The appearance of full-page government adverts last week in some of the largest newspapers circulating in Wales struck right to the kernel of the Welsh media problem.
The ad – which I saw in the Daily Mail - carried emblazoned across its centre the words “in England”.
Those two words – which would have seemed totally superfluous to most readers – had been inserted by the Department for Children, Schools and Families to avoid causing confusion over London’s new plans for upper-secondary school education.
While Wales has its own baccalaureate, England was launching a “new” range of diplomas, apprenticeships, GCSEs and A levels.
Had those words “in England”, not been prominently included, enormous confusion would have been caused to Welsh parents.
Expect to see lots more of this sort of advert. For the London press is being increasingly obviously seen as an English press.
The failure by London-based managements to take note of how increasingly useless their newspapers are to their readers in Wales is dramatically different to how those managements treat Scotland, Northern Ireland and Eire.
It is difficult – without visiting the variety of circulation areas which exist – to discover to what extent newspapers publish regional editions of their newspapers.
But details of how far the Daily Mirror - published, of course, by the same firm which owns the Western Mail and the Daily Post - goes to satisfy one part of the British Isles was revealed in The Guardian in July. The report read:
The Daily Mirror was not published in the Republic of Ireland today after technical problems meant the content could not be sent to the printer.
Trinity Mirror chose to print the UK edition in Northern Ireland but is understood to have decided not to risk a political backlash by doing the same in the Republic of Ireland.
Instead, the company wrote to almost every newsagent in the whole of the Republic of Ireland to inform them the Daily Mirror would not be available today.
MediaGuardian.co.uk understands that the editorial was prepared on time but the PDF files could not be transferred to the printer in Meath after the link failed and the backup link also went down. A Mirror source said: “It was a complete and total fuck-up.”
A spokesman for Mirror Group, the Trinity Mirror subsidiary that publishes the title, added: “Due to an unprecedented telecoms supplier problem that was beyond our control the Irish Daily Mirror was not published today.”
The Northern Irish edition, which is usually fully localised, was printed as usual by the Belfast Telegraph printers but using the same copy as in England and Wales with just a couple of pages of local content.
The Mirror sells an average 70,351 copies in the Republic of Ireland each day according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. [story published July 1]
Admittedly, for a time, Trinity Mirror did bring out a Welsh Mirror. Some cynics reckon its sole aim was to prevent Plaid making Welsh election gains. When it succeeded in that, the paper was closed.
The managing director of the Western Mail, Keith Dye, when giving evidence to the Assembly culture committee in 2006 on his company’s (at that time much criticised) role in Welsh newspapers was scathing when asked why London-based papers published separate Scottish editions, but not Welsh.
He seemed to infer that there was no real reason for Scotland, beyond distance – which demanded a separate printing centre.
Well, that’s rubbish. Scottish politicians wouldn’t accept a London paper unless it contained substantial amount of Scottish copy.
Ditto, Ireland, as The Guardian reported.
It’s becoming increasingly important, from the point of view of democracy and public knowledge of governmental policies, that the same applied to Wales. AS IT ONCE DID.
The Daily Express and the Daily Herald certainly ran separate Welsh editions, with one or more pages of local copy. WE NEED A REPETITION. Not, for the present, going as far as either Scotland or Ireland, but certainly an improvement on the present calamitous situation. And it’s time for Assembly politicians to wake up and take some action.
On broadcasting, such action has already been taken, by the Assembly’s broadcasting committee and by the government itself.
And according to the Mail on Sunday this week – in almost the only story ever to burst through the Mail papers’ seeming policy of totally ignoring the existence of a Welsh political life – that action by Cardiff is about to have a major impact (although, of course, the paper managed to ignore the existence of the Assembly’s part in it !).
MoS reported “ITV poised to cut local news”. One par in the report said, “Only London, Wales and the North West would be unaffected.”
No explanation was given why this might be so. But London and Cardiff both possess assemblies full of mouthy politicians. And the Manchester area until recently possessed its own regional editions of the London dailies, carrying locally-produced copy.
Indeed, the Daily Mail to this day still runs a “North West edition”, boldly so labeled on the front page. Presumably locals were so upset at losing their regional editions that the Mail felt it had to offer something. It’s unfortunate that this “north-west edition” contains not a word of local news copy; the editionalising consists purely of moving stories around the paper, to give the impression of something different from the paper sold in Yorkshire!
The Welsh political success over ITV should embolden Cardiff Bay to take on London newspaper managements.
Broadcasters accept that a major problem exists in how to serve Wales politically. Publishers merely try to push the identical problem under the carpet.
Don’t expect the Mail papers to be the first to respond favourably – despite their group’s ownership of the Swansea Evening Post (the largest-selling Welsh daily, having soundly overtaken the Cardiff South Wales Echo, whose circulation is falling at quite a high rate, which the Post’s is almost holding stable), as well as of the dailies in Plymouth (Western Morning News, a paper which stands high in standards above the Western Mail) and Bristol (Western Daily Press).
Perhaps more to the point, the Mail group own the title of The Welshman (an offshoot, closed about 30 years ago, of the Carmarthen Journal). Just the right name, surely, to launch a competitor for a Cardiff daily – the Western Mail’s real dream, anyway, was presumably to conquer much-larger Bristol, hence its name ?
Currently, it seems, no politician wants to challenge the Western Mail for fear of being banned from its pages (as the Mail peremptorily did to the weekly column of former arts minister Alun Pugh when he had the gall to voice a criticism of the paper; he said the Daily Post was much better !)
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Until we have our own National newspaper in Wales, whether in Welsh or English, we will always be bombarded with news that is irrelevant to us as a nation, unless it is negative news of course. We do have that joke of a Welsh daily, The Western Mail though that has become a gloryfied Daily Mirror. They are more obsessed with sport and celebrities than any serious news about Wales, the nation it is supposed to represent. What articles there are about Wales have an English slant to them.
Why the Politicians in Wales seem afraid to critiscise the Western Mail I find it difficult to understand. . It is about time our Politicians stood up to them or better still fight for an independent Welsh Daily that will get their messages across to the people who matter here in Wales.
Thank goodness we have one to rely on that puts Cymru first and out there in the world, the ‘Cambria’ Thank you for a truly wonderfull magazine
Seems ITV Wales is being cut badly… 90 mins of non-news programmes from Wales down from 4 hrs a week. Shocking stuff.