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Rulers, pencils and media hysteria to set SOCA's crime-fighting agenda
Observers of the Government's tough new approach to serious and organised crime were last week entertained by the Independent's interview of Sir Stephen Lander, head of the new SOCA crime-fighting agency. In this he unveiled the so-called British FBI's radical plan to set its crime-fighting priorities by the sophisticated and impartial method of picking 30 or so newspapers, taking out a ruler, and measuring the column-inches written about each category of offence – even in cases where the long-suffering readers typically dismiss such stories as yet more Government scare-mongering and turn straight to the football pages.
DeadBrain, having established that the date was not April 1st, swiftly secured an exclusive follow-up with SOCA's newly-appointed Director of Rulers and Pencils, Sir Douglas Ramsbottom.
The former spy chief began by admitting that the scheme was "not quite right" and complained, "It's rather jolly awkward you know, when one sees a 4-word tabloid headline splashed across the whole front page, and then the wretched broadsheets go and print an article about something far more serious or organised in 10-point Times Roman. Though they do tend to use longer words, don't they? But then there's column widths – they vary so, and there's adverts and pictures, and with online stuff, our techies say it even depends on your screen resolution! No, it's not an easy task by any means."
DeadBrain reporter Greg Mullet ventured to suggest that there might be other things which could skew SOCA's precious statistics. "Good Lord yes," Sir Douglas responded. "If a new release of 'The Godfather' comes out, the critics will be all over it and we'll have to switch our resources to the Mafia. Then if an EastEnders star is spotted smoking a joint, the tabloids will be all over that and we'll have to switch over to drugs. Then if hordes of people write in to complain about all the media coverage about soap opera stars smoking pot, we'll have to devote even more resources to drugs, won't we?"
Mullet innocently enquired whether the extent of media coverage just occasionally depended on the person the crime happened to (or even who perpetrated it) rather than what it was. "Indeed," Sir Douglas replied, warming to his theme. "Who wants to read about a few hundred Fred Bloggs-es on a sink estate infested with Eastern European asylum-seeking protection racketeers – particularly if the story's already become old news before we started gathering our statistics? They'd much rather read about Prince Harry's alleged serious and organised underage drinking. Not that we'd dream of exploiting such media bias, of course."
Mullet followed up by asking whether SOCA recorded column-inches on what could hardly be a more serious or organised crime than starting an illegal war on the basis of knowingly flawed intelligence and then conducting a whitewash inquiry undermining the reputation of the broadcasting organisation which exposed it. Sir Douglas declined to answer but reluctantly commented, "You know, the legality of the Belmarsh detentions is looking a bit dodgy as well these days and, no, we're not measuring column-inches on that either. Well, not for that purpose anyway."
Sir Douglas briskly moved on to the topic of how SOCA's 30 target publications are selected, given the difficulty of finding enough which are not either owned by tycoons widely believed to be in cahoots with Blair, or tainted by "politically incorrect" statements to which they had allegedly been party. "Well, we did look at the Beano - but unfortunately in the end the Home Office determined that juvenile and canine offences of the kind committed by Dennis the Menace and Gnasher were beyond our remit."
Rounding off the interview, Mullet dryly referred Sir Douglas to the curious regularity with which a certain broadsheet seemed to publish front-page articles about the security services during 2003-4, and enquired whether SOCA mightn't be – inadvertently of course - measuring alleged public concern which it, or even "Whitehall press releases", had perhaps generated in the first place. Sir Douglas however again declined to answer, but did concede that Government-fuelled media hysteria was not the only thing to be measured in column-inches: there were always certain entries in certain files on certain unusually complaisant journalists, too.
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