Telegraph and Mail caught out in bogus health and safety stories. Details here. Short version: The Institution of Occupational Safety and Health advise businesses to grit areas around the property they own, basically because it’s the right thing to do. They provide quotes to the hacks to that effect. These quotes are ignored in favour of a quote lifted from an article written a year ago in the IOSH journal by an outside party. This does not reflect the IOSH’s policy. But it does fit the agenda of sections of the media on ‘elf n safety stories.
The thaw’s started here in Manchester, but there are plenty of places where it hasn’t and it’s quite conceivable that businesses may abandon plans to grit public areas after reading what the Mail and the Telegraph say is official advice. As a result, it’s quite conceivable that people will be injured because of these effect of these stories. And all because the dead hand of the rightwing press chose to stifle individual initiative.
The guy on the local radio breakfast show (Sheffield) picked this up this morning, because he'd been getting calls from listeners about it and he has a pretty good ear for Mail generated bullshit.
So he rang the IOSH and a woman said that they'd researched the allegation and could find no record of anybody being sued for gritting in front of their premises, ever. She said you'd have to prove that they cleared the snow incompetently out of malice. It's completely made up.
Posted by: chris y | January 12, 2010 at 09:24 AM
Sometimes I just chill out and think 'surely nobody automatically believes what they read in the papers anyway, so it probably doesn't matter'. Then somebody casually drops some piece of made-up nonsense they've just read in the Mail into the conversation, as if it was the unvarnished evidence of their own eyes or ears and I realise that it does.
Posted by: Andrew King | January 15, 2010 at 12:45 PM