Showing posts with label Ross Slater. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ross Slater. Show all posts

Monday, 21 April 2014

An Easter story with a happy ending

Once upon a time there was a publication called the Mail on Sunday.  It pretended to be a newspaper.  Its editor hated poor people, and published lots of stories about how they were all too lazy to work and got lots of money for doing nothing.  The people who worked at the paper particularly hated food banks because they showed that some people were so poor that they had no food.  And the Trussell Trust which ran food banks angered the paper's best friend, a man called Iain Duncan Smith who was Secretary of State; he didn't like anyone who said he was wrong.
So the Mail had an idea.  It sent two people called "reporters" to food banks in Nottingham and London to make up lots of stories.  One reporter, called Ross Slater, went to the CAB in Nottingham and told lots of lies to get a voucher.  He took that to the Trussell Trust food bank and was asked some more questions, so he told more lies.  He was given about £40 worth of groceries.  When the reporters took their story back to the Mail, the sub-editors added some more lies, such as "no questions asked", and "vouchers for sob stories" and this was published in the paper.
But the Mail had not realised that this particular Sunday was special.  It was Easter Sunday.  And they had not realised that many people in this country would get angry at the lies.  On Twitter lots of real journalists started making up headlines for the Mail of 2,000 years ago, like "Outrage as carpenter feeds 5,000 people with no questions asked".  The Mail reporters didn't understand this, but they knew that people were angry.  So Ross Slater tweeted, "All food returned to saint Philip church Notts at 0930 plus small donation".  (Despite calling himself a journalist he did not understand punctuation.)  This did not help, because many people answered him with insults.
Some people had a good idea.  They tweeted that if people were angry about the Mail's lies they should give money to the Trussell Trust, and they gave the Trust's JustGiving page.  This brought in lots of donations, more than the Trust had ever had in one day, and they were very pleased.
But no one lived happily ever after, because the Mail went on making up stories.