The paper reported, ‘The neighbour said police made several calls to the property in recent months after the family were targeted by racist vandals.

‘“She’s had a lot of hassle since she moved into this village –windows broken, etc. She’s got an English voice and she’s living in a Welsh village. That’s what they’re like round here.”

Interesting stuff. Rather inflammatory. Especially as it carried the page-lead headline, “NEIGHBOUR TELLS OF ANTI-ENGLISH TAUNTS”.

The reporter concerned – who would also have had access to the Press Association copy, which probably put the Western Mail onto the story – is the paper’s proficient northern reporter, based in the Daily Post‘s offices in Llandudno Junction.

Now, the other sources which carry the story – the Daily Post and the Daily Mail (which managed to struggle across the English border for once) – both carry quotes from a local individual who “did not want to be named”.

That sort of things happens in journalism. People who don’t want to be named are  great sources of accurate information. In the field where I worked, many were prominent politicians.

Are both Mails quoting from the same person ? Unlikely; the quotes don’t quite fit together. So, it’s not a case of one individual having sounded off to every journalist around, and the Post and English Mail having deleted those comments which sounded off about Welsh racialism.

In any case, journalists in Wales don’t wander around in packs. They are sometimes more likely to do so in England, where journalists from the English “nationals” realise the value of physically sticking together so that their offerings possess a similarity which hinders disparaging comments from news desks about why one newspaper has failed to uncover an angle which has been obtained by a rival.

The reason why the Cardiff journal has obtained a line which the others have failed to find is surely simply that the Llandudno Junction man arrived at a different time, has spoken to different people, and has therefore obtained a different story.

I have no doubt at all that the Ll J man in Cardiff’s pay (nothing wrong about getting your money from what used to be called Thomson House) heard what he heard.

But the Ll J man is English, uses a strong English accent, spoke to a person with a similar accent, and got badly let down – it seems – in the varacity of what he was told.

Was that English individual right in her (or his) belief that Ms Stevens was being targeted by local vandals ?

Or was that individual merely transferring her (or his) own dislike of the locals she couldn’t understand onto Ms Stevens, whe she thought was one “of her own” .

The police “did not deny that the family had been targeted by locals”. Well, police press officers, in my experience, are not a particularly high form of life. They are horrifyingly subservient to police officers – very much a lower form a life in the view of the man in blue; and they will be totally unable to obtain any worthwhile guidance for a journalist on that sort of issue (although the situation may be very different in the Metropolitan Police, who have to deal with experienced and “battle-hardened” English-”national” hacks).

I’m sure the Ll J hack was told by his newsdesk to check out the local English-woman’s claims. The press officer would then have taken refuge in the usual no-comment strategy, hardly imagining that  ”no comment” would help generate the Welsh racism headline. After all, police press officers in my experience are incapable of doing anything other than reading out a press release.

And they would have had no press release on anti-English taunts.

Not that privately Northern police officers wouldn’t have plenty to say on the often-difficult relationships between the local Welsh and the sometimes-arrogant English who think they own all of Wales, as well of as much of the rest of the world as they would like to possess.

It is difficult to imagine that a woman born in Blaenau Ffestiniog wouldn’t remember  enough Welsh to let any local yobbo know what he should do with his f… self.

Why did the Western Mail use this line ? Of course, the paper no longer possesses its own news editor. The same news desk now serves the Mail, the South Wales Echo (both are now printed in the very early morning, and distributed in the same WH Smiths wholesalers’ vans) as well as Wales on Sunday.

Alan Edmunds is still editor, but he’s now also virtual managing director of the Cardiff operation (the titular MD apparently remains in Liverpool). I hope that doesn’t mean he’s got too much to do.

We should be thankful that the racism line was NOT the front-page headline; after all, the story WAS the front-page lead.

The strife between the Welsh and English in Wales seldom makes the pages of the Mail. Perhaps because reporters are trained (although not overtly) to play down such differences and difficulties.

In this case, of course, it seems these differences DID NOT exist.

Many years ago I wrote a long story which did involve a very strong dollop of controversy between the two groups. I was sent by the then news editor, one John Humphries to write a story about a non-linguistic problem in Cardigan. It’s so long ago that I no longer remember the details of the story.

But I was very taken by the extremely strong points made by my informant about the difficulties caused by local English people. The informant was a first-rate individual; he was willing to have his name used; and to my surprise the story was used uncut.

Mr Humphries later became editor, and that story was very much an exception. Perhaps internal powers had words in his ear about playing up the differences between the Welsh and the English. He tells in his book Freedom Fighters (University of Wales Press) about his premature (albeit well-compensated) retirement from the paper, which he says was because he had refocused the paper on “Welsh national issues”.

The paper is now run by Mr Edmunds. While Mr Humphries was a man of Gwent, Mr Edmunds apparently hails from Ely (it is said, although Fairwater, where is father once had an estate agency, together with one in Albany Road, Roath, is a more likely origin).

He doesn’t speak Welsh, although he learned it at school. He now understands “pigeon Welsh”, he said when appointed to the editor’s job.  I would have thought “gull Welsh” would have been more suitable for Cardiff.

His period as editor has been noticeable for its lack of information on Welsh-language matters. While arts coverage of English events is presumably OK, the Welsh language half of art  doesn’t really exist.

The paper’s been acceptable over the S4C crisis. But it has definitely been written from and English-language standpoint. I don’t think the paper has yet called for the Welsh channel to be split between the Welsh and English languages – Mr E does at least possess some sort of political antenna – but the reports are scarcely written with a pro-S4C agenda in mind.

We all know that some programmes possess a theoretical audience of 0. But there always have been some such programmes. Why that happens is never explained. But then not much in Welsh is ever explained.

After all, a language spoken by pigeons is hardly worth bothering about.

Except perhaps if someone says that racism (linguistic or national; what is the difference ?) has led to the death of three individuals, a mother and her two children.

I am not blaming the reporter for running the story. But perhaps the news desk should have asked more questions. Had anyone on the news desk ever been anywhere near Trawsfynydd ? Did anyone in Park Street (where the car park of the Western Mail used to be located) know anything about local difficulties ?

The paper seems to have made a terrible mess with this story. Mr E possesses an antenna. But it seems to have let him down here.  Perhaps he has been longing to run this story for years. And now was his chance.

Surely Llais y Sais is NOT the Mail’s real title.

Similarly Mr E’s antenna let him down badly in the political world. For five years, the Western Mail closed its office at the National Assembly and left its Thomson House-based reporters to cover events there. In fact, they hardly ever did.

Llais y Sais didn’t want to hear what the Assembly was doing in case it might start to make a name for itself, with people wanting it to remain in existence and grow in powers.  Much better if the miniscule majority in favour fell to become a minority, and the Tories won power in London with a policy of holding a keep-or-abolish referendum.

Not that such thoughts would ever reach the editorial column. After all, if you’re losing circulation, there’s no sense in alienating most of those who remain.

Of course, the mess that the paper seems to have caused in Trawsfynydd may have no effect at all. Because no-one – or hardly – reads our “national” paper in the village”.

Perhaps one should ask what “national” means in this context. In the opinion of one extremely-senior individual at the paper, the “nation” referred to was that of Fleet Street, with the Western Mail ranked beside the Daily Express.

The nation certainly wasn’t Wales. Has the situation changed ?