News

Patrick O'Brien

Horribly wrong about the Cambrian News

Aberystwyth

Sadly George, you're just horribly wrong about the Cambrian News. Your totally unevidenced inference that, with other, unspecified, titles this is a newspaper that is a "potent threat" to democracy, "championing the overdog, misrepresenting democratic choices, defending business, the police and local elites from those who seek to challenge them" is a travesty. Clearly your knowledge of the Cambrian News's record is non-existent. It is a matter of record that this is a newspaper which has campaigned forcefully and tenaciously on a range of political and environmental issues for at least the last 35 years. To my certain knowledge it has been for that entire period energetically anti-establishment, pro-democracy and anti-sleaze. It has habitually sided with the underdog in instances of oppressiveness by local government and other authorities and as a result came to be loathed by officialdom locally and in Cardiff. In the 1970s it vigorously opposed plans by the then Welsh Office to demolish scores of homes in Aberystwyth to make way for a destructive "inner relief road", and fought proposals by the former district council to pull down an entire enclave of 19th-century cottages to make way for a car-park. As a result, both schemes were abandoned. In the 1980s it alone unearthed and exposed serious failings in the Welsh Office's monitoring of radiation levels in foods following Chernobyl. In the same decade the paper became a bete noir of management at Trawsfynydd nuclear power-station after its repeated exclusive exposures of specific dangers at the plant, which included stories about radioactive leaks, statistics unreported elsewhere on radiation levels in fish in Trawsfynydd lake that were being eaten by fishermen, and exclusives about cracks in the Maentwrog dam wall at one end of the lake and buckled railway-lines used by trains carrying nuclear waste. No other newspapers touched these stories. It the late 1980s and 1990s it reported year in year out on environmental threats to Cardigan Bay and to its dolphins and seals from proposed gas and oil exploration and ran a world newspaper exclusive on scientific findings about the global threat to marine mammals posed by PCBs. In recent years it campaigned tirelessly - and successfully - against efforts to strip crucial consultant services from the district general hospital in Aberystwyth serving mid-west and southern north Wales, engaging in bitter verbal spats with Assembly government health ministers while demolishing official claims that patient services would not be downgraded. More recently it has vigorously backed local shopkeepers and residents whose businesses and homes were threatened by compulsory purchase orders to accommodate national stores, and highlighted threats to the Cardigan Bay seabed from scallop-dredging. (You, George, even lifted a quote from one of its scalloping stories!) This then is the newspaper you denigrate. Oh, and the famous Ray Tindle edict commanding his newspapers to report nothing happening in their areas critical of Britain's role in the Iraq war. You are clearly, George, in ignorance of the fact that the Cambrian News in fact disregarded this particular piece of advice. Focusing on your particular complain about Tesco, the butcher, the consultants and the town council, you accuse the paper of running the story without performing even the briefest check. Its report in fact makes clear that it tried to contact both the butcher and the consultants, but without success. It is reasonable to suppose it was up against a deadline and could wait no longer. So why the heck didn't you do your homework on the Cambrian News's record before dragging its name through the mud? Synecdoches, you are clearly not aware, are by their nature extremely unreliable.

George Monbiot

your made-up story

Machynlleth

Right, so after publishing your story, you have "since learned" that it was completely wrong. It took me 30 seconds to find this out. Why were you not able to do so before you published? All that was required was to search the pdf of the retail impact assessment for the words "butcher" and "Lloyd" to discover that, contrary to your story, it did not discuss the butcher's shop or make any claim about what Wil said. It beggars belief that you were prepared to run this story without taking that basic precaution. In 24 years as a journalist I don't think I've ever come across such sloppy or careless reporting. Heaven knows how you are going to spin your correction piece in this week's Cambrian News. Will you admit that you didn't just get the author of the report wrong, but that it doesn't even say what you claim it said. It simply reports concerns from members of the general public about what might happen in the town and does not claim to represent the views of Wil Lloyd. Wrong document, wrong author, wrong organisation, wrong claims, wrong source - but apart from that, your story can't be faulted. And you say your conscience is clear!