitting that the block was made on "behavioural" rather than technical evidence. Yet the related accounts purportedly linked to Shapps had been dormant for years. It appeared that a smear had been manufactured to cause Shapps damage.

In early June, Symonds was censured for multiple violations of Wikipedia policy. The investigation into Symonds found that he had exceeded his authority in releasing private data about Wikipedia accounts, had failed to produce evidence and "struggled to provide an accurate timeline." Symonds had his checkuser and oversight permissions revoked and was "desysopped" (see here and here).

However the Guardian story ran and ran, with 42 reports on the BBC in a 24-hour period.

Gotcha? Not quite

Shapps complained to the BBC, arguing that "insufficient care was taken to carry out even the most basic fact checks before running the original story. For example, the original claim was made by a single politically-driven administrator, rather than Wikipedia itself."

Shapps has now published a response, including a letter from the BBC's director of news and current affairs, ex-Times editor James Harding, which Shapps describes as "an apology" – although if it is, it's something of a qualified apology.

Harding maintains that: "I don't think the original story needed 'correcting'... because we reported the event accurately and fairly." However, he added that the BBC didn't do "quite enough" on the "subsequent development" of the story. For which he's sorry. A bit.

"Thank you for taking the time to raise what must have been a particularly infuriating episode," Harding sympathises.

Here's the obligatory picture of Shapps in his kitchen, where he can now spend a lot more time, thanks to Wikipedia. ®

Source (underlining mine)

Maybe you can lay the blame at the feet of the 24-hour news cycle, but it's a bit concerning that one person who seems to have been acting alone was able to manipulate two major media organizations like this in order to use it as a weapon, and a seemingly effective one, against a political enemy.

Disclosure: I know jack & shit about Shapps outside of this article; it just caught my eye while I was looking at Windows 10 newsstuffs.

[Lewkowski]

This is why every single news report should always be viewed with the thought that someone is pushing an agenda and/or attempting to bolster ratings. Bottom line is you should never trust what you see in the news media without digging into it further. Never.

One of the nice parts of the 21st century has been the airing of the media's dirty laundry. It is disappointing that so many people (in America and in Europe) still give credence to media figures.

[Timbuk2]

Hm had wondered what'd happened to Shapps after the Tory victory.

[wiggin]

This is a failure of basic fact checking. Even amateur-hour papers have someone whose job it is to corroborate information (especially politically sensitive information) from sources. My old uni newspaper did it for crying out loud. The Guardian really messed up on this one. Not as sure about the BBC - they might have just phrased it as 'the Guardian says such', which technically doesn't need fact checking. That's sloppy rather than wildly unprofessional.

[RandBlade]

This was one of the most disgraceful moments of media coverage in the election. Within hours of this smear coming out it was clear it was a smear. A claim made by one "Wikipedia Editor" whose word was treated as gospel, who happened to be an active member of the Lib Dems not that it made any of this coverage. Standard journalistic rules require double-sourcing a story and this was never done and instead the lefty parts of the media went all guns blazing at the Tory Chairman over what transpired to be the fictitious imaginings of a Lib Dem activist. Disgraceful.

What makes it worse is that it is pretty obvious that if the shoe had been on the other foot and say a Tory activist made up fictitious claims as fact that the BBC would not have led bulletins with this claim as facts from an impartial source like they did with this story. Plus inevitably the coverage given to the story being fake got nothing like the coverage the story originally received. I can't think of anything similar.

I feel sorry for Shapps who helped get a famous victory and got demoted afterwards as a result. In part I suspect due to stories like this - it doesn't pay to become the story and an embarrassment during an election, even if the story was fake.

[agamemnus]

Unreal.

Trump.

[RandBlade]

What?

[GGT]

He meant Donald Trump.

[RandBlade]

I figured but what's it got to do with this thread?

[Flixy]

I figured but what's it got to do with this thread?

.. his political ambitions are as much a joke as the Guardian's reporting on this, maybe? I don't know, maybe he posted in the wrong thread or something?