Watford Council has banned parents from playgrounds in case they're paedophiles! Wuurgh! Perlidigol-Creckniss-Gawn-Mayyd, yoo-coodern-mayyk-id-upp!* 
One newspaper technique for fooling people is the red herring. Here's how it works. Someone offers a list of things that have happened or reasons for something happening and the papers choose the most outrageous or ridiculous and focus on it as if it's the only one.
This will be a short post, but I'm surprised this hasn't been covered more widely. In its haste to use Griffin's disastrous appearance on Question last week to attack the BBC (while at the same time, attacking the BNP), the Mail published 'The BNP backlash - MPs accuse BBC of playing into Nick Griffin's hands by stage-managing Question Time onslaught'.
After much worring and nail-chewing about Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time, it turns out we all had very little to be anxious about. Griffin was rubbish. So embarrassingly bad that even the BNP can't lie about how well he did, which is their usual reaction to goons from the party appearing on television and looking like goons. He looked so bad and out of his depth that the best they can do is cry 'fix'.
If nothing else, the Jan Moir debacle has meant that the PCC has waived its usual rule of not addressing third party complaints. On the face of it, that's a good thing. Of course, it took a major event like this one for that to happen, but surely it's welcome that in this one case the PCC have gone for addressing matters of accuracy over considering whether or not an individual will be likely to
Sometimes, when you're a plank like me who spends a lot of time examining tabloid rubbish, coming back to look at the papers after a long break can be a bit confusing. You've seen everything before, especially when you're looking at immigration scare stories.
"SACK THEM!" screamed the Daily Mail around a year ago, on the fourth consecutive front page to feature news of a now infamous prank call. This was the point that the paper went beyond reporting the 'outrage' and started demanding drastic action from its commercial rival, disguising its calls as reportage of others' demands. The action just so happened to include sacking two of its biggest stars and audience-pullers, which was a nice coincidence.