One wonders just how neutral British media is upon glancing at the 'corrections and clarifications' column in the Guardian last Friday:
In a Comment piece headed A storming send-off - but the silences show why he had to go, page 29, September 27, we said that Tony Blair's statement that a withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan would be "a craven act of surrender" was received by conference delegates in silence. That was not the case. As our "clapometer" recorded on page 6 of the same issue, the statement drew 11.44 seconds of applause.
As blog Harry's Place notes (via Instapundit):
Even if Freedland's (the journalist covering the event) hearing aid had malfunctioned for a full twelve seconds one might expect the reporter to have witnessed the massed palms of the delegates' left and right hands being brought together in the universal physical gesture of agreement and approval for the same amount of time.
Doing so, however, would have meant admitting that the view common among metropolitan journalists that Labour foreign policy is hugely unpopular with Party members isn't supported by the facts though.
Absolutely. It's almost an insult to the integrity of the paper to have this kind of 'oversight' under a corrections and clarifications byline. This is not just sloppy journalism, it betrays the fundamental law of news reporting - reporting the facts.
It is unfathomable that you could construe a twelve second round of applause into dead silence at such a key point in the speech without having some kind of agenda at play. And if something like that does happen to be a genuine error, then it doesn't say much for your reporting credentials.
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