[A-List] UK state: London mayoral election

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

The Evening Standard has become a disgusting rightwing Daily Mail clone ever
since Max Hastings stepped down as editor (it is owned by the same company).
Its vendetta against Ken Livingstone, while conducted from a punk
Thatcherite perspective, is useful ammo for New Labour, keen to undermine
Livingstone wherever possible. So Ken's very public retaliation against the
paper, styled as a defence of London, promises to be very interesting. Given
Livingstone's keen sense of the possibilities, chances are that he will draw
blood -- and deservedly so.

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Ken Livingstone: A paper that's tired of life
Londoners are not getting the newspaper they deserve. That's why I'm taking
the 'Evening Standard' to the PCC, says Ken Livingstone
The Independent
25 February 2003

London is full of people who love their city and its pace of life. It is
not, by definition, a city likely to be impressed with a pale imitation of
the Daily Mail. But that is what London's daily paper, the Evening Standard,
has become. In the process, it has become bad for the city.

It is one thing for a newspaper to wage a campaign against a politician or
party, but it is another to have a monopoly in London and use it to run down
the city. What I really object to about the new-look Standard is the
relentless doing-down of London, the sense that everything in London is bad,
that the capital is some kind of crime hell full of people scared out of
their wits at the lawlessness and filth around them. Of course, the problems
that damage Londoners' quality of life must be addressed by the Standard.
But that must be balanced with what is good about our capital. At present,
the balance in the Standard is wrong.

Last week, the Standard blasted that the "Met charges only 11 per cent of
criminals" (19 February), saying: "Scotland Yard's dismal record for
catching criminals and bringing them to justice is exposed today in new
police performance figures." Such coverage is typical. But the detail of the
Standard's story showed a more mixed picture, with the Met's performance on
burglary and car crime better than in the rest of the country. In seven out
of 13 measures, the force performed above the national average.

The effect of this pattern of coverage, day in day out, is to hurt London's
image at home and abroad, and to falsify the picture. Further, the
cumulative picture it generates, with its tendency to dramatise the worst
aspects of big-city life, does not correlate to the experience of most
Standard readers. The ceaseless knocking of London will only deter people
from coming here, from choosing it as a place to visit, invest, work, live.

The Standard has an official position in favour of congestion charging. The
start of the charge has been met with a barrage of distorted coverage
designed to maximise opposition. The problem I have with that, apart from
the tedium of having to reply to the inaccuracies, is that 85 per cent of
people entering central London rely on public transport, not cars. A high
proportion of them are core Standard readers. Far more of its readers are
public-transport-users than drivers. The Standard seems to have become
detached from the interests of those readers because it sees the issues of
congestion and public transport through a national, Daily Mail prism. In
fact, polls show Londoners to be evenly divided on the issue of congestion
charging.

The paper's hostile coverage of congestion charging led to a front page last
Thursday: "C-Charge: Thousands Are Fined By Mistake". No one seeing that
would have been in any doubt as to its meaning. It was emblazoned on the
Standard's placards across London. It wasn't true. There will, indeed, be
mistakes in billing people for the charge, as in any big IT system, but the
Standard's headline stated as a news fact something that was a conscious
distortion.

The Standard dominates its market as the only daily evening London paper.
Associated Newspapers guards that position with Metro, a freesheet
distributed - without competition - at rail and Tube stations in the
morning. Thus, the Standard controls the morning and evening London
newspaper game and owns the advertising market in that sector. The absence
of competition deprives the consumer of any power. It is in the nature of
such private monopolies that they will exploit their unassailable position
to their financial gain.

In short, the Standard is bad for tourism, bad for the image of our capital,
bad for business, bad for competition. The Evening Standard is, at present,
bad for London.

Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, has made a complaint about the
'Evening Standard' to the PCC